The plain explanation
What is astrocartography?
The shortest honest answer, followed by the longer one. You do not have to believe any of it to read this page.
The idea, in numbers
- Bodies mapped
- 10
- Sun, Moon and the eight planets
- Chart angles
- 4
- rising, setting, overhead, underfoot
- Lines per person
- 40
- ten bodies x four angles
- What moves them
- 4 minutes = 100 km
- an error in the birth time shifts every line
In short
Astrocartography maps where each planet stood at one of four chart angles at the moment you were born, drawn as lines across the world. Ten bodies across four angles gives forty lines, and they fall in a different place for every person alive. Where the lines go is ordinary astronomy; what being near one means is an interpretation, and this page keeps those two apart.
The short answer
At the moment you were born, every planet was directly overhead at exactly one point on Earth, and on the horizon along a line of other points. Project those positions onto a map and you get a set of lines. Ten bodies across four angles of a chart gives forty lines, and they fall in a different place for every person alive.
Astrocartography is the practice of reading those lines as a map of places, the claim being that living near one of yours emphasises a particular quality of experience there.
Where the lines actually come from
This part is not interpretation. It is the same calculation that tells you where a solar eclipse will be visible, and any two competent tools should agree on it to the arcminute.
A Midheaven line is a meridian, a line of longitude, placed where a planet stood directly overhead. Its Imum Coeli line sits exactly opposite. Ascendant and Descendant lines are solved separately at every latitude, which is why they curve.
Where a body never rises or never sets at a latitude, its line does not exist there. An honest map leaves that gap. A map that draws a continuous line through it is showing you something that is not there.
The formulas, in fullThe four angles, briefly
MC, Midheaven
What you are seen doing. Career, visibility, reputation. The angle most associated with public work.
IC, Imum Coeli
Home, rest, the private base. A demanding planet here affects the place you are meant to recover in, which is why it tends to be felt so strongly.
AC, Ascendant
How you arrive and how you are met. The version of you a new city seems to draw out.
DC, Descendant
Who you meet, and how partnership tends to run. The relational angle.
What we claim, and what we do not
The geometry is exact. The reading is an interpretation drawn from a fixed table written by a person, nothing is generated, so the same birth moment gives the same words in ten years and you can hold us to a screenshot.
You do not have to accept the interpretation to use this. Run it against cities you have already lived in. Either it describes them or it does not, and that is a test you can finish in about a minute.
A city has no fixed character either. It has a relationship with one particular chart the same street is a sprint for one person and a rest for another, and most cities are simply neutral for you, which we will say rather than reaching for something.
Common questions
What is an astrocartography line?
A line on a world map marking every place where one planet was exactly on a chart angle at the moment you were born. Ten planets across four angles gives forty lines, and they fall in different places for every person.
Do I need my exact birth time?
For the lines, yes, an hour of error moves them by about fifteen degrees of longitude. Without a time we draw no lines at all rather than guess. You still get your planetary signs and the sky as it moves now, neither of which depends on the hour.
What do the four angles mean?
MC is what you are seen doing. IC is home, rest and the private base. AC is how you show up. DC is who you meet and how you relate.
Is astrocartography scientific?
Half of it is, and the half that is not is the interesting half. Where the lines fall is ordinary astronomy, the same kind of maths that says when an eclipse will happen and where it will be visible, so any two honest tools should put your lines in the same place, to within the width of a street. What that proximity then means for how a city treats you is an interpretation, not a measurement. We keep those two apart rather than blurring them, and the workings for the first half are written out in full on our methodology page.
The words you will meet, defined
Four terms carry almost all of the vocabulary. Every other page on this site assumes them, so they are set out here rather than left to be picked up.
Orb
How close a place has to be to a line before the line counts as reaching it, measured as a distance. We measure it in great-circle degreesabout 111 kilometres per degree, anywhere on Earth, and treat anything within about two degrees as in range. Older software often quotes the same figure in degrees of longitude, which shrink towards the poles, so our numbers read tighter at high latitude for the same city. Neither is wrong; they are different measurements, and the difference is worth knowing before comparing two tools.
Circumpolar
A body that never rises or never sets at a given latitude, it circles the pole without touching the horizon. This is why a rising or setting line can simply stop partway up a map: above a certain latitude there is no moment of rising to mark, so there is no line. A tool that draws one anyway is inventing a position.
Relocated chart
The same birth moment read as though you had been born somewhere else. It is the formal machinery behind the idea that a place emphasises something: the moment does not change, but which planets sit on which angles does. Astrocartography is a way of seeing every relocation at once, on a map, instead of one at a time.
Paran
A latitude where two different planetary lines cross. Practitioners read the crossing as combining both influences along that band of latitude rather than at a single point. It is a real feature of the geometry and we compute it, though nothing on the current surface displays it.
What this cannot tell you
The most useful part of any method is the list of questions it refuses. These are limits of the approach, not of this implementation.
It cannot rank cities for people in general. There is no such thing as a good astrocartography city. Every line is somebody’s, and the same place is a different answer for two people born days apart.
It cannot work without the hour you were born. The four angles depend on the earth’s rotation, so four minutes moves a line about a hundred kilometres. Without a time, angular lines are not approximate, they are undefined, and we switch them off rather than drawing something we cannot stand behind.
It cannot predict events. The claim is about the character of a place, not about what will happen in it. Anything promising outcomes from a line has left the method behind.
It is not medical, financial or legal guidance, and no reading here is offered as any of the three.
Your own map
See your own forty
The day, the hour and the town you were born in. It computes on your own device, needs no account, and most of the world will come back quiet, which is the usual shape of a chart.
Draw my 40 linesNo card. No account needed to see your map.
Keep reading
Start with a city you already know
The fastest way to judge any of this is against a place you have actually lived.