← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 222/235
Composite chart
What it is
A composite chart is one chart made from two. Instead of comparing two people's planets, as synastry does, it averages them: for every planet and point, it takes the midpoint between the first person's position and the second's. The composite Sun sits halfway between the two Suns, the composite Moon halfway between the two Moons, and so on round the wheel.
The result is read as the chart of the relationship itself — the couple, the friendship or the partnership as a third thing that neither person is on their own, with a temperament, purpose and sore spots of its own.
Where it comes from
The method was set out by John Townley in the early 1970s and made a staple of modern relationship astrology by Robert Hand's Planets in Composite (1975). It is a twentieth-century technique; the older tradition compared charts rather than merging them.
How it is worked out
- Nearer midpoints. Any two positions have two midpoints, opposite each other. The composite uses the nearer one, on the shorter arc between them. When the two positions are close to opposite, the choice becomes delicate, and a small change in either can flip a composite planet to the other side of the zodiac.
- The houses. Houses are the most debated part. One way takes each house cusp, or at least the Midheaven, as the midpoint of the two corresponding cusps. Hand preferred to take the composite Midheaven and derive the Ascendant and the other cusps from it for the latitude where the couple live. The two methods can give different rising signs, so schools differ.
- The aspects are then read inside the composite chart as in any chart.
Because a composite is an average and not a moment, it can show things no real sky could: composite Mercury or Venus further from the composite Sun than they can ever stand in the heavens, for example. It cannot be progressed as a birth chart can, although astrologers do follow transits to its points.
How it is read
The composite is read much like a natal chart, but for the bond rather than a person:
- the composite Sun — what the relationship is for, its central purpose;
- the composite Moon — its emotional climate, what makes it feel safe;
- Venus and Mars — its affection and its drive;
- Saturn — what holds it together, and where it feels heavy;
- the houses — the areas of life the relationship tends to live through.
Most astrologers read it alongside synastry, not instead of it: synastry for how two people strike each other, the composite for what they make together. As with every relationship technique, it describes tendencies and themes, not the fate of the relationship; many "difficult" composites belong to couples who did the work and stayed happily together.
Composite or Davison?
The Davison chart answers the same question differently. Where the composite averages two sets of positions, the Davison finds the moment and place halfway between the two births and casts a real chart for it. Some astrologers prefer one, some use both.
In a reading here
Composite readings here build the chart from the nearer midpoint of each pair of planets, and take each house cusp as the midpoint of the two corresponding cusps. A composite-transits reading follows the current sky across the composite's points.