Birth Time Rectification

When getting your natal chart read, one of the first things the astrologer will ask you for is your birth data: date, time and place of birth. Two of these - date and place - no problems! But the third, birth time, is often more problematic. Can we trust our mother’s memory? Did the midwife write it down correctly? Or perhaps only after a long pause? What about when we’re 5th of 7 children, and parents can’t remember whether 5:30am was you, Alice or Nate? And perhaps those who might have had memory of our birth have long gone… The good news is that there is something that we can do about birth times which are vague or completely uncertain.

Rectification: Deducing Unknown or vague Birth times

This is a process of working back though significant biographical events in someone’s life, in combination with an awareness of their physical and energetic bodies, in order to deduce a workable - and helpfully accurate - birth time.

It’s particularly important when the birth time is unknown, as is often the case with adopted children. But it is also invaluable in gaining some degree of precision when there is uncertainty or only an approximate time available. Other methods of doing this exist – eg. computer rectifying and dowsing using a pendulum – but genuine human-calculated rectification, if done well, is generally the most trustworthy. 

In my work reading horoscopes I find it really helps to have a fairly accurate birth time. A time of birth known to within about 30 minutes significantly ‘grounds’ the chart. This means that I can better glean how the archetypal characters that the planets in the chart are representing actually express or manifest in the client's life, how the potentials come to earth, so to speak - both in a ‘personality’ way and also for the purpose of understanding the present and future circumstances. So, whilst reading a chart of unknown birth time is still going to be insightful and of help, having a more precise time enables me to be more accurate, more useful, and to work deeper with my client and in a more personal and relevant way. 

No rectification work is guaranteed to give you your exact time, particularly if the ‘window’ of time in which you may have been born is very wide; it is a challenging process, involving an almost infinite number of choices (and you can see a little of what is involved here in this somewhat brief rectification of a public figure). But I will work on the information that you give me until I feel satisfied that it represents the You that I experience, the You that you show me through your biographical information and presence. So I do appreciate you being open and generous with the information you give me. 

I would say here that I have done rectifications for a couple of adopted people who have, some time after the rectification, met with their birth mothers and had the birth times I came up with confirmed. This is gratifying for me, but shows the process does work. Almost inevitably, too, the interpretation of a client’s chart after I’ve completed a rectification reinforces the rectified time, giving me a wonderful sense of confirmation.

There is a school of thought, for which I (perhaps contrarily!) have quite some sympathy, which believes rectification is, from one perspective, unnecessary and misses a fundamental point of the astrological phenomenon. Followers of this approach would say that the time of birth a client presents to an astrologer must be taken as the most appropriate or ‘right’ time for that particular astrological reading, and it will prove to yield a relevant and useful description of where the client is at that particular time in their lives and what they need to know. This is subtle stuff, and takes astrology right to the nub of its ‘mechanics’ - why does astrology work in the first place?; if you’re interested in this I could refer you to some exciting writing on it, for example outlined in this paper by Kirk Little. 

But, if you are drawn to the idea of rectifcation, then, from what I’ve seen in my work, the results can be extremely relevant to, and somehow symbolise - or be synchronous with - a significant turning point in a person’s life: often they move into a new, perhaps even more authentic, identity concurring with this new birth time. Sometimes the process itself can move some deep stuff within the client, and it can certainly be worth being a bit prepared for this.

Contact me if you’d like to discuss this further or book in for your own rectification. I explain how I carry out this process with you, and list the sorts of thing I would need from you, in this document here; the cost is shown on the Prices page, but does depend to some extent on how vague your birth time is.