A New Approach to Chart Interpretation

by Rusty Hamilton

Part 4: Thread-Based Astrology for Reality Seekers

The Thread-Based Astrology approach I developed from my quest into the ancient language of the zodiac considers the process of delineating a chart as being similar to that of trying to translate an archaic language. We know definitions of some of the words. But where the meanings are uncertain or more obscure, logical “likelihood” and intuition both play a part.

Here in Part 4 of this ongoing series we’ll follow the logical threads that connect the various elements of a chart and we’ll also get a feel for where the connections are more intuitive. As you’re no doubt aware, the previous installments dealt with the planets, the elements and qualities, and the signs and aspects formed by the combinations of those elements and qualities.

Up until now, the series has been, more or less, a review of the basics of astrology. There has been little new information thus far; nothing that would make people raise their eyebrows in disbelief, anyway. We’re about to change that somewhat.

In brief review, the earlier lessons in the series yielded keywords for the planets, signs, and aspects, and gave structures for combining those keywords to form “astrology sentences.” So what’s next? How do you put together all those things, for so many planets and aspects, to form a cohesive interpretation of a natal chart?

I actually have no idea what the “common” method of chart interpretation is. I have a vague notion that most people just look at a chart and pull out a few key details, then form some sort of intuitive conclusion based on the overall “feel” of the chart. If you do this, as I mentioned in the first article, you probably don’t need the information in this series. The entire point of the research I did over the past year or so was to come up with a way for intuition-less, concrete reality seekers such as myself to interpret a chart.

Granted, there are already many astrology books out there that provide a “down-to-earth” approach to cracking the code of an astrology chart. However, a look through those books will almost invariably reveal the same instruction somewhere within the text: “Use your intuition.” I feel this is very wrong. There is a place for intuition in chart interpretation, but most books tend to require the intuitive step far too early in the process.

Imagine the process of delineating a chart as being similar to that of deciphering some ancient, nearly untranslatable foreign language. Since you won’t have a complete dictionary of every word in the language, you’re invariably going to run across a few things you can’t quite figure out through left-brain-ish, logical processes. However, this doesn’t mean you need to throw logical processes out the window, either. What you’re probably going to do in this situation is chip away at as much of each sentence as you can, until you’re left with a basic skeleton of the text. Skeletons, of anything, serve the highly useful function of providing shape and form to otherwise amorphous objects; in essence, they provide limits. By using those limits, it is much easier to intuitively ascertain the meanings of certain words.

For example, if your ancient language text read something along the lines of “When Barushka went to the ______, he bought a half-gallon of ______,” you could almost automatically figure out the words you don’t know. The first blank is obviously some sort of market or store, because the sentence says that Barushka bought something there. Most buying and selling that we know of takes place within markets or shops. It could be that this isn’t the case; maybe Barushka bought his half-gallon of whatever in the Himalayas or something. However, this is rather improbable; it is more likely that the purchasing taking place here is going on in a market or shop. This is a rather inane example, but it illustrates the general process I use for analyzing a natal chart rather. Logic is used to uncover as much of the basic framework of an unknown as possible, then intuition is used to fill in the gaps.

In contrast, most astrology books do the opposite, albeit to varying degrees. Again, this is not necessarily a problem if you’re adept at using your intuition, but many people, including myself, are not. Books such as The Only Way to Learn Astrology series provide a balanced approach between logic and intuition. Others, however, just give you a list of planetary placements to consult and tell you to make some sort of creative decision based on these descriptions.

I am not trying to bash the works of these authors. My point is, simply, that most of their approaches to chart interpretation do not work for me. When I began my astrology research last year, finding out why these approaches never seemed to produce any accurate results for me was a significant goal. Fortunately, this was a goal I achieved.

From what I have seen, the common approach to chart delineation seems to be to start with the Sun and move onward through the other nine planets. The Sun’s sign, house placement, and aspects are considered, then those of the Moon, and so forth. This would seem to be a very straightforward and sensible approach to chart delineation, but it always left me cold, for two basic reasons.

First, after having dissected the chart, planet by planet, I personally found it extremely difficult to reintegrate all the information I uncovered into a complete whole. While it is absolutely necessary to consider each planet individually in order to dig up as much information as possible about it, it is also important to remember that none of the planets, or anything else in the chart for that matter, can function on its own. Everything is intertwined in a chart. I just do not have the kind of mind that can look at a bunch of puzzle pieces on the floor and suddenly know exactly how every piece fits together to form the entire puzzle.

