The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 169, titled:
Rectification: Using Astrology to Find Your Birth Time
With Chris Brennan and astrologers Leisa Schaim, and Patrick Watson
Episode originally released on August 27, 2018
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Mary Sharon
Transcription released June 16, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This episode is recorded on Sunday, August 26th, 2018, starting at 2:45pm in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 169th episode of the show. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and help support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with astrologers Leisa Schaim and Patrick Watson about rectification and the process of using astrology to find your correct birth time. Hey, guys, how’s it going?
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey, good.
PATRICK WATSON: Nice to be.
CB: Yeah, nice to… It’s been almost a year I think since… Was our last episode the Saturn in Sagittarius retrospective about a year ago now?
LS: I think so, yeah.
PW: Or was it the Capricorn?
LS: For all three of us I guess together.
PW: All three of us together, yeah.
CB: Yeah, so maybe it was a little bit more recently, but it’s still been a while since we all got together. But this is great, I’m excited about this as I usually am. But I’m actually more excited than usual because this is going to be an awesome episode that I’ve been meaning to do for a while and that people have been asking about for a while, which is the big sort of looming topic of rectification, which is, yeah, it’s a really big topic. And I was putting it off and putting it off and not sure how to deal with it. And I’ve wanted to deal with it for a long time because there’s a lot of trickiness, there’s sometimes some controversy surrounding it, but we’re gonna deal with all of that today. And I think people are gonna find it really helpful in the long term. So both of you rectify charts, right?
PW: Yes.
LS: Mhm, yeah.
CB: Okay, so that’s a service that both of you offer. I also rectify charts, and I have a lecture on my website that I sell on how to do chart rectification, and I’m in the process of developing a course. So it’s kind of fresh in my mind right now, and that’s part of the reason I wanted to talk about it today in order to set sort of the foundation for some of those discussions in the future by having this be essentially my first episode in the podcast series on rectification. So I wanted to start at the beginning and just assume that we don’t know anything, and we’re not taking anything for granted, and just sort of build things up from there. So the first step and the first thing I usually start out with when I talk about rectification is just defining our terms and defining the concept. So the term rectify itself, if you look it up in a dictionary, it means to set right, to put right or to correct. And in astrology, rectification is typically, I like to define it as a procedure that’s used in order to find a birth time when a person’s birth time is either unknown or is uncertain. So, you know, what do we mean by that? What are some scenarios in which a birth time might be unknown or uncertain?
LS: Well, some people will simply come and say the hospitals or the, you know, the officials did not record birth times at the time or in the location where I was born. So you have some of those where you’ll know the date of birth but nothing at all about the time. So that’s one scenario.
PW: Or if they’re adopted, sometimes they don’t have they’re not actually privy to that information of exactly, you know, some of the details on the birth certificate. There’s lots of reasons why someone may not know. The parents may not have any kind of recollection or never made a record of it, you know, or the hospital has the records all burned in a fire.
CB: The hospital was destroyed by a freak tsunami which wiped out all of the records of birth at that time. So why is that important though? Maybe we should establish that first. We’re primarily talking about natal astrology here, about casting birth charts or natal charts, which is a chart cast for the moment of your birth that depicts the alignment of the planets at the moment you were born under the premise that has something to say about your future and your character and events that will occur in your life in the future. And I guess this talk is important because many of the basic techniques of natal astrology and birth chart analysis require an accurate birth time. So what are some of the reasons for that or what are some of the techniques that are actually dependent on a birth time? Both let’s talk about maybe some basic techniques and then talk about some advanced techniques that you need to have an accurate birth time in order to use. So what would some of those be?
PW: Like the houses you know, to know what sign was rising on the local eastern horizon at the time and place that someone’s born is, regardless of the house system you use, the way that houses or topics of life divided or generated amongst the signs, so that’s important for getting this in a more specific topical significations of what specific area of life a sign or division of sign is relevant for. So for example, you know, the third house of siblings and the fourth house of home and family and the fifth house of children that you wouldn’t know, you know, which sign which portions of signs are signed to which topic if you don’t have the Ascendant. So that’s one. One thing you really need the Ascendant for the time of birth for.
CB: Right. So the Ascendant or the rising sign in a person’s birth chart is calculated based on the birth time, and without an Ascendant or without a rising sign, you can’t calculate the 12 houses and the 12 houses especially pertained to different areas of a person’s life or different people in a person’s life in natal astrology.
LS: Right. And so, you know, without the time, you’ll have, presumably, for at least most of the planets, maybe not the Moon, you’ll have planets in the signs. But the next step is putting them in houses and seeing how those different energies affect different areas of life. And so, like you all were saying, if you don’t know where to put them, you know, the rising sign is where you start that entire sequence. And so without that, you don’t know where those different planets are.
PW: Also, the Moon travels about 13 degrees a day. So depending on where the Moon is on the day you’re born, the Moon can actually switch signs. So not only would it be in a different sign or rather house, but the sign and its ruler would be completely different depending on when and the day you were born. And that would change the way you would interpret the Moon. And it would change the applying and separating aspects.
CB: Right. There was actually a really famous case of that about a decade ago, a famous case of rectification with Obama’s birth chart, where there was a period of time where we didn’t know… We knew what day he was born, but we didn’t know what time Obama was born.
PW: Late Taurus or late Gemini Moon.
CB: Yeah, and astrologers I remember on like Myspace on one of the astrology forums back then that astrologers are actually debating this, whether Obama was a Taurus Moon or a Gemini Moon. And I remember one astrologer arguing very strongly that he was a Taurus Moon, and I just was like, “That does not sound right.” Because everything we knew about the guy at the time was like his strength in oratory, he was a great speaker. And I was leaning towards the Gemini Moon for that reason. And that actually, once the birth certificate was released, ended up being the case. So that in and of itself is just an instance right there of, very loosely speaking, like rectification of having a choice between two options for birth chart placements, and then having to reverse engineer what the person’s true birth chart must have been based on what you know about their life. And that’s basically rectification in a nutshell.
PW: And that’s more likely to happen with the Moon because it travels more degrees in a day, but it can also affect the other planets. You know, if you’re born close to a so called cusp, then depending if you were born on a day when the Sun actually changed signs, then even your Sun sign would be uncertain.
LS: [unintelligible 8.34] end of one of the other planets changing signs, which doesn’t happen nearly as often of course, but does happen sometimes.
CB: Sure, sure. And we’ll get into more of those technical details later. But the basic premise here is that, you know, many techniques in astrology require an accurate birth time. And if you don’t know your birth time at all or if you only have a rough approximation, then sometimes that makes rectification necessary if you want to be able to use some of those techniques. So sometimes rectification, I should point out just in terms of adopting loose versus really strict definitions, sometimes the term rectification is used more broadly to talk about just reverse engineering a chart in general. And actually the earliest historical reference that I’ve been able to find to rectification, I was able to trace back to the 1st Century BCE, and I talk about this a little bit in my book on Hellenistic astrology. The earliest historical reference I found was actually an astrologer who was attempting to rectify and to find the chart for the founding of Rome. So it’s like a Roman astrologer who was trying to find the founding chart for Rome, as well as the birth chart for the founder of Rome. And he came up with a speculative chart based on what he knew about Rome as an early empire and what he thought he knew about the founder of the sort of mythological founder of Rome. So that, roughly speaking, could also be treated as a process of rectification because it can really be applied to any chart where you’re trying to figure out the speculative birth chart for something. But most commonly, it’s used whenever astrologers use that term, they’re typically talking about Natal Astrology. And they’re typically talking about trying to find the correct birth time in order to narrow down the correct birth chart for the individual. All right, so as we’ve talked about, the basic premise is that the birth chart will describe the quality of the life as well as some events in the future. And so by extension, just from that premise, it should be possible to reverse engineer a chart based on known events if the person has already, you know, been alive for a while, let’s say a few decades, and some part of their life has already passed, and some of the major events in their life have already taken place, versus for you know, let’s say a newborn, you couldn’t really rectify a chart very well because they’ve just been born and not much has happened to them yet.
PW: They’re the worst clients.
CB: Yeah, worst clients. In terms of just ranking your clients, newborns would be lower on the list. Top 10–
PW: They never respond to my emails.
CB: Right, and they’re always cranky. That’s the next top 10 list Patrick, is like top 10 worst client types. And that one would be up there.
PW: Babies, yeah.
CB: Right, babies or yeah, let’s shelve that. Okay, I don’t want to offend anyone. So especially any babies. So rectification is taking this theory that theoretically like if astrology works and the birth charts should be able to say things about events in your life in the future, that if you know already some events that occur in the person’s life, you should be able to reverse engineer the birth chart. And rectification typically then is actually applying that theory in practice, usually in cases of necessity, where you don’t have a choice but to sort of reverse engineer it like that in order to try to figure out what the person’s birth time originally was. So you can figure out what their true birth chart was. So we’ve already touched on this a little bit, but what are some… Let’s talk about some instances where rectification is necessary. And there seems like… Lisa, when we were talking about this in preparing the sort of outline, you identified two broad or distinct categories where there’s either a limited time window when the person knows that they were born approximately during a certain part of the day versus sometimes there is absolutely no time window in terms of they just know the day they were born, and it could be anywhere within that 24-hour period.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And one’s much harder than the other to work with I would say. Because if you have a 24-hour period, then you have so many more combinations of factors if you just mess with the rising sign as we’ll talk about. There are just so many different combinations of variables that it becomes much more challenging to figure out with a decent degree of confidence that this is the right one, even the right rising sign much less the exact time, versus if you have something like, “Oh, I know I was born after lunch and like before midnight,” you then at least have like half of the day. So that cuts in half all of those variables. So they’re pretty different in terms of, you know, how easy it is to work with.
CB: Right, so a large part of that then is a matter of difficulty and the number of variables. Because if you have, let’s say somebody where they were born within a 2-hour time span and you just have to narrow it down within that 2-hour time span, and let’s say they have it’s a choice between they have either one rising sign, let’s say Aquarius, or another rising sign, which is Pisces, then that’s sort of dealing with two different charts and the variables involved in that, versus if it’s a 24-hour period, and let’s say you’re just trying to figure out the rising sign, there’s going to be 12 different rising signs within that 24-hour period. So your variables just went up from like two to twelve suddenly. So part of this is the number of variables that you have to deal with, which is the main struggle. Also, sometimes there can be a given birth time, but sometimes the birth time can be rounded. And in some instances in order to use specific techniques that really rely on an exact birth time with a precise Ascendant or other precise degrees in the chart, the chart may need to be rectified in order to use that technique to narrow things down.
LS: Yeah, and I run into that sometimes. I don’t do a whole rectification session on it per se, but if I’m for instance using a given birth time from a birth certificate and it’s seems not rounded, but say I’m trying to use a timing technique like zodical releasing and the lats are very, very close to switching and in that particular technique where the lats fall is when you begin this entire timing sequence, and so it’s really important, even if it’s only a matter of a few minutes difference. So those are the cases in which I will try to kind of ask some questions during the session to try to figure out which one it’s most likely to be.
PW: Especially if the time is close to a multiple of five. Because those tend to be the most sort of commonly rounded times. [crosstalk 15.41] Yeah. So yeah, the most rounded time… According to some research by astrologer Renay Oshop, she put out this article about basically the distribution of birth times of AA rated birth data from 1930 through to today on astro.com, and it showed that birth times ran into the hour web, the most common birth far beyond the normal amount that you should see. And then 30 minutes past, half past the hour was the next big peak, and then 15, 45 minutes past the hour, and then the 10, 20, 40, 50 minutes were the next ones that were kind of beyond. And then the ones that were the least were the, you know, multiples of 5, 5, 25, 35, 55 etc. So basically, if you see an AA rated time that’s rounded to the hour or is on the hour, unless there’s a specific note like someone marked it down at the time knowing that it was actually at that time, should probably treat it a little cautiously just knowing that it’s probably within an hour, you know, either before or after the recorded time. So yeah, I mean, you do have to kind of do a bit of on the fly rectification as a, you know, an astrologer looking at lots of different charts.
CB: Right. Like all astrologers know that if somebody gives you a birth time and it’s right on the hour or even if it’s on the half hour, then it’s very highly likely that you’re probably working with a rounded time. So you have to be careful if there’s any changes in that time within a, let’s say, a 15 to 30-minute timeframe before or after, that those could potentially be the person’s actual birth chart. And the Renay Oshop article was just published earlier this year on her website and the title, you can do a Google search for, the title is Even AA Rating Charts in Astro-Databank of People Born After 1930 Are Highly Likely to be Wrong. Because she shows that distribution and shows that the five increment thing that Patrick mentioned, but also especially the quarter and the half hour and on the hour just stand out as being way more than they should or occurring way more frequently than they should in a random distribution. And that implies then or then that’s taken to imply that most recorded birth times are probably rounded. And it’s either that or most people are being born like in 15 minute intervals or something like that. Although–
PW: [unintelligible 18.23] how it works.
CB: We probably actually do have to be careful about that due to things like the increasing use of C-sections as doctors probably would, you know, potentially scheduled those closer to, you know, half hours and hours and stuff like that. I’m not sure if that’s relevant at all here in terms of trying to interpret these results.
LS: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s a good point. Although usually, there’s still time after that. So I would imagine, you know, from the beginning of the procedure to taking them out, so I don’t know, the C-section ones that I’ve looked at, marked C-section and have a time, are still exact times.
PW: You can’t always even trust those. I mean, you start kind of going down a rabbit hole of not being able to trust anything you see, there is some degree to which you just have to accept that like, you know, you don’t know exactly who wrote it down and how well… I mean, I imagine it just varies from nurse to nurse, doctor to doctor how well, you know that time is being taken down. I know that from my own birth the clock on the wall was like 20 minutes off. And the official time in my birth certificate is actually different than what my father said it was. My mom as an astrologer, she told my father to make sure that she actually got my birth time that he got my birth time correctly. And so he was the one who noticed that the clock was wrong on the wall, and he pointed that out to the nurse. And she’s like, “Oh, I’ve been using that clock for all those times.” [crosstalk 19.52] If you were born during the Mercury retrograde of October 1987 at High Wycombe General Hospital in Bucks, UK, your time is off by probably like, I don’t know, 20 minutes or so. [crosstalk 20.07]
CB: I literally as a consulting astrologer wake up with nightmares of exactly that scenario.
PW: #astrologernightmares. Those are the things that keep me up at night. But, yeah, you can’t… I guess it’s just you just have to use, you know, your best sense, you know that you can as far as you know what birth time it’s you can trust. I tend to be a little more trustful of times which are in those, you know, periods in between the multiples of five. You know, if someone gives me a birth time like 1:02, you know, that gives me a little more confidence as long as AM and PM are clear as well. That’s another nightmare.
LS: Right. I mean, though it’s worth noting that, you know, when a birth is happening, that’s not the first thing… That’s probably, you know, like pretty down the list of like people’s concerns in the room.
PW: Wasn’t for me.
LS: Right, for most people. Yeah, no, I mean, I’ve definitely directed people to pay attention to the time no matter what when there’s a birth happening. But in terms of your regular births that don’t involve an astrologer, you know…
CB: I remember getting minute by minute email updates from you Patrick, like when your first child was born.
PW: I made sure to get that time correct. And it actually really mattered because he ended up being a 29 degree Taurus rising. And so if I hadn’t been looking at the time very closely, you know, like the next minute he was going to be Gemini rising.
CB: That literally would have bothered you for the rest of his life if you didn’t know.
PW: Yeah, you’re damn right. It would have definitely bothered me. So it definitely paid for me to pay attention to that. But what’s amazing now is in the future people are gonna probably have a social media record to be able to look back at, because parents nowadays when they usually it’s like a big social media event when people are, you know, showing off, you know, “Hey, look, we birthed a kid,” so there’s usually timestamps on those posts. They usually include the time in the posts. You know now it’s like a big cutesy thing to have like their chalkboard and, you know, all this data about them. Like, you know, “They were this heavy, and they came out at this time.” And like people are right on top of it, it’s a part of like this, you know, sort of showboating thing. But it works. It works for people in the future because they’re actually going to have potentially a much better, you know, digital record of these births. So it’s kind of exciting for future astrologers.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
LS: Great in terms of records. I mean, it’s probably worth noting that even if it does look like an exact time, the nurse could have turned around 2 minutes later and gone, “Oh, okay. Right, I need to write down the time,” you know, or that kind of thing. It’s just, you know, check the baby, check the mother, and then write down the time.
