← Reference · 05 of 07

How these readings are made

The interpretations on this site are composed from four vocabularies rather than written out one by one. Here is the whole method, so you can discount it accordingly.

There are thirteen bodies, twelve signs, twelve houses and seven aspects in play here. That is 1,872 placement combinations before aspects are counted at all. Writing each one by hand produces one of two things: a single thin paragraph repeated with the nouns swapped, or a corpus so large nobody ever proofreads it. Most astrology software ships the second and hopes you do not compare two entries side by side.

So these are composed. Each body is given a principle — what the tradition takes it to govern. Each sign is given a manner, an adverbial phrase for how it goes about things. Each house is given an arena, the area of life it covers. Each aspect is given a relation, describing what it says about two principles meeting. A reading is then one sentence from the first three, and another from the fourth.

Mars is 'the capacity to want something and go at it'. Capricorn's manner is 'patiently, on the assumption that the return will be slow'. The tenth house arena is 'vocation and public standing'. Put together: the capacity to want something and go at it, pursued patiently, on the assumption that the return will be slow — in vocation and public standing. That is the entire trick.

The advantage is consistency: every combination gets the same care, because there are only forty-odd pieces of writing to get right rather than two thousand. The cost is that the seams sometimes show, and a composed sentence will never have the particularity of one written for a single placement. That seems the better trade, and in any case it is stated rather than hidden.

What none of this is, is checkable. The positions elsewhere on this site are computed from an ephemeris and verified against published values to the arcminute; that is a different kind of claim, and it is deliberately kept in a different voice. A reading is the tradition's symbolism recombined. It describes what Mars in Capricorn is supposed to mean. It does not describe you, and this site has no way of finding out whether it does.