The other reason I could never get anywhere with the planet-based chart interpretation techniques has nothing to do with my poor intuitive abilities; it has to do with my tendency to want to know “how” and “why.” While the planet-based approach does a very good job of describing “what” and “where,” it does absolutely nothing to explain “how” and “why.”

Using the planet-based approach, for example, even someone as intuitively-challenged as myself can determine from my chart that I’m a loyal and relatively kind person despite my bad temper and over-sensitivity. Similarly, it would be easy to tell from Charles Manson’s chart that he is a dangerous mix of emotional coldness and rabid desires. Many people are content to stop analyzing a chart at this point; once they know someone’s basic astrological character they feel they know the person a bit better. I do not. You may have a general idea about how people are going to express emotions, for example, but do you really know what’s going to set them off? What energizes their emotions? Do you know whether they’re ruled by their heart or their head? And, most importantly, how do a person’s various personality facets interact in the form of the whole person?

Believe it or not, the approach to chart interpretation that I’ve developed does answer these questions, at least as much as possible. It is because of this that I urge even those who have no need of logic-based interpretation systems (those of you who can just look at a chart and know what that person is all about), to keep reading, if you’ve read this far already.

Thread-Based Astrology Uncovers Life’s Themes

I have coined the term “Thread-based Astrology” for my system. There is no esoteric meaning behind the name; “thread” was just a convenient way for me to describe a hierarchy of rulerships. You can call it whatever you want.

The chart we will be using to illustrate the techniques used in thread-based astrology is not of anyone I know, nor of anyone generally known, such as a celebrity. I did not want to use the chart of someone I was familiar with, so that there would be no question as to whether I had altered my interpretation to fit a particular, known personality.

For simplicity’s sake, we will call the person born with the chart below “Joe Bloggs.” His birth data would be April 29, 1997, at 2:30 p.m. EDT, at 75:50W, 39:36N. While some people interpret a child’s chart differently from an adult’s, we’ll assume for the sake of illustration that we’re looking at the overall potential themes for Joe’s lifespan, rather than focusing in on those particular facets related to childhood behavior.

Joe Bloggs’ Natal Chart, with a small glyph for each planetary ruler next to the larger glyph for each sign in the outside circle.

Those of you who are not beginning astrology students probably already know that each sign is ruled by a particular planet, and that studying the placement of that ruling planet gives you more insight into how the ruled sign works. In the example chart given here, Joe Bloggs has Mars in Virgo in the 1st house. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out from this placement that Joe’s self-directed, Mars-type activities are probably going to be characterized by a lot of energetic analyzing, organizing, and other Virgoan qualities. However, the sign of Virgo is ruled by Mercury, and Mercury in Joe’s chart is located in Taurus in the 9th house. This would add a practical Taurean influence to Joe’s Mars, which might make him a bit less likely to fly off the handle about insignificant details. It would probably also make him even more analytical, though, since Taurus is partially about value-assessment.

This process, in which the placement of each planet is modified slightly by the placement of its individual ruler, should all be old-hat to the advanced astrologers out there. Just about everyone who has been doing astrology for any length of time has at least come across the idea that planets located in a particular sign are influenced by the placement of the planet that rules that sign. The problem here is that rulerships are commonly thought of as being one-to-one in nature. Virgo, the sign in which Joe’s Mars is located in our example chart, is ruled by Mercury, so traditional astrology would hold that Mercury and only Mercury influences Mars in this way. However, my research has shown me that this is not quite the case! Planets are influenced not by a single ruling planet, but by the rulers of the rulers (etc.) until we get to planets in dignities, which rule themselves. The hierarchy of rulers we have here is what I call a thread, as illustrated below.

Venus-Ruled Thread: The power in this thread of Joe Bloggs’ chart procedes from Venus to the Sun in one sub-thread and also from Venus down through Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Neptune in a long thread of linkages.

Taking the list of planet placements in their signs and correlating each sign in the list with its ruler reveals the interlocking chain or thread. Thus, in Joe’s chart, starting from the “bottom” of one particular hierarchy, we have Neptune in Capricorn, ruled by Saturn in Aries, in turn ruled by Mars in Virgo, which is itself ruled by Mercury in Taurus. Finishing off this “thread” is Venus, ruler of Taurus. The upward linkage stops here because Venus in Joe’s chart is placed there in Taurus, which it rules, so there is nowhere further to go in the hierarchy. Neptune in this chart is the apparent “bottom” of the hierarchy, because it rules Pisces, and there are no planets in Pisces. Therefore, it rules nothing in the chart. However, Neptune’s position at the bottom of the thread is also very important, as we’ll see later. Venus, at the top of the thread, also occupies an important position. Since no other planet rules it, we say it is self-directed; it cannot be shifted from its purpose by another planet.

