Astrology and Music: The Interval You Are Living In

Almost every person who books a reading asks me some version of the same question in the first ten minutes.

Is it a good chart?

They mean: is there a lot of difficulty in there. Are there many squares. Is the damage extensive. I understand the question — it comes from a real place, usually from a period in which life has been hard enough that the person would like to be told the hardness is nearly over.

But sit with what the question assumes. It assumes tension is a flaw in the design. That somewhere there exists a chart made only of soft angles, and that the person holding it is living a better life than you.

Nobody thinks this way about music.

Nobody asks a composer to write a piece without dissonance. Nobody wants ninety minutes of unbroken consonance — it is unbearable within about four minutes, and it goes nowhere, because nothing in it needs to move. Every piece of music you have ever loved is built from tension that has not yet resolved. The tension is the reason it moves at all.

This is the most useful thing music has to say to astrology, and it is why the two belong together far more literally than most people realise.

Relationship is what produces meaning

Start with the discovery the whole tradition rests on.

A single string, stopped nowhere, has no interval. Nothing about it is consonant or dissonant; it is simply a sound. Halve it and you get the octave. Stop it at two-thirds and you get the fifth; at three-quarters, the fourth. What produces musical quality is the proportion between two lengths — the relationship, not the object.

The Pythagoreans took this as a revelation about reality rather than about strings, and the West has been arguing about it ever since. But you do not need their metaphysics to see what happens next, because astrology is built on exactly the same operation.

A planet on its own tells you very little. What carries the meaning is the angle between two planets — and the angles are the same divisions.

Divide the circle by two and you have the opposition, 180°. By three, the trine, 120°. By four, the square, 90°. By six, the sextile, 60°. Those are the same divisions that give the octave, the fifth and the fourth — the identical arithmetic, performed on a circle instead of a string, and the resemblance is structural rather than poetic. In 1976 the English astrologer John Addey made this the basis of an entire system, reading the whole chart as harmonics — the circle divided by 5, by 7, by 9, each division producing its own quality, exactly as the overtone series does in sound.

So when I say I compose music from a birth chart, I am not translating between two unrelated languages. I am working in one grammar that happens to have two notations.

And here is the part that matters for a life rather than for a theory: in music, the simple divisions sound easy and the complex ones sound difficult — and the difficult ones are where everything interesting happens.

Kepler, and the song of misery

The one man who tried to measure this is worth meeting properly, because his story is stranger than the version usually told.

Johannes Kepler spent his life convinced the solar system was built on musical proportion. He first tried geometry — the five Platonic solids nested inside one another — and published it, and it did not quite fit. Decades later, working with Tycho Brahe's observations, he found the answer in motion: because the orbits are ellipses, each planet moves faster at perihelion and slower at aphelion, and if you take those two extreme angular velocities as lengths on a monochord, they give musical intervals. Mars comes out at roughly 2:3 — a perfect fifth.

He published it in 1619 as Harmonices Mundi. The three laws of planetary motion that every schoolchild now learns were, to him, minor by-products of the real search.

"The movements of the heavens," he wrote, "are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony, perceived by the intellect, not by the ear."

Then there is the detail I cannot stop returning to. Kepler worked out that the Earth's velocity varies by a semitone — from mi to fa and back. Mi–fa–mi. And in the margin he noted what those syllables spell in Latin: miseria, fames. Misery and famine. He was writing during the religious wars, persecuted by both sides, his mother tried for witchcraft. He measured the sky, found our planet singing a semitone, and heard in it exactly what he was living.

I want to be honest about the status of this. Kepler's planetary harmonies cannot be definitively verified today, and harmonic thinking of every kind carries a permanent risk: that we project the correspondence into the structure rather than find it there. Anyone working in this field who does not say that out loud is selling something. What survives the caution is a discipline of listening rather than a proof — and Kepler's mi–fa–mi remains, for me, one of the most honest things a scientist has ever written down, precisely because it is unprovable and true.