PW: Right. I mean, when I was there for the both births that I was present for, they actually called out the time, and then someone wrote it down. So they said like, “1:06,” and then, you know, I heard the cry, you know. So it was…
CB: That’s good to know, because there’s sometimes the debate where some astrologers assume that whatever the recorded time is, is automatically could be slightly later than the actual birth.
PW: Right, and that is possible.
LS: [unintelligible 23.25], you know. There’s, yeah, different procedures in different hospitals all over the world.
CB: All right. So when it comes to this in terms of the general subtopic right now of when is rectification usually necessary, I’ve got it broken down into the three categories of worst case scenario if there’s absolutely no birth time in an entire 24-hour period, the less worst case scenario is if they have some general idea of what time of day they were born, like their parents remember that they were born, you know, around sunrise, which I think was the case with like John Kerry, that’s what his birth time is based on, or they were born in the evening or like… My parents actually tell a funny story about how they were out like getting a haircut when my mom’s water broke. And so you can actually, even though I have recorded birth time, if I didn’t, you could otherwise partially rectify it based on that known event that was happening and like what times of day they would have been able to get a haircut or what have you. So that’s the less worst case scenario. And then the best case scenario is when they have a rounded time or an approximate time that just needs fine tuning. Although even this can be tough for some people with what I like to call cuspy Ascendants, when the Ascendant gets like really close to the very end of the sign or is very close to the very beginning of the sign, because then even sort of minute changes in the birth time could change the entire rising sign.
PW: [unintelligible 24.55]
LS: Well, I have a… My dad has 29 45 rising, and it’s… I’ve spent like years literally like tracking events just to make sure that it’s still that sign which I’ve decided finally it is, but yeah.
CB: Yeah, and I have a few friends on Twitter, astrologers who have like 29 degree rising or zero degree rising Ascendants that are trying to figure this out right now. So this episode partially goes out to them who are, you know, trying to learn rectification in order to figure out what their true birth chart is as they learn and as they practice astrology.
PW: And that’s also what people are trying to still decide on with President Trump as well. You know, they’re trying to decide is he really zero Virgo rising or 29 Leo rising. So yeah, it comes up every so often.
CB: Right, because isn’t his like at the very beginning of that minute, because that’s another funny thing that comes up in terms of how birth times are recorded, is when you have even an exact minute, like you write down like 9:51 AM, that actually means in seconds, like nine… Usually people will look at that as 9:51 and zero seconds, but there’s actually 60 seconds in a minute. And there’s some instances, I think Trump is one of those instances where–
PW: It changed in a minute.
CB: Yeah, it changes within that minute. So if you don’t take for granted that he was born at the very beginning of the minute rather than 30 seconds in the minute or 45 seconds into the minute or even like 59 seconds, let’s say, then it could be a completely different rising sign.
PW: Right. I mean, and obviously we’re measuring from I mean the Ascendant when you see the Ascendant in the chart, because there’s three different kinds of Ascendant. There’s the one that is basically projection from the equator and then there’s the local one, which you see, and they’re very, very small. I mean, the difference between them is very, very small. But you know, due to atmospheric refraction, you can technically see two degrees lower than what your, you know, beyond what your Ascendant is. So I mean, at the time, I guess, you could say, with a birth time that lead that like technically, it’s like peeking into the other sign, even though like equatorially it’s still at that 29 degrees.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that starts to get tricky in terms of this difference between like a mathematical astrology versus observational astrology, some of the debates sorrounding that.
PW: And it usually doesn’t matter, it usually doesn’t matter because the planets and everything they’re so far away, but for the horizon it is a kind of slightly tricky issue figuring out those boundaries.
CB: All right. We’ll come back to that. So this brings up, and we started to get into this, but the next sort of general subtopic as we’re getting further and further into this, is this issue of rectifying whether you’re rectifying out of necessity or you’re rectifying whatever the opposite is of necessity, I guess, as a matter of principle. And I’ve always seen rectification as a matter of necessity. It’s like something you have to do if you don’t know the birth time because you don’t have a choice. If the person wants to look at their house placements, if they want to know what the rising sign is, if they want to be able to use certain timing techniques, they need to know their birth time. And the only way to figure out the birth time is to rectify it if there’s no other way. So it’s like rectification as a matter of necessity. And I think, the majority of rectification, the way that most astrologers apply it, that’s usually the case. However, I have met some astrologers, especially some older astrologers occasionally who believe that every chart should be rectified. One of those astrologers who passed away a few years ago was Axel Harvey, and that was just a general principle of his. That he believed every birth chart needed to be rectified in order to basically to fine tune the birth time under the premise that we were talking about earlier, that he didn’t think that you could take it for granted that any recorded birth time was necessarily accurate and that sometimes you needed to apply the techniques in order to see if your expectations matched the chart itself or if something was being thrown off, like your expectations weren’t being met by the events that were occurring in the person’s life, but they would be if you adjusted the chart one way or another. And that is a really tricky issue and tricky debate.
LS: Yeah, I tend to fall more on the out of necessity. Just because I think you can get a little bit… You know, if you do it for every single birth chart with the assumption that the times are more likely to be off than correct, then you start to get into little tricky territory in terms of you kind of choosing which things are the most important. I mean, you already kind of do that when you read a chart. But I think there’s just a little bit of human error potential to be introduced to something that could actually be the correct time. It’s obviously not like a black or white issue, like probably somewhere in the middle is where I fall, but I wouldn’t necessarily rectify every given time, especially if they were exact times. Because I think you can get a little bit of hubris around it. Like that you know better than then the recorded time and that something you’re noticing must be more important.
PW: Yeah, that’s a great point because it’s difficult to tell… How do you tell the difference between like just reading a chart kind of like a chart that’s kind of hard to read versus like reading the wrong chart? I mean, it’s difficult to know, you know, when which, you know, which scenario is actually happening. I tend to fall on the necessity side as well. But I do see some value in, you know, kind of washing the fruit off before you eat it, you know, polishing the stone before you try to make it skip. I mean, you know, I can see why Axel felt like that. But that’s just a level of paranoia that I almost can’t like handle. There’s some degree to which you just kind of have to start working with the time that you have, you know, there’s some degree to which you just have to kind of eventually, you know, settle on something, you know, to be able to proceed in some way.
LS: And it can be a little bit fluid, like not like an either/or. Like you could not intend to rectify a chart, but then once you start talking to a person, be like, “It doesn’t really seem like this is matching up well enough.” And then you could start kind of inquiring and fiddling and seeing if it might be off. So I don’t know, that happens to me sometimes.
CB: Right. And so it’s like the argument in favor is that there’s no guarantee that even a decent-looking recorded time was recorded accurately, whereas the argument against rectifying every chart is the astrologer may not even be looking at the right techniques or they may not, so, you know, one astrologer… Because one of the things that we’re going to get into later is that rectification is very much dependent on what techniques you use as an astrologer. And every astrologer might approach rectification slightly differently or sometimes wildly differently, depending on what their basic approach to natal astrology is. Because all rectification is is basically the application of your specific approach to natal astrology in order to try to back or reverse engineer a person’s birth time. And we all know very quickly early on in your studies, once you start learning astrology, you realize there’s a lot of diversity in the field in terms of different approaches to interpreting a birth chart. So as a result, there’s also a lot of different approaches to rectifying a birth chart. And so people, you know, one person might approach rectifying a chart with one set of techniques, and they might come to the conclusion that this is the wrong birth time. Because if it was moved 10 minutes earlier then this technique that I use regularly would work really well, whereas it doesn’t seem to work as well in my preferred technique with the recorded birth time. But then the problem I have with that is that sometimes you’ll bring that to like another astrologer where I might look at the chart using different techniques like Hellenistic time lord techniques and think that the chart actually works perfectly well and the technique works really well using the recorded birth time or different different variations of that. So that’s an issue. Additionally, the astrologer might not have full knowledge of the person’s life like, you know, rectifying it, maybe there’s some event that hasn’t occurred yet in the person’s life that will occur later on that will just fit perfectly with the recorded time. But if you’ve already made the assumption that the time is off and you’ve rectified their chart, they might not later, you know, make the connection that the original chart was actually correct because they’re then proceeding with this altered chart instead.
PW: Well, you’re not all parts of your chart at every time of your life. I mean, that’s why annual Profection is so useful, these time lord period is so useful because it kind of tells you like what paths of your chart you’re even living at at a given time. So yeah, that kind of gets into the specific techniques you can use.
CB: Yeah, so it’s risky, I mean, in my opinion, it’s risky to rectify everything because you might be wrong. But then, you know, some of these things like the Renay Oshop article about rounded times with the majority of times potentially being rounded, definitely does give me some pause. And especially in charts where if it was like 5 or 10 minutes earlier or later, it could really make a difference. So there’s something really close to a cusp, then I can see the necessity of rectifying a little bit more. But you just have to… This then leads into another our next subtopic, which is that one of the major underlying issues is that rectification is always ultimately speculative, that it’s really a speculative application of astrology. Because oftentimes or the vast majority of the times, you’re not really going to know for sure, and you’re not going to be able to verify whether your rectification was definitely correct. And in some instances, it might not be or the astrologer could be off, either in minor ways or sometimes in major ways in their attempt to rectify the chart. So we always have to understand and contextualize rectification as something that’s speculative, and that it’s something that is an attempt on the individual astrologers part to find or to sort of uncover the original birth time.
LS: Yeah, definitely. And I think all three of us probably approach it in pretty similar way in terms of kind of respecting the speculative nature of that. But it’s very research-oriented. And, you know, you can’t say, “Oh, I’ve definitely found this.” It’s like you do your best possible work in kind of researching it to figure out where it should land, but you can’t say this is definitely more reliable. And so yeah, anyway, I just wanted to kind of throw that out there.
PW: The music producer Quincy Jones said that a mix is never finished, only abandoned. So like that’s sort of the attitude I take towards rectification. I try my best obviously to get as close as I can, but you know, there’s only so much you can do beyond a certain point. So, you know, it’s never finished, but it’s abandoned.
CB: Right. And that brings up actually really important practical issue for practicing astrologers that we were talking about before we started recording, that you run into and that we’ve all run into, which is that rectification is such a challenging, it’s probably one of the most challenging things in astrology. I think that’s actually sometimes said, that it’s like the most challenging thing to do in astrology, and it’s the most labor-intensive. So that sometimes in terms of doing it for clients, you can run into a real issue of how to structure your time, how to charge for it, and how much time to actually devote to it. Because this is something where sometimes there’s astrologers that spend, I don’t know, overstate that or overdramatize it. But there’s astrologers who spend a good part of their career, their life, like trying to figure out their correct birth time or trying to figure that out if it was completely unknown. And there is an issue sometimes of seeing clients about like how much time can you actually spend. Because if you did like the full nine yards, you could spend years really trying to rectify a person’s chart, I feel like.
LS: Definitely. Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons, it’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons why I most of the time rectify it to the rising sign rather than specific degrees. Because you can do quite a lot with the rising sign compared to not having that. It sets up all the houses and the house placements and rulerships. And you just don’t have the exact angle degrees. And, you know, while you could keep trying for that and sometimes I do a little bit more, but especially for the lats, which we’ll talk about later, yeah, that’s kind of where my middle ground lies in terms of how long it will take me and kind of like the most reliable results I feel like a decent bit of confidence in.
PW: Yeah, I’ve been on kind of a journey with rectifications. Because when I first started out, I just I wanted to try to, you know, give the most detail, the most, you know, the best shot I could possibly give to someone to find their exact birth time. And you know, it did take quite a long time because I’d have to kind of correspond with them over email, would have certain questions I do some research on, like what trends were happening when and I’d have more questions, so it had to be kind of a back and forth like that and had to be over email because just it was an easy way for me to list all the dates I wanted to know about, all ranges of times I wanted to know about. So in some ways, it’s kind of frustrating for the person because it takes so long, you know, for me to be able to get back to them or for them to get back to me. And then charging is difficult too because it is such a labor-intensive process. You want to charge you know probably make it the more expensive thing that you charge people for, but on the other hand, you’re dealing with a person who, you know, is probably really frustrated by the fact that they don’t have an exact birth time and that they, you know, want to apply some of these more specific date things to their chart, but they just, you know, they don’t have, you know, a high enough degree of confidence in what their birth time might be to proceed. So, you know, it kind of feels like probably for them that they’re being kind of, you know, charged for something that wasn’t their fault, you know. So I–
CB: There’s a tension there between the sort of demands, the necessity of the clients end versus like the necessity of the time constraints that the astrologers have just because there’s so many variables, you know. If you’re trying to collect all of the different events and circumstances and unique things in a person’s life, and then compare those two, all of the different possible charts, there’s just, you know, hundreds or thousands of different events that you could check and take into account. And at some point, you just have to arbitrarily draw a line at where you have to stop.
PW: And at the same time, you have to also take into account that it takes… I forgot what I was gonna say. It’s a speculative exercise as well. So you don’t want to charge too much for something that you can’t even necessarily verify that you did a good job. Because you can do all this work and really feel like you’re getting closer, but you could just be getting further away. So that’s another tension. Because myself at least, I don’t want to feel like I am charging someone and promising that I’m actually going to get them the real time, because obviously I want to do my best to do that, but I also know that, you know, this is as much of an art as it is, you know, an exercise in astrological logic. So it’s a tricky thing, you know. And I’ve kind of gone back and forth on it on my pricing and the way that I offer this, but yeah, I think, I mean, the closest I narrow it down to is if I feel like I can, and if I think there are things which seem to suggest a specific degree, then I’ll try to get it to the degree, a 4-minute range. Otherwise, I might only have, I might only be able to kind of confidently narrow down to the sign. It’s really based on my degree of confidence.
CB: Right. And it’s gonna vary from client to client, depending on the circumstances of what they know about their birth time or their birth date and the events in their life and some of the different things surrounding that. There’s a lot of variables involved?
LS: Right.
PW: Yes.
CB: Okay, so each astrologer uses their own preferred techniques in rectification, and as a result, different astrologers can come to different conclusions. Although not always, I should say, I once actually rectified a time, and I ended up with the same rising sign and like roughly the same degrees as Rob Hand. And the client later told me that either she had already gone to Rob Hand or she went to Rob Hand later, and he actually came up with roughly the same birth time. So occasionally, there can be overlap like that where, you know, astrologers, especially if they’re coming at it, this is more likely if they’re coming at it from the same tradition. Like if the three of us, for example, we have very similar approaches, we all use whole sign houses, we all use the traditional rulership, sometimes we apply the same timing techniques like profections or zodical releasing, so there’s going to be a higher likelihood I think that, you know, the three of us would come to the same conclusion about a chart compared to if you had two astrologers from entirely different approaches or traditions trying to rectify the same chart, the results might be a little bit more mixed.
PW: I always independently pick the same elections that you guys do. I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that one.” Like it’s always… Like you’re always like right in my brain for this, like so yeah, I’ll take the credit, please. No, just kidding. So yeah, no, that is an interesting point. I would imagine that our results could be fairly similar if we did something like that because of the similarity in our approach.
CB: Right, just a standardization of approach, which I feel like didn’t exist as much a few decades ago. But when you have people like us or even, you know, Austin, Kelly, who also have a very similar approach in terms of our unique sort of synthesis of traditional and modern astrology, then when you start to get that sort of standardization of people using very similar approaches that that they can come to similar results across many different areas because you have the same basic set of procedures. And that’s one of the things that becomes really important for rectification, is you have to, which we’re about to get into in the next section finally as we get into the technical section of this discussion, you have to have like a standardized set of procedures that you’ll apply to every natal chart in order to interpret it. And that becomes your foundation for being able to do any rectification.