Think of these threads as being composed of a set of gears, all connected to each other. If you move the gear at the top of the line, the others move as well. In our example above, Venus, at the top of the thread, is the major gear. When it creates some sort of situation, or is acted upon through an aspect to another planet, the excess energy sort of “spills over” onto the other planets below it in the thread and makes them react as well. If you’re following me so far, it should be pretty easy to figure out that the ruling planet of a thread represents the starting point of a major theme in an individual’s chart. The more planets are under the dominion of the ruling planet, the more this theme takes center stage in the individual’s life.

Going back to our example, we see that there are the four planets we mentioned, Neptune, Saturn, Mars and Mercury, linked together through their individual rulerships, operating under Venus in this thread. In addition, the Sun is in Taurus, ruled by Venus, so the Sun is the fifth planet in the Venus-ruled thread. With so much in the thread, the theme it represents must be rather significant in the chart. Let’s see if we can unravel its meaning.

We’ll begin with Venus, the ruler of the thread, located in Taurus and in the 9th house. If we turn this into an astrology sentence, we get the following:

The passive desires (Venus) express themselves through value assessment/the growing process (Taurus) to or through learning/life experience (9th house).

In a nutshell, this means that Joe is attracted to people or situations that teach him about life by teaching him what is important and what is not. However, you could have derived this sentence just by delineating each planet individually, with no regard for the whole. How does this piece of information relate to the entire person?

To start with, keep in mind that the five planets below Venus essentially get activated by whatever Venus does. It could be said that the lower planets in a thread “serve” the higher ones, but don’t think that these lower planets are bereft of any autonomy just because they “serve.” Each has its own little job to do and is still going to do it no matter what the “bosses” say. The actions of the higher planets, however, provide the reasoning behind the actions of the lower ones. It shouldn’t be hard to see that this can supply us with answers as to why our charts act the way they do.

Directly below Venus in this thread are Mercury and the Sun, both in the same sign and house as Venus. Since the Sun in this case is both conjunct Venus and also a separate sub-thread, we’ll leave it aside and concentrate on Mercury and the planets it influences through rulership.

A traditional, planet-by-planet reading of Mercury in Taurus in the 9th would suggest a person with a practical, stubborn mind who was interested in some sort of mental expansion. Since Aries is on the cusp of the 9th house we might go even further and say that the expansion this person is interested in is very personal and self-oriented. But none of this answers the burning question I always have when I interpret a chart: Why?

Well, if we look back to the placement of Venus, which we have said is in a position of rulership over Mercury in Joe’s particular chart, we get another piece to the puzzle. Venus, by its nature, attracts. Placed in Taurus, Venus wants to attract the situations and people necessary for Joe to learn how to develop stable, nurturing relationships as well as how to eliminate old, unhealthy ones. If this is essential to the life’s work of Joe’s soul, we might expect that he would need to meet and interact with a lot of people over the course of his life. Having a broad-minded yet practical outlook, as reflected in Joe’s 9th-house Mercury in Taurus, would certainly help with this, wouldn’t it? In conversations, he would be neither boring nor eccentric. In a way, it’s almost like Venus in this case is the driver of an ox-cart, and Mercury is the ox; Mercury soldiers onward to do what Venus thought up but can’t do by itself. Rulerships don’t just add a sort of “tone color” to the planets they rule; they add purpose to them.

These explanations should start to give you a feel for what thread-based astrology is all about. But let’s not stop here! We’ll continue down the thread. We’ve already uncovered that part of Joe’s purpose in life is to interact closely with people who are going to teach him healthier ways to relate, and that his wide range of practical interests helps him meet those people. What next? We’ve looked at Venus and Mercury, so let’s continue on down to Mars. Because Mars is placed in the 1st house and in Virgo, Mars’ job here, independently of the rest of the chart, is to develop Joe as a person through analysis and adaptation.

When we consider the two upper planets of this thread in tandem with Mars, we again get an enhanced picture of Joe. If you knew Joe as a person you might not be very fond of him, as he’s apt to be a rather critical, picky person with that 1st-house Virgo Mars. Why does he need to be so fault-finding? Looking at the planets above Mars in the thread can give us the answer. Creating and maintaining stable, healthy relationships is a theme of Joe’s life, aided by his many sensible interests. The seriousness with which Joe expands himself mentally may be the cause of his critical nature; perhaps the subjects he involves himself in require a painstakingly analytical attitude. Also, a critical attitude can actually be in keeping with the theme of assessing the value of relationships, since it can strain out all the weirdos out there.

