Forty lines is too many: which ones to read first

Start with the angle, not the planet

The four line types are different in kind rather than in strength, and the angle is what decides which part of life a line is about. If you are asking a question about work, the MC lines are the relevant set and the other thirty are noise for that purpose. If the question is about home, it is the IC lines.

This is the most useful filter available and it is barely mentioned, because most writing organises itself by planet. Filtering by angle first cuts forty lines to ten before you have thought about a single planet.

Then the personal planets

The Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars move quickly, so their lines are genuinely yours: somebody born a day later has them somewhere noticeably different. Jupiter and Saturn move slowly enough that people born in the same year share them approximately, and Uranus, Neptune and Pluto move so slowly that their lines are close to a generational feature.

That is a real distinction rather than a preference. A Pluto line is shared with everybody born within a couple of years of you, which does not make it meaningless but does make it less personal than a Moon line. This site uses the same distinction when ranking cities.

Then proximity, with the birth time in mind

Closer is conventionally stronger, and how close counts is convention rather than measurement. What is not convention is the error: a birth time rounded to the nearest half hour moves every line by roughly 800 km. If your time came off a birth certificate to the minute, proximity is worth taking seriously. If it came from a relative's memory, treat anything under a thousand kilometres as the same distance.

This is the one place where being honest about your data changes the reading rather than just qualifying it.

What not to do with the ranking

Do not treat it as a score. The order above is a way of deciding what to read first, not a claim that a Moon line is stronger than a Saturn line in some absolute sense. A Saturn MC line is the single most relevant thing on the map to somebody asking about their career, whatever the ordering says.

And do not read forty lines. A map you have interpreted exhaustively will support any conclusion you brought to it, which is the standard failure of every technique that produces this much material at once. Pick the question first.

Frequently asked questions

Which planet line is the strongest?

None of them, in the abstract. The useful question is which is most relevant to what you are asking, and that is decided by the angle first and the planet second. A map read without a question in mind will support whatever you already suspected.

Are the outer planet lines worth reading at all?

Yes, but with the knowledge that you share them with everybody born around the same time. They describe something closer to a generational relationship with a place than a personal one. The personal planets, which move fast enough to be genuinely individual, are the ones that distinguish your map from a stranger's.

How much does my birth time change the ranking?

It changes proximity, which is one of the three filters, and it changes it by a lot: roughly 800 km for a time rounded to the half hour. It does not change which planet or which angle a line belongs to, so the first two filters are robust to a poor birth time and the third is not.