Planetary Signatures of the Davison Chart - A Series
An introduction to understanding the planetary influences on your relationships.
Happy Moon in Libra! Due to the heavy associations between the sign of Libra and relating to other people, what a great time to talk about relationships and astrology. The great thing about astrology is that there are several means to assess the role that other people are playing in you life. First and foremost, it is crucial to look at your own chart to see key themes in your relationships to other people. Rooting other charts and techniques within your own chart will allow you to get more personalized nuance when it comes to how other people and their placements affect your ability to connect with them.
When you are done looking at the terrain of relationships from the perspective of your own natal chart, you can now apply three different techniques to get more insight about your relationships. These techniques are synastry, midpoint composite charts, and Davison Relationship Charts. Synastry is merely an overlay of the charts of multiple people to see how their planets aspect one another. Midpoint composite charts and Davison Relationship Charts are composite style charts that average the placements or the birth data to generate a chart that describes the relationship in some way. For more information and opinions on these different methods, check out this blog post I co-authored with astrologer Anna DunLany for the Association of Young Astrologers.
I am a huge proponent of the Davison Relationship Chart because it is a chart that exists in time and space. Therefore, you can have retrogrades and eclipses come to life in these charts, and really color the focus of relationships. Unlike the midpoint composite, which generates a perfect average of placements, Davison Relationship Charts are not necessarily perfect averages of both parties and their placements. This fact can add rich interpretive nuance, especially when the chart seems to be strongly reminiscent of one person’s natal chart and not the other. I cover some of this in the first installment of workshops on the Davison Chart and its uses, which I have been teaching with the help of Anak Rabanal, The Practical Astrologer.
More than anything, I really love how understanding the Davison Chart as an entity can speak to the lessons you might need to learn in your relationships, and how you can understand what relationships need to be functional. Just as your natal chart can describe strengths to hone and weaknesses to remediate, Davisons can too! This may have you wondering, “What is the theme of a Davison Chart? And how can I use this to enhance my relationships?”
Just like the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant can provide substantial insight into a natal chart, I believe that looking at these things can help you understand your Davison with someone as well. However, I feel that the chart ruler provides the meat and potatoes of understanding the focus of your relationship and maybe the reasons for a relationship being born. Moving into 2023, I hope to do a deep dive into chart examples of different planets acting as chart rulers of the Davison. For the purposes of prediction in this series, I will be leaning heavily on the use of the traditional seven planets, since outer planets move much too slow to be of substantial use in describing relationships.
Other potential contenders for giving planets the potential to define your relationship with someone:
Planets ruling a stellium or having key placements fall in signs ruled by a particular planet.
Planets ruling the lots of Fortune or Spirit — these describe the material circumstances drawing you to someone, but also the spiritual/goal directed undercurrents motivating a relationship.
A planet on an angle/in an angular house - especially in the 1st or 10th. This rule is not useful if you have stelliums in either place. This becomes especially relevant if you have retrograde planets angular, because it ties a relationship to that planetary cycle.
Final Dispositor of the chart - this is not a common phenomenon, but sometimes the dispositor trees will take influence back to one planet, even if it is not doing anything major.
If you find that many of these factors, along with the placement of the Sun/Moon/Rising and their rulers converge on a particular planet and its influence? Congrats! You have identified a planet that contributes to the signature of your relationship.
I am wrapping up the preparation for the second installment of this workshop series on the Davison Chart, to provide people with the language to understand how a planetary influence drives their relationships. This workshop will also be a nice refresher for talking about the building blocks of birth charts, but to describe an entity involving two people. We are hoping to make this accessible to enthusiasts of astrology but also those who practice relationship astrology. If you are compelled to go on this journey of using astrology to enhance your relationships in a meaningful way, please follow the link below to purchase a recording:
I cannot wait to share insights with you all in this series! See you next month when I get to wax lyrical on Davison Charts with heavy Lunar influence.