At The FCEA, we have been rolling out new 400 courses addressing advanced topics. One of our new classes is “402: Chart Rectification” Here’s what that speciality course is all about. As we all know, a person’s exact time of birth is mission-critical in astrology, but sometimes it’s impossible to find it. That’s especially true if someone was born at home and no record was kept. Generally it’s more of a problem with older people – years ago, it was more common not to bother with “an inconsequential detail” like that. People are pretty good about it nowadays.
The problem runs deeper. A birth listed “at noon” also naturally triggers suspicion. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ditto for a birth registered exactly on the half or quarter hour. Naturally, it’s possible for someone to be born at 10:15, but the number smacks of being rounded off. Sometimes even a few minutes of error can make a big difference in a chart – it could change the Ascendant sign, for example. We need to be careful with “recorded” birth times like those.
More insidiously, even a seemingly accurate birth time can be off by a little. Maybe your client reports, “My birth certificate says that I was born at 11:07 PM.” That has the ring of real authority – but what do we actually mean by the moment of birth? Some of you female readers have had babies, and you know it’s not quite like, “Pop! Oooh, a baby! Quick – what time is it?” Are we talking about the first breath, the emergence of the child’s head, the final separation from the mother’s body, or the severing of the umbilical cord? There’s no clear agreement about any of that.
Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern: it runs out that people are often born a little earlier than what’s recorded. It’s not a reliable principle, but it’s one worth considering. The reason is probably pretty simple: the medical staff is busy with the actual birthing process. When it’s over and the baby is safely delivered, someone looks at the clock and calls out the time. The actual birth occurred a bit earlier. I’m a good example of that. On my birth certificate, my time of birth is listed as 3:30 AM. I’ve come to believe that it is closer to 3:22 AM. That’s an eight minute difference – enough to make some significant changes in my chart.
Then there’s the final vexation: how accurate was the clock on the wall? As we all know, unless a clock is tied to the Internet, it can easily drift a minute or two away from reality. Typically no one notices it.
Applying that caution in practice brings us to the fascinating world of chart rectification.
WHAT IS CHART RECTIFICATION?
We all know that a person’s astrological chart correlates with the timing of life events. That’s an astrological staple; it’s the standard practice of transits, progressions, and solar arcs. What if we turn that process on its head? What if instead of predicting events from a chart, we use the timing of events to predict the chart?
That, in a nut shell, is rectification.
Take for example the start of a significant relationship. Such a life-changing event is always heralded by relevant transits, progressions, or solar arcs. At such a time, progressed Venus might, for one illustration, form a conjunction with your natal Sun. That’s everyday astrology at work – but it won’t help us much in this case. Why? Because even if all we know is the day that someone was born, we already know the position of their Sun within about one degree of accuracy. That Venus progression doesn’t narrow down the time of birth at all.
Let’s say that when that significant relationship started, progressed Venus was entering your 7th house. Like Venus hitting the Sun, that would also be a textbook astrological correlate for someone important popping into your life. But to know the position of that house cusp, we would have to know the time of your birth within a few minutes.
The next step is the critical one.
Say we don’t know a woman’s birth time, but we do know that she met her husband when her progressed Venus had reached 11 degrees of Capricorn. Let’s also say that she told us that years earlier when she met “Mister Wrong,” transiting Pluto was in the same position. And when solar arc Jupiter was there, she met her literary agent who opened publishing doors for her.
We don’t know the woman’s birth time, but we’re starting to see a pattern of relationship sensitivity around that Capricorn degree. Let’s add one more critical point: no planetary aspects are triggered there. So what’s happening? Why are her relationships sensitive to that degree?
That’s how rectification works. When a birth time is unknown, the Angles reveal themselves through clusterings of astrological events that cannot otherwise be explained. In other words, we’re not interested in transits, progressions, or solar arcs making aspects to planets. We are only interested in their aspects to the four Angles of the chart.
Essentially we work backwards through the timing of actual events in order to find the chart that would have predicted them.
That’s rectification.
A FEW PRACTICAL GUIDELINES
In undertaking a rectification, I ask the client for a list of the dates of about ten “big events.” To prime the pump, I suggest physical moves, the beginnings or endings of relationships, illnesses or accidents, career developments, significant deaths, the births of children, and so forth.
I also add an important stricture: make sure these events are all separated by at least a couple of years. Otherwise we’ll get “false positives.” How far do the outer planets or the progressions go in a year? Not far! So if the dates are close together, meaningless clusterings are inevitable. One exception: with dates separated by two or three months, it’s okay to use the transits of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. They move fast enough that they spread out over time periods like that. Never use anything slower with dates that are close together!
If the client can give me exact dates – for example, “I got married on June 13, 2019” – that’s great news. That means I can use those quick transits of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. That’s why events where people can recall exact dates are particularly useful: marriages, the births of children, and parental deaths come to mind.
