Astrology glossary: the essential terms explained

Understanding the vocabulary of your birth chart

Planets and luminaries

Sun. The heart of the chart: your identity, your vital drive, what you reach toward to feel alive. It is the famous "sun sign" of horoscopes, but only one piece among many. See the Sun in astrology.

Moon. Your inner world: emotions, deep needs, emotional memory, what makes you feel safe. It describes how you feel before you think. See the moon sign.

Mercury. How you think, speak, learn and connect ideas. See Mercury in astrology.

Venus. How you love, what attracts you, your relationship to pleasure, beauty and your own sense of worth. See Venus in astrology.

Mars. Your energy for action, desire, anger, the way you go after what you want. See Mars in astrology.

Jupiter. Expansion, confidence, the meaning you give to things, the areas where life opens up for you.

Saturn. Structure, maturity, limits and lessons. Wherever Saturn sits, you progress through effort and time. See the Saturn return, a pivotal passage around age 29-30.

Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. The transpersonal planets, slow-moving, marking a generation as much as an individual: freedom and rupture (Uranus), imagination and the ideal (Neptune), deep transformation and power (Pluto).

Luminaries. The term for the Sun and Moon together, the two lights of the chart, one turned toward identity, the other toward emotion.

Signs, angles and houses

Zodiac sign. One of the twelve sectors of the zodiac (from Aries to Pisces). A sign describes a style, a way of being, not an area of life.

Ascendant (rising sign). The sign rising on the horizon at the time of your birth. It colours your temperament, your bearing and the way you meet the world, and it sets the whole house system. See how to find your rising sign.

Descendant. The point opposite the ascendant: what you seek in another, what draws you and completes you in relationship. It sits on the cusp of the seventh house.

Midheaven (MC). The top of the chart: vocation, public image, professional direction, what you are seen rising toward.

Astrological houses. The twelve sectors that divide the chart into concrete areas of life (the body, money, partnership, work, family…). A planet in a house acts in that area. See the astrological houses.

Twelfth house. The house of the unconscious, the hidden, what works behind the scenes: fertile solitude, buried memory, inner trials. One of the most karmic sectors of the chart.

Aspects: the dialogue between planets

Aspect. The angle between two planets, which shows whether they cooperate, strain or merge.

Conjunction. Two planets at the same point: their energies blend, for better and for intensity.

Trine and sextile. The so-called harmonious aspects: energy flows easily, often like a natural talent.

Square and opposition. The aspects of tension: friction and pull, but also an engine of growth once you learn to inhabit them.

Orb. The margin of tolerance allowed for an aspect to count. The tighter the orb, the stronger the aspect.

Karmic and sensitive points

Lunar nodes. The axis of the north and south nodes, which describes your direction of growth. The south node speaks of what is already known, acquired and automatic; the north node points to the path to dare, uncomfortable but full of growth.

Black Moon (Lilith). A calculated point, not a body: the apogee of the Moon's orbit. It describes your untamed part, your deep refusals, what will not bend. See Black Moon Lilith.

Chiron. The asteroid of the "healing wound": the fault line you carry that, once worked through, becomes a source of help to others. See Chiron in astrology.

Juno. The asteroid of lasting commitment: what you seek in alliance, partnership and loyalty. See Venus and Juno.

Karmic astrology. A reading that looks at what repeats from one life, story or lineage to the next, through the nodes, Saturn, the twelfth house or the Black Moon. See the karmic relationship.

Transgenerational. What is passed down and replayed from one generation to the next, readable in the echoes between the charts of a single family. See generational astrology.

Relationship readings

Synastry. The comparison of two charts to understand a relationship: what attracts, what wounds, what repairs, what replays between two people. See synastry.

Composite chart. A single chart calculated from both, describing the relationship itself as an entity with its own dynamic. See the composite chart.

Transit. The passage of a current planet over a point in your birth chart: this is what "activates" the chart in the present and describes the cycles you are moving through.

This glossary is only a doorway. To see how these notions connect in your own sky, you can calculate your free birth chart or, for a personal and grounded reading, explore my birth chart reading.