Five ways to read one birth

It began with Babylonian sky records and took its present shape — the birth chart — in Hellenistic Egypt around the second century BCE. The astrology most familiar in the West descends from it.

The calculation has three layers: which of the twelve signs each planet occupies, which of the twelve houses — the sky divided from the horizon — it stands in, and the angles the planets form with each other, called aspects. The signs are anchored to the equinox, that is, to the seasons, which is why this zodiac is called tropical.

Planets and houses are read for temperament and ways of relating; techniques such as transits are read for timing. House division differs by school, so the report records which method was used.

The year, month, day and hour of birth are each written as two characters — eight in all, which is what saju palja means. It began in Tang-dynasty China, and the present form, centred on the day of birth, was settled in the Song.

Each character carries one of five energies: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. The calculation counts which way those eight lean, and how the character standing for the person — the day master — relates to the other seven, relations called the ten gods. Stems hidden inside the branches are counted too.

It is read for temperament and the flow of work, money and relationships, with ten-year luck cycles and annual cycles for timing. The hour pillar depends on an exact birth time, so the report states how accurate the time was.

A board of twelve palaces is built from the moment of birth, and stars are placed on it. The tradition was passed down from the Song dynasty, and its present form was settled under the Ming and Qing.

Each palace stands for one area of life — money, career, marriage, health — and the palace standing for the person is the Life Palace. The stars placed on the board, Zi Wei and thirteen other major stars plus their assistants, are not the stars of the night sky: their seats follow rules. That is where it parts from Western astrology.

Four stars change character with the birth year's stem — the Four Transformations — and a palace is read together with the palaces facing it. Placement rules differ by school, so the report records which rules were followed.

The astrology of India. The name comes from jyotisha, Sanskrit for 'the science of light', and it began as one of the auxiliary disciplines of the Vedas.

It computes the same sky as Western astrology but anchors it differently: to the fixed stars rather than the seasons. The gap between the two anchors is a correction called the ayanamsha, currently about 24 degrees — enough for the same person to land in different signs in the two systems.

Its own instruments are the 27 nakshatras the Moon moves through, the dasha periods that assign each planet a stretch of years, and divisional charts such as the navamsa that magnify the birth chart. It is used above all for reading long arcs of time.

The only modern system of the five. Ra Uru Hu formalised it in 1987, weaving the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, the chakras, the Kabbalah and astrology into a single figure called the bodygraph.

It calculates two moments: the planets at birth, and the planets when the Sun stood 88 degrees earlier — roughly three months before. Both sets are converted into 64 gates and drawn on the bodygraph. When gates join into a completed channel, the centres that channel touches become defined.

The combination of defined centres is read as a type, a decision-making authority and a strategy. Its roots and language differ from the older traditions, so the report reads it separately first and counts it toward shared patterns only where the meaning is confirmed to match.