About
I read a birth chart for strength and effect. The chart records where the Sun, the Moon and the planets stood when you were born, and the old astrologers read it as the order a person is made within: a body with a temperament, set in its surroundings. From it I can say what you have to work with, which planets are strong and which are weak, and when the year favors an undertaking. The forecast is what the chart marks out, with its doubts stated. The decision stays with you.
Fig. 7
Three-unit station
H. Noordung, 1929 · Public domain, via NASA / Wikimedia Commons
Herman Potočnik published under the name Hermann Noordung in 1929 and died that year, aged 36. Stations designed decades later look a good deal like his. I took the name.
How I read
I work in the tradition that runs from the Hellenistic astrologers of the first centuries of our era to the astrologers of the Renaissance.
The stars are read here more as signs of an order than as causes. A chart records the sky at a moment, and the tradition reads it as a sign of the order that a person or a matter was made within.
For a person, I start from the four qualities, hot, cold, wet and dry, because the old writers used them to describe bodies, seasons and planets alike. Ptolemy gives the Sun the power to heat, the Moon the power to moisten, and Saturn the power to cool. A temperament is a mixture of them. From there I read the body and the soul together, and the condition of each planet.
I write in plain speech and I say where the chart is doubtful. My aim in a reading is effect and strength. I want you to know what you have to work with, and how it is put together, so that you can use it. A reading is not counseling or therapy.
The Renaissance as a method
I look to the Renaissance for a method. It was the point where the old understanding of the heavens and the new methods lived side by side, before they split, and a careful person had to hold both. Marsilio Ficino, in his Three Books on Life, says that each person should fit himself chiefly to the power he is chiefly subject to. I try to work the same way: the old texts read closely, and the work checked against the chart in front of me.
Ficino, De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life), Book III, chapter 2. Paraphrased.
Write to me
For a question about a reading, write to noordung.astrologer@gmail.com.