A Quick + Dirty Technique for Reading a Birth Chart With Archetypes
Looking at a birth chart can be intimidating. There are ten planets, twelve signs, twelve houses, four angles, and Chiron, asteroids, and fixed stars if you choose to use them.
And you can’t even read each of these elements in isolation. Planets don’t really make sense without understanding their context within signs and houses, and relationships between planets can influence the way planets express themselves, too.
Fortunately, there is a trick for cutting through the complexity to the most important information in the chart and summarizing it in a sentence. I learned this trick from my favorite astrology book The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest.
This trick is so good, it is often the very first thing out of my mouth when I do a reading. It not only helps me center myself in my understanding of the chart, and it gives the person I’m reading for a snapshot of their astrological influences that they can understand without a lot of explaining.
The Power of Archetypes
Archetypes are ways of talking about similarities between people. They take the complexity of human individuality and break it down into patterns that you can quickly identify. Merlin and Gandalf come from stories that were told hundreds of years apart, but those characters have so many similarities, we can say they both participate in the archetype Wizard.
Your birth chart is a collection of archetypes. The planets are your psyche divided up into ten parts, and each part is assigned an archetype that corresponds to the sign of that planet.
Knowing the archetypes in your chart can help you understand yourself better and find your ideal friends and allies.
Archetypes of the Signs
Table of Archetypes (from The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest)
(Note: The author now uses The Voyager instead of The G*psy.)
Aries: Warrior
Taurus: Druid
Gemini: Investigator
Cancer: Healer
Leo: Bard
Virgo: Hacker
Libra: Diplomat
Scorpio: Sorcerer
Sagittarius: Voyager
Capricorn: Wizard
Aquarius: Rebel
Pisces: Mystic
Reading Archetypes in a Birth Chart
Using archetypes in a natal chart reading gives you a simple shorthand for understanding the planets in the signs.
If you have Mercury in Aries, you have the Mind of a Warrior. If you have Mars in Cancer, your Inner Defense Department protects the people you love like a Mamma Bear.
One of the fun things about the signs is that they are complex enough that you can assign several different archetypes to them. In the section of The Inner Sky that inspired this post, Steven Forrest assigns at least three archetypes to every sign, and he made that list for the purposes of simplifying things.
Spend some quality time with the signs, and you can probably expand that list of archetypes even more.
The Importance of the Sun, Moon, and Rising Sign
Once you have your list of archetypes, you want to focus your attention on your Big 3: sun, moon, and ascendant (aka AC or rising sign).
These three points in your chart are the cornerstones of your personality:
The sun is the story you tell yourself about yourself (aka the ego).
The moon is your heart, intuition, and emotional self. It’s the way you feel through the world.
The ascendant is your personality, the mask you wear that summarizes your personality into a nice, neat movie blurb that allows people you don’t know very well to categorize you quickly.
I explore the sun, moon, and ascendant more in depth in my article “What is the Difference Between Your Sun, Moon, and Rising Sign.”
Archetypes and Your Sun, Moon, and Rising Sign
Using archetypes, you can summarize these three points in your chart by filling in the blanks in this ad lib:
I am a [SUN SIGN ARCHETYPE] with the heart of a [MOON SIGN ARCHETYPE] wearing the mask of the [ASCENDANT SIGN ARCHETYPE].
When I put that sentence together using the archetypes in my birth chart, I get:
“I am a Druid (Taurus) with the heart of a Rebel (Aquarius) wearing the mask of the Bard (Leo).”
Using Steven Forrest’s list it could also be:
“I am a Musician with the heart of a Truth Sayer wearing the mask of the King.”
Depending, on the day, most combinations of the archetypes feel true to me, even the ones that are paradoxical (eg. Silent One with the heart of a Truth Sayer).
Human beings are complex creatures filled with masses of contradictions. One of the wonderful things about astrology is that there are ways of expressing all of it without creating false tidiness.
It’s Really That Simple
You can spend your whole life diving into the complexity of your birth chart, but putting together a sentence with the Big 3 is enough to give you the essence of a person in a way that is simple enough to understand but complex enough to dive deep and explore.
Would you like to go more in-depth with the archetypes in your chart? Check out my course Storytelling with Astrological Symbols.
Note: This article contains affiliate links. If you buy a book I recommend, I will get a small gratuity from the bookseller at no extra cost to you.
