Best Astrocartography Lines for Love

Why the Descendant is the partnership angle

In a birth chart the Descendant sits opposite the Ascendant. The Ascendant is the point rising in the east, and since antiquity it has stood for the person whose chart it is; the Descendant, setting in the west, opens the seventh house, which traditional texts give to marriage, partnerships and open enemies. The seventh is the house of the other party.

A map turns that idea into geography. A planet's DSC line joins the places where that planet's zodiac degree was setting at the moment you were born. Had you been born at the same instant anywhere along the line, the planet would sit exactly on your Descendant, so a chart relocated there puts it at the start of the seventh house. That is the whole case for the DSC as the love angle: on it, a planet describes the people you pair with rather than you.

The other angles still matter, just differently. A planet on the Ascendant describes how you come across, on the IC your home and family life, on the Midheaven your public standing. People meet partners through all of them, but only the Descendant is about the partner by definition. When a reading says a line is "good for love" without naming the angle, ask which one it means.

Venus: the same planet on four angles

Venus is the planet of attraction, affection and pleasure in every astrological tradition, and classical astrologers counted it as one of the two benefics, with Jupiter. That is why Venus lines are the first thing people look for. They are not interchangeable, though, because the angle decides whose Venus it is.

• Venus DSC: Venus on the partnership angle. Readers expect partners who are affectionate and easy to be with, and relationships that run on goodwill. The usual caution is that Venus describes ease rather than commitment: the line favors enjoying a partner more than building a household.
• Venus ASC: Venus on the angle of self. This line is read for how you come across: more at ease, better dressed, easier to like. It suits being courted and making friends, which is not the same as finding a partner, though one often follows the other.
• Venus IC: Venus at the base of the chart, the angle of home, family and private life. It is the line readers name for a home that is pleasant to share, and for settling down once a relationship exists.
• Venus MC: Venus at the top of the chart. Its theme is a career in which charm, design or diplomacy count, and relationships that start at work. It is a love line only indirectly.

The Moon, the Sun and Ptolemy's rule for marriage

Venus was not the only significator of marriage in ancient astrology. In the chapter on marriage in his Tetrabiblos (Book IV), Ptolemy took the Moon as the significator of a man's marriage and the Sun as a woman's, judging the timing and quality of a match from their positions and the planets they apply to. Modern astrocartographers have mostly dropped the split by sex but kept the two lights in the reading.

The Moon DSC line is read for emotional closeness: partners who look after you or need looking after, and a relationship carried by daily habits more than grand gestures. Because the Moon also stands for changing moods, readers expect the bond to be close and sometimes changeable. The Sun DSC line is read for partners who matter to your sense of who you are: people with a strong presence, sometimes stronger than yours, and relationships that become part of how others see you.

Jupiter, the other benefic, gets a mention in most love readings. On the Descendant it is read for generous, outgoing partners and relationships that widen your life, through travel, study or a different culture. The cautions are Jupiter's usual ones: too much of a good thing, and promises bigger than the follow-through.

Lines that complicate a relationship

Every planet has a DSC line somewhere, and the slower or harsher ones are read as complicating partnership rather than ruling it out. These are the readings you will meet most often, with the reasoning behind each.

• Saturn DSC: Saturn stands for time, structure and limits, so on the partnership angle it is read for commitment that carries weight: older or more serious partners, relationships with duties attached, and bonds that last because they are worked at. The complaint is coolness, not instability.
• Mars DSC: Mars brings drive and heat to whoever is opposite you. Readers expect strong attraction and frequent friction, and partners who compete with you as well as want you.
• Uranus DSC: Uranus is read for sudden change and independence. On the Descendant it suggests unconventional arrangements and relationships that start and end abruptly.
• Neptune DSC: Neptune blurs outlines. This is the line most often described as romantic and most often warned about, because it is read for seeing the partner you hoped for rather than the one in front of you.
• Pluto DSC: Pluto is read for intensity and control. Relationships here are expected to change both people, not always comfortably.

Weighing love lines on your own map

1. Start with places, not lines. Pin the city you live in or are considering, then read the lines that pass within a few hundred kilometers of it.
2. Name the angle before the planet. A Venus ASC line and a Venus DSC line are different readings, and so are a Moon DSC and a Moon IC.
3. Measure at the right latitude. DSC lines curve, so a line that passes through Madrid can run hundreds of kilometers from a city at the same longitude in Scotland. The map's hover box gives the distance from the cursor to the nearest line.
4. Look where a Venus or Moon line crosses a meridian line (an MC or IC). The crossing, and the band of latitude through it, is where readers expect the two themes to combine.
5. Compare with your birth chart. If Venus is already in your seventh house where you were born, a Venus DSC line repeats something you have; readers treat repetition as emphasis, not as a new ingredient.
6. Discount anything finer than your birth time allows. If the time could be twenty minutes out, so could every line, by the same amount.

Worked example: Prince William's partnership lines

Prince William was born at 9:03 PM British Summer Time on June 21, 1982, at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London; the time comes from the official birth announcement. At that moment the degree setting over London was 27°28′ Gemini. The Sun at 0°06′ Cancer and the Moon at 4°57′ Cancer had both just passed it: the two lights were low in the western sky, about to set, inside the seventh house of a quadrant system such as Placidus. (With Whole Sign houses, which start his seventh house at 0° Gemini, they fall in the eighth.)

Because both lights were a few degrees past the Descendant at London, their DSC lines lie a little to the east, where the setting degree had moved on to theirs. On London's parallel the Sun's DSC line runs at 2°42′E, 157 km from the hospital at its nearest. It passes 49 km from Stockholm and 50 km from Amsterdam, then bends southwest past Lisbon (61 km) toward Recife in Brazil (105 km). The Moon's runs farther east, at 7°50′E on the same parallel: 8 km from Cologne, 37 km from Hamburg, 17 km from Madrid and 16 km from Seville.

Venus is another matter. Venus at 25°39′ Taurus sat more than 23° from every angle at London, and all four of its lines miss Western Europe. The nearest, the Venus IC line, runs down the meridian 22°53′E, 1,569 km from London, through Sofia (35 km), Athens (73 km) and Riga (74 km). The Venus DSC line crosses London's parallel in the mid-Atlantic at 41°10′W; its long stretch over land is in South America, between Maturín in Venezuela (51 km) and Arequipa in Peru (145 km). The Venus ASC line passes 7 km from Novosibirsk and 61 km from Hanoi, and the Venus MC line runs down the Pacific with no city of half a million within 300 km.

Two kinds of crossing pull these threads together. The Moon's DSC line meets the Venus IC meridian at 59°49′N, 22°53′E, near the southwest tip of Finland and 120 km from Helsinki; the Sun's DSC line meets the same meridian farther north, at 61°34′N. A reader looking for partnership and home together would point to that stretch of the Baltic. One looking for partnership with standing would note that both lights' DSC lines also cross his Jupiter MC meridian (2°03′W): the Sun's at 47°31′N in western France, the Moon's at 42°07′N in northern Spain, 111 km from Zaragoza.

What would an astrocartographer take from all this? Read by the reasoning above, William's clearest partnership lines are the two lights', and they pass within 447 km of where he was born, while the Venus lines, read for attraction and ease, are far from Britain. That is a description of a map, not a verdict on anyone's marriage. One chart cannot test a method, and nothing here is evidence that astrocartography works. You can open William's map with every line drawn and check each figure in the hover box.