What Is a Bearing?

A word with two meanings

In astrology a bearing usually means a compass direction. Local Space astrology draws each planet's direction from your birthplace as a line running out across the map. Our engine computes those lines too, as a separate technique.

The Bearing on this page is something else: a point on the Human Design wheel, found by reading the solar and lunar charts together. We borrowed sailing words for it (heading, course, tacking). We didn't borrow the Local Space method.

The tradition: Local Space is an established astrological technique, set out in Steve Cozzi's Planets in Locality (1986). It is unrelated to the Bearing described here.

The Crossing: two rings on one hinge

Your solar chart's cross is anchored on the Sun and your lunar chart's on the Moon. Draw each as a ring of the 64-gate wheel. The two rings share one hinge, the axis of your Personality North Node, which is the same in both charts. The hinge is astronomy: the Moon's orbit really does cross the plane of the Sun's apparent path along the Nodes.

The leading ring stands upright: the solar ring for a day birth, the lunar ring for a night birth. The other ring is tilted about the hinge by kappa, the acute angle between your Personality Sun's axis and your Personality Moon's axis, anywhere from 0° to 90°. The size of that tilt is our convention. The Moon's real orbit is tilted about 5.1°; we use kappa instead, so the figure shows how far apart the two crosses sit.

Soul Cartography: The hinge on the Nodes is physical. The tilt by kappa, the choice of which ring leads, and the name Crossing are NightNight Charts'.

The Bearing itself

Treat your leading Personality point and the other chart's Personality point as two arrows of length one, each on its own ring. Their average is a third arrow, V = (S + M) ÷ 2, and three things are read from it.

With no tilt, the heading would be the nearer midpoint of the Sun and Moon, a long-standing idea in Western astrology. The tilt about the Nodes moves it by an amount that depends on where the Sun and Moon sit relative to the Nodes, which is why a Bearing needs both charts and the Nodal axis together.

• Heading: V's direction, projected onto the leading ring and read on the wheel as a gate and line. This is your Bearing.
• Length, or course: from 0, when the two points face each other, to 1, when they coincide. Four bands are named: straight course (0.8 and above), steady reach (0.5 to 0.8), tacking (0.2 to 0.5) and open water (below 0.2).
• Pull: how far V leans out of the leading ring's plane toward the other chart, in degrees.

Soul Cartography: When the length falls below 0.05, which happens close to a Full Moon, the heading is treated as undefined. The gate is still shown, and carries less weight.

What the studies are for

The engine includes a spread and sensitivity study of the Bearing. It samples births evenly in time from 1940 to 2010 and across inhabited latitudes, and measures how evenly Bearings fall across the 64 gates and four courses, how far a Bearing moves when the birth time moves by an hour, how often the choice of leading chart changes the gate, and how often the Bearing shares a gate with the Sun, the Moon or their plain midpoint. A second study measures how often planets sit along the Bearing's longitude, against a random longitude in the same sky.

These check whether the construction behaves like a sensible measurement. They don't check whether a Bearing describes anyone. The results aren't published yet, so we're not quoting numbers from them.

The method

The current method

• Take the Personality Sun, Personality Moon and Personality North Node longitudes from the same ephemeris as both charts.
• Decide the lead from sect: the lunar ring leads for a night birth, the solar ring for a day birth, and the solar ring when sect is uncertain.
• Compute kappa, the acute angle between the Sun's axis and the Moon's axis (0° to 90°).
• Place S, the leading point, on the upright ring and M, the other point, on the ring tilted by kappa about the Node axis. Average them: V = (S + M) ÷ 2.
• Read the heading as a gate and line on the standard wheel, the length of V as the course, and the angle of V out of the leading plane as the pull.
• Also compute the Bearing with the other ring upright. It is shown for transparency, and read in full when sect is uncertain.

Why we do it this way

• The two charts have to be read together somewhere. A single derived point gives that joint reading a concrete anchor instead of a list of comparisons.
• The Nodal axis is the one line both charts share in the sky, so hinging the rings on it ties the construction to real geometry.
• Tilting by kappa rather than by the Moon's 5.1° orbital tilt makes the figure show how far apart the two crosses sit, which is what the reading is about.
• Averaging two arrows gives a length as well as a direction, so the method can say when the two charts nearly cancel and the heading should carry less weight.

What it assumes

• That the solar and lunar charts are both meaningful. The Bearing inherits the lunar chart's premise.
• That the chart that led at birth, decided by sect, should stand upright. With the other ring upright the Bearing can land on a different gate, so this choice matters.
• That the birth time is accurate. The Moon moves about half a degree an hour, and sect can change near sunrise or sunset.

What is still experimental

• The whole construction. It is new, and we know of no precedent for it in Human Design.
• The names: the eight Crossing families, set in 45° bands around the Moon's principal phases, and the four course names are draft proposals.
• The Bearing texts for each gate, in a solar-led and a lunar-led form, which we wrote.
• An exploratory listing of the planets that sat along the Bearing's longitude at birth.

What would change or falsify it

• If small, realistic errors in birth time moved most Bearings to a different gate, the Bearing would be too unstable to read for most people. The spread study measures this.
• If Bearings clustered on a few gates rather than spreading across all 64, the construction would reflect geometry more than the individual chart.
• If a Bearing almost always landed on the same gate as the Sun, the Moon or their plain midpoint, it would add nothing those points do not already give.
• If readers could not tell their own Bearing reading from someone else's more often than chance, the reading would not be earning its place. That test has not been run.

Where it lives

• The Crossing, the Bearing, its course and pull, the Moon's phase and the Bearing reading: identityos-engine, packages/identityos-nocturnal, the crossing module.
• The Bearing texts, gate entries and framework the reading is composed from: identityos-engine, packages/identityos-nocturnal/data.
• The spread and sensitivity study, and the study of planets along the Bearing against a random control: identityos-engine, scripts/bearing_study.py and scripts/bearing_sky_study.py.
• Local Space, the unrelated astrological meaning of bearing: identityos-engine, packages/identityos-locality, the Local Space module.

Related

• How the reading is built
• Human Design, in Soul Cartography
• What is lunar Human Design?
• Solar vs lunar Human Design
• How the lunar Design is calculated
• Standard vs lunar Human Design, side by side
• All research

Common questions

Is a Bearing part of Human Design?

No. It is NightNight Charts' construction, built from the standard chart and the lunar chart together. No Human Design school uses it.

Is it the same as a Local Space bearing?

No. Local Space draws compass directions from your birthplace across a map. A Bearing is a gate and line on the Human Design wheel.

Why does it depend on whether I was born by day or by night?

The chart that led at your birth stands upright in the construction and the other is tilted against it. Swapping them can give a different gate, so sect decides, and the alternative is shown when sect is uncertain.

What does open water mean?

That you were born close to a Full Moon, when the Sun and Moon nearly face each other, so the two directions almost cancel. The gate is still shown, but it carries less weight.

Has the Bearing been validated?

No. The geometry is exact and reproducible, but there's no evidence yet that a Bearing describes a person. It's a way of reading the two charts together. Test it against your own life.