Draconic
Soul Chart

A draconic chart is your birth chart counted from a different starting point. The tropical zodiac measures longitude from the March equinox, where the Sun crosses the equator heading north. The draconic zodiac measures it from the Moon's North Node, where the Moon's orbit crosses the Sun's path heading north. Subtract the node's longitude from every position and the node lands on 0° Aries, with everything else moved back by the same amount.

The word comes from the old picture of the lunar nodes as a dragon, draco in Latin, with the North Node as its head and the South Node as its tail. Astronomers kept the word: the draconic month, 27.21 days on average from 1900 to 2050 in our ephemeris, is the time the Moon takes to come back to the same node. It is shorter than the 27.32 days the Moon takes to return to the same longitude, because the nodes drift backward to meet it. Eclipses happen only when the Sun is close to a node, which is why the nodes were tracked long before anyone cast a horoscope.

One number is subtracted from everything, so the draconic chart keeps every aspect of the birth chart: planets 90° apart are still 90° apart, and a Grand Trine is still a Grand Trine. What changes is the sign and degree each planet falls in, and, when houses follow the signs, sometimes its house. Astrologers who work with the chart read the draconic signs next to the tropical ones and look for draconic planets that land on birth-chart planets, and the calculator gives you both. The node itself, its sign dates and its speed have their own page: the North Node calculator.

The method is recent. Pamela Crane, a British astrologer, traces her own work on it to a talk Dennis Elwell gave at the Astrological Association's conference in Cambridge in September 1977, on what he called multi-dimensional transits. Crane published Draconic Astrology in 1987 and The Draconic Chart in 2000. She casts the chart from the true node, as this calculator does, and reads it as a second wheel drawn around the birth chart, with the two compared point by point.

The calculator first casts your birth chart with the site's ephemeris, after turning your local birth time into Universal Time (the methodology page explains the steps). Then it works through six steps:

1. The node. It takes the true North Node, also called the osculating node: the node of the lunar orbit as it stood at the minute you were born. The site's birth chart and North Node calculator use the same node. The mean node, which moves at a steady average rate, is computed as well and shown beside the result.
2. The subtraction. The node's longitude is subtracted from the ten planets, Chiron, Black Moon Lilith, the four asteroids, the Part of Fortune and the Vertex, and each result is taken around the circle (modulo 360°). The North Node itself comes out at 0°00′ Aries and the South Node at 0°00′ Libra.
3. The angles. The draconic Ascendant and Midheaven are your Ascendant and Midheaven as they were at the minute of birth, minus the node. They are never taken from house cusps: in Whole Sign houses the first cusp is 0° of the rising sign, not the Ascendant (the section on houses below shows what went wrong when an earlier version did this).
4. Houses. Whole Sign houses by default: house 1 is the entire sign the draconic Ascendant falls in, house 2 the sign after it, and so on around the zodiac. Choose Placidus and each birth-chart cusp moves back by the node's longitude; choose Equal and the houses run in 30° steps from the draconic Ascendant. With either of those two, every planet keeps its birth-chart house.
5. Contacts. Each of the twelve draconic points (ten planets, Ascendant, Midheaven) is compared with the same twelve tropical points for conjunctions and oppositions within 1°. No point is checked against its own tropical place, since the gap between the two is always the node's longitude.
6. Display. Positions are truncated to the arc-minute, never rounded up, the same as on every page of the site.

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco at 7:15 PM (UTC−8:00) on February 24, 1955, the time on his birth certificate. His true North Node was at 3°24′ Capricorn, a longitude of 273°24′. Subtracting 273°24′ is the same as adding 86°35′, which is two signs and 26°35′. So a planet past 3°24′ of its sign lands three signs further on, and a planet in the first 3°24′ of a sign only two. All ten of his planets sit past that degree, so each moved exactly three signs: the Sun from Pisces to Gemini, the Moon from Aries to Cancer, Venus from Capricorn to Aries. Every value below was checked against an independent run of the same ephemeris that bypasses the API.

His draconic Ascendant is 18°52′ Sagittarius and his draconic Midheaven 17°54′ Virgo; both moved three signs as well, since both sit past 3°24′ of their signs. The aspects are untouched: his Sun and Saturn are 104°35′ apart in the tropical chart and 104°35′ apart in the draconic one.

A planet can keep its tropical sign only when the arc is under 30°, which happens when the North Node is in Aries or Pisces at birth. The node spends about a year and a half in each sign, so that covers roughly one birth in six; everyone else sees every planet change sign, as Steve Jobs does.

In Whole Sign houses each house is one sign, counted from the rising sign. The draconic chart moves the Ascendant and the planets by the same arc, so most planets keep their house number. The exception is a planet on the other side of the node's degree from the Ascendant. Steve Jobs's node is at 3°24′ of its sign and his Ascendant at 22°17′, so a point in the first 3°24′ of any sign moves one sign less than the Ascendant and drops back a house. None of his ten planets is in that stretch. Chiron is, at 2°19′ Aquarius, and goes from his 6th house to the 5th.

With Placidus or Equal houses nothing changes house. The API moves every cusp back by the same 273°24′, so the draconic chart is the birth chart turned on its wheel: Steve Jobs's Placidus first cusp goes from 22°17′ Virgo to 18°52′ Sagittarius, his second from 18°14′ Libra to 14°49′ Capricorn, and every planet stays where it was.

The earlier version of this calculator got the angles and houses wrong. It subtracted the node from the Whole Sign cusps and called the first one the Ascendant. Steve Jobs's first Whole Sign cusp is 0°00′ Virgo, so it printed a draconic Ascendant of 26°35′ Scorpio and put a cusp at 26°35′ of every sign, which is no house system at all. His true draconic Ascendant, 18°52′ Sagittarius, is in the next sign, and the houses now start from it.

