Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Rectification peregrination



I enjoyed the article featured in Astro News yesterday "Darning Your Threads" which had appeared in the Astro Cocktail website. It dealt with rectification of birth charts, and rang a few bells for me.

I had problems discovering my own birth time. The story of my birth, which occurred at home, as told by my father misled me somewhat. He said he thought I was born "around tea time" - in our world that would have been around 5pm. A birthtime of approximately 5pm gave me Leo rising. I struggled with that idea for many years. The only likeness I could see between me and Leo was a tendency to hanker after the most expensive version of anything I went out to buy. "Champagne taste, and beer money", my Mum was wont to say.

After a house move I found myself living quite close to Aunt Lil, my mother's sister who had been present at my birth. I visited her regularly and chatted about family and old times. She told me I was born around 2.30pm. Feeling unwilling to go against my Dad's estimate completely, I decided on a time of 3.30pm, splitting the difference. This gave me Cancer rising, and I felt it fit my personality better, especially the way I was in youth, and to some extent even now. My mother had no reliable memory of my birth time - not surprising because she suffered a hemorrhage and almost died. She did offer once "I think it might have been about 3 o'clock, but I'm not sure".

There must be thousands of people in the UK with no clear information on their times of birth. Unlike procedures in the USA, times of birth were not recorded, even for hospital births - maybe this is still the case. Americans are very lucky in this regard. My husband has birth time recorded on birth certificate as well as in a couple of "Baby Books", which also tell of his baby progress, first word uttered, first solid food... what a sweet little fellow...(chortle). "Baby Books" seem to be an American custom, I didn't ever see one in England.

It wasn't until I moved to live in America that I felt inclined to ask a professional astrologer to rectify my chart. After considering a list of some 10 to 12 events in my life so far, and looking at a time span of 2pm to 6pm, the astrologer came up with a birth time of 2.27pm. He said that although he was not as sure as he'd like to be about the exact degree, he was certain that my rising sign is Cancer. A slightly later time would shunt Sun from 8th to 7th house. I could argue for both.

Several key events in my life have fallen more closely into place astrologically now. This birth time is as near to accurate as I'm ever likely to get. The astrologer did a good job.

5 comments:

  1. I had the same problem, but only had about an hour within which it could have been.
    Which meant I was either Virgo or Libra ascendant. I ended up with Virgo.

    I'm curious if you have Neptune aspecting your ascendant or asc ruler at all? Neptune is exactly sextile my asc on the time I have gone with, and it kind of fitted the picture that it was a cloudy, uncertain issue of birthtime.

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  2. Hi Barbara.

    After reading your comment I went to play with the rectification tool in my software. If I move birth time to 3.07pm instead of 2.27pm Neptune exactly sextiles ascendant! Sun moves from 8th to 7th also. Hmmmm - I wonder.

    Interesting! I'll keep that in mind. Thank you.

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  3. ooh how interesting!! That might add weight to my theory if you felt that time fits you. But of course, it's a theory that can never be proved... in true Neptune style!

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  4. I am fortunate enough to have access to my birth certificate, which states my time of birth was 6:04 AM. This chart gives me an early Aries Ascendant, yet due to the speed this sign traverses the horizon, it is possible that I have a Pisces Ascendant if my time of birth is inaccurate by three minutes or more. In fact, rectifying my chart by three minutes would also give me a Sagittarius Midheaven/Gemini Nadir instead of my current Capricorn Midheaven/Cancer Nadir. Finding the correct signs has become something of an obsession of mine, but unfortunately, I have not yet experienced my first Saturn Return and am considered by many to be too young for rectification.

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  5. Hello Sabiana

    It must be frustrating for you!

    Using the bit of Aquarian logic I can dredge up, I think I'd guess that, if anything, the time on your birth certificate is likely to be later than actual birth time, rather than earlier, meaning that the sign rising would be Pisces.

    I notice from your profile that your interests embrace mystical subjects - very Pisces, not very Aries! I see your Sun is in Aries, so the mystical traits may come from your ascendant. But in the end you're the only one who can decide.

    One quote I always fall back on is "there are no walls in space". I think it's possible that those of us with significant cusps in our charts do draw on both signs to varying degrees at different stages of life.

    I wonder if your Mercury and/or Venus are in Pisces ?

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