What is a Persona Chart?

The birth horoscope is a "script of life" which gives me an exact overview of my "drama". If we translate the horoscope drawing into a view of a stage, the circle of the horoscope becomes the circle of the stage, and the planets turn into people or actors.

Every single person in the drama has his or her very own history, has individual energies, individual needs, has weaknesses and strengths, and individual physical and psychological responses. Each person has an individual way of going through life, as well as an individual path to consciousness.

The birth horoscope represents these twelve characters in their particular arrangement as parts of the whole. We want to show a new way of looking at the chart. We do not look at the whole, but consider its parts. We will not forget, of course, that whole is more than the sum of its parts. And we keep in mind that we will do what we are doing now only for a limited period of time. But we will do it anyway.

We learn a method by which we can take out a single one of these inner personalities, and look at it closely and independently from the others for a while. The birth chart provides us with little information about this personality: we only know the zodiacal sign, its house placing, and its relations with other planetary personalities. This is not a vast amount of information. For this reason we will take a step which might sound outrageous at first: we cast an individual horoscope for this inner personality.

The individual characters on the stage of my life have birth dates themselves, i.e. they have to "come to light". This phrase contains the secret of their birth. They are born the moment the Sun, which has brought me (my outer self) to light (for example on 22.8.62, at 13h22), reaches this inner personality for the first time and thus "brings it to light". If Mars in this horoscope is 26 degrees 42 minutes Aquarius, the Sun reaches the "warrior" on 3.2.63 at 1h32. Now, I have the dates I need for Mars' horoscope: the birth date of the "warrior".

In technical terms: A Persona Chart is the chart for the first transit of the Sun over the position of another natal planet. All Persona Charts 'happen' within the first year after a person's birth, when the Sun makes its first circle around it, and 'wakes up' one subpersona after the other.

We call this horoscope a "persona chart". For one, this horoscope describes one of my inner "personalities", and secondly, it is derived from "per-sonare" and therefore associated with the motif of "that which rings through". Each of the inner personalities rings through the whole consisting of all the other personalities. A special sound rings through the whole chart. An individual sound!

This inner personality has - an ascendant - a ruler of the first house - a Sun, which is always the protagonist (because the Sun take the place which was taken by Mars before) - again 12 characters on the stage (!) - a midheaven.

We can treat this horoscope like a normal horoscope, but we have to keep in mind that it is not our chart, but the chart of this one person within us. We have to take care not to take this horoscope for the whole.

Persona charts are horoscopes of independent personalities - we cannot stress this often enough. Personalities inside me. The birth chart is the horoscope of the most important inner personality, of my Sun. (Therefore the Sun does not get an extra persona chart, because the horoscope this personality would have a year after birth - that is when the Sun returns to the place it had at birth - has already a different name: it is called Solar Return Chart). All the other inner personalities are relegated to second place in "traditional" astrology.

Persona charts are horoscopes which promote the other personalities beside the Sun to the rank of protagonists. They take these personalities more seriously than the birth chart does. We think it is really unfair that on the stage of life only the one (Sun) protagonist is endowed with a biography, and that only his life is given description. The other personalities are simply seen as minor characters. For this reason we want to provide a method which allows the reader to provide the other characters with biographies (i.e. life descriptions) of their own. It will occur to you that these personalities have unjustly been neglected for so long, and - to go even further - that they themselves have an ego and their own members of the cast!