How to read a relocation chart

A relocation chart keeps your planets exactly where they were born and rebuilds the twelve houses for the city you are standing in. The wheel is anchored by four points: the Ascendant on the left, the Midheaven on top, the Descendant on the right, the IC at the bottom. Everything you read hangs off those four pegs.

Pathfinder casts this chart for any city you tap and writes the interpretation in plain language. Every placement gets a verdict, beneficial or challenging, a written read of its strengths and challenges, and an effect purity bar showing how cleanly it comes through. The sections below are the order to read them in.

Start with any planet sitting within about two degrees of an angle, because those placements run the city. The angle names the arena. The Ascendant is presence and the body. The Descendant is partnership. The Midheaven is career and reputation. The IC is home and roots. A planet on one of those points pours its theme into that arena for as long as you are there.

The tightness decides the volume, and the scale is not linear. Venus 0.4 degrees from the Descendant is a headline, the kind of contact people write years of their life around. The same Venus four degrees out is a paragraph. Read the tightest angle contact first, because it colors everything after it, and a city with no angle contact inside two degrees is usually a quiet city, whatever the rest of the wheel says.

Next, hold the relocation chart against your birth chart and find the planets that changed rooms. A planet that sat in your natal 12th house and climbs into the relocated 10th has not changed its nature, but it has changed its job, and you will feel the promotion. Moves into the angular houses, the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th, are the loud ones. Moves out of them are the strange relief of a theme going quiet.

This step is where the cities you already know become evidence. Think of a place where a specific part of life ran hot, then check which planet changed houses when you moved there. The pattern repeats more often than coincidence allows, and it teaches you which of your planets actually respond to relocation, because they do not all respond equally.

Now the fine print, in the app's own order. The verdict is the summary: beneficial or challenging, one glance per placement. Treat it as a table of contents. The written strengths and challenges under it are the actual chapter, and they routinely hold the decision. Two cities can both hand you a strong Jupiter with opposite meanings, one running your 4th house and one your 10th. The verdict says Jupiter is loud. The sentence says where.

The purity bar answers a subtler question: how cleanly does this placement come through? High purity means one voice, one theme, an effect you can plan around. Low purity means a committee, the planet's message crossed with other contacts pulling at it, and the lived experience tends to feel mixed in exactly the way the bar suggests. When two placements disagree about a city, the purer one usually wins the argument.

Say the chart for a candidate city shows Mars 1.2 degrees from the Midheaven, nothing else angular, and the Moon dropped from your natal 4th house into the 12th here. Angles first: Mars on the MC is a career engine, and 1.2 degrees is loud. House movers second: the Moon leaving the 4th is home comfort going quiet, retreat replacing nesting.

Now the fine print. Mars carries a beneficial verdict with a high purity bar: one voice, and the voice says work. The Moon reads challenging, low purity, a mild ache rather than a crisis. The read writes itself. This is a sprint city, excellent for a launch year and thin for convalescence, and the forecast can time the push within it.

Notice what the read did not do. It did not average the two placements into a shrug, and it did not let the challenging Moon veto a career city for a career goal. It stacked the evidence in order and let the goal arbitrate.

The first is reading one placement alone. A city is a wheel, not a line, and the single loudest placement is the beginning of the read, not the end.

The second is ignoring orb. A planet shown near an angle at five degrees is not on the angle, and a read built on it is fiction with good typography.

The third is treating the verdict as the decision. The verdict is a label, and the written strengths and challenges are the content. The fourth is comparing a candidate city to a fantasy instead of to your actual options. Relocation charts rank real choices against each other. Measured against an imaginary perfect city, every real one reads like a compromise.