In a couple of previous posts, I showed how you can confirm or rectify the birth time by quickly eyeballing solar arc directions to the angles of a horoscope, and drawing a correspondence between the closure time of a solar arc direction and a memorable event in the life. In all the examples that I presented in those posts, the convergence was rapid with a single solar arc direction sufficing to close on the birth time.
In this post, I am going to present a situation that had me use three different solar arc directions to rectify down the birth time. This was for a consultation with a man who gave his birth time at between 7:00 and 7:30 am. As before, we start with a reference chart drawn for the middle time of 7:15 am:
We look for prospective convergence of solar arc direction between any of the angles and the planets Saturn through Pluto.
Before we get deeper into this exercise, let us draw some limits on the MC and ascendant positions corresponding to the birth time window. Since this chart is drawn for a 7:15 am birth time, taking the lower extreme, 7 am, of the window would result in the MC/ascendant backing up by about four degrees, maximum, using the rate of motion of the MC at about one degree to four minutes. Analogously, if the other extreme, 7:30 am, of the time window were used, the MC would advance by about four degrees. The actual new midheaven and ascendants are shown below for both these times:
Let’s start with Saturn in the 7:15 am chart. It is at 21 Ari 31, about six degrees below the descendant which is at at 27 Ari 22. So the Saturn would come in contact with the descendant by solar arc direction in about six years time. If we were to use the descendant for the 7 am time (which would be 24 Ari 46), then the separation from Saturn is only 3 degrees and 15 minutes of arc. But for the descendant in the 7:30 am time (29 Lib 58), the separation from Saturn would increase to 8 degrees and 27 minutes. Since each degree separation corresponds to one year of solar directed time, a solar directed Saturn conjunction with the descendant could happen as early as three years of age (7:00 am birth time), or as late as eight and a half years (7:30 am birth time).
Now that we have the extremes and the middle worked out, we can ask this man for the dates—month and year—of some momentous events such as marriage, death of a parent, highly significant home move, going away to college far from home, accident, hospitalization due to illness, etc.
The first thing this man ventures is that his parents divorced when he was 5 years old, to the month.
SA Saturn at this time has been directed to 26 Ari 29, and is closest to the descendant of the 7:15 time chart that we started with. It is, however, almost a degree behind the descendant still, which corresponds to almost a year in time.
This is too much of a leeway in time. So, based on this one point of data alone, the birth time should be 3-4 minutes before 7:15 so that the SA Saturn would be closer to the descendant. But we want to check other events as well, mainly because a parental divorce is generally more appropriately seen via contacts to the IC or MC, due to the typical home disruption (IC) or change in parental status (MC). Moreover, Saturn is not heavy enough to indicate the deep trauma that this would have caused in a child of less than ten years of age. This does not mean the SA Saturn to descendant measurement is not coincident with the parents’ divorce; it simply is not convincing enough by itself.
The second event the man recalls happened when he was just a little over eleven years old: his stepfather died. This was indeed a terrible blow. His mother had remarried a few years back, and he was just getting to bond with a new father who loved him and showed his affection in a hundred different ways. Even the largest separation between Saturn and the descendant, of 8 degrees and 27 minutes in the 7:30 chart, would not be large enough for the SA Saturn to be at the descendant death to coincide with this death—that would need about eleven years, by which time SA Saturn would be way past the descendant.
More importantly, a trauma of this magnitude for a child of only eleven is absolutely more powerful that anything Saturn can indicate: it begs for an outer planet contact. However, none of the outer planets are anywhere close to coming into a conjunction (eyeball) contact with any of the angles by solar direction in eleven years after birth, in any of the three candidate charts. (One or more of the outer planets may have been active by transit at this time, but transits are not used to rectify charts since, unlike solar arc, they can’t pinpoint an event down to a month or two.)
So, we need another event from our client. The next event he cites is his marriage, which happened when he was just shy of being 26 years old.
At the time of his marriage, SA Uranus was at 27 Lib 23, pretty much exactly on the ascendant of the 7:15 am chart. We can close the matter right here and use the 7:15 am time. But just one thing before we call it. The issue is that the actual marriage date is usually not a surprise since it is planned ahead of time, after the couple has decided on marrrying. On the other hand, with a Uranian event we expect an element of surprise. This man actually met his wife-to-be a year before the marriage, and they decided to get married soon after. So if we take that decision to be the actual event, then the ascendant would have to back up by about a degree, so that SA Uranus would be exactly on it a year back.
So, let’s move the birth time back to 7:10 am. The solar arc direction for the year before (when the man was just about to turn 25) now has SA Uranus conjunct the new ascendant. This is a lot more convincing, so we can go with the 7:10 time for birth.