LS: Definitely. I was in a workshop last year, an astrology workshop. And one of the people in the class came up during the intermission to the astrologer running it and said with great frustration, “I’ve gone to three different people to rectify my chart, and I have three completely different times that came out of it.” And then the person running it was like, “Oh well, let me look at it, too.” But that kind of scares me and also reinforces what you were just saying, is that I feel like that probably wouldn’t happen as much if you were using similar kind of concrete techniques and also the ones that really emphasize concrete events perhaps rather than psychological propensities. I think that’s actually pretty important in terms of doing rectification. Not that you throw out the other, of course, but you know, the emphasis.
CB: Yeah, because it starts getting into something we’ll talk about in just a minute in terms of the client’s perception of their life and their character and the events in their life and their own personality versus either your perception of that, your awareness of the events that have happened in their life, or, you know, the objective reality of what events and what their character is, which might be like a whole third category that’s independent of what they think about it or what you think about it.
PW: Yeah, sometimes you have to kind of read between the lines, because you know, someone telling you like, “I’m humble, I’m the most humble person in the entire world. No one’s more humble than me.” And something like, “You know, I don’t think I should take you at your word,” you know, probably a more of a Sun person maybe, similar thing going on. But so–
CB: Right, there’s like a news personality recently that was saying he was like literally the least racist person you’ve ever met in the world or something like that. And it’s like a little when somebody is overstating something like that, like it does, especially in a client session, raise the questions.
PW: Right.
LS: Yeah. So it’s useful if you’re using techniques that don’t over rely on the necessity of that.
CB: Sure.
PW: An unreliable narrator.
CB: Unreliable narrator, which is a topic we’ve come to a few times before on the podcast at different points, but it becomes especially relevant within this context. So we’ll get more into that in just a second. But just to conclude this little section, you know, as a result of astrologers using different techniques or approaches, they can come to different conclusions, that’s not necessarily always the case. But due to this, we have to realize and sort of set as a basis at the very beginning, and everybody should know and understand especially people that are having their charts rectified, that every rectification needs to be taken with a grain of salt. And anytime rectification has been employed on your chart, you need to state that up front. Or any time you as an astrologer if you’re using let’s say a chart as an example in a teaching or something, if you’ve rectified that chart, that needs to be stated up front, because anytime you say in a group of astrologers or to another astrologer that this chart has been rectified, they will immediately like process that and understand that that means the reliability of the chart has been downgraded sort of a level in their mind on some level in varying degrees.
CB: Grains of salt and whatnot.
CB: Right, different grains of… Sometimes like a huge mountain of salt needs to be, you know, kept in your mind if a rectification is stated. So if you ever see an astrologer for consultation and you’ve previously had your birth chart rectified by another astrologer, make sure you tell the astrologer that you’re seeing that your birth chart has been rectified. Do not just like give them the time and say this is my chart, and this is my recorded birth time. Because what you actually have is a speculative birth time that another astrologer came up with that the astrologer that you’re taking it to if they knew that that was a rectification, they might they may or may not agree with, and they might adjust one way or another. So that’s very important.
PW: Or they might change up the techniques they use to investigate that chart. Because I mean, there are some basic things you can do if you don’t have a birth time. It can’t be as detailed or as specific as if you did, but yeah, best thing just be upfront about it, please.
LS: Yeah, they might change which techniques they put emphasis on even if you use multiple techniques. And also on the flip side, as an astrologer, you should always ask what is the source of this birth time for every client. Because once in a while someone will say, “Oh, it was rectified.” And then so if you don’t ask that, you won’t know.
CB: Yeah, there’s like… Yeah, I rectified it. I’d been studying astrology for about 5 days, and I figured out pretty early on that I must have Capricorn rising because that places asteroid Sedna in my ninth house, right on the cusp.
PW: Classic Sedna third house personality, yeah.
CB: Right. You’re such a Sedna third house, Patrick.
PW: I don’t even know where my sign is.
CB: Well, it’s really slow. It’s probably the same for all of us like–
PW: All right, yeah. Yeah, well, that sounds like a very 12th house Lilith Black Moon thing of you to say, Chris.
CB: Right, that’s gonna be my next t-shirt, that’s my next t-shirt item. All right, so tell astrologers. And then recently, I’ve actually been annoyed that Astro-Databank has been listing rectifications in their database. And I do not think that this is something they did… Occasionally, like you would see that but not as like a standard thing. But for some reason, they’re like standardly listing sometimes rectifications now which is driving me crazy.
PW: Yeah, you might as well just like delete the word rectifications and just put in the phrase, a time some guy came up with. Like I mean, because it would be different if rectification were like a standardized practice, but because it’s not, it’s, you know, that is not reliable. And that is not, it shouldn’t even be mentioned. It’s still, you know, Astro-Databank should be just for, you know, properly sourced data or providing the status of that data. And if it’s unknown, then it’s unknown, you know. And if people are trying to rectify it, then, you know, that’s sort of a separate question of what its status is which is unknown. So yeah, I totally agree.
LS: Yeah, I mean, and not everyone… I mean, in addition to there not being a standard set of techniques or approaches that everyone uses, not everyone even routinely rectifies. And so the rectification could just be like someone who was fiddling around with a chart who otherwise, you know, doesn’t necessarily use concrete-based techniques and so forth. You know, you just have no idea because it’s all across the board. People often like to actually speculative rectify to like for, you know, for public charts as kind of like an ego thing, I think. Not necessarily with client work, but I think sometimes there’s like a contest or perception of like, I’m going to be the first to like figure this out, and like, I’m really smart because I rectify this chart, and I know that it’s the right one. So I see that a lot, you know…
PW: And conferences will advertise that they have that speculative time and use it to drive up ticket purchases.
CB: Right. We’re at like the two or three year anniversary of you ending up in the Washington Post for that. What was the title? It was like This birth time is not to be Trusted with a picture of Hillary Clinton like right below it.
PW: Yeah, it is on record.
CB: Yeah, not the whole story but just like really briefly.
PW: Really briefly. We didn’t know Hillary’s birth time, and Marc Penfield got it from [unintelligible 52.09] Well, yeah, basically, yeah, he said he had a birth time, and it didn’t come from a reliable source. And…
CB: They said that they had the birth certificate.
PW: They said they had the birth certificate, that wasn’t true. The ISAR conference used as an opportunity to drive sales for people to come to the conference where they were going to get an exclusive to reveal the birth time. But before they did that, a set of circumstances occurred that eventually resulted in a Washington Post reporter confronting him directly, Marc Penfield, about the source at the time. And he finally had to put up a shut up, and he admitted that, you know, it was basically all baloney. And so that happened on the same weekend that the ISAR conference was going to, you know, unveil the time and it got totally shut to hell. And I’m sort of part of the reason why
CB: You were interviewed by the Washington Post because you and I had been like furiously researching this time for like the 2 weeks leading up to the conference trying to understand if it was legitimate or not.
PW: Yeah, I mean, I would much rather have had just the real time, but you know, at least we got to shoot down a fake time.
CB: Yeah, that was good times.
PW: Yeah, anyway.
CB: All right. So this brings up to, before we move on to topics that have both been mentioned very recently, but one of them is the ego thing. So I occasionally do notice this. I don’t know if you guys have noticed this as well. But it’s sometimes makes me nervous about rectification. Because sometimes there’s… It’s not true of everybody, and I’m not thinking of anyone in particular, but I mean, the Astro-Databank thing does strike me in this way of it seems incredibly, I don’t know you have to have like a pretty big ego to think that your rectification skills are that good that you’re willing to like put it in a database that’s otherwise for recording accurate birth times and tracking accurate birth times. And that is like a shadow side that I sometimes see in rectification, can be that like egoic thing of like, “I’m the best astrologer in the world, and I can figure out any birth time because I’m so good at it that I’m willing to, you know, make great claims about it.”
PW: It’s weird. It’s sort of a weird mirror image of how skeptics tend to think that the most impressive thing an astrologer can do is to guess someone’s Sun sign. Like, you know, this ability to think that you can, you know, rectify a chart, you know, perfectly and just have the goal to put it on Astro-Databank is you know.
LS: Well, I think you just have to kind of strike a middle way with things like rectification. Because on the one hand, astrology at all, you know, shows you things that you shouldn’t be able to know otherwise as Chris has often said. And so it is already something in that realm, and I think that’s why people can so easily try to take it in that direction. Because if you as an astrologer can look at this chart of just like symbols, and be like, “This is what your parents were like” or, you know, “This is what your career’s like,” then I think by the same manner of thinking, people might think, “Well, if I can go one further and I don’t even have a birth time, and I can say these things about you,” you know, I think that’s where the ego kind of comes in, is pushing those same kind of skills or same kind of phenomena, you know, further.
CB: Right. Yeah, I mean, if it’s reputed by all most astrologers to be like the most difficult thing to do in astrology but then you’re the person that supposedly specializes in it, and you can figure it out anyone’s birth time, then it’s seen as impressive or supposed to be seen as impressive or something like that.
LS: Right. And it is impressive if you can do that reliably and repeatedly, it’s just because it’s hard. It’s really it is really hard. It’s a very challenging task that requires you to have a very, I think, investigative and perceptive approach to things, you know. So I mean, I think on the one hand, it is a little bit of measure of like how good you are at approaching astrological things in some way. But it’s not not everything depends on that, and there can still be lots of factors that can throw you even if you are good.
CB: Right, due to a lot of those variables that we were talking about earlier.
PW: Right, you could be wrong for the right reasons.
LS: Yeah, exactly. And well, I think we’ll talk about a little a few of those and the techniques.
CB: Right, or right for the wrong reasons.
PW: Exactly.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So and then the last thing, and you guys sort of brought this up in passing, it’s almost like a whole separate thing, but it’s a related issue of astrologers sometimes doing things that they don’t specialize in or that they don’t actually have much background in. This comes up the most commonly in like electional astrology, and Leisa and I were like constantly bemoaning this with different electional things in the past of just like what like a modern psychological astrologer who’s like really good at character analysis in astrology occasionally will like, you know, there’ll be an occasion to like, pick a time to start something and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I do that.” And they’ll start applying like psychological astrology to picking a chart, and the techniques you would do and the things you would look for for like an event chart and picking an auspicious election are often very different than what you might look like in modern psychological astrology. And I don’t know if that’s because the approaches themselves are truly different or if it’s because modern psychological astrology is so much more just removed from attempting to make distinctions like good and bad or benefic an malefic or look at things from an event perspective, and instead just looking at everything as psychological or what that is. But it’s an issue that sometimes, that comes up most frequently in electional but it’s also probably slightly relevant here as well in terms of is the astrologer somebody who really has done rectification a lot before, who specializes in rectification? Or is it somebody that just thinks that they know sort of their approach to natal astrology enough that they could reverse engineer a chart theoretically?
PW: I think it’s where it starts. You got to start somewhere. Most astrologers have not gone through a course, a study, or maybe an incomplete course of study or mostly independently knowledgeable through their own investigations and their own reading and their own experience. And I think that’s where you’d have to start if you were starting rectification. You’d have to eventually kind of get to a point where you know natal astrology well enough that you might take a chance on a chart where you didn’t know what the birth name was but you knew certain things about certain signs and what happens when a given planet rules the ascendant. And you might try to start whittling it down. I think that’s what the first step will kind of look like as someone who feels like they’re comfortable enough with natal astrology to kind of do it backward as well.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Mhm.
CB: And I don’t wanna emphasize that or harp on that too much for that reason because rectification for the most part really is just largely reverse engineering natal astrology and using that to reverse-engineer the birth time based on events you know in a person’s life. And so if you’re a good natal astrologer, then you could do rectification. I guess it comes up more as an issue in electional astrology. That’s where I’m most frequently annoyed by it. But I could just see some of the same dynamics coming up in natal astrology potentially as well where, I don’t know, there’s certain techniques where if you know about them like if you know how to look at the rulers of the houses that becomes a really relevant thing when you’re doing rectification. But if what is to me at least a major component of horoscopic astrology is not in your vocabulary, then you’re missing like a major tool that’s probably I would view as being crucial in rectification. But then of course you get into the whole subjective nature of different approaches to astrology.
PW: Well, I would suppose that if a psychological astrologer’s attempting rectification that they would have a psychological approach to it. It wouldn’t be events-based. It would be more, I guess, character-based. They would use that vocabulary to describe what they know whereas someone who has knowledge in a more predictive or event-oriented more sort of externally located kind of astrology, then that’s how they would approach rectification focusing on these external events.
LS: Mhm. I think you can validly use different approaches to astrology to rectify. Each astrologer is not gonna use all the possible techniques that one could use in looking at charts in general or in doing rectification specifically. But at the same time I think there is something to be said for the ability to look at both. I do have a bias towards the ability to look at concrete events and what that looks like, the ability to look at the quality of a certain area of life rather than merely a psychological kind of manifestation, I guess. And it’s not to say that those don’t matter. But I think if you can’t even see those even if that’s not the only thing you’re looking at, then you’re gonna miss things. Because usually with rectification, that’s what people are going to be able to give you many years after the fact is events and also like, “This is kind of how this area of my life goes more or less.”
PW: Well–
LS: And not like Venus in any sign always is good for something, like that kind of thing.
PW: Right. And there’s always gonna be some degree to which I think the least–there’s three main candidates I would think for planets which have kind of more of a–Like you could apply some psychological analysis to, for example, to the ruler of the ascendant or the sect light. And that’s the way that you can narrow things down as well. Like, “Is this person kind of more like Mars in general?”
LS: Sure.
PW: Like what–
LS: Sure.
PW: What do they present themselves as? What is sort of the main thrust of their MO, the way they kind of go through life, the way they kind of appear to people? And that can often give you a lot of insight just into which planetary archetype they tend to embody most.
LS: Absolutely.
CB: Right.
LS: And I definitely use that, too.
CB: It’s just the ability to do both.
LS: Yeah, exactly. It’s just like not having those other tools versus being able to use both.
PW: Mhm.
LS: Cuz if it was reversed and it was the issue where like the tradition flipped with revival traditional astrology and everybody was just doing predictive event-oriented astrology, then you would be missing out. If you weren’t incorporating the character analysis and the ability to see how the archetypes are manifesting in a character or in a psychological sense, then that would be what’s deficient. It’s only that we’re coming out of the phase of the tradition where it’s been almost entirely character-based and now it’s having to incorporate and say that we need to incorporate event-based astrology more into it, that we’re able to sort of frame it that way. But it’s really just the ability to do both sort of simultaneously so that you can look at if somebody potentially has Mars in their first house and understand that it could manifest either literally as an event like physically or it could manifest psychologically like as Mars in their first house manifesting as this person’s career is more or this person’s character is more like brash and assertive or aggressive or something like that. Or has it manifested in a specific event where they got robbed when they were 16 and stabbed in the arm and they have a scar from being stabbed or something like that which could have been like an event that activated that Mars placement?
LS: Right.
PW: Yeah.
CB: So, yeah, achieving balance between those two approaches of the event-based and also the psychological or the character-based things is really super important when it comes to rectification because that gives you the full array of necessary tools in your sort of investigative approach.
LS: Mhm.
PW: Mhm.
CB: All right. So, that brings us to the end of that whole section. Let’s actually get into now some actual strategies for rectification. And as we transition into this of course the first like primary thing that we have to get out of the way in terms of practical details is that first it’s important to search everywhere and make sure you’ve done an exhaustive search for possible birth records first before you spend a bunch of time like rectifying it. So, don’t go out and like have an astrologer spend like a month rectifying your birth time and then turns around that you find your birth certificate like in your sock drawer the week after they finished it or something like that.
LS: Right.
PW: There’s a page on Astrodatabank that has the birth certificate policies for each state in the United States, so I imagine that might be a good thing to throw up on the video when this goes up. And there’s also a page about different countries and their birth certificate policies like whether they record time zones or not, so that might be a good place to start looking if you aren’t even sure where to begin with your birth certificate. Cuz in some cases you may be in a place that has a birth certificate obviously but doesn’t record the time or something like that or they only record the time to a certain time, certain year or range of years.
