What is a horoscope?

You’re standing in a beautiful park full of flowers and trees and take a photograph of this lustrous panorama. Sometime later, you take the photo to hand and must imagine how the park looked in its actual breadth and depth. The photo is flat – two-dimensional – but the park fills space – it is three-dimensional.

This is a good description of a horoscope: It is a two-dimensional map of the three-dimensional sky. The Earth is round and the “sky map“ – the horoscope – is round, too. If we (in the northern hemisphere) imagine the horoscope to be the face of a clock, South is at 12 o’clock, West at 3 o’clock, North at 6 o’clock, and East at 9 o’clock.

The sun appears to circle around the earth. The horoscope depicts the sun’s path as a circle divided into 12 segments. A constellation is assigned to each segment. Since most of these constellations depict animals or mythological creatures, this circle has come to be called the “zodiac”, derived from the Greek word for animal or life (zōion). Each of the segments is called a “sign”.

Traditional astrology works with the seven visible planets: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each planet is represented by a symbol. In the horoscope, each of the planets is placed in a zodiac position corresponding to its location in the sky.

Astrology is based on what we can see from our position on the Earth. We know that the Earth moves around the sun, not the other way around, but astrology is rooted in what we humans perceive. A horoscope depicts the sky as we see it. Your natal horoscope depicts the position of the planets as they were at the exact time of your birth and is unique.