Several points spring to mind when I look at the location of the MC in relation to the zodiac.Knowing where North is reveals instantly where the stars are at their highest altitude. The intimate relations between my geography, my sky and my life are confirmed.

However, if I don’t know where North is, and despite the fact that I am very familiar with the constellations and how the relative positions of their main stars change as their imaginary shapes roll across the sky, I find it very difficult to orientate myself to true North.

If getting accurate bearings is my aim, I find true South and project the meridian back over my head. The highest zodiac constellation is not due North. It gives me a rough idea, which I can adjust if enough time elapses to indicate which stars are ascending and which are descending.

If I am simply in a forest of stars which I am identifying, the Ascendant and Descendant are the East and West, and North is near enough to halfway between the two.

The point is that the symbolism of the transit of stars, planets or signs can be derived mathematically—and how exciting it must have been to assist at the birth of coordinate geometry, the measurement of time and the practice of geodetics—but not from immediate experience.

For my purpose, which is primarily to encourage you to experience the night sky for yourself, the MC, which according to my understanding of convention represents the direction of your mission in life, can primarily be symbolised by the highest visible or imaginable sector of the zodiac, and only secondarily related to the theoretical moment of its transit.

Here is where it is, I say, and it is welling or subsiding, possibly ascending in the social quadrant or descending in the personal. Perhaps the quadrants should be established in the same way, for it is also problematic to directly establish the cardinal directions by observing the Sun’s transit.

At the end of the day, as it were, I am happy to disturb convention, and to raise questions which resonate with direct experience and reconnect geometry and observation. In this case, your navel-gazing might be enhanced by allowing the question, how will the orientation of your Medium Zodiaci to culmination influence the resolution of the opposition of your Ascendant and Descendant, in view of its square with both?