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First Things First: Gathering the Information You Need

      Before you can gaze in wonder at the wonders of your chart, you need the following information:

       The month, day, and year of your birth

       The place of your birth

       The precise time of your birth

      Most people know the month, day, year, and place of their birth. If there’s a problem, it’s usually with time. Time matters because it determines your rising sign (see Chapter 11) as well as the house positions for your planets (see Chapter 12). Without a birth time, those components of your chart are unknowable. Having an accurate time is also important if one of your planets changed signs on the day you were born. Is your Moon in Leo or in Virgo? There’s a big difference. That’s why I recommend that you corroborate your birth time through the official record, your birth certificate.

      

If you don’t already have a copy of your birth certificate, the most reliable way to get one is to go to the National Center for Health Statistics at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/index.htm and click on “National Vital Statistics System” followed by “How to get a birth, death, marriage, or divorce certificate.” That will send you to a list of U.S. states and territories (plus “foreign or high-seas events,” for those whose birth stories are more dramatic than most). Click on the place of your birth, follow instructions, and be prepared to pay a fee, different in every location.

Once you have your birth certificate, you can be confident that the information on it is more or less correct, although I marvel at the vast number of people who, according to their birth certificates, were born exactly on the hour or half hour. Statistically speaking, there are way too many of us. Still, the time on your birth certificate, rounded off though it may be, has to be considered the gold standard.

      If you don’t have a birth certificate, do some sleuthing. Start by asking your mother. But don’t be surprised if her memory of what must surely have been the highlight of her life turns out to be spotty. It’s shocking how many parents can’t remember when their children were born. They know the date — birthdays are easy — but the time is another story. They can’t recall if it was 2:05 or 5:02. They don’t know if it was a.m. or p.m. One mother confessed to me that she wasn’t sure who was born at 10:06 a.m.: her daughter or herself. As every courtroom attorney knows, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. This is just another instance of that truth.

      Dealing with approximate birth times

      It can happen, especially if you were born in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, or India, that a birth certificate will not include a time. In that case, you may have to rely on family legend. Maybe you’ve been told that you were born after breakfast or in the middle of Saturday Night Live. If that is your situation, take the information and run with it. When you’re ready to get your chart, choose a time that corresponds to the legend. Born in the middle of rush hour? Figure that for 6:00 p.m. and carry on.

      Coping with an absence of information

      A more significant problem arises if you have no idea whatsoever of your time of birth, and no way to find it out. I have a beloved friend, one of many children, who never knew her birth time. And then one day, things got rapidly worse. During an astonishing conversation with an older sister, she discovered that no one in her family could vouch with 100 percent certainty for the day of her birth — or even the month. Suddenly she wasn’t sure whether she was a Libra (no way) or a Scorpio (yes). This rare state of affairs is an astrologer’s worst-case scenario.

If your birth time is irretrievably lost, your ascendant and house placements are unknowable. You also face a small additional problem: what to do when an astrological website or piece of software requires you to fill in a birth time. Here are three ways to handle that:

       Assume you were born at noon. That way, the calculations can’t be more than 12 hours off. Even the moon, which spins through the entire zodiac in a month, can’t be more than about six and a half degrees off. So the planetary positions will be roughly correct. But the house positions won’t be, which means that the Sun isn’t really at the top of your chart (unless, by coincidence, you really were born around noon). It just looks that way.

       Assume you were born at sunrise. Not all astrology websites allow that possibility, but many do. Just choose the sunrise option and proceed. As with noon charts, remember that the Sun probably isn’t in the first house (unless you really were born at dawn), and the house positions are only a guess. (If you were born via C-section but don’t know exactly when, you might want to assume that you were born at 8:00 a.m., which is statistically the most common birth time in the United States, entirely due to C-section deliveries.)

       Use what are known as “natural houses.” With natural houses, Aries always occupies the whole of the first house, Taurus occupies the second, and so on, all the way to Pisces, which encompasses the entire twelfth house. Thus, if you were born under Libra, which is the seventh sign of the zodiac, your Sun will be in the seventh house. Again, since you don’t know when you were born, these house positions are only provisional. But without them, you’d be looking at little more than a list. By using natural houses, you can see how the planets are arranged, what signs they are in, and how they interact with each other — and that’s a wealth of information.

      Finally, if your birth time truly is lost, there is one more option. You can commission a professional astrologer to rectify your chart. Rectification is a complex, laborious process. It involves working backwards from major events in your life (such as marriage, divorce, the birth of a child, or the death of a parent) to make an educated guess about your probable birth time. Some astrology software includes rectification modules, making it possible to do this yourself. But I would advise against that; it’s too easy to let wishful thinking influence your results. Ask a seasoned professional, someone who has considerable experience with this specific technique. Rectification isn’t a sure bet, especially in the hands of amateurs. But when it works, it works.

      

Getting Your Horoscope Online for Free

Someday, should you resolve to quit your day job and become a professional astrologer, you may want to learn how to cast a chart the old-fashioned way. It wouldn’t be a waste of effort, and if you decide to become a certified astrologer through one of the official astrological organizations, such as the American Federation of Astrologers, you’ll be required to master that skill. At the moment, though, there’s no need to climb that particular mountain because you can obtain a copy of your chart for free just by going to an astrological website and entering the date, time, and place of your birth. Many websites offer free horoscopes. Here are a few of the best:

       Astrolabe (https://alabe.com): Astrolabe provides a no-frills birth chart with two or three pages of interpretation. Its resources and services are not as extensive as those of some other websites, and its charts are not as lovely. But if you go to this website, look for “Free Astro Chart” (or words to that effect), enter your birth data, and hit “submit,” your natal chart will instantly wing its way back to you. Astrolabe does not tempt you with too many bells and whistles. (Don’t worry, I tell you in the following bullet points where to satisfy that craving.) But if you want an easy-to-read birth chart with some basic interpretation, you can get it here — fast and free.

       Astro-charts (https://astro-charts.com): The first thing you’ll see here

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