A chart has ten planets in it, and each one stands for a part of you. The Sun is one part, the Moon another, Venus another. Before you worry about signs or houses, it helps to know who these ten are and what each of them wants. That's the what of a chart, the first of the three questions from lesson 0.
Picture a household where everyone wants something different. One person wants the heating up, another wants to go out, another wants to finish their work first. A chart works a lot like that. Each planet has its own job and its own wants, and a person is what happens when they all live under one roof.
Astrologers still say "planets" for all ten even though the Sun is a star and the Moon is a moon. It's an old habit, and it's handy, so we'll keep it.
These move fast, so they're very specific to you. Two people born a month apart usually have several of them in different signs.
If you only had time to learn five planets, learn these. Most of what people recognize in themselves comes from here.
These two move more slowly and sit between the personal and the generational. Jupiter spends about a year in each sign, Saturn about two and a half.
Jupiter is growth. It shows where life tends to open up for you, where you're generous or lucky, and sometimes where you overdo it. Saturn is limits and discipline. It shows where things feel hard at first, where you have to put in the hours, and often where you end up most solid because of it.
People sometimes call Saturn the scary one. It's more like a strict teacher you end up grateful for. We'll see it again in lesson 9, when it comes back around to where it was at your birth.
Uranus, Neptune and Pluto move so slowly that everyone in your school year has them in the same sign. Uranus takes about seven years to cross a sign, Neptune about fourteen, Pluto anywhere from twelve to thirty.
So their sign says more about a generation than about you. Maya's Pluto is in Sagittarius, and so is the Pluto of nearly everyone born between about 1995 and 2008. That tells you something about the mood of those years, and almost nothing about Maya as a person.
These three become personal in two ways. The first is by house, meaning which area of your life they land in (lesson 4). The second is by aspect, meaning when they line up with one of your personal planets (lesson 6). Until then, read their signs lightly.
Here are Maya's ten, in the usual order:
Even before you know a thing about signs, the list has a shape. Four planets sit in Pisces and three in Capricorn. That leaves only three planets for the other ten signs. When planets bunch up like that, the chart is shouting about something, and in lesson 7 we'll talk about how to weigh a crowd like this.
Look at the personal five too. Her Sun, Mercury and Mars are all in Pisces. So her core drive, her way of thinking and her way of going after things all share one style. Her Moon and Venus are elsewhere, in Capricorn and Taurus. You'll often find the most interesting parts of a chart where the personal planets split up like that.
The "retrograde" next to Pluto means that, seen from Earth, it looked like it was moving backward at the time. For the slow planets that happens for months every year, so you can ignore it for now. Lesson 9 explains what retrograde means in practice.
Find your five personal planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars) and write the sign next to each. Then pick one and write, in your own words and without looking anything up, what part of your life it's about. Keep it to one line. In lesson 3 you'll add the sign to it.