The calculator moves every other point in the birth chart by the same arc. Points that are built from other points come out the same either way. Steve Jobs was born after sunset, so his Part of Fortune is the Ascendant plus the Sun minus the Moon: 20°17′ Leo. Subtract the node from it, or build it again from the draconic Ascendant, Sun and Moon, and both routes give 16°52′ Scorpio: built from draconic points, the formula takes the node off twice (with the Ascendant and the Sun) and puts it back once (with the Moon), so it comes off exactly once. Chiron, Lilith and the Vertex simply move by the arc like the planets, and Chiron, in the first 3°24′ of its sign, is the one point here that changes Whole Sign house.

There are two ways to place the node. The mean node moves backward at a steady average rate, 19°20′ a year, a full circle in 18.61 years. The true node is the node of the Moon's orbit as it actually is at the moment of birth; the Sun's pull keeps tilting that orbit, so the true node swings ahead of the mean and falls behind it, and now and then briefly moves forward. A draconic chart is shifted by whichever node is used, so the two versions of a chart differ by exactly the gap between them.

For Steve Jobs the true node was 3°24′ Capricorn and the mean node 2°30′ Capricorn, 0°54′ apart. With the mean node his draconic Sun is 3°14′ Gemini instead of 2°20′ Gemini, and his draconic Ascendant 19°47′ Sagittarius instead of 18°52′ Sagittarius; no planet or angle changes sign.

Sampling every six hours from 1900 to 2050, the ephemeris puts the true node up to 1°58′ ahead of the mean node (October 11, 1905) and up to 1°56′ behind it (March 2, 1949), and more than 1° away 52.8% of the time. In those samples the choice of node puts the draconic Sun in a different sign 3.0% of the time and the draconic Moon 3.2% of the time. So if a draconic position falls within about 2° of a sign boundary, check it with both nodes. The calculator does this for you: under the result it lists any planet or angle that the mean node would put in another sign.

Laying the draconic chart over the tropical one shows where a draconic point falls on a birth-chart point. With a 1° orb the calculator finds 2 such contacts for Steve Jobs: draconic Neptune opposite tropical Uranus, 0°30′ from exact, and draconic Pluto conjunct tropical Saturn, 0°44′ from exact.

It helps to know how many to expect. Twelve draconic points against eleven tropical ones make 132 pairs, and a conjunction and an opposition each allowed 1° either side cover 4° of the circle, so chance alone gives about 1.5 contacts per chart. Two is ordinary. At a 3° orb the expected count rises to about 4.4, which is why the calculator keeps the orb tight.

Crane works with wider orbs. For a contact on the same axis, a conjunction or an opposition, she allows up to 5° either side, and 2° for squares. At 5° chance alone would give about 7.3 conjunctions and oppositions per chart, so the calculator lists only the closest, within 1°. If you follow her practice, compare the tropical and draconic columns of the result table by eye for the wider ones.

There is one contact the calculator never lists: a planet and its own draconic place. They are always the node's longitude apart, 273°24′ for Steve Jobs, so for people born with the node near 0° Aries every planet sits on itself, and for everyone else none does.

Your draconic chart is fixed at birth, like your tropical one. What the node's motion changes is where the draconic zodiac sits for people born at other times. The table follows a birth at Steve Jobs's date and clock time, February 24 at 7:15 PM Pacific time, through every year from 1946 to 1966, a little more than one full turn of the nodes, each row cast with the same ephemeris as the calculator. The tropical Sun stays between 5°26′ Pisces and 6°18′ Pisces in every row. The node moves back, so the draconic Sun moves forward, by about 19°25′ a year, and it passes through all twelve signs before the node comes around again.

Three things follow. People born on the same day share the draconic shift to within a few arc-minutes, since the node moves about 3.2′ a day on average. People born a year apart differ by about 19°, more than half a sign. And people born one nodal cycle apart come back close together: the 1946 and 1965 rows have nodes only 7°31′ apart, closer than any two neighboring years. Apart from the fast-moving Moon, the draconic signs come from the birth date alone; the draconic Ascendant, Midheaven and houses also need the time and place. In 1955 the row matches Steve Jobs's own chart, a draconic Sun at 2°20′ Gemini.

Crane's own practice keeps the houses of the birth chart and changes only the signs, which is what the Placidus and Equal settings do here; the Whole Sign setting instead counts houses from the draconic rising sign. In relationship work she notes one person's Sun conjunct or opposite the other's Moon, draconic to draconic or draconic to tropical. The calculator gives the positions and leaves the weighting to you. Two cautions apply to any reading. The draconic sign of every planet but the Moon depends on the birth date only, so it is shared by everyone born within a day or two of you; the draconic Ascendant and houses are the personal part. And the choice of node matters near sign boundaries, as the section above shows.

• Pamela Crane, Draconic Astrology: An Introduction to the Use of Draconic Charts in Astrological Interpretation (The Aquarian Press, 1987), and The Draconic Chart (Flare Publications, 2000; revised edition 2013). Her orbs and her use of the true node are described on her own website.
• Victor Olliver, Chasing the Dragons: An Introduction to Draconic Astrology (The Wessex Astrologer, 2021), a more recent survey that names Elwell and Crane among the chart's early researchers.
• Dennis Elwell, “Multi-dimensional Transits,” a talk at the Astrological Association's Cambridge conference, September 1977, printed in the Astrological Journal; Crane names it as her starting point.
• Every position, both nodes and the angles come from the site's ephemeris, and the gap between the true and mean node quoted above was computed with it.

The draconic planets need only the birth date; the draconic Ascendant, Midheaven and houses need the birth time to within a few minutes, exactly as the tropical ones do. The calculator works out the positions. It makes no claim about what a draconic placement means for a person.