Welcome to my Astro Advice Column! If you subscribe to my Astro-Kats or Star Kids Club groups you are able to ask me questions about astrology for this advice column.


So I’ve been a fan of astrology since I’ve known what it was. I have my birthdate and place, I just don’t know what time I was born. This has tormented me for years n years. Jumping from Virgo rising to Libra and now I’m a Leo rising *sigh* how can I solve this problem? I mean the obvi would be; “just check your birth certificate!” But 📰 new flash, I HAVE. And it doesn’t have my birth time. I even asked the hospital, apparently in my state they stopped recording it after a while (don’t know why). So I’m at my wits end with this, and would appreciate some Astro guidance, for an AstroDweeb.

–AstroDweeb


Hi AstroDweeb!

I had to laugh in delight when I saw your question. It’s such a great question that so many people have! I feel like we, astrologers, don’t talk enough about the journey of finding your birth time.

I want to start by telling you a story. I have many charts for my relatives. The last time I went back to see them, I was able to get the birth information of quite a few of them. Happy that I got this information, I saved it and kept it with me, sometimes referring to their charts and rising signs frequently in conversation or just in my own thoughts.

The other day I was talking to my partner and looking over their family’s charts and synastry with one another. As we did this, they gave a complaint that shocked me. It was a complaint that their friend had told them. The complaint is: “everyone in China is born at 8 AM.”

I was shocked by this information because, as I reviewed the birth times that I had captured of my relatives, I started to notice that they were all born at 8 AM.

The joke here, just to over explain for a bit, is not that there are a lot of people in China born right at 8 AM for some mysterious reason. The joke is that Chinese people of a certain generation will all say that they are born at 8 AM because none of them know what time they were born and neither do they care but 8 AM seems like a good time to be born for whatever reason.

Here’s another story. Growing up, we had the running joke that every Chinese person has at least three or four birthdays. There’s your Gregorian calendar birthday, your lunar calendar birthday, the birthday that is on your legal documentation, and then there might be an extra birthday that your family uses to celebrate the event of your birth. There’s other birthdays too—if you’re traditional, you might celebrate your birthday on the lunar new year rather than on the date that coincides with your birthday according to any calendar. You might also have a fake birthday that your parents used to get you in school earlier so that they don’t have to pay for extra childcare.

My grandma didn’t have a birthday because her mother didn’t remember when she was born. A lot of birthing parents forget this kind of thing, I think, because birth is long and hard and they would rather forget. Forgotten births are more common than we realize in our era of hospital recorded data.

But I am certain that my grandma was some kind of a Gemini. I never talked to her about it. She celebrated four birthdays a year because she didn’t have one and she felt vengeful about it. Each of those birthdays have some kind of prominent Gemini placement and, maybe, that is enough. Two of her three children were Gemini Suns and her husband was a Gemini Moon. Her ears were very good. No matter what she was doing, she could hear everything that was going on. You couldn’t keep anything from her.

So, if you don’t know your birth time you’re not alone. You are actually the norm. If you do not know your birth time, you are living honestly. The rest of us are all just pretending to know our birth times.

Think about it. Are you sure that you were born at a certain time just because the hospital recorded it as such? Why should they have the authority on accuracy? Are you certain of a birth time because your birthing parent remembered it? Who the hell remembers the time of day after just giving birth? There’s one thing that I know for sure and that is that you, as a just born infant, never looked at the clock and remembered what time you were born. So, you can never be sure.

Birth times work like this: you think that you were born at this or that time. You are absolutely certain of it. You understand yourself to be a certain kind of person and then you discover, later, that you were not born in the morning at all but at midnight. You have a kind of crisis that then you discover that you are actually growing into another type of person. You realize that this isn’t right either and then you’re left with a range of possibilities but a certainty about your own journey. All of the possibilities for your birth time might be meaningful to you for different reasons.

Really, everyone should rectify their birth chart. If you were born in a hospital and you think that your birth time is accurate, you should rectify it. If your mother is adamant you were born on a Sunday and your records show that you were born on a Friday, you should rectify your chart. If you have no idea what year you were born or how old you are, you should rectify your chart.

There are some ways to do this. I don’t offer it specifically and I’ve done what I feel is a good job and what I feel is a poor job at rectifying a client’s chart when asked to in a consultation. You might start with looking over the timeline of your life and figuring out at ages you grew the most—the ages that you grew the most through challenge and the ones where you found the most support. You might overlay that with your profections year or other timing techniques. You might look at all the places you have lived and what those places have meant for you and relate that to the relocated angles of your chart at different times. You might look at your different firdaria periods or profection years and see if you can feel out issues of sect.

You might have many birthdays. You might celebrate your date of transitioning. You might celebrate the anniversary of a new name. These are all your birthdays.

Really, finding your birth time using astrology is just like anything else in astrology. It’s a question that allows you to peer more closely at yourself and consider what it is like to create meaning by living.

When we pretend to know our birth times as many of us do, we pretend that we know where the stars were when we were born with certainty. This is an illusion and a foolish one. That is okay because astrologizing, finding meaning through the stars, is fundamentally a foolish activity. It takes a fool to believe that we can ever know ourselves.

So, rectify your chart if you are curious. It sounds like you are captured by curiosity. Do this with flair. Have a good time. Do this in the same way that you might venture an interpretation of yourself while having just lived half of your life. Be willing to feel like your chart is wrong when you rectify. Rectify in order to have a way to talk about yourself.

I like to think of astrology as this—you already know your chart. You might not know how to write a delineation of your Mars in Libra yet but you already know the stoicism that comes up like a shield when you are most agitated. That is your most powerful tool for discovering your origin and your birth time can be part of that origin if you want it to be.s