Astrocartography Books and Courses Worth Your Time
My first astrocartography reading came from another astrologer. I paid for it. Then I asked my questions and the answers came back thin. So I went after the books instead.
Fifteen years on, I have read every published title in this field. All of them. The whole shelf fits inside one armful, which says a lot about how young this work still is. Below is what each book teaches, ranked by how much of it I still use. Courses after that. Then the certification question, which has a short answer nobody selling a program wants to give you.
What the Whole Astrocartography Shelf Adds Up To
Roughly a dozen titles. That is the complete published literature on planetary lines. Natal astrology could swallow a decade of reading and still leave gaps. This field cannot.
The smallness cuts both ways, though. Reading everything is genuinely possible here. Almost nothing has been checked twice, however. Two authors will hand you opposite readings of the same Saturn line. Neither one shows their working. So you end up doing what I did. Read all of it, then test the claims against your own history. That testing produced the full guide to planetary lines on this site.
The Six Astrocartography Books I Keep Recommending
Prices swing wildly across this shelf. One title sits at fourteen dollars new. Another goes for two hundred used, because it went out of print and never came back.
The Psychology of Astrocartography
Jim Lewis wrote this with Kenneth Irving. It came out in 1997, after Lewis had already died. Still the deepest book in the field, and nothing else is close.
What makes it different is the refusal to hand you a lookup table. Lewis argues every line through psychology instead. Your Saturn line is not a bad place. It is where a specific pressure gets applied to you, over and over, until you deal with it. That framing changed how I read maps for good.
Used copies run expensive. Worth the money anyway, if you plan to practice rather than browse.
The Book of Maps and International Interpretations
Two companion volumes carry the Astro Carto Graphy name. One collects maps drawn for well-known charts. The other reads specific cities and countries against specific lines.
I treat the international interpretations volume as a sanity check rather than a source. Somebody writes that Paris on a Venus line means romance. Fine. My own line meanings came out of testing instead. Useful as reference, weak as teaching.
Where in the World, by Erin Sullivan
Sullivan puts astrocartography and the relocation chart side by side. Nobody else does that properly. The two tools answer different questions and can disagree with each other, which beginners find out the hard way.
Denser writing than the others. Slower going. Read it third, once relocation has started to interest you.
From Here to There, by Martin Davis
Davis wrote the practical manual. Astromapping is his word for the whole area. He walks through paran lines, local space and the plotting mechanics, with worked examples you can follow.
His other title, Astrolocality Astrology, covers similar ground at shorter length. Either one works. Both stay in print, which cannot be said for Lewis.
An Astrologer’s Guide to Where You’ll Thrive
Clarisse Monahan published this one in 2025 with Penguin Random House. It hit number one in the category fast. She reads lines at Soho House locations, London through to Mexico City.
This book is the one to hand a friend who has never heard the word. Clean writing. Real clarity on the four angles. The trade-off is baked into the format, though. A mass-market book gives everybody the same Venus paragraph.
Finding Your Best Places, by Dan Furst
Furst teaches the map by direction instead of by house language. Up reads toward the soul, down toward the body. East for individual goals, west for relationships.
That shorthand is the best beginner framing anybody has put into print. I have watched it land for people who bounced straight off the AC and MC labels. More on those in the four angle lines.
Which Astrocartography Book to Read First
Furst first. Then Monahan, for the interpretive vocabulary. Sullivan third. Lewis last, and only if you intend to practice.
People argue with that order. Most of them want to open Lewis first, because his name sits on the technique itself. Then they stall around page forty. His book assumes you already read a natal chart comfortably, and it never stops to catch you up.
Jim Lewis Astrocartography and Its Critics
Type his name into a search box and the suggestions turn ugly fast. Con artist. Debunked. Both worth addressing rather than ducking.
Lewis sold hand-drawn maps by mail order from the mid-1970s. He advertised hard. Charged well too. He also died in 1995, at 53. That left the criticism unanswered by the one person who could have answered it.
Here is my read after fifteen years. The commercial packaging was aggressive. His underlying technique still holds up in my own testing, and in the testing of every practitioner I respect. Those are two separate questions and they keep getting merged. Astrology is not science by official labels, and I will not pretend otherwise. Too many confluences, though. Don’t believe me. Go test it against your own past.
Hunting for the Astrocartography PDF Copies
A large share of the searches landing here want a file rather than a book. The psychology of astrocartography pdf. Astrocartography books pdf. Scribd. I understand the impulse completely, given what a used copy costs.
Here is where the legal copies actually sit. Archive.org holds a lending scan of Lewis, borrowable an hour at a time with a free account. Your public library can order most of the rest through interlibrary loan. Monahan and Furst both sell proper ebooks at normal prices.
The pirated files floating around are usually that 1997 text, scanned crooked, with the maps gone soft and unreadable. Maps are the whole point of that book. So you save forty dollars and lose the diagrams.
Astrocartography Courses and What They Add
I took every video course I could find, back when I was learning this. Several software packages too, bought and compared against each other.
