Читать книгу Astrology For Dummies - Rae Orion - Страница 35

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.