Astrology Cheat Sheet

A birth chart looks complicated and is, underneath, only four ideas stacked together. There is a sign, which is a style, a way of going about a thing. There is a planet, which is the thing being done, the part of you in question. There is a house, which is the area of life it happens in. And there are aspects, which describe how the parts get along with one another. A planet, in a sign, in a house, holding a conversation with the other planets. That is the entire grammar. Everything below is just vocabulary for those four.

This page is the quick reference, the whole sky on one screen. Each sign links to its full personality portrait if you want the long, honest version. The deeper guides to the planets, houses and aspects will hang off this page as they are written. For now, this is the map you can keep open in a tab.

Every sign is one of four elements and one of three modalities. Learn these six ideas and you can half-read a sign you have never studied, because the element tells you its temperament and the modality tells you how it moves through the world.

The sign is the style, the planet is the function, and the house is the setting, the actual area of life where it plays out. The same Mars wants the same things in everyone; in the tenth house it pushes a career, in the seventh it pushes a relationship. Twelve houses, twelve arenas, running from the most personal to the most collective. A deeper page for each will live here in time.

Now the four ideas combine into one sentence. Take any planet. Read it as: this part of me (the planet), does its thing in this style (the sign it is in), in this area of life (the house it is in), and gets on with the rest of me like this (its aspects). Moon in Capricorn in the seventh house reads, roughly, as my emotional needs are met through structure and self-reliance, and they play out in close partnership. That is a real reading. You just did it.

Begin with the big three and you will already understand most of someone. The Sun is the core self, the project of a life. The Moon is the inner weather, what you need to feel safe. The Rising sign, the sign on the horizon at your birth, is the doorway, how you arrive and how the world first reads you. Sun for who you are becoming, Moon for what you need, Rising for how you meet the world. Most of the rest is detail hung on that frame.

And then stop treating it as a verdict. A chart is not a sentence passed on you. It is a description of the instrument; the music is still yours to play. Read it for what is useful, leave what is not, and let it be a language rather than a law.