What's next? Well, in this particular thread we still have Saturn and Neptune to delineate. By now, you should be getting the hang of thread-based astrology. The thread-ruler sets the theme, while the other planets in the thread – although retaining their own individual purposes – all contribute to that theme.

Joe Bloggs, we have learned, is concerned partially with the life experience needed to build stable and nurturing relationships. He does this through his practical yet far-reaching mindset, which leads him to act in a very exacting, and possibly over-critical, way. The next planet in the thread, Saturn in Aries in the 8th, shows another facet of his personality. Individually, it is concerned with limitations incurred through his personal actions; these limitations lead him into control issues and, hopefully, some sort of rebirth (via the 8th house) through those issues.

Since his 1st-house Virgo Mars rules over these Saturnine limitations, we can infer that some of these limitations occur because of his analytical, critical nature. For example, he may be too critical of others, which leads him into repeated conflicts with them. If he can overcome these issues, he can achieve a better understanding of himself, which in turn will lead him to healthier, more productive relationships.

The final planet in this thread is Neptune in Capricorn in the 5th house. By itself, this planet’s placement means that Joe expresses himself through losing himself in the things he builds or creates. When we consider this in tandem with Neptune’s ruler in the thread, Saturn, we can conclude that Joe seeks this sort of productive escape because of the limitations he perceives are surrounding his personal actions. Neptune in this chart provides something of an outlet for his Saturn-created frustrations.

We’ve now delineated an entire thread! Even if you’re sneering in contempt for this method at this point, I hope you can at least see how it can be helpful for those of us who can’t just pull details like the ones derived above out of the air.

Some Threads Are Loops

Keep in mind that sometimes there will not be a clear ruler of a given thread. I’ve seen loops of as many as three or four planets, each planet ruling the next. It’s probably possible for one’s entire chart to be one big loop rather than one or more threads. If this is your chart, you’re probably a VERY interesting person, because you must be constantly in motion. Think about it. If a thread-ruler is like a huge gear that turns all the other gears, and if every planet is a thread-ruler, you would have something resembling a massive wheel. Any transiting planet that aspects a thread-ruler is going to start the rest of the thread moving. So, if everything is a thread-ruler there will be so much energy produced that you’ll either be unstoppable or you’ll just disintegrate from the strain.

Much more common that a chart of unending loops is a chart in which two or more planets rule a single thread together. When there are only two planets involved in this, we have what is traditionally called a mutual reception, where each of the two planets involved is placed in a sign the other rules, such as Mars in Pisces and Neptune in Aries. This essentially means that the two planets in mutual reception at the top of a thread share the responsibility of directing of the rest of the thread. They won’t always share it equally, of course, but unless one planet in the mutual reception is being transited heavily, the co-rulership is usually roughly equal. When you have three or more planets ruling one another, instead of a linear thread you could visualize the relationships as something like a lopsided Sun: you’ll have a ring of mutually-ruling planets on the inside and a bunch of little protrusions coming off it, representing the planets ranking lower on the threads of those rulers.

As a final note on thread-rulers, there are also frequently planets that rule themselves and nothing else. Treat those as being very self-contained. Essentially, you can interpret them as you would if you were using the traditional, planet-by-planet method. It’s not that they don’t do anything - in fact, their energy is less diluted and so can actually be very intense - but they just kind of do their own thing without a whole lot of regard for the rest of the chart.

It may help to draw what we’re describing in some way other than a chart wheel. If you’re art-phobic, don’t worry. There’s virtually no work involved if you have the freeware astrology program Astrolog. If you do, start it up, load whatever chart file you want, and go to the menu bar. Under the “Chart” heading, select the “Influence” option. Or just hold down “Shift” and press “J.” You’ll be taken to a frightening-looking screen, but you can ignore everything except the box in the upper left-hand corner, the one marked “Sign Dispositor Hierarchy.” It looks like the picture shown here.

If you’re used to looking this way at dispositors (which I suppose is the “official” name for the planets that we’ve been describing as having “rulerships” over other planets in their threads), then your work is completely finished at this point. Copy the image down onto a piece of paper if you want, and you’re set. Personally, I don’t like the way Astrolog portrays this. In the image shown, you can see that the arrows are pointing up towards the ruling planets. I prefer drawing diagrams like these with the arrows pointing down because, to me, it better illustrates who’s really calling the shots. The power flows downward. For mutual receptions, I draw the planets next to each other with a pair of opposite-facing arrows stacked on top of each other.

