The Rules of Chart Interpretation - Rod Suskin

Minderwiz

Books on chart delineation and interpretation present challenges to the reader and to the author. For the reader the book needs to be concise, easy to follow and practically useful. By that I mean that given a chart the reader should be able to construct a delineation - a run down of planets in houses and signs and the way that they interact - using the book as a guide and having not too many difficulties in achieving the desired result.

For the author the challenge is to keep a highly complex body of knowledge directly relevant to the student, without confusing them or producing hundreds of pages of philosophical underpinning, caveats and detailed underpinning. This means that both reader and author are looking for a relatively short set of practical instructions or rules, that will enable the student to get to his or her goal with some reasonable understanding of what they are doing and why.

A further problem for both reader and author is what approach to Astrology should be reflected in the book. There used to be an obvious and standard answer to this. Use the approach that is dominant at the time of writing. In the second half of the Twentieth Century you would use a book that reflected the views of Psychological Counsellors who used Astrology in their Practise, such people as Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas or Stephen Arroyo. In the early Twenty First Century, there is something of a Traditional revival because of perceived difficulties with the Modern Approach but little in the way of contemporary guides to using traditional approaches. But books by medieval or hellenistic authors are not easily accessible, and take much knowledge for granted that has been lost in the intervening years.

Rod Suskin’s book is one of the very few attempts by a contemporary author to produce a guide book on chart delineation using medieval practices. Although it uses practices largely drawn from the late medieval period and the works of Lilly and Morin, it mentions the outer planets and in principle it could be used to provide a psychological delineation, though it’s not intended for such a purpose and it might not be the best way to achieve that end.

As with the Astrology of the period he draws on, there’s a rather mechanical method. However Suskin does tell his readers that eventually experience will enable them to know when to step outside some of the rules he expounds. I say ‘some’ because Suskin has some core rules which should not be broken except in very rare circumstances, mainly related to where common sense and experience say that there is a difficulty with a literal application. Guidebooks cannot cover every conceivable set of circumstances.

Suskin has 42 Rules for delineation, which seems a little excessive however half of them are derived from his 21 core rules. This still seems a lot but I think many students want to have clear guidance, at least to start with and applying rules is really the only way one can begin to delineate charts, having never done it before. Eventually experience will take over and some of the rules are modified or even discarded or broken. So if you are looking for clear guidance on process then this book does it.

Of course, this book, like all such books, is open to criticism, especially from established Astrologers who have different methods. So it is incumbent on us to put ourselves back to our own early learning. This book would certainly have helped me as I began to depart from an unhappy modern approach (I never liked Jungian psychology as the main object and medium of Astrology) and move towards a traditional approach.

This book shows how to use essential dignity to assess the condition of a planet and accidental dignity, such as house placement and aspects, to assess it’s strength and therefore make an assessment about how well it will express it’s function in the chart. He shows how house rulers are crucial to the process of integrating the various parts of the chart and shows how to deal with houses that either have no planets or houses that have two or more planets. He also shows how to deal with aspects and their role in chart delineation, which really is to either support or hinder the way a planet fulfils its function.

By it’s very nature there are over-simplifications and an assumption that the late medieval approach is ‘the’ traditional approach rather than ‘a’ traditional approach. But then trying to encompass a Hellenistic Approach or a detailed Morin or Lilly approach would vitiate the book as a guide to interpretation. So if you’re going to use the book bear in mind that there are traditional approaches from different periods that would contradict some of what Suskin says. The obvious areas is his use of scoring on Essential Dignities. Not only would Lilly use ptolemaic dignities rather than egyptian, but his scoring would contradict those of Suskin, at least in part. Suskin recognises that one and flags it in the text. Hellenistic authors didn’t use scoring systems (though there is a very limited reference to what might be one in Ptolemy) and this is not flagged. Nor would Hellenistic Astrologers assess which planet is the dominant one in as aspect in quite the same was as Suskin does. So readers should realise that there are variants and Suskin’s account should not be taken as completely ‘gospel’ for the tradition.

The same is true about his injunction to always use a quadrant system, such as Placidus, Regiomontanus, etc in chart delineation. That indeed was the case in the late medieval period and in the work of Lilly and Morin. However it is not true of Hellenistic Astrology or early Medieval Astrology.

So whereas Suskin says the student should only use Whole Sign Houses where a birth time is unknown or uncertain, He is out of step with the origins of Astrology and the work of many contemporary Astrologers involved in the traditional revival. Personally I’d advise beginners to use Whole Sign Houses because that was the system that was originally intended to be used. But they also need to be aware that they will need quadrant houses at a later stage (many prediction methods require them) and they should eventually be able to use both, types for delineation as it is useful to take a second view of the chart from a different perspective.

There’s no treatment of Temperament, in the book, something that later traditional authors would start with. Combining this book with Dorian Greenbaum’s book on Temperament would not only get round the omission but also provide a sound basis for establishing a traditional approach.

Lastly I have some unease about Suskin's reference to Karma. There are 31 references to it, in the last one - a footnote towards the very end, he recognises that Western culture has no concept of Karma and neither has Islamic culture. If he had simply kept to a mention of ‘Fate’ or ‘God’s Will’ both of which are cited by Astrologers across the tradition, then I would be quite happy about the book. But he gives an incorrect impression.

However a student wanting to know how to carry out a traditional chart delineation will find this and extremely useful book.

This book is available in Kindle format as well as the usual paperback format.