Today’s Podcast: https://shows.acast.com/fun-astrology/episodes/astrology-fun-may-15-2021-special-listener-question-on-inter
And it’s Saturday. Welcome back. I’m so glad you stopped by on the weekend. Thanks for doing that. We’re got a great listener question today. There’s nothing going on in the chart that we haven’t talked about during the week. The moon is solidly and happily in cancer. So hopefully you’ll get some inspiration from that, but we have a great listener question about a more technical aspect of the chart that we really don’t.
I want to give more time to, so that’s why we’re doing it here on the weekend. Hi, Thomas. This is Chris from Phoenix, Arizona, and I have a question regarding intercepted signs. I just had the Steven forest reading done through your website and I absolutely love it. But when I look at the Placidus burst chart, um, I noticed that my Virgo sign and as well as my Pisces are kind of swallowed up and I’ve heard that’s called an intercepted sign, I believe so.
I’m wondering if you could speak to that. Chris you are awesome. Thank you for that. Great question. And I hope that you are heading to Sedona this morning while you’re listening to this. I know if I were there and the land of enchantment, that’s where I’d want to be. So, what we’re talking about here is house systems, and I’m going to be covering this in the course in depth.
I’m designing an astrology, a fun astrology one Oh one course, we’re going to do it, fun astrology style. And definitely we will talk about the house systems. So some of that I’ll defer there simply because it’ll probably be about 30 or 45 minutes long just to set up how we got to these different slices of the pie.
And that’s exactly what we’re talking about. So think about the astrological wheel as a piece of pie, and we’re going to cut it into 12 pieces. Well, how do we cut the pieces of the pie or really what we’re saying is how do we take the infinite three dimensional multi-dimensional sky and reduce it down to the equivalent of a doily.
And when you realize that that’s just not possible, then you understand something has to give. So these house systems are man’s best effort to take the sky and put it on some kind of two dimensional, symmetric graph that we can grasp. And as I love to say, remember, it’s not the universe that put these lines on these charts, it’s us, it’s humans.
And I was having a conversation about something else with a friend the other day. And I asked him, I said, rhetorically, have you ever seen. A government agency that operated efficiently, and this guy is a former CFO of a multi-billion dollar company. And he said, no, well, have you ever seen a human do something completely flawlessly?
And no. So we have to built in the elasticity of being human on these things on these lines, in the chart. So, how did we get here? Well, the chart started and again, I’ll go into more detail on this, but let’s say roughly five to 700 BC. The first charts were square. The round chart came in from what I’ve read and understand.
I wasn’t there, even though some might accuse me of that, but at this point, no, I wasn’t there when the circle chart began somewhere in a hundred, maybe BC or thereabouts, but eventually it morphed into the circle that we see today. So what they did, you know, remember this is pre-internet pre telescope.
They took a look at the sunrise point on the horizon and they made that the ascendant. So the astrological chart is designed to start over there around the nine o’clock position. And I say that broadly, it starts with the ascendant. If you will, that’s the sunrise. And then it follows the sun all the way around clockwise for 24 hours.
So the mid point up at the top of the chart is the sun at its highest point in the sky during the day of your birth or the day you’re looking at, we come on around two, around the broadly three o’clock position. There’s sunset. We come down to the what’s, the bottom of the chart, the darkest part of the night, the column or the Nadir.
And then we come back around to the ascendant. Well, the ancients did a pretty good job for what they started with because they put the ascendant as a plot on the chart, and then they made it the first house, the entire first house and whatever sign that ascendant was in. Like the chart I’m looking at for today right now has the ascendant in cancer.
And at 26 degrees. So they made that the whole first house cancer with the ascendant at 26 degrees out of 30 possible degrees. And they made the whole enchilada the first house. Okay. Does that make sense? I mean, look, that’s all you’ve got, right? Why not throw it down and start from there? Well, it’s an imperfect system because it’s a three-dimensional sky.
So ever since people have been trying to quote unquote, fix it well, at least up until the middle ages they did. And that’s how we got the variations. Now there are about 24 or 26, 27 recognized house systems in astrology it’s mind-boggling and they are different ways at trying to wrap the sky onto a doily.
Well, the one that Chris is talking about is the Placidus system. And it came about in the middle ages. And again, without going into too much detail, let’s just say that it’s about six, 700, 600 years old. Now it’s what’s called a time-based system. So what it does is it takes that ascendant point. Let’s use our example, 26 degrees cancer, and it makes that point, the cusp or the beginning.
Of the first house, our first slice of pie, then it takes the mid point and makes it the cusp of the 10th house. And then basically it wraps the rest of the houses around those two fixed points. And the way that the time and math of the system work is basically the closer you are to the equator. The more equal your houses are going to be.
The farther away you are from the equator, the more variance you’re going to have in the size and shape and placement of the houses. So if you’re born in Alberta, Canada, for example, you’re going to have some houses are going to be small and thin, and some are going to be really fat inside those fatter houses.
