This book is an outstanding read. I’m not sure that it’s suitable for beginners, although it is a crash course through the way that astrology functions. Rather than write a traditional textbook, Robert Hand has given us an interpretive overview of what each component of the natal chart means.

This is not a cookbook, where you examine your chart and are given a single interpretation. Instead, Hand breaks the chart into its individual components: elements, quadriplicities, planets, angles, aspects, signs, and houses. Then, he explains how each of these things must be interpreted.

For instance, when googling the third house, you’ll often find that it’s related to primary education, the local environment, and so on. But, what is the underlying meaning that unifies these different things? In Hand’s view–and I think he’s correct–it’s the “lower mind.” That is, it is the part of the mind that runs on auto-pilot. Education fits here because it helps to produce that auto-pilot. The ninth house, in contrast, is about environments where you have to think and reflect on. Your daily habits aren’t going to save you if you get pulled out of a small Midwestern town and get dropped off in Dakar.

One of the most insightful parts of the book was the segment on the planets. A lot of these are intuitive to me: Venus blends or merges, Mars separates, Jupiter expands, Saturn limits, Uranus is a lightning-strike, Neptune dissolves, and Pluto transforms. But, what does Mercury do? Hand argues that it forms. It takes all of the information that we absorb each day and molds it into something meaningful. His articulation of it was an “ah-ha! 💡” moment for me, and it helped put this all into place.

The one section on the book that I found challenging was his bit on midpoints. He argues in here that they’re really quite important, and they’re made to be something much more complex than they actually are. After reading this, I still think they’re pretty complex, and I’d rather not engage with them right now.

Obviously, there is far more here than I could put into a single review. But, for those who have the fundamentals down and want to make sense of the underlying logic of astrology, you could hardly do better than this book.