The Anatomy of a Sky Chart
The Sky Chart, or Birth-Sky, is an accurate representation of the state of the heavens at a given instant in time. For instance, the diagram below shows where the planets were at the time the StarChamber first came into being: April 16, 1997.
This diagram looks appealing enough, but what does it signify? Or rather, how does it signify the stated date? It's been stripped down to the barest minimum of symbolic content, so the first thing we need to do is explain the symbols that appear. All of the symbols used here come down to us from ancient times.
First consider the symbols of the zodiac around the inner circle. There are several dozen different constellations in the sky, yet only twelve of them qualify as signs of the zodiac. Why should that be? The answer is that these are the constellations that the sun, by chance, appears to move through as the earth circles the sun. Seen from Earth, the sun appears to move slowly through these special constellations once every year. The ancients can be forgiven if they thought the sun moved around the earth. If you think of it from this earth-based perspective, the sun moves counterclockwise around the circle of the zodiac as shown below.
This diagram shows that certain seasons always occur when the sun is in certain zodiacal constellations. For instance, on the first day of spring, the sun is in Pisces. On June 21st, the sun is just moving from Taurus to Gemini. Notice that some constellations are wider (and therefore correspond to a longer part of the year) than others. Virgo is extremely wide, whereas Cancer is quite small.
The seven objects (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) encircling the zodiac are the heavenly bodies that were originally called "planets" by the ancients. The word planet comes from the Greek planasthai, meaning "to wander." These were the wandering stars---literally anything in the sky that wasn't motionless relative to the great multitude of the so-called "fixed stars." The seven ancient planets gave rise to our seven day week: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday are easily identified with Saturn, the sun and the moon. In French, the correspondence between planet and day is clear: mardi (Tuesday) = Mars, mercredi (Wednesday) = Mercury, jeudi (Thursday) = Jupiter, vendredi (Friday) = Venus.
Now we can put it all together into one big diagram. Remember that all the planets stay in the same plane as they orbit the sun; this means that every planet moves through the zodiac just as the sun does, though not at the same rate as the sun. Finally, the "planets" are ranked in order of how fast they moved through the sky. The moon is the innermost, requiring only one month to complete the zodiacal circuit. Saturn, on the outside track, takes almost 30 years.
This image uniquely identifies an instant in time by taking a snapshot of the hands of our planetary clock. It's a frozen moment in time, and if it represents your birth date, then it shows you the sky your parents looked at the night you were born. Want one for yourself? Check out the StarChamber Catalog and drop us a line.
 Ned (Paracelsus) Visit the Paracelsus Weblog Send mail to paracelsus@starchamber.com Copyright © 1996-2003, Paracelsus, All rights reserved The Star Chamber |