Astrology Basics in 5 Minutes: Signs, Houses, Planets, Nakshatras

A Vedic birth chart is built from four layers, and reading any chart, your own or a celebrity's, comes down to combining them: which sign a planet sits in, which house that sign falls into from the ascendant, which planet it is, and which of the 27 nakshatras its degree falls in.

The twelve signs, rashis, are fixed thirty degree slices of the sky, Aries through Pisces. A planet's sign is the broadest statement about it: which of the twelve is where it stands.

The twelve houses, bhavas, are counted from the ascendant, the sign rising on the eastern horizon at the exact moment of birth, which is why the birth time matters so much. The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra answers what each house governs one at a time, in chapter 11: the first is the body and the self, and the chapter continues house by house through the twelfth.

The nine grahas are the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and the two lunar nodes, Rahu and Ketu. The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra gives each a role rather than a fixed outcome: chapter 3 names the Sun as governing the soul and the Moon the mind, among the others, which is why the Moon's sign and nakshatra carry particular weight in this system, enough that the Vimshottari dasha sequence, the timeline of planetary periods that runs through a whole life, is set entirely from the Moon's position at birth.

The 27 nakshatras divide the zodiac further, into roughly 13 degree 20 minute segments, each with its own ruling planet. A planet's nakshatra is a finer address than its sign alone, and it is what starts the Vimshottari dasha sequence: the specific nakshatra the Moon occupies at birth decides which planetary period a life begins under.

Put together, a single line like "the Moon is in Taurus, in the second house, in the nakshatra Rohini" is already reading all four layers at once. That is the whole grammar. What differs between traditions and practitioners is how those four are weighed and combined, which is a much longer conversation than five minutes.