The incarnation cross is often presented as the big theme of your life. In practice, it is a group of 4 gates taken from your chart, plus an angle that comes from your profile.
The 4 gates of your cross
Your cross brings together the gates of two bodies at two moments:
- the Sun and the Earth when you were born;
- the Sun and the Earth about 88 days before your birth, when the Sun sat 88 degrees earlier in the zodiac.
The Earth is always opposite the Sun, so its gate follows from the Sun’s. In practice your cross depends on two positions of the Sun, which is why it rarely changes from one hour to the next. On our calculator it shows up as Sun/Earth | Sun/Earth, for example 13/7 | 1/2, followed by the angle.
The Sun moves into a new gate roughly every 5 to 6 days, so people born in the same week often share the same cross.
The 3 angles
The angle comes from your profile and nothing else:
- Right angle: profiles 1/3, 1/4, 2/4, 2/5, 3/5, 3/6 and 4/6. The system describes it as a life path that mostly follows your own track. About 65% of charts.
- Left angle: profiles 5/1, 5/2, 6/2 and 6/3. A path where meeting other people plays a big part. About 33% of charts.
- Juxtaposition: the 4/1 profile only. A path described as very fixed, one that rarely swerves. About 2% of charts.
These percentages add up the profile frequencies measured on 20,000 charts: see our frequencies.
How many crosses are there?
The usual count is 192 crosses: 64 possible gates for the birth Sun, times 3 angles. They carry 112 names, because some names are shared: a right angle name covers 4 Sun gates, a left angle name covers 2, and each juxtaposition cross has its own. The full list is at the bottom of this page, with one page per cross. The names come from Ra Uru Hu’s books.
The classic texts on each cross are very general, which is exactly where the Forer effect thrives. Our cross pages stick to the 4 gates, how common the cross really is, and a test to run on yourself.
How to use it
The most useful move is to read your 4 gates one at a time. Your birth Sun gate carries the most weight in the chart. Open each gate’s page and keep the line that fits.
Read the gate of your birth Sun, then a neighboring gate picked at random. For each, count how many sentences sound like you. If the gap is small, don’t put much weight on your cross.
The cross is the most symbolic part of the chart. It deserves more distance than your type or your authority, which rest on stricter calculation rules.