Astrocartography: The Places Where You Live Best

Since antiquity, charts have been cast for cities and kingdoms (Sun ingresses, eclipses, conjunctions) to judge the conditions of a place. Ptolemy explains it at the opening of his Book II: astrology is divided into the “general” (races, countries and cities) and the “particular” (individuals), and it requires us to consider the familiarity of signs and stars with the climes and regions of the Earth.

In the twentieth century, Jim Lewis structured a set of cartographic techniques that he named AstroCartoGraphy (ACG): lines where, for your birth time, a planet is “angular” on some meridian or parallel of the globe (on the Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven or Imum Coeli). Two modern pillars were added to it: relocated charts (your same birth chart recalculated for another city) and the Local Space system, which draws on the map the azimuth directions of your planets from your birthplace. All of this can be complemented with fixed-star parans and with the geodetic hypothesis, which assigns zodiacal longitudes to meridians. Taken together, it is a working technique for making decisions about places and locations, without giving up the rigor of always checking against the natal chart to verify whatever these techniques may suggest.

AstroCartoGraphy (ACG) / Astrocartography

An ACG map plots, for your birth time, the places where each planet was on the Asc, MC, DC or IC. Crossing a line or living near it increases that planet's weight in how you experience the place. Jim Lewis left written, practical explanations, from how to read intersections to a set of auxiliary techniques that include orbs of influence, transits over the map and “cyclocartography” (mapping transits onto the ACG).

In classical practice it pays to work with exactness: the closer the line, the greater the angularity (the strength with which it manifests). Lewis suggests ranges of influence that, in accumulated experience, amount to a corridor around the angular line.

Relocated charts

A relocated chart keeps the angular relationships between the planets in your natal chart, but the change of place forces the houses to be recalculated for the new city or location. Because of that, when you move, planets can fall in a different house from the one they occupy in the natal chart: recalculating the houses shifts the house cusps, so that, for example, the Sun or the Moon ends up in another house. That gives the planet's qualities a new meaning in its new house and carries those meanings into the areas of your life that house describes.

Local Space / Azimuth cartography

Michael Erlewine formalized Local Space in the 1970s. In this technique each planet, seen from your birthplace, has an azimuth (a compass direction on the Earth). As you move, you “activate” the corresponding planetary quality. It does not replace ACG; it complements it at the scale of a neighborhood or a city, or for choosing travel directions or where to activate something within a country. Erlewine's writings explain when to prioritize horizons, how to use orbs in azimuth and how to draw the “Venus line” or the “Jupiter line” toward specific cities.

What questions can this kind of consultation answer?

Clients come to this technique with different questions. They write to me because they have been offered a job in another city, because the family is moving and not everyone agrees, because they have spent three years somewhere where nothing quite comes together. Others ask about a three-week trip, a vacation, business, a partner in another country… and so on. Remember that the map shows which area of life comes to the fore in each place, and how intensely.

There is one question worth asking before looking at any line: what do you want to happen there? Looking for a place to work is not the same as looking for one to rest, to raise children or to get through a period of grief. A line that favors business can make rest impossible. The idea should be to find the right balance, or to know exactly how intense what you will find in that place is going to be.

Understanding the four angles

A Jupiter line does not mean the same thing in one place as in another, and the difference lies in the angle. Remember that each planet draws four lines across the world, one for each angle of the chart, and that in this technique the angle matters as much as the planet.

On the Ascendant line, the planet colors meanings related to the body and to character. There you behave like that planet and people perceive you that way, for better and for worse. The Midheaven line works outward: your profession, recognition, what the world sees of you. The Descendant line colors everything to do with other people — your partner, your associates and also your adversaries, because the seventh sector includes both. And the Imum Coeli line shows matters related to home, family and roots.

Here is an example of the kind I often see in consultation. Someone moves to a city on their Sun–Midheaven line and gets exactly what that line promises (if they have a good Sun in the natal chart): progress in their career, recognition, respect, responsibility and some social advancement. Later they tell me they are happy with their professional achievements, but exhausted, and that they would like to slow down a little to have more time for their home (4th house) or their partner (7th house). That is why you should look for the right balance, or simply be aware of what you are looking for.

Parans, or why two cities on the same latitude feel alike

ACG lines run north to south, except the Ascendant and Descendant lines, which curve. Parans run the other way, from east to west, and so they affect an entire band of latitude. Bernadette Brady documented the method with fixed stars: two bodies form a paran when they reach any of the four angles at the same time, even if they are not close in the zodiac.

In practice, this explains something people tell me without knowing what to call it. They move to a city that has nothing to do with the previous one, thousands of kilometers away, and feel that the same things keep happening to them. If both cities lie in the same band, they often share a paran. Parans are worked with a band of influence, not an exact point, and that is why they should be taken into account in an astrocartography consultation.

The geodetic hypothesis

The idea is old, and it is elegant. Sepharial, and later Chris McRae, assigned a degree of the zodiac to each terrestrial meridian, taking Greenwich as 0° Aries, so that every place on the planet has its own zodiacal longitude and its own cusps. On that map you can look at transits and eclipses and see where they fall.

I will say frankly what practice has led me to think of it: it is a tool for cross-checking, not for deciding. I use it to look at countries and world events, always cross-referenced with the founding chart of the place, which is the one that does have a verifiable date. To decide on a personal chart, I prefer ACG with the natal chart in front of me.

Five lessons

I mentioned the first one above, and I repeat it because it does the most damage and usually spreads the fastest: chasing a Jupiter or Venus line without looking at how those planets stand in your chart. The second is believing that moving erases what you carry with you, or makes problems disappear “magically.” A good consultation will certainly help you choose the best place or places to move to, and the new place changes the setting, but not the “script” of your life; it will only amplify it in some areas. The third is doing an astrocartography consultation (or any astrological consultation) without verifying (rectifying) the birth time. An error of twenty minutes is enough to shift the lines by hundreds of kilometers.

The fourth is forgetting the obvious: every place also comes with its own requirements of language, visas, climate, rent and kinds of people. That is why you should not consult lightly, looking for “something better,” without first thinking carefully about factors like these. And the fifth is that not everything is “solved” with astrocartography. I have seen a recent tendency to give astrocartography a role similar to, or even greater than, what other astrological techniques can offer in terms of predictions and timing, but the reality is that astrocartography should be used as a complementary technique. That, of course, does not mean it doesn't work — it certainly does, and I have seen it proven completely. It simply has to be fitted in properly and correlated with the rest to give the expected result.

Final recommendations

There is no “miracle line” detached from the context of the natal chart and the main predictive techniques. It is common in this technique to “chase” a Jupiter or Venus line on the assumption that it will bring only good things. However, if in your natal chart these planets (or any planet you want to analyze) are debilitated or under strong squares, they will not bring anything you are looking for, and could even show the worst of their polarities.

Finally, it is worth remembering that, as with any other astrological technique, you need a birth time that has been verified and properly rectified by an astrologer, to make sure that any conjecture — in this case, any astrocartographic line — is the one that truly corresponds to your chart.