Often in practice the date won’t be so precise. Instead, you’ll hear something like, “I moved to Chicago in summer 2007.” That can be helpful too – but we have to sacrifice those fast planets. Over three months, they’ll cover wide arcs. The good news is that even with vague dates, you can still use all the slow-moving ones – the transits of Jupiter on out, plus all the solar arcs and progressions. With the possible exception of transiting Jupiter, they don’t move far in a single summer.
Sometimes people know that they were born “early in the morning” or that “dad had to rush mom to the hospital in the wee hours.” That’s not accurate enough for us to set up a chart, but it’s still a huge help because it considerably narrows down the possibilities. Before you start a rectification, always see if any hints like that are available.
We know that when a planet has moved within a couple degrees of an Angle, things tend to happen. The planet doesn’t have to be exactly on the Angle, in other words. In my earlier example where we saw events clustering in a woman’s life when planets got to “11 degrees of Capricorn,” I was oversimplifying. A more likely reality would be seeing a clustering of planets falling between, say, 9 and 13 degrees of Capricorn. You basically average it out – because of orbs, the truth will likely lie somewhere in the middle of the cluster.
The more events you have, the better. As I mentioned, I’ll initially ask for ten. That’s generally been enough in my experience. Sometimes you get unlucky though – maybe all those events make perfect astrological sense, but they’re all tied to planetary aspects, not aspects to the Angles. If you’re not getting anywhere with a rectification, ask for another batch of events.
There’s one more stricture: since this whole process depends on having the dates of many big events spread out over a long period of time, it follows that you really can’t do reliable rectification work for children.
FCEA 402
That’s our rectification class. It dives deeply into the nuts and bolts of this method in a lot more detail than I can cover in a brief newsletter. In framing 402, I used the chart of soul-singer James Brown as an example. No birth time was available for him. He was born in poverty. But in a live video of one of his performances, he made reference to having “Leo rising.” That narrowed his time of birth down to a couple of hours, and I took it from there.
James Brown was of course a famous person, so it was easy to research the dates of various biographical events, both glorious and inglorious.
In 402, we teach a strictly hands-on method of chart rectification. All you need is time and astrological knowledge. Nowadays, there are many computer-assisted rectification methods available as well. Sirius software and Astrolabe’s “Jigsaw” can help. In the past, I’ve often used the rectification module in Alphee Lavoie’s A.I.R. software program. I’m not sure if that’s still available at this point.
Tools such as those can be helpful and there’s no shame in using them. Still, they embody the same kinds of temptations and pitfalls that are built into Artificial Intelligence in general – rely on them too much, and pretty soon you’re letting the machine do your thinking for you, while you learn nothing at all.
Rectification taught me an enormous amount about how transits, progressions, and solar arcs actually work. For one example, when I was a young astrologer, I was bamboozled into believing the standard line about “benefic” and “malefic” planets. Perhaps more than anything else, rectification disabused me of all that. I saw enough deaths heralded by Jupiter and enough loving relationships heralded by Saturn that I was compelled to think more deeply about everything.
Intuition definitely plays a role in astrological work. We do need to be careful of it though. Be wary if you find yourself saying something like, “I just know you must have Gemini rising.” It might turn out that the person has Cancer rising, but with Mercury conjunct the Ascendant. You sensed the energy correctly, but you mislabeled it – and naturally such an “intuitive” error would cascade into a wildly incorrect reading.
There’s no substitute in other words for doing the rigorous work of rectification. Perhaps the biggest danger that arises if you simply let the software do it for you is that such laziness cancels out all the parts of your intuition that are actually helpful. By the time you’ve rectified a chart, your understanding of how the planets actually work in that person’s life is profound. Even better, maybe you get the feeling that a planet seems to be in the wrong house – rectification puts it in the 9th, but the 8th house feels like a more natural fit with the actual story of the person’s life. Then you realize that if he or she were born just one minute later, that planet would indeed land in the 8th house.
Behind such a realization, here’s what’s going on technically. Remember how when we saw a cluster of planets hovering over a three or four degree area which we suspect is the position of an Angle, we just averaged it out and picked the middle? Because Angles have orbs, that’s just the way it all works in practice. The results are always slightly fuzzy – say, within a degree or so of error. And maybe because of that inherent imprecision, moving that suspect planet into the 8th house not only makes astrological sense, it’s also operating within the bounds of the small “quantum” uncertainties that underlie all rectification work.
The point is that it was your precious intuition that sensed the error. If you had relied solely on computerized rectification, that intuitive insight would never have arisen. As with the best of modern astrological practice, we’re working in partnership with these mighty microchips, but we shouldn’t enslave ourselves to them.
Let me offer your intuition one final image: there’s an astrologer who sometimes simply gazes in awe at the starry night sky and there’s another one who never steps away from the computer screen. Which one do you want to trust with your soul?
So roll up your sleeves, dive into the rectification process, and let your intelligence and your intuition learn to dance together. They’re stronger together than they are apart.