LS: Mhm.
PW: So–
LS: Yeah, there’s a surprising number of those where it’s just a range or there’ll be like a range cut out.
PW: Mhm.
LS: Like the 1950s weren’t recording times, but before and after they were. Things like that.
PW: Yeah.
LS: And I’ve definitely brought this up to great effect to clients in the past because even then if the birth certificate doesn’t have a time available, sometimes the next year would be like, “But the hospitals recorded times.”
PW: Mhm.
LS: And they would have something they would put in the crib that had like the name and the gender and the birth time. So, I’ve heard of this. I don’t think it was in the US. And so it’s good to inquire about any possible other written records that could possibly be out there. Baby books are a big one. Or–
CB: Newspaper announcements sometimes.
LS: Newspaper announcements. What was I gonna say? Baby books something like–Or like family Bibles sometimes for like recording–
PW: Family Qurans and even events.
LS: –events. Oh, really?
PW: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
PW: Yeah, like family Bibles–
CB: Like some churches I feel like in like Europe or other places I feel like we have some old records where for some reason that was like kept on record by the church.
LS: Mhm.
PW: Sometimes baptism records they have, but I don’t know if they also have the time of birth on the baptism record.
LS: Mhm. Yeah.
PW: But churches tend to keep a baptism record which can be useful in itself for births that we don’t know a whole lot about. Like for example we have William Shakespeare’s baptism record which kind of gives us like some insight into when he was born and the other side of him.
LS: You also wanna be careful if people were born in areas where the laws have changed on what’s important to be recorded not just during the years but per location, per country as I knew someone who was born in Mexico several decades ago. And wherever she was born, the policy was actually to record the date when the parents registered the birth not necessarily the actual birth. So it wasn’t even necessarily–
PW: #astrologernightmares right there. Absolutely nighmares scenario.
[Chris laughs]
LS: That’s even worse.
CB: Thank you for implanting that in my mind.
LS: Right. Well, you don’t even know if it’s the right date then. And in fact you just know this is when they registered, and hopefully the family knows the actual date of birth.
PW: Oh, another fun nightmare as well to have is sometimes the time zone laws have changed in certain states for certain periods of time.
LS: Yeah.
PW: So you wanna make sure you have that straight as well if that’s at all in doubt, and you can’t always trust Solar Fire even to kind of know exactly what–Generally, Solar Fire is really good and astro.com is usually really good about kind of knowing like when a time zone switches or changes. But it is something that will always be nagging at the back of your skull. Like–[laughs]
LS: Mhm.
PW: Like timezone issues.
CB: That’s a big potential valid motivator for rectification if the person was born in a city where there’s some question about whether daylight savings time was in effect. And I know in like the middle of the 20th century in like Chicago we have huge issues with that, right?
LS: Yeah.
PW: Right. Yeah.
LS: Yeah, I’ve had a few clients with that where like it’ll pop up. And usually on Solar Fire it will give you the alert if it’s one of those that they flagged. But it’s like no at this time during this time period in Illinois they were required to record it in specific like daylight savings time or standard time, I forget which. But then you have to question whether it was written down that way or–
CB: Well, the issue–
LS: –cuz some of them will say it won’t.
CB: What was it? Cuz with Patrick it was like daylight savings time was in effect nationwide, but then there was some stupid local law that said that they were supposed to record in standard time or something like that.
PW: I–
LS: Yeah, it’s something like that.
PW: It’s making me glaze over just thinking about it.
LS: It’s something like that, and I’ve had a few clients that have had that exact issue every time.
CB: Yeah.
PW: Yeah. And people are still messing around with it, too. Florida recently was kind of going over whether they wanted to change, get rid of–No, they wanted to switch to daylight saving time permanently. I live in Arizona, and they don’t have daylight saving time. So, I feel like that’s just the way that we should go. We should go back to like not having daylight saving time. This is such a hassle.
CB: Yeah. Luckily, I think in modern times this is becoming less of an issue because we have like the Olson timezone database where a lot of this stuff is being recorded and is being synchronized really well because it becomes really important for computers and for servers and different things like that. So it’s like you have to track it relatively well. It’s more of an issue as far as I know at this point for previously with like birth times from the middle of the 20th century or earlier where you have a lot of these questions sometimes about time zone issues.
LS: Mhm.
PW: Yeah.
CB: All right. So, yeah. So that’s the starting point. Try to find some birth record first. Exhaust all of your options. Ideally, the birth certificate is the best thing. But a birth record or baby book or something is next best after that. The next best thing is make sure the person or either you yourself or the person has talked to the parents, has talked to other relatives to see if other relatives have any recollection about the time. And see if they recall at the very least like the time of day. I feel like I have a lot of relatives where the parents or other relatives who were around at the time will at least remember something about the time of day. This can help to narrow down the approximate time frame that you have to work with as the astrologer. Like if they remember that they were born around sunrise or–
PW: Midnight.
CB: Yeah, or if they were born at midnight or in the evening–
PW: Middle of the day.
CB: –or Patrick, our famous one, born in time for breakfast. That was another–
[Patrick and Leisa laugh]
CB: Supposed time for Hillary Clinton was supposedly based on that, but now there’s a question of whether that statement was ever actually made.
LS: Right.
CB: We don’t have to get into that.
LS: Well, and actually that’s a good reminder that even so it’s much better to have a part of the day to start working with rather that’s from someone’s memory versus 24 hours. And I actually only work with like if there’s some portion of the day and not 24 hours in terms of my own rectification practice. But–
PW: It’d be like 10 people away?
LS: Yeah.
[Patrick laughs]
LS: Because it’s a balance again in terms of what I feel like I can reliably nail down with a decent–with my own personal degree of certainty that I want in terms of giving that service. And maybe at some point that will change, but for now with the tools I have used I think successfully I feel good about that for about like eight hours or something like that. Four or five rising signs, maybe six. But when it’s a whole 24 hours, it’s a lot of variables. And I feel less confident in saying this is probably yeah. So–
CB: Yeah.
LS: But, what I was gonna say about that was so it’s definitely great to have a part of the day rather than 24 hours completely unknown. But, I’ve really come–Not even just from rectifications but from client work in general. I’ve come to really cast much more doubt than I did before on the whole mother’s memory of part of day. And I don’t wanna sound rude about it because they’re the ones giving birth, and it should be like this really big event. but I’ve just had so many occasions now where even the time part of day is sometimes wrong after someone finally finds their birth certificate whereas the–
CB: Where like they’ll initially talk to the parents, and then parents will be like, “Yeah, it was about six o’clock.” And then later they find their birth certificate, and it’s just something completely different.
LS: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: That’s like a really common, I think, experience as astrologers. And it’s led to, I think, a general consensus where it’s often stated that the parents’ memories are generally viewed as being more unreliable than the birth certificate although it’s funny cuz that is the general consensus. But then you have interesting your anecdote Patrick where it’s actually the opposite for you went with your birth. Is that the case? Do I remember that correctly?
PW: Yeah.
LS: Mhm.
PW: I told the story of my–yeah, of my birth. Yeah, that’s my parents. Well, it’s because my mom was into astrology. But she wanted to make sure that she got the time right.
CB: Right. But–
LS: Right. And most people wouldn’t be doing that.
CB: But otherwise, the recorded time would have been wrong for you. But that’s like a unique instance that stood out whereas the majority of the time it’s probably the opposite where you got to rely on the birth record and the parents’ birth times, their memories can be unreliable because it’s such a crazy experience and such a crazy day for them or sometimes multiple days of like suddenly going into labor and then the labor itself and if that was their first child or whatever else was going on in their life at that time. And they really may not have a clear, an actually clear memory of exactly like what time the birth occurred on.
LS: Well, and especially so if you’re not asking soon after which we are usually not. You’re usually asking them like 30 40 years later.
CB: Right. Like–
LS: So–
CB: –asking you for–
LS: –by that point–
CB: –what you had for lunch in like May 1st of 1992?
LS: Right. Yeah, so we can morph–
PW: Nick knows.
[Leisa and Chris laugh]
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
PW: And Nick Dagan Best knows.
CB: Right. Yeah. He’d go like–
PW: He knows that. He knows what will happen.
[Leisa laughs]
CB: “Actually, I was eating at a pizzeria in downtown Manhattan. And I was reading a book on Mick Jagger.”
LS: Right.
[Patrick laughs]
LS: The virtue of Virgo planets. [laughs]
PW: Yeah.
CB: Right. That is the virtue of Virgo planets. All right. So, try to figure out what the memories of the parents are. And it’s not just the parents, sometimes there can be other relatives that remember other things. And that can help to cooperate each other or sometimes it can be different. I’ve had instances where like the parents remembered one time, but then like the uncle was like, “No, no. They have no idea what they’re talking about. It was actually like 5:00 p.m.”
LS: Mhm.
PW: And that’s the moment when you realize that you’re almost like a detective.
CB: Yeah.
PW: You’re like–[laughs]
CB: This is a–
PW: –counting down this piece of information, and you have enough cross reference [laughs]your evidence and–
LS: –statements and trying to figure out like what is actually happening.
CB: Right.
LS: And that is kind of the essence of the entire project of rectification.
PW: Yeah.
LS: It’s detective work.
CB: Right. And I think that is why the all three of us excel at it with our various Scorpio placements of different sorts. And that’s why I called it at the very beginning. I often have a difficult time figuring out like how do you classify what rectification is. Is it a technique? But it’s not necessarily a technique. It’s a procedure is what I’ve been calling it or at least that’s how I classified it at the beginning because it’s like this process or this procedure that you do of this sort of investigative work of trying to reverse-engineer but also like take different accounts and all of the evidence and all of the different testimony and like witness statements into account in order to come to a final verdict. And maybe even placing it in like a judicial context is a good one because that’s a really good example where it’s like in a court like a court case. You have two different sides, and they’re trying to do their best to present the evidence to make their argument. And ultimately like it’s up to the jury as like this third party observer to like look at all the evidence and decide if the person is like guilty or not guilty. And that’s like the best way that we’ve come up with in order to figure out legal truth or to decide law and things like that at this point, but that’s kind of what you’re doing when it comes to rectification as well.
LS: Right. Definitely. And I often find like I’m looking to pile up more and more evidence or things that contradict like one particular idea. When I start getting an idea of this might be the rising sign and get like, “Do you have two or three pieces of evidence that point in that direction versus just one?” Or, “Do you have things that come up that make that unlikely all of a sudden?” And things like that.
CB: Right.
PW: Mhm.
CB: Yeah.
PW: Yeah. Sometimes it’s a different thing with each chart that you kind of keep having to kind of come back to just like a few transits that kind of stick out that you otherwise have like a good case, but then like there’s these sort of glaring inconsistencies.
LS: Mhm.
CB: Right.
PW: It’s something like, “Uh how does that fit?” Like maybe hmm. Yeah.
LS: Well, and what’s scary about that is that can either mean you don’t have it right and you have to second guess everything you’ve just done. Or it can just mean well, there’s always multiple factors going on at any given time. And so is it because of some other thing that’s happening in the chart?
CB: Right. Is there something that’s missing? Is there something that hasn’t happened yet? Is there something the client hasn’t told you about? That was a famous one that was like a sort of quasi rectification at like an open retreat a few years ago. We had a panel, and it was like in front of the entire conference attendee audience. And I was on the panel of astrologers that were–What we were trying to do we were trying to delineate like an anonymous chart which is kind of like an interesting approximation of rectification and kept focusing on like some lineup of planets. It was in a certain house and like some important event that must have happened in that area. And the person got up afterwards and was just like, “No, nothing happened that didn’t really connect with me.” And everyone was kind of disappointed, but then later it turned out we sort of got word that the person that that stuff had been spot on. And some major event had happened, but the person just didn’t wanna talk about it publicly. And that being an issue when you’re doing rectification as well as to the issue of who’s your rectification for. And on the one hand, is it for like a client and somebody you’re talking to directly versus–Patrick, you and I have had a lot of experience with attempting to rectify like politicians’ birth times where oftentimes politicians will know their birth date and location but not the time and then trying to figure that out based on events about their life but not being able to actually talk to or interact with that person directly.
PW: Mhm.
LS: Yeah.
PW: Yeah.
LS: That’s a really big difference in terms of the information that’s available and in terms of getting information that would not otherwise be recorded in any sort of written format and would not be publicly known. Yeah, it’s a really big difference.
CB: Right.
PW: Yeah, like on all of our work with Hillary Clinton’s chart eventually we will get an answer on that because of the–
CB: You think?
[Leisa laughs]
PW: –genealogical copy of her birth certificate which will become available like in 2022 on her birthday. Like once she reaches a certain age the record becomes public. So it will–
LS: It’s only 2022?
PW: Yeah.
LS: That’s only four years from now.
PW: Yeah, I think it’s in 2022. Yeah, on her birthday we will be able to get a public record of her birth certificate. And we’ll finally get–
CB: I feel like you’re jinxing this or something.
[Leisa laughs]
PW: –some closure on whether predictions were wrong because people were using the wrong time or people were using the right time but based incorrect predictions off of it. So it will be quite–
CB: Yeah. And then astrologers will go to great lengths to not have to rectify by doing things like I did and going up to her at a book signing and like asking her, “What time were you born?” and, yeah, her saying, “I don’t know. I think eight o’clock in the evening.”
PW: Right.
CB: So, yeah. But I hope you’re not jinxing us on that. Isn’t there some important proviso? Like if something happens before 8:22, then–
PW: If she dies before that date, then it’s gonna be we won’t get access to it for like another I think 20 years or something. Like it’s so terrible. So, yeah, she has to stay with us so that we can have access to that document.
LS: That’s so–
PW: Obviously we have nothing but best wishes for her. But I just–
[Leisa laughs]
PW: Yeah.
LS: It’s a really weird lie. I think it would be the reverse. It’s kind of a tangent, but I can’t–[laughs]
PW: Right. I know. Yeah. I have to look at the law again, but that’s the last time I looked into this seriously. Yeah. We just wait a little bit, wait a couple more years. Wait a few more years, then there is a copy that will be available. But if she dies before then, it won’t be available for much longer after that.
LS: Okay.
PW: Just Illinois law.
CB: All right. Just astrologer things like waiting around politicians.
[Leisa laughs]
PW: #astrologernightmares.
CB: Right. Okay, so let’s move on to some technical stuff at this point. We got most of the practical details out of the way. So my approach to this, I started developing this approach about a decade ago at least when I started seeing clients more and more consistently in like the mid 2000s once my practice of Hellenistic astrology was getting down and I was pretty comfortable doing the sort of synthesis that I came up with of modern and traditional astrology which uses whole sign houses and uses the traditional rulerships but also incorporates like the outer planets and their aspects to natal planets as well as their transits and things like that. And I wrote this article about a decade ago on rectifications. It’s still on the horoscopic astrology blog that outlines more or less the basics of my approach, and one of the things that I realized pretty early on in my studies once I converted the whole sign houses and once I started seeing clients where their birth time was sometimes unclear or unreliable is that rectifying when you use whole sign houses one of the interesting side effects of that is that rectification accidentally one of the benefits or just sort of a fringe benefit or bonus is that rectification becomes much easier. Because then every time the rising sign changes, all of the house placements change for the entire chart.
LS: Mhm.
CB: And so there’s much more of a difference if you’re using whole sign houses between one rising sign versus another. And even if it’s only like a five-minute difference in the time, If that ascendant if the degree of the ascendant changes signs, then that changes the rising sign and it changes the rest of the 12 houses for every planet in the chart. And that sort of indirectly makes it easier to narrow down the rising sign because the differences are much more stark in that case, and that became sort of the foundation of my approach to doing rectification over the years with clients. And then I think you guys have sort of adopted that approach as well. And when I started writing my book a few years ago, I stopped seeing clients and started referring all of my rectification consultations to you guys. So I know you guys have been doing a ton of rectifications over the past few years and have gotten even more proficient at it and gotten really good at it using that similar approach for the most part.