A course buys you one thing a book cannot. Somebody reads a live chart in front of you and explains why they said that. Watching the reasoning happen beats reading the conclusion. Helena Woods runs a locational astrology course alongside her natal material. Dara Dubinet teaches astrogeography across a seventeen-video intro. Astrology schools add astromapping modules from time to time as well.
Prices sit all over the place. A short intro course runs near a hundred dollars. Longer programs reach into the thousands. My advice is unglamorous. Read Furst and Monahan first, cheaply. Take a course only after you have a specific question the books failed to answer. Who teaches what is compared on notable astrocartographers.
Astrocartography Certification Does Not Exist
No certifying body governs this field. None at all. Astrology as a whole carries no licensing authority anywhere on earth. This corner of it is far too small and too new even for the informal groups.
So anybody advertising a certified astrocartographer is describing a certificate they printed themselves, or one their teacher printed. Not fraud, exactly. It is a private badge, and it means whatever that particular school means.
I hold nothing. No certificate, no diploma, no membership anywhere. What I have instead is the whole shelf read. Every course watched. Hundreds of maps drawn and printed by hand. Judge that however you like.
Astrocartography 101 Without Spending Anything
Free starting points exist, though most people never find them. The AstroWiki at astro.com carries an entry on this technique that runs short and accurate. Better information than most paid intro material, in my opinion.
Then pull your own lines. Several calculators do this at no cost, and I walked through them on the free chart page. The software and apps comparison covers the paid tools separately.
Third move is the one that teaches you most. Take the significant events of your life. Find where each one happened. Check which line was sitting underneath. That calibration does more for you than any single book chapter.
What No Book Can Do for You
Every title on this shelf writes about a generic Venus line. Yours has a specific longitude. It runs down specific streets in your city.
I moved from Kazakhstan to Canada at twenty-four. Opposite sides of the world, twelve hours apart. My Moon sits close to both cities, on different angles. No book contains that. It came out of my own chart, plotted and then checked against nine years of living here.
That gap is why I make maps rather than write another book. Each printed astrocartography map gets developed and printed by hand, with your lines on it, at 24 by 36 inches. Reading about lines is cheap. Seeing your own on a wall is different work entirely.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which astrocartography line should you live on?
No single answer fits everybody, and any book claiming otherwise is selling simplicity. Sun and Jupiter lines suit most people for general ease. Venus for relationships and beauty. Moon for home and family. What matters more is which line already runs through the places where your life went well. Start there, then read the rest of your map with that calibration in hand. My walkthrough sits on the how to read your map page.
How do I do my own astrocartography?
Three things get you started. Your birth date, your birth time, your birth city. Feed those into a free calculator and the lines appear across a world map. Plotting is the easy half. Reading them takes the study this page describes, plus a year or two of checking each line against your own history.
Does astrocartography really work?
Not scientifically proven, no. Astrology carries no scientific standing by official labels, and I refuse to dress that up for you. What I can tell you is that the confluences pile past the point where I could ignore them. My coffee shop failed on a Pluto line. The best haircuts of my life all come from one barber on my Venus line. Don’t believe me. Go test your own past and see what turns up.
Where should I travel in astrocartography?
Jupiter lines for expansion and luck. Venus lines for a pleasure trip. Sun lines when you want to be seen and felt. Neptune for a rest, since sleep genuinely improves there for most people I have asked. Skip the Pluto and Uranus crossings for anything high-stakes. Travel is the cheapest way to test a line on yourself. Two weeks somewhere costs far less than a move.
Is there a free astrocartography wiki?
The AstroWiki at astro.com is the one worth your time. Its entry covers the four angles and the ten planets in a few hundred words. Free information, and no account needed to read it. Wikipedia carries a thinner page, mostly about Jim Lewis himself rather than the method.
Are the Jim Lewis books in Portuguese?
Not that I have found. Searches for translated editions come through regularly, Portuguese most often of all. That 1997 text stayed English-only as far as I can tell. Monahan’s 2025 book has better odds of translation, with a major publisher behind it. Same answer for the occasional search after an astrocartography title by an author named Juliet. No such book exists that I can locate.
What is locational astrology, and where to learn it?
Locational astrology is the wider family. This technique sits inside it, next to relocation charts, local space and the astromapping variants. Davis covers the whole family in one volume. Sullivan handles the relocation half best of anybody. For local space specifically, I wrote up my own city map on the local space astrology page.
Where should I live based on my birthday?
Your birthday alone cannot answer it. Birth time and city matter.
Why the Short Shelf Is Good News
A dozen books. One long weekend each. You could genuinely finish the entire published literature on planetary lines inside a year, reading at a relaxed pace.
Then you would still be standing at the beginning. Reading about a Saturn line and living eight months on one are separate kinds of knowing. The books hand you vocabulary. Your own map hands you the sentences. My copy of Lewis still has arguments in the margins, and most of them I keep losing.