The lowest-ranking planet in a given thread often has a function almost as significant as a thread-ruler in its own way. Because the thread-rulers represent very basic or subconscious needs and processes, the areas they portray in a chart may seem unimportant in one’s daily life. In fact, after people read this article I imagine a lot of people are going to come up with their thread-ruler(s) and think, “That’s nothing like me! My biggest motivation in life isn’t creating stable relationships, it’s finding a good job!” The problem is that we don’t always know what we really want.

What the lowest planets in a thread represent are the more “surface” processes in your life. In our image-obsessed, superficial Western culture, we tend to look (and think!) only of these surface aspects. Thus, someone with Pluto in Scorpio in the 10th as a thread-ruler may harbor dreams of world domination, but if he has Venus in Pisces in the 2nd as the lowest planet in that thread, we’ll probably never know his secret schemes! This person will probably appear to us to be very generous and kind, and he may well be, but we have no way of knowing his deepest intentions.

In Joe’s chart, Neptune in Capricorn is the lowest planet in its thread. People probably see Joe as a very hard-working individual, possibly a workaholic, whose artistic expression shows best in whatever it is he works at. Of course, this is assuming Joe is using the energy of his chart to its highest potential. It’s entirely possible that he isn’t, and in this case, people might see him as a shiftless, lazy person who is vague and somewhat incomprehensible in terms of his self-expression.

Planetary Aspects in Thread-Based Astrology

Now we get to the aspects, the final part of this lesson. Aspects denote the nature of the relationship between two aspected planets. Taking this a step further, we can say that aspects are also the relationships between either: (1) different threads entirely, or
(2) different facets of the same thread.

There are four separate classifications of aspects if we use this new thread-based system:

1. Ruler-to-Ruler aspects, of ruling planets to one another;
2. Ruler-to-Planet aspects, of the thread-rulers to non-ruling planets outside the ruler’s thread of influence;
3. Ruler-to-Ruled aspects, of the thread-rulers to planets under them in the thread; and
4. Planet-to-Planet aspects, between non-ruling planets on different threads or between two lower-level planets in the same thread.

In Joe’s chart there is a wide square between Venus, the ruler of one thread, and Uranus, the ruler of the other. So this is a ruler-to-ruler aspect. We’ve said that thread-rulers essentially represent a main theme in the life of the individual whose chart is being analyzed. Logically, then, we can surmise that the aspects between two thread-rulers represent the interaction between the differing themes.

Planetary Aspects Between Thread-Rulers: The square aspect, in red, between thread-rulers Venus and Uranus can affect planets down the line in each of their separate threads. The Venus-ruled thread is connected with lavender lines and the Uranus-ruled thread is in blue-green.

In this example, we have Venus in Taurus in the 9th house squaring Uranus in Aquarius in the 6th. Looking at the thread-ruler by keywords, we can say that the Uranus-ruled thread is going to be about changes incurred through rules being made and broken by both Joe and the people he meets; these changes are going to force him to analyze and adapt to his environment. In other words, Joe is going to find his life continually disrupted by the erratic behavior of himself and others until he figures out how to organize his life into something more stable.

So, on the one hand we have the Venus thread, in which Joe wants to create lasting and healthy relationships, and on the other, we have the Uranus thread, where Joe finds himself continually at odds with other people due to mutually odd behavior. Obviously, the relationships he tries to create are going to be constantly disrupted by his need to adapt to social rules being made and broken, and vice-versa. The Venus-Uranus square depicts this, and gives the individual a chance to consciously balance the two polarities.

If Uranus gets the upper hand here, and “weirds out” Venus and its corresponding thread, the amount to which Uranus is overdone will be reflected in overactivity in Venus’ thread. If Uranus is too chaotic for Joe’s peace-loving Venus, and Venus reacts contrariwise by digging in its heels, some of this negativity will spill over, down the Venus thread onto Mercury, possibly causing Joe to be a rather unhealthy combination of lazy and stubborn. We saw in the delineation above that work is extremely important to Joe. So, if he becomes too lazy, his Mars, ruled by Mercury, will suffer; he’ll probably become needlessly critical of others if the negative Mercury in Taurus traits are overdone. This in turn will force Saturn to create even more limitations, which could push Neptune into inhibiting his expression, due to obsession with work (or with avoiding work). What is important to grasp here is that aspects between rulers can affect EVERY planet within both threads.

