Butterfly Mind

Mine is one of those natal charts with planets well-spread over the whole area of the circle. Astrologers call this a "splash" configuration, and it's said to bestow versatility, but lack of concentrated focus.

I'm fairly versatile and interested in just about anything - except sport. I enjoy variety, and have lived in big cities, small towns, country and coast. I turned my hand to many different occupations before settling down in a department of the UK's civil service for a long career. I worked for an archivist, I was a hotel receptionist in several locations, I did stints as barmaid in some fairly low dives, secretarial work in a computer accessories firm, accounts clerk at a 'bus company, assisted my parents in a variety of businesses, and for a time, during my first short-lived marriage, ran our own cafe with my ex-husband. I did the cooking !

HeWhoKnows gazes disbelievingly over my shoulder as I type.

"You.....cooking??!!"

"It's all down to my splash chart, I've moved on now from that particular area."

"Yes, I've noticed."

"But it's worked out well. In the last few years you've moved into the cooking area of your own splashy chart", I respond, with some satisfaction.

Whenever it's called for, I can focus on a specific subject as well as the rest of 'em. I don't, it appears, have the kind of focus required to drive me on to notable success and fame.

So many individuals who have been particularly successful in a chosen career or calling have natal charts where planets form a bundle or bowl configuration (planets all lying within half, or less, of the full circle). There are famous people with splashy natal charts, of course, but I've noticed the bowl and bundle come up more frequently among charts I've looked at during research for these blog posts.

Of the other chart patterns commonly considered by astrologers, the "funnel" or "bucket"(a bundle configuration with one rogue planet opposing the planet cluster) and the "see-saw" (two planet clusters in opposition) both seem to manifest most clearly. I'm doubtful that the "locomotive" and the "splay" are as easy to see in action, but that's just my own view.

Astrologer John Townley's article "Planetary Order III: Islands in the Sky" is one of the best and clearest articles I've seen on the topic of chart shapes or "Jones Patterns", as they are known. They are named for Mark Edmund Jones, an American astrologer who studied chart shapes, defined and introduced names for them.

I long ago accepted that I'm a scattered individual with a butterfly mind and a butterfly chart. I'd never make the top sections of Astrotheme's lists of dominant signs or planets, even should I, in some fantasy world, become a celebrity or an axe murderer. My splashy natal chart may even help to save me from either possibility - so it's not all bad!