(This is part of the “Ask An Astrologer” series, where I occasionally try to demonstrate how getting a consultation can genuinely help and provide real guidance, using real-life examples. Want to find out for yourself? There’s a link to my e-mail at the bottom of this blog entry.)
LM writes:
I don’t know the exact time of my birth and someone told me you do chart rectifications. I did a little research on it, and I was I was wondering if you could explain how you go about the process.
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I’m glad you asked about this. There are a lot of people out there who do not know what time of day they were born at. This can be a major impediment to do a proper reading for that person. There is still some value to looking at transits without an exact time of birth of though. In fact, I do it here all the time — because often with celebrities or people who have just recently entered the news, it can be pretty hard to get a confirmed time of birth.
Nonetheless, without a time of birth we can’t know what the house placements of the planets in the birth chart, nor can we look at transits to the Ascendant or the Midheaven, and we can’t even be entirely precise about where the Moon is in the birth chart. Fortunately, astrology provides a way to work those things out. It’s called “doing a rectification.”
There are some very good astrologers out there who won’t go near a rectification with a ten-foot pole. I can understand that. Rectifications are time consuming and involve a lot of work. There are also some astrologers out there who, if you tell them you were born at 2:37 PM, they will automatically start tinkering with your chart to see if maybe you were born at 2:35 or 2:39 or something. Frankly, I’m not that OCD.
Think about it this way: if a competent astrologer knows where your Ascendant and Midheaven are, he or she can make predictions about your future based on upcoming transit to those points. What blows some people’s minds is that if you don’t know where the Ascendant and Midheaven, you can do a rectification and work those out based on events that have happened in the past.
If you look around you will find various people have various techniques for doing a rectification. Here’s how I do it.
I like to start with a list of major life events that have happened for the client: marriages and breakups, hirings and firings, major health events, accidents, and so on. I also like to be able to see a picture of the client, because what a person actually looks like can tell you something about their ascendant and what condition the ascendant ruler is in.
(By the way, you might be surprised to learn that I don’t count the birth of a child as “a major life event” when doing a rectification. That’s because I came to the conclusion a long time ago that whenever a new human lands here on Earth, that human is here on his or her agenda — and not yours, so much.)
When I tinker, I like to do it hardcore, so I don’t stop there. Once I have an Ascendant and a Midheaven that appear to work, I dive into the harmonic charts. I find the 5th, 7th 9th,and 10th harmonic charts quite useful. Then, just to be safe, I convert the whole thing into Vedic and look at the rising nakshatra.
“Wait a minute,” some of you are saying, “harmonic charts? Nakshatra? What the heck is that all about?” To which I reply: I am writing this during a New Moon in Aries, and in that spirit? I’ve already hit my word count for the day, so I’ll get back to those subjects later.
(Want to see how a rectification is done? CLICK HERE for more, featuring Special Guest Star Kim Jong-un!)
Want to know how to work with the current and future energy to get maximum benefit? Feel free to write me about it!
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