PW: I think one of the main benefits of that’s exactly as you described. But I think like the first thing that I would do if you were listening to this and you kind of wonder like, “Okay, what is the first step to that?” So, in whatever time period you’re looking at, whatever time range the person’s birth time may be in, whether that’s the full 24 hours or the like six-hour range you might be working with, you just note down where every ascendant ruler falls like what house and sign each ascendant will represent. So you’d know for example, “Okay, if there are an Aries rising, Mars is in Libra. If Taurus is rising, Venus is in Aquarius.” Just write down where every ascendant ruler would end up if they were that ascendant. Because that gives you then at most 12 options for how that person expresses himself potentially. The ruler of the ascendant is a planet which really I don’t wanna say–Basically, it’s the one planet [unintelligible]
CB: Yeah, and we’re gonna get there.
PW: Okay.
CB: That might be jumping a little too far ahead.
PW: Okay. All right. Pardon me.
CB: So let’s start just with the the rising sign and talking about the difference between the rising sign and the rising degree because the first basic principle, and this is something that really trips people up cuz they make it more complicated than it needs to be right from the start, is that it’s easier to figure out the rising sign than the rising degree. I think that’s like an easily like not even arguable thing that most astrologers would probably agree on, right?
LS: Definitely.
PW: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Arguably that and especially from our perspective using the whole sign houses. But I would think even if you’re using quadrant houses, this would still largely be the case. Figuring out the rising sign should probably be your first starting point since there’s only 12 sign or there’s only 12 signs the zodiac. And there’s only 12 possible rising signs during a 24-hour period because the ascendant spends approximately let’s say like two hours, give or take, in each sign. So approximately two hours, give or take, the rising sign is gonna change using whole sign houses. There’s a huge difference from one rising sign to another and especially if the person has any sort of general vague can establish any sort of vague timeframe within a few hour timeframe of what part of the day they were born. There’s only gonna be within a few hour timeframe maybe only two or three rising signs that occurred during that time. So immediately that narrows it down to only like two or three charts that you need to look at and compare for your initial starting point for doing the rectification. And so this becomes then sort of like a process of comparing essentially two or three different charts, and that’s much more approachable. And then from there you can sort of take it from there. And once you narrow down the correct rising sign, you can then narrow down the correct degree or attempt to. But it’s setting that starting point first at the rising sign that’s really important.
LS: Mhm.
PW: Mhm.
CB: Okay. We’re still moving into the actual like technical part of this, but there’s one last sort of quasi non-technical thing which is establishing the evidence for the rectification by talking with the client. So, your primary data for doing any sort of rectification is the known characteristics and events in the client’s life so far. And some of these are gonna match natal placements, others are gonna be tied into timing techniques. So when it comes to this, you run into some issues that we’ve already touched on. One of them is that the client’s clear perception of their own life is a major variable. Other variables connected with that are, do they have a good memory? Do they have good records for when certain events happen in their life? Are they a reliable narrator for their own life or not? Can they be objective when they’re talking about their own life? Or how objective, let’s say, can they be? Since we all are sort of subjective. But maybe some people are able to step outside of their life or maybe there’s certain parts of our life that we are able to step outside of and be objective about more than others. So, much of what you do really depends on accurate reporting on the part of the client.
LS: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and it’s like another one of those astrologer nightmares. I’ve gotten clients who say, “I would like a rectification, but I have a really bad memory.” I’m like, “Oh no.”
[Patrick laughs]
CB: Right.
LS: And then my first response internally is, “Oh no.” But then I go to, “Okay. Well, then before we ever talk, just scour your records, your emails, your diaries and like try to find dates for things.” Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and some clients will be great and have like a diary where they’ve written down like every event that’s ever occurred in their life and like what they had for lunch at a pizzeria in Manhattan in like 1992 whereas there’s other clients that couldn’t tell you what they did last week or something like that.
LS: Mhm. Or will remember it wrongly and report it wrongly.
CB: Sure. So, much of it depends on accurate reporting on the client. This is where the whole investigative sort of Columbo-type aspect of doing–Is Columbo–That’s not like a relevant reference pop culture reference in like 2018. Is there like an equivalent? What’s the investigative equivalent in 2018?
LS: Well–
PW: Sherlock?
CB: Sherlock.
PW: Benedict Cumberbatch?
CB: Oh, that Sherlock. Okay, I was thinking like you’re referring to like 18th century 19th century.
[Leisa laughs]
PW: Or Luther that’s on Netflix where Idris Elba he plays like a cop, I think. I haven’t actually seen that show, but it looks good.
CB: All right. Let’s go with Sherlock and either the Robert Downey, Jr. version or the Benedict Cumberbatch version of essentially what we’re doing here. And a lot of this is gonna depend on your ability to ask good questions as a sort of investigator and to craft questions that will elicit responses that are gonna be helpful cuz you might craft some questions that actually aren’t gonna be helpful. And there’s other questions that might actually elicit like a really good response that’s gonna be useful for you in comparing let’s say the two or three rising signs that you have in the best case scenario where you have like just two or three to compare. So, listen closely. This is one of the points you made Leisa that you have to listen really closely to their answers for subtle clues, right?
LS: Yeah. So it’s the question and the listening. Both are really important. And when I first started doing rectification, I realized that pretty quickly is even if you have astrological techniques at your disposal, no one really tells you which specific questions to ask. And so you have to kind of build that up yourself. And then when they answer, sometimes they’ll give you the actual answer. And then there’ll be a little bit of a throwaway phrase or there’ll be a little bit of a something oh and this. And you might, instead of ignoring that because it wasn’t the main thing you first asked about, like follow that up with like follow-up questions like, “Oh, wait. So what about that other thing?” And you kind of have to like go from there. I was telling Patrick earlier that when I do rectification, I do kind of maybe half of it first with the kind of list of events before we even talk. And then I will maybe do the other half talking with the client so that I can ask those kind of direct and follow-up questions and get information that I wouldn’t have otherwise if we had not actually talked directly. And sometimes it’ll be like something really subtle. It wouldn’t have been something you thought to ask a question about. I can’t think of an example right now, but I know that I’ve had those where I’m like, “Oh, I would not have known that if we had not had this conversation.” Yeah.
CB: Right. Had you not made that like offhanded comment that we then pressed on, and then it turned out that there’s this whole other area that was important about understanding the reality and the concrete circumstances of your life. But that wouldn’t have been evident otherwise.
LS: Exactly, and that can be something about their life in general or their personality. It can be like an event that they forgot to list because it wasn’t immediately coming up as important to them but then you think it’s important. Yeah, so a variety of things like that.
PW: It’s kind of funny sometimes cuz I find usually the one way I’m able to kind of start narrowing things down is when I ask about some of the worst things about their life because those tend to really stick out.
CB: Right.
LS: Okay.
PW: I wish it could be more positive, but it immediately grabs your attention like, “Okay, well, which house then is Saturn or Mars doing its thing in? Is this more of a Mars thing?” It’s more of a Saturn problem like in your life. So I find questions about things which are about the hardest things about their life. The biggest challenges they have are often very instructive about what possibilities there might be.
LS: Definitely. And if you’re going for rectification if you’re on the other end of things you have to kind of be up for that. I think to get a good job done you have to know that you can’t be close-lipped about your life because it’s essential information. We’re not just like asking gratuitously for you to spill your guts about things that are personal or hard but that it’s really actually essential information.
CB: Right. It’s like the one instance where it’s okay to tell the astrologer everything about your life before they’ve said anything about your chart. It’s like the reverse of the natal consultation although obviously that’s not always true since a natal consultation is actually more of a dialogue ideally, and that’s when it’s most effective. But it’s funny how that’s inverted with rectification.
LS: Right.
CB: Not just on the astrologer’s part but also on the client’s part.
LS: Mhm.
CB: All right. So the primary thing the astrologers, the investigator is doing at this point is you need to figure out what are some of the major events that have already occurred in the life of the individual. And specifically what makes the most useful thing perhaps I would say is what makes their life distinct from other lives in general. And we run into a really problematic point here that constantly frustrated me doing consultations which is that people normalize their experiences. And they sort of generalize them and assume that once they’ve had certain experiences in their life because they grow to accept and sort of be okay with that or just understand that that’s part of their life whether it’s a good event or whether it’s a bad event. Everybody, for some reason, has this innate tendency to just assume that it’s the same in everyone else’s life. And this causes a real issue because then they don’t recognize oftentimes or sometimes the things that are unique about their life that are not true, and that actually becomes your job as the astrologer to when they’re recounting these things to push further sometimes in order to get them to draw out and to explain some of those parts in their life in more detail. And that’s when you have to figure out what are the unique things about this person’s life because sometimes they will not be things that the person themself actually recognizes is unique.
LS: Definitely. I’ve seen that with inheritances in particular and wherever you locate on the chart as far as what’s going on with that. But those are the kind of things in life where if you get an inheritance, you might think everyone gets an inheritance. But not everyone does.
CB: Right. They have like Jupiter in the day chart in the eighth house, and I think everybody gets like a million dollars. Like Lisa Marie Presley turned 25 years old. And the day she turned 25, she moved into a second house profection year. And she has Jupiter in the second house, and it became activated. And she has the ruler of the second to the eighth house, so she has all these specific combinations for that very unique thing. And then the day she turned 25 she inherited millions of dollars from the estate of her father who was Elvis.
LS: Mhm. And that’s a really striking example obviously, but I think people often overlook it as something unique in their life when it’s not as extreme. But it’s still something that’s not true for everyone. And so I’ve seen for instance inheritance of property like, “Oh, I inherited this condo that’s fully paid off this house or whatever. And I live in that now.” Well, that’s not true for everyone. It’s true for some people. But it’s like one piece of information where you can be like, “Oh, okay.” So even though this person isn’t fully satisfied with this area of their life, they’ve still been given something that not everyone is given. And so that’s just one kind of example of things that are common enough that people can overlook but are still useful information if you can find that out from them.
PW: Sometimes I’ll ask people to think about–like thinking about how a biographer might approach their life. lf you read a lot of biographies, you’ll see how they may kind of break people’s lives into discrete chunks. This works especially well for zodiacal releasing where it’s usually about in terms of location. For example I won’t give any personal details beyond general ones, but I had a client who her zodiacal releasing periods broke down. The major periods coincided with places that she’d lived. So and she thought of her life in that way too like, “Oh, those are my Paris years. Oh, and then I moved to LA. And those were the Los Angeles years. And when those were done, then I moved to Minnesota. And that was like that period of my life.” So it was defined by the places that she was. If someone’s trying to make a movie of your life or write a book about your life, they’d probably like organize the book in that way as well. Like, “Well, this is the Paris section. And this is the Los Angeles section. And this is the Minnesota section.” So, sometimes it’s difficult for everyone to do that like objectively. And again, you got to listen to what they’re telling you but also read through the lines and see what they’re not intending to tell you with what they say.
LS: Definitely.
CB: Right. That can be–
PW: [unintelligible] all those sleuthing skills.
CB: That can be a useful thing maybe then to tell for clients to do or prospective people that are trying to rectify their chart is to try to write an outline or a biography for yourself. You don’t need to write pages that are over the top in terms of–You’re not going for literary quality here. You’re going for like, “In this date or in this week or in this month I moved to a different country.” or something like that. Or, “In this month I started going to a different school.” Or I was–
PW: What’s the broad strokes of your life? What’s the overall shape of how things have happened? I think that those can be very instructive especially with like the major periods on zodiacal releasing from Fortune or Spirit. Those can be very interesting.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like I don’t wanna get too technical here since we’re still coming up from the beginning in the very basics. So it’s like that would be really useful to have that. There is a probably line there. There’s an issue in there between having not enough detail versus having too much detail. Like there can be instances where somebody is giving away too much detail or they’re going way over the top about things that might not necessarily be important or maybe they’re just writing too much. Like you as the astrologer can’t read like a 500-page book about this person’s life. You need kind of the CliffsNotes version of the highlight reel basically. What are the most important events in like a bullet point format probably ideally?
PW: What would make it onto the Wikipedia article about you?
LS: Mhm.
CB: Right.
LS: Right.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And not one of those like really long obnoxious articles about somebody that’s really famous, but let’s say somebody–
PW: I love it when on Wikipedia it says like, “This article is too long.” Like where it says like, “This article has too much information.”
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So, let’s see. So, document, clients, good idea to document your life, don’t go over the top. There was some other point in there that I meant to mention, but I think I just lost it. So we’ll move on. So, one of the things we’re getting to hear from a technical standpoint is that it becomes really useful from a basic technical standpoint when you’re just looking at the chart still and you’re trying to establish the rising sign and the other houses and the house placements for each of the planets to really start focusing on the 12 houses, the topics that are associated with them especially in terms of different concrete areas of your life and to try to really narrow it down to a set of concrete areas that each house relates to so that you would know the difference between a planet being in one house versus another. And here especially I think it becomes really useful to focus on the benefics and malefics. And I think that’s what you were starting to say, Patrick, because that’s how you identify like the areas of life where things will tend to go more smoothly or more–the person might tend to be more fortunate or other areas where that person might tend to encounter more challenges or setbacks or sometimes hardships.
LS: Mhm.
CB: So–
LS: Yeah. And especially if you have maybe half of the day if you know at all whether they were born during the daytime when the Sun was out versus at night, you can particularly use that. Or even if you don’t know that, you can use those two things in conjunction. Use the concept of sect whether you’re born during the day or night with the benefic and malefic distinction because that gives you what in theory at least should be the best and worst areas of someone’s life or the area that is the most challenging for them versus the area that is most fortunate. And, of course, I would like follow up very quickly with saying like there’s always or often times anyway there are mitigations that alter that and make that less completely clear. But it’s a really good place to start.
PW: And sometimes someone can be born close to sunrise or sunset. So they just become ambiguous.
LS: We don’t rectify them. [laughs]
PW: Again, #astrologernightmares. That’s your new T-shirt. I’ll take 50% of your profits for that.
[Leisa laughs]
CB: Okay.
PW: So, yeah, the sect is definitely a good way to–
CB: I’m gonna write down a hashtag by the way. Let’s actually start that astrologer thing that’s gonna be even more popular than Jo Gleason’s hashtag. What was it? It was–
PW: Actual–
LS: It’s like actual astrologer life or something like that.
PW: –culture.
CB: Okay. #astrologernightmares.
LS: Yeah, that’s a good one.
[Leisa and Patrick laughs]
PW: Let’s see. What else?
CB: So how’s this–
LS: Yeah, that’s a huge one. Yeah. But–
PW: Yeah.
CB: Houses and sects especially. That was my first I think one of my–
PW: It’s unfortunate though when someone is born at night and you’re working with a 24-hour period cuz you don’t know if it’s the night before the morning like or the night after the sunset.
LS: Yeah, like before sunrise cuz after some time–
PW: There’s like two chunks of nights you have to deal with because of the way we measure when a day begins. It begins at midnight as opposed to at sunrise. So–
CB: Right.
LS: Right.
CB: But let’s just assume for our sake for the sake of our sanity that we’re dealing with an example where we know the person was born either during the day or at night. One of the shortcuts that you can use right from the start, and this is a shortcut that I talk about constantly in electional astrology and in natal astrology but is also very useful here, is just that for people that were born during the day generally speaking and other factors aside, the planet Jupiter tends to be the most positive planet. And the planet Mars tends to be the most negative or challenging planet, let’s say. And for people that were born at night, the most positive planet tends to be Venus. And the most challenging planet tends to be Saturn. And so right away that gives you two planets that you really wanna focus the majority of your energy on in seeing what houses they would be placed in depending on the different rising signs and then start checking to see if they actually in their lived experience have had either very positive events or very negative events happen in those areas of their life that match those house placements. So why don’t we just give some basic house significations? I’ve sort of written down a list here, but maybe you guys can help me with this. So first house, basic signification’s the character, the physical body, and the appearance.
LS: Mhm.
CB: Yeah?
LS: Yeah.
PW: Yeah. One’s essential vitality, their modus operandi MO.
CB: So, differences there let’s say Mars there in a day chart I delineated earlier as like somebody maybe that had a potential injury at some point to the body to the extent that the first house deals with the body or perhaps if it’s more being associated with a character, maybe there’s somebody that’s more brash or more assertive or aggressive or what have you.
