Your birth chart, read for love
Everyone knows their Sun sign. Your Venus, Mars and Moon are the three that actually run your relationships.
A birth chart is the sky at the moment you were born. For love, three placements do most of the work: Venus is how you love, Mars is what you chase, and the Moon is what you need in order to feel safe with someone. Your Sun sign says almost nothing about any of it.
Why Venus, Mars and the Moon
Sun-sign astrology asks one question and answers it twelve ways. A birth chart asks better ones. Venus describes what you find beautiful and how you show affection — whether you court slowly or decide in an evening. Mars describes appetite and how you go after what you want, which is why two people with easy Venus signs can still fight about pace. The Moon is the private one: what you need before you can relax with somebody, and what you do when you do not get it. Those three disagree with each other in most charts, and the disagreement is usually the interesting part.
What your birth time changes
The planets move slowly enough that a date is usually sufficient for them. The Moon is the exception: it covers about thirteen degrees a day, so on roughly half of all days it changes sign somewhere in the twenty-four hours, and the time is what settles which side you fall on. The rising sign is stricter still. It moves a full degree every four minutes, so a birth recorded to the nearest minute fixes it to about six minutes of arc — and a birth time somebody half-remembers fixes it to nothing. If you do not know yours, this page will not guess: it drops the rising sign and the houses and reads the planets, which is all that can honestly be said.
The cards on the wheel
Each sign divides into three decans of ten degrees, and in the Golden Dawn tradition every decan is ruled by one of the minor arcana — the same system the 1909 deck was drawn inside. That gives every degree of your chart a card. Venus at twenty-four degrees of Taurus is the third decan of a fixed earth sign, which is the Seven of Pentacles: the card of waiting to see whether what you planted is going to grow. It is the same correspondence a reader uses at a table, and it is why this chart is drawn with cards on it instead of only symbols.
How this chart is calculated
Positions come from the VSOP87 planetary model with a stated accuracy of about one arcminute, referred to the true ecliptic of date — the tropical zodiac, the frame the signs are actually defined in. The ascendant, midheaven and Placidus cusps are computed from apparent sidereal time and the true obliquity, so the angles and the planets sit on the same ecliptic rather than two that differ by the nutation. Your local birth time is converted using the historical time-zone rules for that place, which matters more than it sounds: half the twentieth century is full of wartime clocks and decree time.
Checked against a published chart
Astrology software is easy to write and hard to verify, so here is ours checked against a birth record with an AA rating — Diana, Princess of Wales, 1 July 1961, 19:45 BST at Sandringham. Published: Sun 9°40′ Cancer, Moon 25°02′ Aquarius, Venus 24°24′ Taurus, Ascendant 18°24′ Sagittarius. Computed here: the same, to the arcminute. Above the polar circles Placidus has no mathematical answer at all, and there this page says whole sign instead of pretending.
Tarot horoscope
Questions people ask
What if I do not know my birth time?
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You still get your planets, including Venus, Mars and the Moon. You do not get a rising sign or houses, because those depend on the minute and there is no honest way to estimate them. If your Moon was near a sign boundary that day the page tells you the range rather than picking one.
Which house system does this use?
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Placidus, which is what most modern software defaults to, so your chart will match what you have seen elsewhere. Inside the polar circles Placidus is undefined — not imprecise, undefined — and there the page switches to whole sign and says so.
Is the north node the true node or the mean node?
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The true node, the one astro.com and most apps show. The mean node is a smoothed average and sits up to about a degree and a half away, which is often enough to land in the neighbouring sign.
Why does my chart show cards?
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Because every ten degrees of the zodiac is a decan, and in the Golden Dawn tradition each decan is ruled by a minor arcanum. Your Venus is not only in a sign, it is on a card — and that card has a page here with what it means in love.
What happens to my birth details?
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The chart is computed on our server and nothing is stored unless you ask for a reading or save it. The city lookup only ever sees a few letters of a place name, never your date or time.