The Hour You Were Born

Ask an astrologer for a chart and the third question is always the hour. Not the day — the hour, and the minute if it can be had. Most people go looking and come back with one of two things: a number on a document, written by someone who was not in the room, or a sentence remembered in the family. Just after the dawn prayer. During the storm. The night the power was out. Both are records, and neither is automatically the truer one. What the hour decides is the ascendant: the degree of the zodiac rising on the eastern horizon at that moment, which needs the place as much as the time, and which opens the first house. Move the ascendant and the same planets in the same signs fall into different houses — a life's material redistributed across a different map. A sign is often said to rise every two hours. That is an average, and it is worth knowing where it fails. Near the equator each sign takes close to two hours. Further north or south, some signs cross the horizon in under an hour while others take more than three, so a remembered hour is worth more in some birthplaces than in others. What does not depend on the hour is a great deal: the Sun, most of the planets, and the aspects between them. An unknown hour does not leave you without a chart. It leaves you without houses. Where the hour is genuinely lost, there is rectification — working backwards from dated events through transits and progressions until one hour fits the life. It is an old craft and honestly speculative: two careful astrologers can land hours apart, and a new event can move a rectified time again. One last trap, and it makes more wrong charts than any other: the timekeeping actually in force at that place on that date. Zones were redrawn, daylight saving was not observed consistently, and the ascendant is the part most sensitive to being an hour out. You needn't post the time itself. How is your birth hour held in your family — by the clock, or by what was happening at the time?