Knowing Your Time of Birth
Knowing the precise time of a person’s birth is essential to doing a good horoscope. Unfortunately, for most people, knowing their time of their birth is, at OUbest,novelty. It might be on their birth certificate, but who looks at that? Your mother might have mentioned it in passing, but that was years ago. It might be part of some family legend, but family legends get exaggerated and changed as time goes on.
A person casually remarks, “Oh, I was born at noon.” Up jumps the astrologer with a bunch of tedious questions. “What does it say on your birth certificate?” “Was the time written down anywhere else, like a birth announcement or in a diary?” “Your mother was probably a bit busy at that moment. Did anyone else note the time?” “Was it exactly at noon, or noonish?”
For most people, their time of birth is not important enough to warrant all of this kind of concern. An example of this is Taylor Swift. This singer has mentioned her time of birth on a couple of occasions. Both were on social media, so there’s no checking even the original citation, and each time she has given a different time: 8:46 PM and 8:36 AM.
You can click here and here to see the two horoscopes. The difference between them is quite evident, even to an astrological novice. The Sun and the Moon and all the planets are in the same signs in both charts, but their placement around the circle is completely different. This difference is a major issue for an astrologer.
The reason the time of birth is so important is that astrology works on the premise that time can be measured in terms of quality as well as quantity. The horoscope is really just a representation of a clock, a clock designed to tell us what a moment in time means. Errors in the timing of a birth make such judgments impossible.
Personally, I favor the 8:46 PM time for Taylor Swift. She is a creative person and the stellum in the Fifth House would be appropriate. However, considering how ephemeral the sources are for these two times of birth, it may be that neither is correct. (Click here to read an earlier article discussing a partial horoscope for Taylor Swift, done for noon.)
Before 9/11 and the rise of identity theft, it was possible for astrologers to obtain the official birth records of celebrities and see the time of birth, (if it was recorded.) Nowadays, there are strict controls on the viewing of those records. So, astrologers have to depend upon the celebrities and their relatives or staff to provide this information, none of whom are likely to consider the information that important. For the astrologer, of course, it is crucial.
