The thing that kept me stuck for about two years when I was learning this properly was that every resource explained astrology as a list of things to memorise. Twelve signs, ten planets, twelve houses, five aspects. Thirty-nine separate facts, all presented as equally important, none of them connected to each other.
Then someone showed me the sentence. One formula that assembles any placement in a chart into plain English, using nothing but the pieces on this page. I stopped memorising that afternoon and started actually reading charts about a week later.
So this is the full reference — every sign, planet, house, symbol and aspect in one place, which is what you came for — plus the formula at the end that makes the reference usable instead of decorative. Save it, screenshot it, print it. It’s the page I wish I’d had.
The 12 zodiac signs
Each sign is a thirty-degree slice of a 360-degree circle. Its behaviour comes from three things: element (what it’s made of), modality (what it does), and ruling planet (its default setting).
| Sign | Symbol | Dates | Element | Modality | Ruler | Keyword |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aries | ♈ Ram | Mar 21 – Apr 19 | Fire | Cardinal | Mars | I initiate |
| Taurus | ♉ Bull | Apr 20 – May 20 | Earth | Fixed | Venus | I hold |
| Gemini | ♊ Twins | May 21 – Jun 20 | Air | Mutable | Mercury | I transmit |
| Cancer | ♋ Crab | Jun 21 – Jul 22 | Water | Cardinal | Moon | I protect |
| Leo | ♌ Lion | Jul 23 – Aug 22 | Fire | Fixed | Sun | I radiate |
| Virgo | ♍ Maiden | Aug 23 – Sep 22 | Earth | Mutable | Mercury | I refine |
| Libra | ♎ Scales | Sep 23 – Oct 22 | Air | Cardinal | Venus | I balance |
| Scorpio | ♏ Scorpion | Oct 23 – Nov 21 | Water | Fixed | Pluto (Mars) | I excavate |
| Sagittarius | ♐ Archer | Nov 22 – Dec 21 | Fire | Mutable | Jupiter | I expand |
| Capricorn | ♑ Sea-goat | Dec 22 – Jan 19 | Earth | Cardinal | Saturn | I build |
| Aquarius | ♒ Water-bearer | Jan 20 – Feb 18 | Air | Fixed | Uranus (Saturn) | I disrupt |
| Pisces | ♓ Fishes | Feb 19 – Mar 20 | Water | Mutable | Neptune (Jupiter) | I dissolve |
The dates shift by about a day depending on the year and your time zone, which matters enormously if your birthday is near a boundary. The full explanation of why the zodiac dates move is here.
Elements — what a sign is made of
Fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius): runs on impulse and self-expression. Acts first, understands later. Earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn): runs on the material and the provable. Trusts what can be measured. Air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius): runs on ideas and other people. Thinks by externalising. Water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces): runs on feeling and memory. Treats emotional information as more reliable than stated fact.
Modalities — what a sign does with it
Cardinal (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn): starts things. These four open the four seasons. Fixed (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius): holds things. These sit in the middle of each season and do not move. Mutable (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces): changes things. These close each season and hand it over.
Combine the two and you can construct any sign from scratch. Fixed water ruled by Pluto: doesn’t move, processes through feeling, oriented toward what’s buried. That’s Scorpio, built rather than memorised.
The 10 planets and what each one governs
In astrology the Sun and Moon are called planets for convenience. The first seven are the personal and social planets; the last three move so slowly that they describe a generation more than an individual — unless they’re touching something personal in your chart.
| Planet | Symbol | Governs | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | ☉ | Identity, purpose, what you’re becoming | 1 sign / month |
| Moon | ☽ | Emotion, instinct, what you need to feel safe | 1 sign / 2.5 days |
| Mercury | ☿ | Thinking, speech, learning, information | ~1 sign / month |
| Venus | ♀ | Love, taste, value, what you’re drawn to | ~1 sign / month |
| Mars | ♂ | Drive, anger, desire, how you fight | ~1 sign / 6 weeks |
| Jupiter | ♃ | Growth, belief, luck, excess | 1 sign / year |
| Saturn | ♄ | Structure, limits, time, consequence | 1 sign / 2.5 years |
| Uranus | ♅ | Disruption, freedom, sudden change | 1 sign / 7 years |
| Neptune | ♆ | Dreams, dissolution, illusion, compassion | 1 sign / 14 years |
| Pluto | ♇ | Power, transformation, what’s buried | 1 sign / 12–20 years |
Two extra points that get printed on charts and confuse beginners: the Ascendant (AC) is the sign rising on the eastern horizon at your birth, and the Midheaven (MC) is the highest point of the chart, governing career and public role. Neither is a planet — they’re angles, calculated from your birth time and location.