The intervals we call unbearable

Music history contains a lesson that no amount of psychological insight delivers as cleanly.

Take the tritone — three whole tones, the most unstable interval in the Western system. Medieval counterpoint avoided it. (The famous story that the Church banned it as diabolus in musica, the devil in music, is a myth; the phrase only appears in the eighteenth century, and you can hear tritones in Pérotin in the thirteenth. But the avoidance was real.) It was handled as something the rules did not know what to do with.

That same interval later became the engine of Western harmony. The dominant seventh chord — the chord that creates the expectation of resolution, the chord almost every piece of tonal music leans on to get home — contains a tritone at its centre. Jazz is largely built on it. The interval that could not be used became the mechanism by which music moves.

Nothing was added to the tritone in the intervening centuries. It did not become a better interval. What changed is that musicians stopped trying to eliminate it and learned what it was for.

I have watched exactly this happen inside people, and it is the whole of my work in one sentence.

Your chart is not a preference

So, the squares.

A square is friction — obstruction, stress, forced motion. In musical terms it does what syncopation does: displaces the accent, refuses the comfortable grid, creates movement through discomfort. An opposition is a genuine polarity, two functions facing each other across the whole diameter of the circle, each one seeing what the other cannot. A trine is fluency: the thing you were given, that costs you nothing, that you will probably undervalue for most of your life precisely because it never resisted you.

Now look at where you actually became someone.

Almost nobody grows through their trines. People grow at the friction points — the place where two parts of them want incompatible things and neither will withdraw. In a chart, those are the hard angles. In a life, they are the recurring situation you have not managed to arrange your way out of. In music they are the reason the piece has not ended yet.

And this is where the analogy stops being an analogy, because music also tells you what to do with the tension, and the instruction is very specific.

You do not remove a dissonance. You resolve it. And a resolution only carries weight in proportion to the dissonance that preceded it — a suspension that resolves after two beats is pleasant; the same suspension held for sixteen bars can undo a room. Which means the resolution requires the dissonance to be fully sounded first. You cannot resolve a chord you refuse to play.

Most spiritual work I encounter is an attempt to resolve a chord that was never played. To arrive at peace without having sounded the rage. To reach forgiveness without ever letting the betrayal be heard at full volume, in the body, with nobody managing it. The result is a kind of premature consonance that everyone in the room can feel is hollow — including, usually, the person performing it.

The tension in your chart is the material the piece is made of. What it costs you is also what it is asking you to become.

Why sound gets in where explanation does not

There is one more reason I work with music rather than only with words.

You have no earlids. Sight can be shut off by a muscle; hearing cannot. Sound arrives whether or not you agree to it, and it arrives in the body before it arrives in the mind — as pressure in the chest, as the involuntary catch in the breath when a harmony turns. By the time you have understood what a chord did to you, it has already done it.

That is why insight so often fails to change anything and why a piece of music can undo you in eleven seconds. Understanding enters through the part of us most practised at defending itself. Resonance does not knock.

The tantric traditions never treated this as metaphor. In their reading, sound is not something the universe contains; vibration is the texture of consciousness itself, and the deepest of it is anāhata — unstruck, sounding without anything being hit. You do not have to accept the metaphysics to notice the practical consequence: the body responds to vibration before the mind arrives to negotiate. In this work that is the point. A wound that has been analysed for fifteen years can still be intact. Something has to reach it that does not require its permission.

This is the layer I call the Symphony of the Spheres, and it is the last thing I offer anyone rather than the first — it has its own page here, and it asks for a body already willing to feel.

What I would ask you instead

So I would like to retire the question I get asked in the first ten minutes.

Not is it a good chart. A chart cannot be good or bad any more than a key signature can. What it can be is honest about where the friction sits, and what has been trying to move through it for most of your life.

The question I would ask instead is this:

Which tension have you been trying to delete — and what might it sound like if you finally let it be played all the way through?

Marco Kailash Nath

Follow me on Instagram

© 2026. All rights reserved TEA.

Letters from the cosmos

Occasional writings to inspire you