PW: Yeah, as far as physical appearance that would be like cuts, burns, scars, all those Mars-type significations. Also tattoos. Tattoos are probably much more common now. But if they kind of have a more like intimidating or kind of aggressive or fiery appearance, that’s sort of indicated by Mars in the first house.
CB: Right.
LS: Or like even sometimes like reddish, like if you can see them. If they look a little bit more reddish or they have red hair, that’s not foolproof. But it’s one thing.
PW: Right. Yeah, some of that.
LS: The other thing is if someone was really brash and had Mars in the first and that’s how it was being expressed, it’s another sort of reiteration of like, “You wouldn’t know that unless you talked to them directly.” versus “Just got a list of dates.” So, some of that is really important in terms of having that interaction and then kind of soberly perceiving how they’re coming off initially to you.
PW: Right.
CB: Yeah. Like what your perception of the person is and what some of your initial, yeah, perception of the person is. And that–
PW: Another thing–Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go on.
CB: Go ahead.
PW: Oh, I was just gonna say that one tricky thing with any planets conjunct the ascendant or on an angle is that it will be difficult to use transits to tell if it’s hitting an angle versus just making an aspect to that planet. And the reason I bring that up is because for example if you have Mars in the ascendant, not only is it gonna be giving you a general signification for like Marsy type things to do with your parents and things like that but it’s also gonna be importing the significations of the houses that it rules. So there is what can be brought to the forefront. So Mars also brings whatever houses have Aries and Scorpio in them relative to whatever rising sign you’re considering.
CB: Right. So–
LS: Right. Well, and that’s gonna be an issue with all of the houses also in terms of evaluating the placements but also the rulers which gets into how this gets complicated.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So this gets really complicated really quickly, but let’s–
PW: Real quick.
[Leisa laughs]
CB: Let’s establish some just basic significations that people can use as a baseline. Cuz one of the issues is especially in the modern text like there’s just people give so many significations for the houses that you really lose track of what some of the fundamentals are or what some of the most basic significations are that you should expect to see–
PW: Not every house can be about transformation, Debra. I didn’t mean that, but the Deborah [unintelligible 00:51:23.18] I was using Debra as like a generic name.
CB: Sure.
PW: Chelsea [laughs]
CB: Steven
PW: Steve
LS: Yeah.
CB: So–
LS: So second house?
CB: First house. Second house–
PW: First, yeah.
CB: –finances, possessions.
LS: Mhm. Yep.
CB: Sometimes often very literally. Third house–Oh, go ahead. Did you have one?
PW: Oh yeah. I was gonna say, yeah, notions of material value.
CB: That starts getting into the more–
PW: Yeah.
CB: That is relevant.
LS: More subjective. Yeah.
CB: But it starts getting into the more subjective thing like, “I want to look. If I see Saturn in the second house, I start asking the person about like, ‘Have you had any major financial setbacks? How do you feel about money? Is money a concern for you?'” And sometimes psychological stuff will come out. I had a client, and I used him as an example in my book where I think he had like Capricorn rising. And the ruler was Saturn in the second house in the night chart. And he grew up in the Great Depression, and he did always have like concerns or fears surrounding money. And that was a psychological manifestation even though later in life he did fine financially. And his wife was like, “He doesn’t have problems with money, but he’s a real penny-pincher. And he’s very careful about how he spends his money because of being scarred when he was earlier about how he grew up in a very poor family.” So you get both like the psychological and the literal things.
PW: Right. Is it Prince Andrew? I think he has Sagittarius rising with Jupiter and Capricorn in the second, so Jupiter ruling the first house and the second house. And he likes to make furniture. And then he became like an auctioneer. So like this Jupiterian figure, this old stuff like selling it and getting it sold. So, yeah, sometimes that’s just really just concrete ways.
LS: Mhm.
CB: Sure. Or the opposite end where again the Lisa Marie Presley example where she had Jupiter in a day chart in the second house inherited like millions of dollars from her father. So, second house third house, literal manifestation, siblings, travel, education. Any others you guys would add?
LS: Sometimes writing. People have written books.
CB: That’s it?
LS: Yeah.
CB: That’s fine. We can move on cuz I didn’t wanna linger on this for long.
LS: Yeah, just communicative stuff.
PW: Yeah–
LS: If they do communicative stuff, yeah.
CB: Sure.
PW: Oftentimes, people with like the Saturn rule in the third I find they really like bike riding or like racing or–I think you have that example about–
CB: Elliott Smith.
PW: Oh, there’s the Elliot Smith one. Yeah, where he drives in the car. Also the Evel Knievel during the short trips. That’s what he’s always known for. Yeah, across the canyon.
CB: He’s like the ruler of the third and then the eighth ruler of the third and the 10th and the eighth. I think it was what it was.
PW: Oh, I thought it was Aquarius rising with Saturn in Aries in the third.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Oh no. So, you’re right actually. I need to look that up, I’m actually spacing it out. I was remember another one. One of my favorite examples is George Lucas who had Mars in the third. And he was born around sunrise, but I think in what may have been a day chart. And he was in a Mars profection year. Mars is activated as a Time Lord, and it actually can join the ruler of his ascendant. But that Mars third house placement was famously involved in like a major car accident where he almost died. And he was like this close to death, but then he survived and decided that he didn’t wanna race cars anymore and went on to be a filmmaker.
LS: Mhm.
PW: I think the thing with third house that at least like in terms if you are trying to lock onto something that you can really say, “Okay, this is like really third house issues.” The sibling thing isn’t always like literally your real sibling. So for example, Walt Disney, he was born with Virgo rising with Mercury in Scorpio in the third. And his brother Roy Disney was like he had this lifelong business partnership with his brother who helped manage the financial aspect of his business, Disney empire. But then you also have another person with the exact same configuration John Cleese, Virgo rising Mercury in Scorpio in the third who his life was revolving around being in like comedy troops and writing with his friends. That’s how he like kind of distinguished himself was through these friendships he had where they did these funny skits and things. So, his brothers in a sense. Same thing with Ringo Starr and George Harrison. That was the first and the third, and they are most sort of associated with like the brothers they had in a sense, the siblings, the band, the gang as it were.
LS: Mhm.
CB: Brotherhood or sisterhood?
PW: Brotherhood or sisterhood, yeah. Yeah.
LS: Mhm. Mhm.
CB: Yeah. All right.
LS: Do people who do driving things like taxi drivers, bus drivers sometimes have third house things?
CB: Sure.
PW: Mhm.
CB: And the George Lucas example is problematic cuz that was a one time event in his life. It was a major event that stands out in his timeline, but it was something that occurred to him when he was 18 and completely changed the course of his life. It’s something I come back to over and over again on the podcast cuz it’s incredibly frustrating from a research standpoint is that there’s some indications in the birth chart that can just be one time things and there’s other indications that can be more persistent or more continuous or can repeat more frequently. And you need to be careful that you’re not always looking for something that’s a constant thing. This is something that happened in George Lucas’s life what like 50 years ago or something like that. So if he’s a client and you’re trying to rectify his chart and he’s only talking about what happened last week, you might have an issue there cuz you really need to focus and identify sometimes one time events that were significant and that were unique. Cuz not everybody’s had like a major that’s an example of unique event where not everybody’s had a major car accident that was like life threatening where they almost died. And so that sort of justifies the Mars in the third house potentially in a day chart placement. All right. So third house fourth house, parents, your home, your living situation.
LS: Mhm.
CB: Good? Okay?
PW: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Fifth house, children is a really primary really tangible one. Sometimes oftentimes that means your children, but sometimes it can be like the topic of children in general comes up. I know, Leisa, you have a famous example that you first pointed out to me of Judy Blume, right?
LS: Mhm. Yeah, children’s author. I see teachers sometimes who deal with a lot of children or some people who have professions where they deal with children or something around children.
CB: Right. Right.
PW: J. K. Rowling, she told us that she’s an Aquarius rising. We don’t have an exact story, but she did say she was an Aquarius rising.
CB: Oh, she did? We know her rising sign now?
PW: Yeah, on Twitter she said, “Aquarius rising.”
CB: I didn’t know about that.
PW: What’s funny about that is I think the ruler of her mid heaven is Jupiter in the 11th, and it’s in the fifth house of children.
CB: Yes. She writes children’s books?
PW: Exactly.
CB: I think that might be Judy Blume as well. She has like a stellium there. I’m trying to remember if one of them was the ruler of the 10th. Anyway, yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve also seen like children’s advocates that have like major 5th house placements connected with career and other things like that. Sometimes though, it can be other things. If the placements are more difficult, it can be like the loss of a child that was like a major event in the person’s life or something traumatic or what have you.
LS: But sometimes, I was just going to say sometimes people who have had either a number of miscarriages or abortions, sometimes there’ll be something difficult in the 5th house even if they don’t have actual children at this point.
CB: Right.
PW: I think there’s also these connotations of the 5th house with fertility and recreation, entertainment, fun allegedly areas of life, so that’s another locus of the 5th house.
LS: And performative arts, creative arts, I see a lot of actors and musicians have things related to the 5th.
PW: Yeah, things people create that fits in the 5th and so as children as well as artistic things.
CB: Right. Okay, so 5th house, 6th house, illness, illnesses, injuries, work, subordinates.
PW: They can also be your employees, anyone who is in service to you, but also the ways in which you are of service to someone else and in that subservient role to someone.
CB: Right.
LS: Or someone who deals with people who are serving in general, like my dad has placements on the 6th and he really likes to talk to waitstaff in all restaurants that he goes to [Leisa laughs] and it sounds weird, but it’s actually a notable constant in his life as well as talking lots and lots about his employees because he does have a business.
CB: Right.
PW: The Olsen twins have Mars in the 6th house and so they’ve come under fire for the fact that children in Third World countries have made their clothes, they came under a lawsuit from their interns who are working for their company saying they weren’t being treated fairly or compensated fairly. So yeah, it’s something that you see with the 6th house as well.
CB: Right. Or the boss or the small business owner who’s had a bad employee that ruined their life for some reason. All right. Or conversely, you have the other end of the spectrum where you have people like Steve Jobs who has some heavy 6th house placements and both gained a lot or became a big figure partially through the work that some of his subordinates did, but also was notoriously not very nice to his subordinates. But it could be sometimes like positive things that come from people that work from you. I guess that was the point of that I was trying to give like a positive example.
LS: Right. I mean, just generally, when there’s an emphasis there or some relationship that’s important from the 6th house, it’s like either work or health is a more prominent issue in that person’s life than average.
CB: Right. All right, 7th house relationships, partners.
LS: And can be business partners or personal partners, although certainly comes up more often in most people’s lives to the personal partners, but it can also be business partners or important one on one things like your lawyer or things where you have like one person who works directly with you.
PW: Someone you have to work with, you know? And usually that always that will usually come up with someone that you’re in a relationship with like a romantic relationship, but it also comes out in some of those other engagements where you’re, I almost wonder if it’s like the house of frenemies, the people who are not your rival, but also like someone you just can’t seem to get rid of your opposite, your polarity.
LS: I’ve seen it also with people who do a lot of either client work or customer service work where they talk to many people over and over and they have a lot of direct one on one interactions. So sometimes, yeah, I’ve seen that in their work.
PW: Most recent example of… [crosstalk 00:04:42:19] Yeah, rule if the 10th and the 7th, yeah, counselors, marriage counselors especially. I was just going to mention a recent example I’ve been looking at is John Lennon who was born with Mars in Libra ruling his Aries Ascendant in the 7th. So, he has the ruler of the Ascendant Mars in his 7th house of Libra. And of course, the interpretation of that aspect would be potential troubles on account of or because of one’s partner and Yoko has [Patrick laughs] definitely, she’s been blamed for the breakup of the Beatles and the a lot of the other band members that they didn’t like her and his whole peace activism was with his partner. And one of the other unfortunate potential outcomes of that position is potential like violence towards one’s spouse with Mars in there. And unfortunately, that is true of John Lennon who was abusive towards both of his wives. So it is, I mean- [Patrick laughs]
CB: Right. That’s the tricky thing that comes up sometimes when talking to a client is realizing when sometimes that comes up when the malefic itself is the ruler of the Ascendant because then it’s like the client sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes can take on that agency of the malefic and that is an issue because sometimes you’ll realize when they’re talking or maybe you won’t realize at all that they’re sometimes the one that’s causing the problem in that area of their life or is manifesting the malefic energy, and that can be difficult to tease out because the subjectivity issue comes in where they might not realize that they’re the one that may be causing problems in that area of their life for some reason.
PW: In any case, the 7th house is definitely related to that part of one’s life.
CB: Right. Yeah. I didn’t mean to get stuck on this section, but we should probably move on because we still have a bit more to cover. So, 8th house, literal manifestations, death, other people’s money, taxes, stuff like that. 9th house, religion, travel, foreign stuff including foreign people and foreign countries, education, astrology also as a side note. 10th house, career, reputation mainly. 11th house friends, groups, alliances. 12th house, enemies, loss. Any other 12th house stuff you guys want to add?
LS: Sometimes people who have chronic illness, it goes there. Monastics, not that that comes up very often in rectification, but so other sometimes people have like retreat experience or things where they go away for some reason.
CB: Yeah, isolation. Okay, we don’t have to expand on that. So, [Chris laughs] it’s funny we spent like-
PW: I’m trying to think of some examples, but again we got to move on.
CB: Three hours later in our short like [Patrick and Leisa laugh] three into the houses. Okay. So, as you can tell at this point, knowledge of natal astrology is really the foundation of rectification. So, your ability to rectify a chart rests on your understanding of natal astrology and you have to know what you would expect from one house placement versus another. So, it’s like what manifestations archetypally would you expect to see of Mars in the 1st house versus Mars in the 2nd house? Because if you don’t know what to expect or what some of the possible manifestations of those two placements are, then you’re not going to be able to choose between them, so that’s part of it. In addition to that, as like a subset of that, the ability to be flexible and to see how different placements are manifesting for the individual where you might already have some preconceived notion about how certain placements might manifest but being open enough and flexible enough to realize that this person’s describing something and they’re actually describing a manifestation of that placement that you’ve never seen before. And that’s something that you get used to eventually as a consulting astrologer because one of the biggest secrets in astrology is that every astrologer learns something new every client they see. I’m not sure if that’s actually a big secret actually in all reality, but it is actually a truism even of the oldest or the wisest astrologers because every natal chart in every person’s life represents a unique manifestation of the potential placement or a unique combination of planetary placements. Okay.
And then finally, it’s not just about house placements. So that’s definitely the starting point and that’s the easiest thing to focus on first. Also, you need to pay attention to the rulers of the houses and what houses each planet is ruling in the chart because they’re going to import topics over from one house into another so you have to be careful then about overlapping indications, and that’s when things start getting really tricky because you realize that there can be from different perspectives like different charts could indicates similar things when things start to overlap.
LS: Right. You can have like with one rising sign, the ruler of the 11th and the 12th and then the next rising sign is the ruler of the 12th and the 11th. And there’s a lot of things like that where it won’t necessarily distinguish very clearly at all that particular area of their life at least, others may not overlap at the same time but that’s pretty common that things like that happen.
CB: Yeah, which is in turn one of the most frustrating things about rectification is those overlapping things. And that, again, brings us full circle back to the point about it being speculative is that ultimately, the astrologer ends up making a judgment call that it’s one over another and sometimes that judgment call, it’s a judgment call. I mean, it’s not an immutable law that they have found the exact chart, but instead they’re trying to add up all of the things and make it a call about where it all lands.
PW: So, not ready for Astrodatabank.
CB: Right, not Astrodatabank, not AA data, probably lower somewhere lower whatever is below AA data.
LS: Right. Yeah. And in addition to the benefic malefic that we were talking about using the sect and house placements of those, the ruler of the Ascendant is super important as well, like one of the first things I don’t know if you wanted to, I wanted to talk about that more. I don’t know if you’re over yet.