Let’s go on to another aspect, this time an example of a ruler-to-planet aspect. In Joe’s chart, Jupiter is part of the Uranus thread and squares Venus. In isolation, this means that Joe expands through his adaptation to the rules he and others make or break, which conflicts with his desire to form lasting relationships. As mentioned in Part 3, aspects can create a surplus of energy, and the case is true here as well. Venus, as a thread-ruler, can influence the entire thread below it, so even though Jupiter is not a thread-ruler, its influence through the aspect is still significant. Jupiter, if used properly, can stimulate and/or heal the entire Venus thread. However, Venus, despite being a thread-ruler, cannot stimulate or heal the Uranus thread at the Jupiter-in-Aquarius level, because Jupiter is too low in the thread to affect much.

Joe Bloggs’ Natal Chart, showing all planetary aspects.

Next, we have ruler-to-ruled aspects. A good example to go over in this chart is Joe’s sextile between Uranus and Pluto. When a thread-ruler aspects any planet it rules, then, depending on the aspect involved, a lot of tension or harmony will be present within the thread. The amount of tension or harmony depends on how far away the aspected planet is from the thread-ruler. In our example, we have Uranus, at the top of the thread, being sextiled by Pluto at the bottom. The sextile is an “easy” aspect, so it would tend to produce harmony, in terms of the chart. But if it were a square, there would be an incredible amount of tension, not harmony, due to the distance top-to-bottom between Uranus and Pluto in the hierarchy of the thread.

Why? Think of some sort of small spring, or really any small object that will bend if you press on it. If you bend the two ends of this spring between your thumb and forefinger, eventually you’ll produce so much tension in the spring that it will either shoot away from you or break. A similar thing occurs in astrology.

The “easier” aspects, such as trines and sextiles, do not necessarily produce this kind of tension in ruler-to-ruled aspects. Any aspect introduces some tension, as discussed in the last article, but the tension in terms of trines and sextiles in this case is a more controlled strain. Imagine bending a spring into a circle and then securing the two ends together somehow. You will have a lot of potential strain within the loop, but since we’re humans and not springs, we can use this controlled tension to give us energy for the things we do.

As a brief example, the Uranus-ruled thread is, as we said before, all about constantly making Joe adapt to new situations. Joe’s Sagittarius 4th-house Pluto, at the bottom of the Uranus-ruled thread, is about Joe gaining enough life experience to find out who he really is. These two goals are relatively compatible, so there shouldn’t be much strain between them. The changes Joe experiences can teach him more about himself, which in turn will help him seek out more exciting changes. In fact, a highly positive “loop” is created by this ruler-to-ruled aspect.

Easy aspects between two threads, no matter what position the aspected planets occupy in a thread, will be of help to a difficult ruler-to-ruled relationship. They will provide “escape valves” for the considerable tension that builds up.

Finally, we have planet-to-planet aspects, which can occur either between threads or between planets within a single thread. For the first type, we will consider the interaction between Joe’s 8th-house Aries Saturn, in the Venus thread, and his 6th-house Aquarius Jupiter. Here we have an example of a planet-to-planet aspect between two threads. When this occurs, the energy produced isn’t especially intense, but it does create a sort of “bridge” between the two threads. This serves two very important purposes. First, as mentioned briefly above, aspects between two threads can help dissipate some of the tensions that build up within an individual thread. Additionally, aspects joining two separate threads can provide a valuable opportunity for us to consciously bridge two opposing themes in our lives.

Using this sextile as an example, the lessons Joe learns through the conflicts created by the limitations on his basic self can help him create new ways to expand through his environment. Through this, he can partially unite the socially weird Uranus side with his desire for stable, lasting relationships.

Planet-to-planet aspects that occur between two planets in the same thread are rather insignificant aspects in my view. Such aspects do little more than denote places in a thread where energy either is blocked or flows more harmoniously than it otherwise would. For example, Mercury squares Neptune in Joe’s chart, and both are in the same thread. All this indicates is that the two planets have trouble communicating with each other. For example, Joe may find it difficult to balance his down-to-earth mentality with his need to lose himself in his work.

These are the main concepts of my astrological theory, and I hope I have explained this thread-based approach clearly. If you have any questions, PM me through the Conscious Evolution Forums. I do read the forums, even when I don’t post.

Next time, I’ll try to clarify some of the finer details and also show you how to use this theory for predictive astrology.