SK: The sun sign has to do with yearly cycles. The earth makes a full revolution around the sun every year, but from our perspective here on earth, it looks like the sun is making the revolution. The ascendant or the rising sign is more about the diurnal rotation of the earth. Every 24 hours, the zodiac makes a full loop, and basically what you’re looking at is which sign on the ecliptic is rising over the eastern horizon, and that has to do with the fact that the earth makes a rotation once a day.
LA: So to read someone’s chart, from what I understand, because I had to give you some information, it’s where you were born, date of birth, time of birth?
SK: Mm-hmm.
LA: The time of birth is kind of tricky, because not everyone knows it or it’s a bit hazy. How exactly do you have to be?
SK: The more exactly the better. That’s a question that astrologers wrestle with all the time, because sometimes even officially recorded birth times aren’t completely accurate because the nurse will just round it up by five minutes or something. Or they say, “My mom remembers this time.” But how reliable is that really if you’re going through childbirth things and all of that.
LA: I imagine different places around the world and even just different nurses or whoever’s there when someone’s giving birth are deciding the birth time based on different things. Is it when the baby’s fully popped out?
SK: I have never been in a delivery room, so I don’t really know.
LA: I have no idea. How do you measure that anyway?
SK: I assume that it’s like once the baby’s fully out or maybe once the baby takes its first breath.
LA: Okay, we’re going to go with that. All right.
SK: This is a deep existential question. When does life really begin?
LA: I know, and I’m like… Oh god. Now we’re getting into some existential American questions, which maybe we’ll breeze over.
Let’s get into some of our listeners’ charts and you can tell them where they’re going to be traveling or what sort of travels they could face. We have one listener who wrote into us, Michelle Hernandez. A faithful listener of the podcast, she says, and a big fan of the horoscopes. Well done to both of us. Pat ourselves on the back.
SK: Michelle is a Scorpio rising, Virgo Sun, Libra Moon.
Michelle Hernandez: Hi Steph. I would love to have my chart read because I have a pretty big summer up ahead. I have two major bookend events taking place that I think really embody the theme of alignment within astrology and travel. I will be walking the Camino de Santiago for the second time in Galicia, Spain. And I will also be celebrating my golden birthday. Astrology and travel have played a similar role in my life in that they’ve really helped me find clarity, find perspective in the now, but they’ve also given me the space to be creative, find new outlets, find new paths as I step into the future, and I think that this summer really reflects that for me.