CB: Yeah, just one more thing before we get there getting started doing rectification, one of the notes I think that you wrote down, Leisa, that was really important because it’s crucial to how all three of us practice, it’s one of the things we take for granted and the actual practical details of doing rectifications as well as electional work and a lot of other things is having the ability to animate the chart really speeds up the process of doing rectification. And then you don’t have to do that, you can just cast charts on astro.com for each of the two or three rising signs or 12 rising signs or 100 different charts for each degree, that’s possible. You could do theoretically, but it’s so much quicker to have Solar Fire or some similar program where you can use the animate chart feature and move it forward in different increments of time like move it forward by minutes, or move it forward by hours, or move back and forth between two rising signs or three rising signs really quickly and that’s super, super helpful. It’s like a basic starting point, practically speaking.
LS: Definitely, I can’t really imagine at this point doing rectification without having that tool, at least, not anywhere near as quickly. You could in theory print out on paper a chart for 12 different rising signs and do that. But yeah, definitely, if you have an animate feature, you’re going to use it for this.
PW: Oh, yeah.
CB: Yeah, super useful. They actually gave me a promo code. You can get a 15% discount on Solar Fire that’s special to The Astrology Podcast by using the promo code AP15 basically when you buy Solar Fire at their website which is alabe.com. So yeah, this is super useful doing the animate feature in order to figure out the timeframe when you’re trying to narrow down the rising sign and being able to switch back and forth and also watch the Ascendant degrees move back and forth or the midheaven degrees and the other angles move back and forth and a number of other things. So here, we finally get to birth chart placements to pay attention to and some of the core things that when you start looking at the charts, what you really want to look out for in terms of what the changes are that you’re comparing in terms of your different perspective birth times. So, the basic question you have to ask yourself is what changes during the course of the timeframe that you have to work with? If you know for example, that let’s say the person was born between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. or something like that let’s say a three-hour timeframe, what are the things that change? So, the rising sign, what are the different rising signs you have to work with? What is the quality of the rising sign? What are the planets in that sign as we’ve talked about already?
The next one you want to pay attention to is the planet ruling the Ascendant? So, what’s the especially for us we’re using the traditional rulership scheme, what’s the planet that rules the rising sign? What is its condition in the chart? And what sign and house is that planet placed in in the chart as a huge, huge factor in terms of especially indicating a major topic or a major area of the person’s life that will become part of the focus or that will stand out in some way in their life? So that’s a big one that you guys both have used as well that I’ve cut both of you off at different points about wanting to talk about earlier in the show.
LS: Right. Because it’s so primary, that’s what you naturally first start thinking about. And that’s actually how I started doing rectification. It was like accidental, I knew all of the same tools and techniques that I use now for that, but I hadn’t actually been trying to formally do it or put it out there and I was working on a blog article and the person had this topic of religion being super important in her life and I didn’t see it. And she said, “Oh, my mom told me this time.” And I just did not see it. And I was like, “Are you sure that this is the right time?” And then she ended up… Well, I started fiddling with the chart when she was like, “I’ll go try to talk to my dad. I think he might have my birth certificate.” And so, I was fiddling with the rising signs in the meantime and looking at in particular which planet ruled each rising sign if you moved at either a few hours earlier or a few hours later, and what house that would be placed in. And I realized that if she was born just a few hours earlier that the Ascendant would be ruled by Jupiter which is naturally associated with religion and also placed in the 9th house. It was like a double whammy and I was like, “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t normally second guess people’s times.” And then she calls me back later and she’s like, “Got a hold of my dad and he has my birth certificate and it was actually three hours earlier.” [Leisa laughs] And so I was very excited about that. [Leisa laughs] Yeah, thank you. And that’s what actually got me started with rectifying even though it was accidental because I realized, “Oh, I actually have these tools already that do show these concrete emphases, you just use them backwards.”
CB: Right. Once you get good enough with the basic fundamentals of natal astrology, you can use that to reverse engineer a chart.
LS: Right. And so, the basic point we’re talking about is that wherever the Ascendant ruler is placed by house and also by the general significations of what the quality of that planet is, that should have something lastingly to say about that person’s life if it should be an area that’s either more important to them, or it’s just something that stands out in their life compared to most people or things like that, it should be an area of emphasis in one way or another
CB: Right, it’s distinctive.
PW: It gives you at least a few archetypes to choose between. If you’re choosing between Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn rising, then you get to decide, okay, are they a Mars in Gemini? Are they a Scorpio rising Mars in Gemini type person, or are they a Sagittarius rising with Jupiter in Pisces type person, or are they a Capricorn rising Saturn in Aries type person? That gives you three different houses, three different planetary natures, three different characters essentially, three different archetypes, the 144 different combinations of Ascendant rulers to figure out which one are they more like, and in that particular example, I mean, that’s going to be clear at a time. I mean, because Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are very distinct from each other.
CB: Right. And it gets a little tricky in terms of doing a character analysis with that. But sometimes, if you’re even just looking at the topics associated with the house, sometimes it’s very literal manifestations where if it’s just a choice between two rising signs and you’ve got one where the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 8th house and you’ve got one where the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 7th house, and let’s say the clients… Yeah, I had one client once actually, it was like this where they were a mortician and they worked with the dead and that was actually the grew up and that was their lifelong aspiration was being a mortician and they ended up doing it and it became a lifelong career and I lean towards ruler of the Ascendant in the 8th house and the topic of death actually being, for some reason, distinctive in their life. Or Patrick earlier, you were using the example of John Lennon who has the ruler of the Ascendant in the 7th house. And so, if you didn’t know this person, you could just say, well, there may be something distinctive about the topic of relationships in this person’s life. And that would be a true statement, I think, or that would be a fair statement about his life, right? Sure. So that comes up with just about all the houses. So, it’s a nice, very, very useful starting point and it’s one of the first things all three of us look to when we’re comparing different rising signs is what house is the ruler of the Ascendant placed in.
LS: And that’s one of those areas where you do have to sometimes ask probing questions because sometimes on the one hand, it’ll be really obvious that that’s an area of emphasis and it will be obvious to them as well as you if it’s something they do for work, like you said, the mortician or things like that or like a really important hobby to them. But sometimes, particularly if it’s a more difficult placement, it will be an area of importance, but it won’t necessarily be something that they’re like consciously thinking about as like important to them because they’re thinking things that are good in my life or things that are important in that way. So, sometimes you have to tease out like oh, but this is still an important area, it’s just the hard one, you know? So, I think in terms of which planet is representing that as well.
CB: Right. That they’ll take you to mean something that you don’t like that it’s supposed to be there very positive area, very negative area, but it’s the opposite or yeah, different things like that.
PW: It can be really subtle. I mean, and sometimes it can hit you in the face and then other times, it can be very subtle. I remember one client I had, it was difficult to decide which planet will be the Descendant. I mean, it was only between two or three options. But I mean, eventually, I was able to tease out that one major thing they were doing was gambling and with Virgo rising, they had Mercury in the second and it’s something they didn’t necessarily think was that important, but they were saying, “Well, I’m doing this online gambling to like, this is what I want to eventually be able to get away from my other job to do.” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I mean, I think, Mercury in Libra the second like that.” I mean, it wasn’t something that I immediately thought of as far as placement, but it seemed to fit what they were describing and it took a while to get to that.
CB: Right. Yeah. And that’s really crucial because they may not recognize it as being as important as it is or it doesn’t necessarily need to be important, but it just needs to be distinctive. Not everybody does online gambling and even if it’s not like a super important thing to that person, it’s a theme that’s coming up in their life that’s distinctive and that’s probably what’s the most important.
PW: Well, because then it came out how before they go into gambling, they’re really good with numbers and this interest in numbers and being good with math and things that have led them to playing games. That’s what made me think, “Okay, I’m a little more confident now. This is definitely Mercury now. We’re definitely talking about a Mercury type person and it’s being applied in this 2nd house area.”
LS: Right. That’s like we were talking about before. I’m sorry, are you done? It was like what we were talking about before. It’s also especially with the Ascendant ruler since it’s so primary, being open to different unique possible manifestations of those placements where that’s true in general with all the house placements, but I would say really important with the Ascendant ruler, or else you might discount something that’s actually showing up there because you’re not thinking about it in that way.
PW: Yeah. Actually, it’s funny you mentioned Steve Jobs earlier, and I actually asked you about Steve Jobs’ child because I didn’t quite understand how he was Mercury in Aquarius in the 6th or whatever. I would have expected as the CEO of a company that maybe he had like a big 10th house emphasis or something. But then you explained to me oh, well, I read his biographies and he has a small 6th house emphasis with his Mercury ruling the Ascendant in the 6th and it just made more sense [Patrick laughs] once you explained to me. So yeah, you have to think laterally and keep an open mind too.
CB: Sure. Yeah, definitely. And I actually just to do a plug for my book, have an entire chapter on the ruler of the Ascendant in each of the 12 houses. So, this is a topic I deal with in my book because it’s like a core component of Hellenistic Astrology which is just basic fundamental Western early natal astrology really placed a lot of emphasis on the ruler of the Ascendant, I know that and I also have like a 10-hour lecture on it, I think, in my course on Hellenistic Astrology. So, if you want to learn more about that, do that. Patrick, I think you’re working on a series or something connected with this sooner?
PW: Yeah, I wanted to do a series on well, because I first did 10 different types of Aries and 10 different types of Taurus but Taurus signs, it was video series geared towards teaching people who aren’t familiar with more advanced astrology that hey, there’s something more beyond your Sun sign, but then I got all these requests to talk about the Ascendant. So, what I’ve done is I have compiled basically a representative from each of the 144 Ascendants and I’ve started a couple of the interviews, I have a lot to get through. [Patrick laughs] It’s going to take a lot longer than I thought it was going to take. But basically, the idea is 144 I want to talk about all 144 Ascendant rulers with not just examples from popular culture, but also talking to people who have them and getting-
CB: And this was going to be a light weekend project or something?
PW: Yeah, originally. I mean, it expanded and expanded, expanded because I realized that this is something that has to be figured out because I mean, everyone has an Ascendant ruler and there has to be something archetypically similar between everyone who has Mercury and Libra and the second ruling the Virgo first house, so there has to be something that connects them. And even though there are all these different variations, it has to be something that is through line. So, I’m hoping that through those interviews and through the examples I’ve found so far that I’ll be able to have resource available for everyone to see more specifically like what the specific outcomes are like for each of the 144 Ascendant rulers, so it’s a massive project. [Patrick laughs]
CB: Is it going to be videos on your YouTube channel or on your website?
PW: Yeah, those will be available. Yeah, those will become available on my YouTube channel Big Fat Astro vlog.
CB: Got it, okay. Cool. So, moving on, let’s like start cranking through some of the rest of this technical stuff. So, planets ruling the Ascendant, the planet ruling the Ascendant, the Moon changing signs sometimes happens, so pay attention if during your timeframe, there’s any sign changes with the Moon. With whole sign houses, this is going to change the house placement, it’s also going to change you want to look at what the house the Moon is ruling because it’s going to import significations from whatever house it rules into the house it’s placed in. So that’ll give you two options if it does change, although that’s rare. Sometimes even just looking at the quality of the sign placement can make a big difference like we talked about the Obama example previously and that early debate that astrologers had before his birth certificate came out about whether he seemed just from a character standpoint more like a Taurus Moon or more like a Gemini Moon. And yeah, it turned out Gemini Moon. So, connected with that applying and separating aspects of the Moon, sometimes that can change in different parts of the day. So that’s something you can pay attention to, is the Moon applying to difficult planets or is it applying to easy or positive planets that’s going to change things both in terms of the general significations of the Moon and some of the character things, but also in terms of the house that it rules and the topics associated with that house. The Sun and other planets can sometimes change signs, but this is less common. So, it can happen with the Sun or Mercury can sometimes be moving pretty quickly and can change signs over the course of the day. Yeah, I do have one ancient horoscope from the fourth century where they were writing down the sign placements and then they were like, Jupiter was in Leo during one part of the day and it was in Virgo the other part of the day. So, I could imagine them rolling their eyes about having to rectify [crosstalk 00:27:42:01] Right, [Patrick laughs] chart rectification [Patrick laughs] nightmares written in hashtag on papyrus. [Leisa laughs] Yeah.
So, that stuff we already talked about using the benefics and the malefics along with sect and how that’s really crucial as a useful central technique in addition to the ruler of the Ascendant and just paying attention to the house placement especially if the most positive and negative planet, you can also run into an issue there that I talk about a lot in my book and in my course where you can have the more constructive malefic which is Saturn in a day chart or Mars in a night chart where it’s like, especially early in a person’s life, it’s like yeah, they run into some challenges or some things come up, but it’s usually not the worst case scenario and it ends up being what I call surmountable difficulties where it’s the cliche, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger type thing. Whereas the other malefic, the most difficult malefic in the chart tends to be the more difficult. This is like major problems that are sometimes not surmountable in a certain area of the life and being able to tell the difference between those two is really crucial and important especially when talking to the client because they themselves may not be able to make that fine distinction, also true of the benefics. So, Jupiter is still positive in a night chart, but it’s not quite as positive as it could be and Venus is still positive in a day chart, but not quite as positive as she otherwise could be. So being able to tell the difference there is also crucial.
Okay, so that’s some of the basic stuff just in terms of birth chart placements to pay attention to when rectifying a chart. There’s a bunch of others we could get into, but those are probably some of the core ones that you really want to pay attention to. After that, you can also get into there’s a whole other area of rectification which has to do with timing techniques. And this is like the second half of rectification where in my approach and I think in all of our approaches, once you narrow down the possibilities that’s when you can start checking some of the timing techniques as the next line of defense or of investigation in terms of figuring this out. So, people tend to use the same timing techniques for rectification that they generally use just in general. I think this is a point that you made, right, Leisa?
LS: Yeah, because I was looking around at books and things and it’s like some people use secondary progressions and solar arc directions and things that I normally would not use for rectification, but that’s also because I don’t use them very often for natal work. And so, yeah, it’s like you just see… And then there was another that did medieval techniques. So basically, whatever your whole toolboxes of the techniques that you use to apply to charts in general, you will generally use for rectification as well.
CB: Yeah, so if everybody basically just uses whatever their favorite pet technique is in natal astrology, they also use that in rectification, there is probably a distinction we could make where there’s probably some more sign-based techniques that are going to be useful as a first line of investigation in terms of timing techniques if they’re focusing on just signs. So, like annual perfections, for example, it counts one sign or one whole sign house per year is pretty useful. You can also look at transits in this way from a sign-based perspective where in whole sign houses as soon as a planet moves into a new sign, it also moves into a new house. And this is super crucial in studying certain like not super outer planet transits, but mid outer planet transits like Jupiter and Saturn because they tend to be very distinctive when they’re going through certain houses in the chart. I think this is… Was this one of the point that you made, Patrick?
PW: Yeah, I found Jupiter and Saturn tend to be really useful to use because their nature is also distinct but also because they don’t travel too fast or too slowly to be confused with something else that’s happening there’s something instead of transitory or more long term.
CB: You get like a year out of Jupiter going through each sign and you get like three years out of Saturn going through each sign.
PW: Yeah, and we’ve been lucky insofar as, for example, with certain clients I have been able to compare like I remember there was one client I had who I couldn’t use the Ascendant as the trigger degree because there were planets in that sign that made it difficult to isolate whether it was truly a transit happening to the Ascendant or one of the planets, so I had a sign selected. So, I had to use the midheaven degree in order to find what this precise degree might be. And when they had Saturn go through certain degrees in Libra, they lost a job opportunity. And then when Jupiter was going through that same part of the zodiac in 2015 in Libra, they got a job opportunity. So, I was able to tell okay, well, all right, the MC is definitely in that part of the zodiac, but the way I was able to narrow down to the degree was by seeing when specifically, they lost the job with Saturn transiting through Libra and the degrees it was at that loss and then comparing that to when they finally got the offer. But the interesting thing was that with the Jupiter transit, they like initially were about to switch to this other job opportunity that came up, but then they decided against it. But then later on that fall, they decided to go ahead and do it again. So, I looked it up and it coincided with the retrograde station of Jupiter like Jupiter was just about to hit a degree but then it went back and then it finally crossed it in later that year when it finally went direct pass that degree. The degree that it finally reached was the same degree that Saturn was at when they had the job loss. So, I was like okay, so that is the degree like when Jupiter finally reached it, they got the job opportunity, when Saturn was at that degree, that was when they lost the job opportunity. So, Saturn Jupiter really helpful in that way because all things considered, Jupiter is more beneficial, constructive, tends to promote growth, grow more opportunities, Saturn tends to deny or constrict one’s options.
