The Jupiter Line in Astrocartography

Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos classes Jupiter and Venus as the beneficent planets and Saturn and Mars as the maleficent ones, and later astrologers kept that scheme. In Christian Astrology (1647), William Lilly's notes on the tenth house say that Jupiter or the Sun placed there "do much fortunate" it, while Saturn or the south node usually deny honor (p. 56). A planet on an angle was held to act most strongly, and the Midheaven is the angle of rank and profession, so Jupiter on the Midheaven became one of the best-regarded placements in a birth chart.

Astrocartography carries that judgment onto the map. On a Jupiter MC line, a chart cast for your birth moment has Jupiter at the Midheaven, and the line inherits the reputation. That is why the Jupiter MC line is the one most often described as a career line, and why Jupiter lines in general are offered as the answer to "where will I be lucky". The honest version of the claim is narrower. The tradition describes favorable conditions, not results, and nothing in a map tracks what happens to people who move to their Jupiter lines.

The example chart is Barack Obama's, with the time from his birth certificate: 7:24 PM on August 4, 1961, Honolulu, or 05:24 UTC the following day. Jupiter stood at 0°51′ Aquarius, retrograde. The lines come from the site's API, as the map draws them for his chart, and every point was checked against the Swiss Ephemeris by the script that built this example.

Jupiter and Saturn meet in the sky about every 20 years, and one of those meetings fell in the year Obama was born: the two were conjunct at 25°12′ Capricorn on February 19, 1961. By August Jupiter had moved a few degrees ahead, to 0°51′ Aquarius, with Saturn at 25°19′ Capricorn, and both were retrograde near their oppositions to the Sun (Jupiter's on July 25, 1961, Saturn's on July 19, 1961).

On the map that closeness turns into pairs of lines a few degrees apart. His Saturn MC line runs through Texas and Oklahoma, 5°47′ farther west and 40 km from Dallas; the IC lines run the same distance apart through India and Siberia. A reader of his map cannot take the Jupiter MC line through the Mississippi valley without noticing the Saturn MC line a few hundred kilometers to the west, and the region between them carries a mix of the two readings: expansion and restraint, opportunity and the work it costs.

Being opposite the Sun, both planets also have their MC lines near the Sun's IC line: his Jupiter MC line is 11°56′ west of the Sun's midnight meridian. And Mercury, opposite Jupiter in his chart, puts its IC line just 1°31′ east of the Jupiter MC line, so Baton Rouge has his Jupiter MC line 25 km away and his Mercury IC line 121 km away.

Obama's Jupiter was retrograde, moving back 0°07′ a day. It had stationed at 7°09′ Aquarius on May 25, 1961 and would station direct at 27°19′ Capricorn on September 23, 1961. Retrograde motion does not change how the line is drawn. What it changes is how the lines move from one birthday to the next: Jupiter is so slow that a birth at the same clock time a day later would move the Jupiter lines 1°06′ west, almost all of it the four minutes a day by which star time gains on clock time.

Jupiter stays close to the ecliptic. Between 1900 and 2050 its latitude never exceeded 1°38′, and the largest values came near opposition, when it is nearest the Earth. At 4.11 AU, with a latitude of 0°38′ south, Obama's Jupiter gives in mundo lines very close to the site's zodiacal ones: the MC line would move 0°08′, the rising line 71 km at 45° N, and even at 60° N only 97 km.

Jim Lewis's 1976 handbook counted a place as near a line within a quarter-inch of his printed map, roughly 300 to 400 miles. Six years later, in the Cyclo*Carto*Graphy handbook, he allowed as much as 700 miles. At 700 miles, Obama's Jupiter lines take in 477 cities, 21% of the site's list, fewer than for his Sun lines even though Jupiter's MC line runs through the middle of North America.

The birth time matters more than the orb. If the certificate had read half an hour later, every Jupiter line would lie 7°31′ farther west: the MC line would run through central Mexico, past Mexico City, Monterrey and San Antonio, and the IC line through Lucknow, Kanpur and Chennai instead of Kolkata. That is the difference between two countries, from one rounded time. Open the pre-filled map to see his Jupiter lines beside his Saturn and Mercury lines.