The shape of a chart

The seven shapes

The astrologer Marc Edmund Jones sorted charts by the pattern their planets make, in 1941. A bundle keeps every planet inside a third of the circle and a bowl inside half. A bucket is a bowl with one planet out on its own across the empty side, the handle. A locomotive leaves one empty third. A seesaw splits the planets into two groups with two empty stretches between them. A splash scatters them round the whole circle, and a splay gathers them in uneven clusters that fit none of the tidier shapes.

How it is measured

The page sorts the ten longitudes and measures every empty stretch between neighbours. The widest one decides most of the shapes: all ten inside 120 degrees is a bundle, inside 180 a bowl, inside 240 a locomotive. A single planet with at least forty degrees empty on both sides of it, while the other nine fit inside 180, is a handle. Two empty stretches of sixty degrees or more make a seesaw, and no stretch wider than sixty makes a splash. Where one shape ends and the next begins is a convention rather than a law, and different astrologers draw the lines a little differently, so the numbers are shown alongside the name.

What it claims

A shape is read as the general cast of a chart, before the details: a concentrated life, a divided one, a scattered one. That is the tradition’s way of talking, set out here; the page measures the circle and predicts nothing about the person it belongs to.

Reading the result, with an example

The tests run in order, bundle, bowl, bucket, locomotive, seesaw, splash, and splay for whatever is left, so a chart takes the first name it fits. Suppose nine planets are strung between 0° Aries and 0° Virgo, a stretch of 150 degrees with no gap among them wider than thirty, and the tenth is at 20° Sagittarius, 260 degrees round. The empty stretches either side of the tenth are 110 and 100 degrees, both over forty, and the other nine fit inside 180, so the page names a bucket with that planet as the handle, ringed in gold on the wheel. Move the tenth to 25° Virgo and the gap beside it closes to twenty-five degrees: there is no handle, all ten fit inside 175 degrees, and the shape is a bowl. The facts under the wheel give the span held, the widest empty stretch and where it runs from and to.

The elements, the modes and the hemispheres

Under the shape the page counts the ten bodies by element, fire, earth, air and water, and by mode, cardinal, fixed and mutable, from the sign each is in. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto stay in a sign for years, so people born within a few years of each other share their signs; the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars do most to make a balance personal. For a birth chart with a known time the note also counts the bodies above and below the horizon and on the eastern and western sides, which depends on the houses and so on the minute of birth.

Limits and common confusions

Only the ten bodies are used, not the angles, the nodes or any asteroid, so a shape needs no birth time. Without one the Moon is placed at midday, and since it moves about thirteen degrees a day it can be six or seven degrees out, which matters only when it sits at the edge of a gap or is the handle. Because the lines between shapes are conventions, a chart whose planets fill 182 degrees is only two degrees from being a bowl, and its measurements say more than its name.

The details the shape is read before are on your birth chart. The larger figures aspects make, such as grand trines and T-squares, are on Aspect patterns; the element and mode of each sign on The signs; and the houses that decide the hemispheres on The houses.