You can have more than one sign. Now that’s the brilliance and the complexity of the Placidus system. I mean, think about it. Let’s go back to whole sign for a second. All the pieces of pie are equal. We take 360, we divide it by 12 that’s, 30. Every piece of pie gets 30 degrees. It’s very symmetric. So when you look at a whole sign chart, you are looking at, if you’re looking at a square aspect, for example, you’re looking at a right angle, a degree there, you’re looking at a square of two points on that circle.
Not so much true in Placidus. Well you are, but it’s harder to see because the lines are different. Again, lines that we humans put in place. Now, the houses, the house systems they are about as charged as political parties, I’m telling you people get married to their house system and they want that to be the right way.
And Steve forest for whom I have graciously narrated for audio books, the elements series is very much from that perspective. He uses the Placidus system only. So back when he was doing in person live courses, if you came to one of his horses, there were S there’s a set of rules. And one of those rules rules is you are on Placidus period.
During this course, his point is pick one and learn it and use it and marry to it. What I’ve observed in my own study of astrology. Is when I first came across the whole sign system, advocated by to me where I found it was through Chris Brennan, who is the host of the brilliant, the astrology podcast. And by the way, I am a supporter of that.
I’m a Patrion of his at his highest level. Why? Because I believe in what he’s doing. He embraced the roots of astrology during his study time at Kepler college. And has done, I think an amazing job of the intricate details that Chris is suited for to really dive deep and appreciate and elevate the roots of this craft.
And as part of that, he exclusively uses the whole sign system. The very first one. So I learned under Placidus as most people do, because that’s the modern system. If you call up a chart online, it’s likely going to be a Placidus chart. That’s how I learned and it read my chart brilliantly. And then I looked at whole sign and I saw some differences, but then I started doing readings and as I started doing readings, I started integrating the two.
And dancing between the two and explaining to people. I had found a richness in both, and then it just made sense to me, wait a minute where the ones who put the lines, so let the universe be bigger and more infinite than a system designed by humans. Why not dance around? And when I started doing that, It unlocked a richness of interpretation that could not have been found if you were locked into one system.
Does that make sense? So intercepted signs are simply those in a time-based system, Placidus being one of those that engulfs, if you will, one or more signs, you could have a really big spread. If you were born way up by the Arctic circle, you know, your chart would be very interesting. And the chances of you having intercepted science would be very high.
Now, the question is how do we interpret them? Well, you just interpret them where they land. So basically let’s say you have a third house intercepted Virgo. Well, that’s a Virgo ruled by mercury as the ruler of the third house, but you’re going to have Leo on the cusp Virgo in the middle. And then it may even change over to Libra.
It will actually, because Virgos intercepted then Libra will be on the cusp of the fourth house. So the synthesis is the same. In other words, that’s a third house, Virgo ruled by mercury. It just doesn’t have a cusp. Now this is where I would jump over and look at where is that Virgo in whole sign. So let’s say it’s in the fourth house.
Well, then you have another flavor of interpretation. So then you start to ask questions related to Virgo, pertaining to home and family. Fourth house, whole sign or Virgo related to communication, learning, education, siblings, neighbors, et cetera. Third house mercury questions for the Placidus interpretation.
Cancer moon lunar questions for the fourth house interpretation. Does that make sense? And then you start to look and what, the other thing that I do is I say, okay, is there any way that this Virgo would fit into the second house? And generally in this example I’m giving no, it probably wouldn’t, it would be more likely to be moved over.
But if it is, then I would look there, there as well. So now we’ve transcended the human lines. We’re looking at this Virgo from the perspective of how the universe. Designed this Virgo and it may very well be like we talked, uh, last week or the week before, about 29 degrees. If you heard that podcast and I answered the question about what you do with a planet that’s at 29 degrees of a sign, and basically you can dance between the two.
Well, here you can dance between all three and see how it applies in your life. Now, Chris also mentioned that she had a stellium in her intercepted sign. We’re going to talk about stellium tomorrow. So I’ll defer that to tomorrow’s podcast. And then she mentioned something very important that she said that in her intercepted sign.
With the stellium. She had planets that were at an angle, a 90 degree angle to the nodes of the moon. Now that’s a big deal. And I’m glad Chris, that you pulled that out because as I’ve said, if you can educate or train your eye, you know, one of the first things that you look at when you’re analyzing a chart, which should be yours to start with, obviously look at the nodes of the moon.
Look at that axis and then see if there are any planets, 90 degrees to that line. It is called the bending of the nodes. So, Chris, I’m going to answer your specific question here just briefly. And then we’ll talk about the stellium tomorrow. The stellium turns planetary energy into a laser beam, rather than say a headlamp beam, the bending of the nodes, those planets at the 90 degree, Mark.
Mean that you are going to do karmic business along those lines in your lifetime. And this is where you start to look at the synthesis. What signs are the nodes in, what planet or planets are at that bending of the nodes? Then it also matters what, uh, directionally, where the planet is placed. There’s a lot that goes into the synthesis of that.
And you could really park on that and do a whole reading just on that element right there, the stellium and the nodes that is super concentrated. Karmic energy is the short, quick answer to that, Chris. Thank you. Really appreciate it. And hope you enjoy this. Sure. Thank you for stopping by. We’ll talk about stelliums tomorrow.