https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MnRMSq7wo0
Astrology goes both ways. I mean that literally, and as the great philosopher Aaliyah put it, let me see you go back, back, forth and forth.
Most of us read a chart like a runner on the starting block. Birth is the gun going off, and life sprints forward into open space. Converse charts flip that. They read your chart backward, into the years before you were born, on the idea that your birth moment is the center of your timeline instead of the start of it. Every step you take forward leaves an equal footprint behind you. So the year your middle-school crush dumped you at the spring fling because you couldn’t do the Macarena, your regular solar return looks that many years forward from your birth to describe it, and your converse solar return looks the same distance backward. Same heartbreak, logged in two directions.
Quick guardrail before anybody runs off confused. A converse chart is a different animal from reviewing your past. Looking at your 17th-birthday solar return to see what happened at 17 is still a regular direct chart. And it is not conception astrology either. I am not out here calculating your parents’ pre-coital concerto. We’re reading the sky behind your birth, not before your existence.
To find out whether rewinding the sky actually does anything, I ran Meghan Markle’s returns across her high-drama years. Start with the royal wedding.
One wedding, two charts
Read the direct chart for May 2018 without peeking at the headlines. The return ascendant lands in her natal 9th house: long voyages, foreign lands, religion. Its ruler, Jupiter, sits in the 7th of marriage and contracts, parked right on her natal Pluto, so the commitment cooking there carries life-altering weight, not a casual fling. Meanwhile Saturn sits on her Midheaven with her natal Neptune. In Uranian work the Midheaven is the self, the soul’s ego structure, so Saturn there drops a new seriousness and a heavy responsibility onto who she is, and it points to separation from her old career and her independence. A foreign journey, sacred vows, a status-shifting contract, and a weight on her identity. That doesn’t promise a wedding, but it raises a big thick caterpillar eyebrow.
Now flip to the converse chart, which rewinds to 1945. The ascendant swings to her natal 4th house of home, roots, and family, and it’s loaded: Pluto, Poseidon, and Juno clustered on the rising degree, with Saturn and Hades on the axis. Blend those and you get a contract (Juno) that blows up her home life (Pluto) in full public view (Poseidon), while her private family gets squeezed by hostile institutional pressure (Saturn-Hades). Same wedding, and this chart only wants to talk about the family.
Which is exactly what happened off to the side of the fairy tale. Her father got caught staging paparazzi photos and bailed on the wedding at the last minute, the British tabloids ran racist commentary about her background, and she quietly converted to the Church of England two months before the ceremony. The direct chart handed us the two-billion-viewer wedding. The converse chart handed us the family circus around it. Read them together and you’ve got the day the way it actually went down.
Why a backward chart would work at all
Here’s my working theory, and I haven’t seen anybody else connect these dots, so holler at me if you have. Physicist Julian Barbour has an idea called the Janus point, after the two-faced Roman god. In his telling, the Big Bang was a midpoint, everything compressed to its tightest shape and then expanding in two opposite directions at once. He describes it as two people standing on top of Mount Fuji and walking down opposite sides. Both of them feel like they’re walking forward. The universe is bi, baby.
Line that up with “as above, so below.” If the big universe expands both ways from a center, maybe we do too, and maybe we get two of them. Conception is the Janus point of the body, one cell expanding out into a meat sack. Birth is the Janus point of the soul, the first breath where your identity anchors into time. Your chart is built on that second point, so your timeline runs out from it forward and backward. A direct chart and a converse chart look nothing alike, decades apart with the planets in different signs, and they still describe the same year, the way 5 plus 3 and 6 plus 2 use different numbers and both land on 8.
And it’s happening to her right now
Fast-forward to her 2026 return, which is about a month old as I write this, so still warm. The direct chart has Uranus and Admetos sitting on an 11th-house Gemini ascendant, which is an earthquake in the social circle: a sudden rupture that jolts her out of a comfortable rest. While I was building my notes for this, the news broke that her personal number leaked out of a WhatsApp group for parents at her kid’s school, a day after word that they’d pulled the kids over security problems. Right on cue.
The converse chart shifts to her 2nd house of money, on Regulus, the little king, which reads as royal money or royal interference touching her security, tied to a writing or media project she’s doing tucked away. And there’s a haunting one: the asteroid Diana sits in her return 10th house, autonomy and freedom and personal space, while she moves back onto UK soil. I’m not saying she’s headed for Princess Diana’s fate. I am saying I hope she gets the security to be safe, and that she might want to borrow Michael Jackson’s grocery-store disguise kit: wig, sunglasses, fake mustache, go buy your M&M’s in peace.
If you’re reading direct returns only, you’re eating one slice of the pie, and we are astrological big backs around here. We need the other side. Converse timing works on progressions, solar arcs, lunar returns, basically any technique in the box, and the two charts are two angles on the same year. Look both ways before you cross the sky.
Want me to pull both sides of your chart for the year ahead? Book a reading.
Astrology is bi, and now you know why. Peace, homie.
