Reading a head of state's term: ingresses, profections and the limits of the method
Mundane astrology is the oldest branch of the subject and the one most often practised badly. Predictions about governments are easy to make, hard to falsify, and attract a kind of confidence that the technique does not support. It is worth setting out how the judgement is actually built, and where it stops.
Three charts, in order
The ingress
The chart of the Sun's entry into Aries, cast for the capital of the country in question, is the standard base for the year. It is local: the same ingress produces different charts, and different judgements, for different capitals. The angles and the lord of the Ascendant describe the condition of the country; the tenth house and its lord describe the government.
Where the ingress falls close to an equinox or a season boundary, the quarterly ingresses are read as well, and the tradition has rules about which takes precedence.
The inauguration
The chart of the moment a government takes office is the chart of that government as an entity — not of the person. It is read like any inception: lord of the Ascendant for the administration itself, tenth for its standing, second for its finances, seventh for its open opponents, twelfth for what works against it out of sight.
Inauguration charts have an advantage that most mundane charts lack: the time is documented to the minute, publicly, and not reconstructed.
The individual
A head of state's own chart is read with ordinary natal technique — profection, directions, the solar revolution — and it answers a different question from the other two. It describes what happens to the person. A government can fail while its leader prospers, and the reverse.
Confusing these three is the commonest error in mundane work. A difficult profection for the individual is not a prediction about the country.
What the agreement of charts is worth
The traditional standard is that testimonies must agree. A difficulty shown in the ingress for the capital, repeated in the inauguration chart's second house, and reflected in the leader's profection, is worth stating. Any one of the three alone is not.
This is a demanding standard and it rules out most of what is published as mundane astrology, which is generally a single striking configuration written up at length.
Where the method stops
Three limits should be stated plainly, because they are what separate this from commentary with charts attached.
The chart does not know the politics. It shows pressure, conflict, gain and loss. Which policy, which faction, which direction — these come from the astrologer's own opinions, and they should be labelled as such or left out.
Retrospective fit proves nothing. Any period of any government contains difficulty and success, and both can be matched to configurations afterwards. The only judgement worth anything is one recorded before the period it describes, with dates.
The technique is not a licence to speak about a living person's character. A chart may be public; the conclusions an astrologer draws about someone who has not asked for a reading are not therefore publishable. Our own position is that mundane work should address offices, events and countries — not the psychology of named individuals.
Worked mundane judgements, recorded in advance, appear in the Tradition.