Midpoint

Meaning

A midpoint is the point halfway between two bodies along the zodiac. Between a Sun at 10° Aries and a Moon at 20° Gemini, 70° apart, the midpoint lies 35° from each, at 15° Taurus. It is usually taken on the shorter arc. Its opposite point, here 15° Scorpio, belongs to it too: midpoint astrologers treat the pair as one axis.

A midpoint is not a body, and alone it is quiet. It comes alive when a third body or angle stands on it, or on its opposite point. That body is then read as joining the two, carrying their meeting. Written Sun/Moon = Venus, it reads as Venus bringing together the self and the feelings: warmth and affection at the meeting of will and need.

Midpoints refine a chart. Two bodies in no aspect at all can still be tied by a third standing at their midpoint, and a chart that looks plain at first can show a dense web of links.

In practice

• Sun/Moon is read as the inner partnership of will and feeling, and in relationships as the place of union. A body on it colours how a person joins with others.
• Venus/Mars is read as attraction, love and desire: a body on it shows how affection and drive combine.
• Mars/Saturn is read as effort under constraint: endurance, discipline, hard work. A body on it is read as how a person meets resistance and keeps going.
• Sun/Ascendant and Moon/Ascendant link the self and the feelings with the way a person meets the world. They depend on the birth time.
• Transits and midpoints: a slow planet crossing a natal midpoint is read as activating both bodies at once.

Across traditions

• The lots of Hellenistic astrology are close cousins: a lot is found by adding and taking away positions, as a midpoint is, but laid off from the Ascendant.
• The composite chart chart is built entirely of midpoints, one for each pair of matching bodies in two charts.

Origin and history

Alfred Witte, of the Hamburg School founded in the 1920s, made midpoints central to his method. He read “planetary pictures”, groups of bodies balanced around a shared midpoint, and used a dial to see them. The core of his rules was published as Regelwerk für Planetenbilder (1928). Reinhold Ebertin kept the midpoints, dropped Witte’s hypothetical planets, and added psychological readings; his Kombination der Gestirneinflüsse (1940), known in English as The Combination of Stellar Influences, became the standard book on midpoints. Ebertin’s notation, A/B for the midpoint of A and B, is still the usual one.

How Ulune calculates it

• A midpoint is taken on the shorter arc between the two bodies.
• The chart table gives five midpoints: Sun/Moon, Sun/Ascendant, Moon/Ascendant, Venus/Mars and Mars/Saturn. Each is listed with the bodies standing on it, or on its opposite point, within an orb of 1°30′.
• Every body, point and angle of the chart can stand on a midpoint, except the two that make it and the lots.
• A full list gives all 78 midpoints of the ten planets, the North Node, the Ascendant and the Midheaven, in zodiac order. It can be narrowed to the midpoints of one body.
• Without a birth time, a midpoint with an angle is marked uncertain, and so is a contact that may not hold through the whole birth day.
• In a composite chart, every body is itself a midpoint of the two charts.