Foundations
Where does the chart show your public life — and your private one?
Your birth sky is cut by two lines at right angles to each other, and where they meet the zodiac you get the four angles of your chart. The Ascendant is one of them. The Midheaven and the IC are the other two.
The horizon is the horizontal line: it cuts the zodiac in the east at your Ascendant, where signs rise, and in the west at your Descendant, where they set. The meridian is the line perpendicular to it, running overhead: it cuts the zodiac at your Midheaven, the highest point the sky reached at your birth minute, and at your Imum Coeli, the point directly beneath your feet. Two lines, four angles, frozen at one moment — that cross is the skeleton every chart wheel is drawn on. It is also why the Ascendant sits on the left edge of the wheel with the Midheaven at the top: you are looking at your own sky, east on the left, overhead up. The Ascendant has an entry of its own, and it is the one to read first — it explains why the whole cross depends on your birth time and place rather than on your birth date alone.
Reputation, vocation, the role you hold in public, the thing strangers know you by. Not necessarily your job title. The shape of your contribution, and the direction you are visibly climbing.
Home, ancestry, the family you came from and the one you build, the base you retreat to. Everything the Midheaven displays is fed from here, which is why career questions so often turn out to be family questions.
Like the Ascendant, the Midheaven comes from the sky's daily rotation rather than the planets' orbits, so it needs a birth time. Without one, Cosmic Color Co leaves the angles and houses out of your chart rather than inventing them.
Both ends of the cross are part of your color: your Ascendant and your Midheaven each add the colors of the sign they fall in. The Descendant and IC are the degrees directly opposite, so those two set the whole cross, and the frame of your birth sky becomes part of your signature.