The three placements that do most of the work
If you only ever learn three, learn these. Your Sun is what you’re built to become. Your Moon is what actually happens inside you when something lands badly — all 12 moon signs are covered here. Your Rising sign is how you arrive and what strangers meet — the full guide to all 12 ascendants is here.
Between those three you have a working outline of a whole person, and you’ve already moved past the version of astrology that only needed your birthday.
The 12 houses
Signs describe how. Houses describe where — which area of life a planet is operating in. Your houses are set by your rising sign, which is why two people with identical planets have entirely different lives if their ascendants differ.
| House | Area of life | Natural sign |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Self, body, appearance, how you arrive | Aries |
| 2nd | Money, possessions, self-worth | Taurus |
| 3rd | Communication, siblings, short trips, daily information | Gemini |
| 4th | Home, family, roots, private base | Cancer |
| 5th | Creativity, romance, play, children | Leo |
| 6th | Routine, work conditions, health habits, service | Virgo |
| 7th | Partnership, marriage, open enemies | Libra |
| 8th | Shared resources, debt, intimacy, transformation | Scorpio |
| 9th | Travel, study, belief, the big picture | Sagittarius |
| 10th | Career, public role, reputation | Capricorn |
| 11th | Friendships, groups, networks, the future | Aquarius |
| 12th | The unconscious, rest, isolation, what’s hidden from yourself | Pisces |
A useful shortcut: houses 1 through 6 are largely about you and your immediate conditions. Houses 7 through 12 are about you in relation to other people and larger systems. The chart gets more collective as it goes round.
The 5 major aspects
Aspects are the angles between two planets. They describe whether two parts of a person cooperate or argue.
| Aspect | Symbol | Angle | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conjunction | ☌ | 0° | Fusion — the two functions become one and can’t be separated |
| Sextile | ⚹ | 60° | Opportunity — cooperates easily, but only if you use it |
| Square | □ | 90° | Friction — internal conflict, and the engine of most growth |
| Trine | △ | 120° | Flow — works so easily you may not notice it’s a strength |
| Opposition | ☍ | 180° | Tension — a see-saw you tend to project onto other people |
The common misreading is that trines are good and squares are bad. In practice a chart full of trines can be oddly frictionless and unmotivated, while squares are where almost all the interesting development happens. A square is a demand that two parts of you find a way to work together, and people generally become good at exactly the thing their squares forced them to solve.
Retrogrades, briefly
A retrograde is an optical effect — a planet appearing to move backward from Earth’s viewpoint because of the relative orbits. Nothing actually reverses.
Astrologically it’s read as the planet’s function turning inward: Mercury retrograde is associated with review and revision rather than new agreements, Venus retrograde with reconsidering what you value, Mars retrograde with redirected drive. The outer planets are retrograde for months every year, which is why nobody panics about them.
The thing worth being clear about: a retrograde is not a prohibition. “Don’t sign anything during Mercury retrograde” is the kind of deterministic advice that makes astrology useless. Read it as a suggestion to check the details twice, and then live your life.
The formula that makes all of this usable
Here’s the sentence I mentioned. Any placement in any chart assembles like this:
[Planet] = what. [Sign] = how. [House] = where.
So Mars in Libra in the 10th house reads: my drive and anger (Mars) operate through negotiation and fairness (Libra) in the area of career and public reputation (10th house). That’s a real interpretation, built from three lookups on this page, and it’s more specific than most horoscope columns manage.
Try another. Moon in Capricorn in the 4th: my emotional needs (Moon) are handled through structure and self-sufficiency (Capricorn) in the area of home and family (4th). Which tells you something quite precise about what that person’s childhood asked of them.
Do it four or five times with your own chart and you’ll never need this page again for the basics. That’s the actual goal — not memorising thirty-nine facts, but being able to build a sentence out of three.
How to actually use this today
Pull up your birth chart on any free calculator. Ignore everything except three lines: your Sun, your Moon, and your Ascendant. Write each one out using the formula above — planet, sign, house.
Then do one more thing, and this is the part that makes it stick. For each of the three, write one specific memory that the sentence explains. Not a general trait. A moment. Something you did last month, or something that happened when you were nine.
Astrology becomes genuinely useful at the point where it stops being a description and starts being a language for things you already knew about yourself but hadn’t put into words. Three sentences and three memories is usually where that turns over.
From here, the natural next stops are the complete rising sign guide for the placement most people are missing, and the moon sign breakdown for the one that explains your relationships.
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