Nobody wrote down the time

Nobody wrote down the hour you were born, and a date and a place alone will still carry a reading further than the person holding them expects. The drawer gave up a school certificate, two expired passports, electricity bills going back to 1997, and nothing with an hour on it. The nursing home closed in 2004. Your father is dead. Your aunt says it was after the evening meal and before the neighbours turned their lights off, and she will not improve on that, because she was 14 at the time and nobody in the house was watching a clock. There was no reason why anybody should have been. If the errand is still ahead of you, the evening it takes is described elsewhere; this is for the person who has done it and come back with a date, a place, and nothing else.

Start by changing the noun. You do not have a missing birth time. You have a wide one. Missing means nothing is there. Wide means you have a range, and a range is something arithmetic can work with. Hand it over and the arithmetic will tell you what it can and cannot do. That answer is longer than the people who feel disqualified expect, and shorter than the people who would like your money will let on.

What a date and a place already buy

Most of the sky barely moves in a day: the sun about a degree between one midnight and the next, the quickest of the planets a little over two, the slowest a few arcminutes. So the date alone tells you which sign each planet was in, and how they stood relative to each other. You know this as well as somebody timed to the second does. On about one date in thirty the sun itself crosses into the next sign, and those crossings are published.

How far a chart moves for a doubt of ten minutes, as against a doubt of a whole day, is a separate and answerable question with a number for an answer. It is a job for the astronomy essays rather than for this one.

Then the moon, which is the interesting case, because it is quick. It covers about 13 degrees a day, a little under 12 when far from us and nearly 15 when close. A sign is 30 degrees wide. Do the division and the moon has a little under an even chance of crossing a sign boundary on any given day. So on slightly more than half of all dates it never crossed into the next sign at all. If yours was such a date, your moon sign is yours, and no hour was ever required for it. On the remaining dates there are two candidates and a boundary crossed somewhere in the 24 hours. Here your aunt earns her place in the record. After the evening meal is not a birth time, and it is often enough to settle which of the two it was.

The nakṣatra (नक्षत्र) is where this stops being free. A nakshatra is one of the 27 segments the moon's path is cut into, each of them 13° 20′ wide, and the moon covers very nearly that much ground in a day. So on almost every date the moon changed nakshatra while the day was going on. You can be told which two it lay between. Nobody can tell you which of them it was, and with a whole day in play there is no honest way round that.

What is gone

The lagna (लग्न) is the degree of the sky rising in the east at the moment in question. The earth turns once a day, so every degree of that circle comes up over the horizon once a day, and all 12 signs take their turn as the rising sign, about two hours each. Without an hour you do not have an uncertain ascendant. You have 12 of them in rotation and no way to choose between them.

The houses go with it, and this is the part that will be felt. A house is not a separate object. It is the same planetary position counted from the rising degree instead of from a fixed zero, which Meghnad has laid out stage by stage. Move the rising degree and every planet changes house. So every sentence of the form "your such-and-such planet sits in your fourth" is off the table, and a great deal of what people expect a reading to sound like is made of precisely those sentences.

Third, the timing ledger. Viṁśottarī (विंशोत्तरी) divides a life into nine periods, one for each of the nine planets the system counts, 120 years in all. The sequence hangs on one quantity: the fraction of its nakshatra the moon had crossed at the moment of birth. It sets how much of the first period had run when you arrived, and every boundary afterwards is measured from it. Across a full day the moon crosses nearly an entire nakshatra. So the ledger does not blur. It can shift by almost the whole length of that first period: 6 years if the sun ruled the nakshatra, 20 years if Venus did. Daśā (दशा) dates given on those terms are not approximately right. They carry a band of years around them, and the band is nowhere on the page.

Now the part that costs people something, and it is not the hour. The temptation is to fill the field. Put in 12 noon, or take your aunt's evening and write 20:30, because the form will not accept after dinner. The software takes the number without comment and returns a chart with arcminutes in it, a rising sign, 12 houses, a table of period dates, and no line recording that one of the three inputs was invented in a hurry by you. It looks exactly like the chart of a person whose hour a nurse wrote down, and the practitioner cannot see the difference either. That is how an invented number acquires authority. Nobody lies at any stage, and by the end it is accurate to the minute.

So the rule is short. Never supply a figure you do not have. Give the range, and say where it came from. "Date and place, no recorded time, family says after the evening meal" is a complete submission and not an apology. If a form demands a time, fill it, then write in the notes what you actually know, in words, so the person on the other side knows which of their instruments to put down.

Three things can honestly be done with what you have. Learn their names before somebody offers you one of them.

The first is to read the chart you can build, and to read it from the moon: the moon's sign treated as the first house, everything counted from there. This is ordinary practice rather than a concession made to you, used alongside the rising sign as a matter of course, and the classical compendium ascribed to Parashara gives a whole chapter to combinations reckoned from the moon. What it is not is the missing frame recovered. It is a second frame, one you would have had anyway, now standing on its own.

The second is praśna (प्रश्न), the branch in which a chart is cast not for your birth but for the moment and the place at which a question is put. It needs no paper at all, which is why it comes up in conversations like this one. Say what it is. It rests on a different claim from the one a birth chart rests on, that the asking is itself an event worth recording, which you may accept or decline. It answers one question, asked once. It does not describe a life, so the hour is about a decision rather than about you, which some find a relief and others find thin. It is not a repair of the chart you cannot have.

The third is rectification, and the tradition has a name for your situation that I find steadying: naṣṭa jātaka (नष्ट जातक), the lost horoscope. Varahamihira gave a chapter of his Brihat Jataka to the problem in the sixth century, so it is fifteen hundred years older than you are, and you are not a defective case. Rectification claims to recover the hour by working backwards from dated events in a life until one candidate time fits them. Whether it recovers anything is a question about method and evidence, and this house is examining it elsewhere. Mine is narrower. You supply the events; the method returns an hour; the hour is then used to account for the events you supplied. Keep that loop where you can see it. If you accept a rectified time, record what it is: rectified by so-and-so, on such a date, from these events. Never as your birth time, because the qualifier is the first thing to fall off. And refuse one thing outright, which is rectification sold as a toll gate, a fee paid before the real reading can begin.

You will hear one of two responses when you say that nobody wrote it down. Either a list of what is now unavailable, which is the sound of somebody who intended to use it. Or a reassurance that it makes no difference, which is the sound of somebody who was not going to use it in the first place.

Consider what the decision in front of you actually requires. Somebody to ask what your two options are, and to keep asking until they are stated in a form you recognise. A structure laid over the mess, which the planets and a moon sign will carry further than people assume. Your own voice, saying the trade out loud in a room where saying it costs you nothing. None of that was ever the work of the rising degree.

What you cannot have is the horizon. Nobody in that house was watching the east while it happened, and it is late to ask them to. Take the day, the place, the sentence about your aunt, and go and ask your question.