← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 4/164
The design moment
The design moment is the second of the two moments an Embodied Energy Chart is cast for. It is the instant, before birth, when the Sun stood exactly 88 degrees of arc earlier along the zodiac than it did at birth. The planets at that moment make up the built-in side of the chart; the planets at birth make up the aware side.
Degrees, not days
The rule is usually shortened to "88 days before birth", and that is close but not right. The measure is the Sun's travel, not the calendar. Because the Earth's orbit is slightly oval, the Sun appears to move faster through the zodiac in early January (just over a degree a day) and slower in early July (a little under). So 88 degrees can take noticeably different amounts of time:
- for a birth in mid-February, whose 88 degrees fall across the fast winter months, the design moment is about 86½ days earlier;
- for a birth in mid-August, whose 88 degrees fall across the slow summer months, it is about 92 days earlier.
Those are the extremes; most births fall in between. A difference of a day or more matters, because the Moon moves about thirteen degrees a day — more than two whole gates. Counting 88 calendar days would put the built-in Moon in the wrong gate for a large share of people, and could change a channel, a centre or the type.
How we find it
We do not count days at all. We take the Sun's exact longitude at birth, subtract 88 degrees, and then search for the moment the Sun reached that point. The search starts about 88 days back, asks the ephemeris where the Sun actually was, corrects the guess by however far it missed (divided by the Sun's speed that day), and repeats. It settles to well under a thousandth of a second of arc in a handful of steps. Then an ordinary chart is cast for the instant found.
Two consequences follow from doing it this way:
- Place does not matter. The design moment is a single universal instant. It is the same for anyone born at the same instant anywhere on Earth, and the built-in chart is read in universal time. Place matters only for converting the local birth time to a universal one in the first place.
- Birth time matters, but gently here. If the birth time is an hour out, the design moment is out by about an hour too. That barely moves the built-in Sun, but it moves the built-in Moon by about half a degree, which can be enough to change its line or, near an edge, its gate.
Why 88 degrees
The tradition gives the figure as part of the system as it was received, and connects it to a stage of development before birth. We take no position on that claim: we describe the chart as the tradition defines it. The figure does have an elegant arithmetical consequence, though. Eighty-eight degrees is just under ninety-four lines of the wheel, so the built-in Sun always sits three or four lines further round than the aware Sun. That is why only twelve profiles exist out of the thirty-six pairs of lines one might imagine — and why, in most people's profile, the second number is two lines on from the first (counting on past 6 back to 1, so 5/1 and 6/2 follow the same rule as 1/3).
It is also, loosely, a quarter of the zodiac. The two sets of planets sit about a quarter-turn apart on the wheel, a little like a solar arc run backwards — though the method is different, since every planet here is taken from its real position at the earlier moment, not moved by the Sun's arc.
In your chart
The date and time of the design moment are printed with the activation table, beside the built-in column. On the ring of sixty-four gates the two sets of markers sit about a quarter of the way round from each other. If the built-in Moon sits close to a gate boundary and the birth time is rough, it is the first value worth treating with care.