CB: Yeah, that idea of looking at Jupiter’s like cycles of expansion and just like expanding whatever house it’s moving through or looking at Saturn as constriction through whatever house it’s moving through is really helpful because then if you’re just paying attention to the whole sign houses, you can identify when is the first time that planet ingresses into that sign and then when is the date when that planet leaves the sign and then look for you end up with for Jupiter like a one year period or for Saturn and a two or three year period and look for expansion or contraction in the house that that planet moved through during that time period. And so, if I had a client where it was like Saturn was going through their fourth whole sign house and they’re just having major issues with their living situation and their home for two or three years and it perfectly coincided with starting as soon as Saturn ingress into the house and then the issues got wrapped up and were finished and stopped being a major point in their life as soon as Saturn leaves that whole sign house. And sometimes things are really simple like that, or comes up in rectification all the time like Saturn going through the first house is often very distinctive. And I’ve had a bunch of several people where if it wasn’t health problems, it was like reporting losing weight during Saturn going through their first house over that two or three-year period for different reasons and again, just that basic archetypal principle of like contraction.
LS: Yeah, and it is really useful, like you all said, that it’s a mid-length period that you can look to or was this the condition during that period of time, but also definitely look at the ingresses like the actual did something coincide with when that planet ingress into that sign/house which is again, useful if you do use whole sign houses. I had one person I talked with recently who the very day they’re a Capricorn rising and the very day that Saturn went into Capricorn they were knocked out and have had post-concussion issues since. And so, sometimes it’s not always obviously, but sometimes the ingresses can coincide with an event even if it’s not a particular degree being heightened.
CB: What was that transiting?
LS: It was Saturn moving into Capricorn with a Capricorn rising chart, even though it was an early Capricorn rising.
CB: Oh, yeah. And it was like right after that they were actually somebody just like punched them and they were knocked out then had serious neurological issues from that point forward and it’s happened right after the ingress?
LS: It was the day of the ingress, so it was the first 24 hours of it going into the sign.
PW: Yeah, ingress is super important and I feel like the only way in which we really pay attention to them in modern astrology generally is like with an Aries ingress chart, but like the ingress is super important. But they can also be complicating in rectification if the Ascendant, or the angle you’re looking for is very close to the beginning of the sign or very close to the end because then you’re not sure was it just the ingress or was it actually hitting the angle you’re looking for?
CB: Yeah, I mean, you still want to pay attention even using whole sign houses, I keep getting this question over and over again where people don’t realize that even when you’re using whole sign houses, we’re still paying attention to the degree of the angles and that includes all of the angles, not just the degree of the Ascendant and Descendant as being sensitive points of power, but also the degrees of the quadrant, MC or midheaven, and the quadrant IC as being important points of power and that an Ingress into, let’s say, the rising sign, you will oftentimes start seeing first house matters start to become more prominent in the person’s life at that time, but it may not culminate until it hits the exact degree of the Ascendant. So that’s one of the things that’s both useful about paying attention to transits from a whole sign perspective, but it also adds some additional complications where it can be tricky because you need to make that distinction between the topic is active, but it’s still building up and hasn’t peaked yet, or the topic is actually peaking right now and it’s perhaps hitting an angle or some sensitive point.
PW: Yeah, that’s a great point. It adds a whole other overlay to the narrative if you have an Ascendant lead in the sign, then it’s like the ingress will be the lead up to this big moment when the planet finally crosses it. But if it’s right at the beginning, then it’s like some big event kicks off this thing that you have to deal with for the duration of that transit through the sign, so it gives you a whole different picture of how something’s going to unfold.
CB: Or like if the person is still in the midst of it, they’re like, “No, that already happened, so it must be past.” But it’s like, well, it hasn’t peaked and hasn’t hit the angle yet. You may have to check in in a few years and see how things went. Yeah, so transits especially of Jupiter and Saturn through the signs, you can narrow that down through specific degrees. You can also pay attention to other outer planet transits sometimes like Uranus or Neptune, but those are much more slow moving and then you run into issues with the inner planets because they move so quickly. It’s often difficult to narrow that down, although sometimes you can use when some of the inner planets slow down like a Venus retrograde period or a Mars retrograde period where it spends a good deal of time in a sign, sometimes those can coincide with significant events. But that can be tricky just because it takes more time to track that stuff than just glancing at time periods indicated by Jupiter or Saturn.
LS: And I want to say about that outer planet transits, I mean, I think in general, they don’t time things enough for me, but Uranus transits because they usually hit so exactly, like usually something because it’s about something coming out of left field and really startling you. And so, I find that those are actually really quite exact timers when they hit even to the minute of things, the astrological minute, and so that’s actually a useful one if it happens to be hitting something important during time periods you’re looking at.
CB: Definitely.
PW: If they’ve lived long enough, Uranus can be really useful for figuring out when it’s crossed like an angular house. There’s usually like more obvious, but they have to have lived quite a bit. If you have a pine in the ‘50s for example, you can use that because then they will have had at least three times in their life that Uranus will have been going through a sign angular in their chart.
LS: True. But also, even if they’re not as old like hard transiting aspects to the Moon or to the Sun, those can be really distinctive, too.
CB: Yeah, that was mine when I started studying astrology transit it was Uranus hitting the Ascendant degree. Yeah.
PW: Me, it was Uranus to my Mercury. Well, I asked you this when I met you. [Patrick laughs] No, no. Yeah, Uranus to Mercury.
CB: Uranus to Mercury, okay. I interpreted that differently for a second. [Leisa and Patrick laugh] All right. So yeah, Uranus to Mercury. Well, that was funny and we met, of course, on Myspace on an internet forum where people were like constantly chatting every day about things and we all-
PW: I actually joined with my, it wasn’t Uranus or my Mercury part of me, it was Jupiter on my Mercury but trine Uranus because I didn’t live in the ‘70s. [Patrick laughs] Yeah, as Uranus trine my Mercury while Jupiter was on my Mercury, so it’s Jupiter Uranus trine when Jupiter was on my Mercury that’s when I joined Myspace. But that was also on the day of my loosing of the bond to Pisces where Uranus was. Yeah, pretty cool.
CB: Okay, good times. All right, so yeah. So that there’s annual perfections where you’re counting one sign house per year, super useful once you know how to use the technique, probably a bit much to go into here but once you learn the technique, the application of it here is obvious. There are also once you move past some of these sign-based techniques that we’re talking about that are really useful for narrowing down the rising sign, you can then get into other degree-based techniques. So, each of us has used zodiac releasing to fine tune birth times, I think, because especially when the Lot of Fortune, or the Lot of Spirit or the Lot of Eros is really close to a sign boundary, you can really tell the difference between one time or another because it results in the timing technique changing by decades either by as short as eight years or sometimes as long as 30 years, and that can be really distinctive. So that’s a whole separate issue because that’s a complicated technique. But there’s also other degree-based techniques like secondary progressions, solar arcs, and primary directions where these often involve certain things like moving the Ascendant forward at certain rates like by a degree a year or different rates like that until it hits an aspect with the planet and then in an event of some sort or some circumstance is supposed to take place. So, these can be really good for narrowing down things and fine-tuning things. For me, at least in my approach, I really hesitate to say that this should be your starting point because this is more like fine tuning things for me, but I know there’s other astrologers that do work with rectification and this is more like their go-to thing for rectification is doing secondary progressions or solar arcs or primary directions.
PW: I feel like that’s like mopping a floor with a toothbrush.
CB: Right, [Patrick laughs] if you like started with primary directions and you’re just like, “I have no idea. This person could be born anytime in this 24-hour period and I’m going to direct like every degree of that.” Sure. So probably not your starting point, but definitely if you’re trying to fine tune things also can be useful if you’re trying to fine tune things if, I don’t know, maybe the person has recorded birth time, but it’s rounded or there’s like a five or 10 or 15 or 30 minute timeframe where they could have been born that’s where some of these techniques are going to become more useful in terms of seeing if you can time things. So, for example, we had my example of Uranus exactly hitting my Ascendant by transit when I started studying astrology. So, if I didn’t know my Ascendant was at 17° of Aquarius, then that may have been something that you could use in retrospect to figure that out.
LS: And I do that pretty often with zodiac releasing even if it’s a known birth time, but the lot changes during that minute. I’ve actually seen that more than once. We’re like, “Okay, we got to figure this out if that’s going to be any substantial part of this consultation.” Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And that’s usually what sucks for all three of us and why we’ve had to get good at rectification is because with zodiac releasing because it’s such an important technique, sometimes you’ll cast the chart like an hour before the client session and you start looking at and you see the Lot of Fortune is that like 29° of Taurus or something like that. [Patrick and Leisa laugh] Right. That’s like obscure ancient Hellenistic astrologer nightmares [Leisa laughs] because then you have to run both zodiac releasing periods and figure out which one it is or you have to figure that out during the course of the consultation very early on, in which case what you’re doing is on the fly rectification.
LS: Which I don’t love, but sometimes is probably like easier than a general rectification just because you’re isolating it to a specific part of their life either their relationship life or their career trajectory. And usually, because the technique is so useful in really popping out important events that happened or what quality it was for that area of their life during that time, you can usually distinguish one from the other if you’re only looking at two as long as they have a good memory or records, at least.
PW: Definitely. Yeah, for sure. And that’s not withstanding the whole potential issue of when and [Leisa laughs] how the lots could possibly switch in certain cases- [Leisa laughs]
CB: All right. So guys, we’ve made it to the end of this. We’ve covered everything that we meant to cover. We have not obviously given a fully comprehensive detailed treatment of rectification which is as all sorts of branches of astrology are or all subsets of astrology are. Obviously, enormous people have written entire books about it. Of course, there’s actually two books I meant to mention that are rectification books that are out there. So, Carol Tebbs wrote a book titled The Complete Book of Chart Rectification in 2008. It deals with secondary progressions, solar arc directions, and other things like that. So, she does tend to focus more on like timing techniques and degree-based techniques, but that’s one book you can check out. Another book is by regulus-astrology.com and that’s A Rectification Manual: The American Presidency where it’s regulus-astrology.com and he outlines some medieval rectification techniques and then tries to apply them in order to rectify different charts of different presidents. So that’s another approach that you could see if you wanted to compare those two books in terms of different approaches to rectification.
In terms of concluding remarks, I think we’ve made the point pretty clearly here that rectification relies on your ability to delineate natal charts in the first place and it’s really just the application of your approach to natal astrology to reverse engineer the chart and establish what your expectations are based on what you know about the client’s life or based on what you know about the person’s life whose chart you’re trying to rectify. So ultimately, it’s speculative and should be treated with caution. But sometimes, for some people, it’s really necessary in order to have a full birth chart. And from that standpoint, it’s a useful tool to develop as an astrologer and all astrologers should probably develop at least some basic familiarity with it because it can be really helpful and necessary in some instances, but ultimately, very helpful to be able to help a person to find their birth time if that’s a piece of information that they really desperately want to find. And if there’s any way that you’re able to do that effectively, then you really wouldn’t be doing that person a favor. So, it’s something that’s ultimately beneficial.
LS: And also, even if you’re not trying to specialize in this area, you will inevitably run into it if you’re doing client consultations at all possibly in the session after you’ve started it, so you need to develop it no matter what if you’re going to do client consultations.
PW: It’s a culminating technique I almost feel. I almost feel like it’s like the ultimate challenge in some ways. I mean, I guess you could say prediction is the ultimate challenge, but I think it really requires all hands on deck in your brain and all of your astrological knowledge has to come to the fore to engage in rectification. So yeah, it’s a big achievement to be able to do it and have the know how to know how you would go about it.
CB: Yeah. And ultimately, it’s one of the two tests that I’ve wanted to do at some point for astrologers where like a lot of them are like scientific and statistical studies that I have read about astrologers and skeptics during the 1960s, and ‘70s, and ‘80s were frankly stupid like testing if Mars in the first house coincided with redheads statistically speaking and stuff like that. And I’ve always like thought about different things that would once there was a decent synthesis of modern and traditional astrology in place, be more interesting or effective ways to test not just astrology independently, but also astrologers. And one of them is separate and it’s something with just natal astrology and can an astrologer match charts to biographies or charts to clients in person who are sitting in front of them that they’re able to interact with? But the separate one is, could an astrologer correctly rectify a chart if they were given a choice between two different charts that had, let’s say, two different rising signs? And could an astrologer or could a group of astrologers do it consistently enough in order to beat the odds, in order to do it more than they should be able to statistically, in order to demonstrate that there’s something going on with astrology? And so, this have been one of my long-term projects in terms of the reconstruction and the synthesis of modern and ancient astrology and also this approach that we’ve outlined to it to rectification here. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m excited that we were able to finally do this episode because that’s one more step towards that in addition to the fact that I had developed that approach to rectification 10 years ago and done that work with Hellenistic astrology and figuring out what worked. And it’s been nice to see you guys following that approach as well and continuing to develop it further, and then now the three of us are passing that on to the wider community who hopefully can emulate some of our methods and improve upon them. And once we have that standardization, then, who knows? Maybe some tests like that would be possible, but this is the first step.
All right, so let’s see other things to mention. Both of you guys do rectification consultations, right? Okay. So, Leisa, what’s your website where people can find out more information?
LS: Mine’s just leisaschaim.com and you can see my name is spelled on the screen there. It’s not phonetic. Yeah.
CB: And Patrick?
PW: And mine is www.bigfatastro.com. That is the name of my website. It has my [Patrick laughs] articles and my services and all of my other stuff is on there. So yeah, bigfatastro.com.
CB: Awesome. So, people can go there to find out more information about your consultations and then each… What I love about it is it’s not just you guys like helping people to find their birth time, but you guys are learning from every example that you do in addition to applying the cumulative wisdom that you have up to this point, each new one teaches you something new in addition to that and so it’s a circular, not circular, but it’s a two-way street so it’s helping to push things forward at the same time. And obviously, a lot of the examples and things that we drew on is like anecdotes during the course of this were drawn from your experience working with clients. All right, cool. And for myself, I have a lecture on my consulting site currently that gives like a concise 90-minute treatment of how to do annual perfections. I’ve made most of it redundant by doing this podcast over the past three hours. So, I am though planning on creating sometime soon a larger course on rectification where we go through basically this outline and all of these steps in more details and give more chart examples. So, I’ll probably be launching that on theastrologyschool.com sometime in the next few months. And yeah, if you’re interested though in learning more about actual natal chart delineation which is the foundation of any approach to rectification as we’ve said, I would definitely recommend checking out my book, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune and checking out my course on the topic, which is available at theastrologyschool.com because it’s not just about studying ancient history, it’s about taking really practical techniques and learning how to apply them in modern charts.
PW: All right, #astrologydreams. [Patrick laughs]
CB: Astrology dreams, all right. I think we did it. This was a marathon episode. Thank you, guys for hanging in there with me. We’re up to like two hours and 56 minutes so we’ve got a very even [Leisa laughs] three hours. But I think this is the episode that I’ve been meaning to do forever and I’m excited, I’m happy about how it came out and thank you both for doing it with me.
LS: Yeah, it’s fun. Thanks for having us.
PW: Thanks for having us.
CB: All right. And thank you, everybody, for listening. You’re awesome. We appreciate the audience and the support especially from all the patrons who have been supporting this work over the past few years because it gives us the ability to do in-depth episodes like this which are like serious treatments of astrology where we’re trying to set the foundations for what will hopefully be thriving community of astrologers in the future or over the course of the next few decades. So, thanks a lot for your support. Make sure you’ve subscribed to the podcast and so on and so forth. So that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time.
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