Turned Chart

Definition

A turned chart is a way of reading a birth chart in which you treat any one house as a stand-in 1st house and renumber the other eleven around it. Turn the 7th house, and it becomes your partner’s "1st" — your partner’s 2nd house of resources lands on your chart’s 8th, your partner’s 10th house of career lands on your chart’s 4th. You can do this from any house to read its sub-topics through a fresh twelve-house grid borrowed from that starting point.

In Tradition

In traditional horary astrology — the branch that answers a question by the chart of the moment it was asked — and its modern revival, turning the chart is treated as an essential tool for questions about a person or topic tied to a house other than the 1st. Writers agree it works best with concrete, event-focused house meanings, and can spawn an unmanageable tangle of stacked meanings when used on abstract psychological house meanings. Practitioners disagree on how far turning an already-turned chart should go.

In Practice

You find the house that stands for the person or topic in question, then renumber the chart so that house becomes the 1st. The sub-topic is then read from the right turned house: a partner’s career sits on your radical 4th (the 10th from the 7th), a brother’s wealth on your radical 4th again (the 2nd from the 3rd), and so on. The technique comes up most in horary judgment of multi-party questions — "will my brother’s employer agree?" — and in synastry and in derived-house work on family or business situations.

Historical Origin

Turning the chart through derived houses is documented in Hellenistic practice: Dorotheus, in Carmen V, applies derived houses to questions, and Hephaistio uses them in marriage analysis. The technique carries through the Arabic transmission and is worked out in detail in medieval-Latin horary by Bonatti and in Lilly’s Christian Astrology (1647). Modern Western synthesis appears in Houlding’s The Houses: Temples of the Sky and Hand’s Horoscope Symbols.

Etymology

Origin: English. Meaning: From the image of rotating or "turning" the chart wheel so that a different house occupies the 1st house position. The Latin equivalent is conversio or revolutio..

Further Reading