Chart shapes
Splash
Planets in most of the signs and nothing left empty
- The rule
- Spread all the way round, with no large empty arc
- Read through one planet
- No
What it is
The ten planets spread around the whole wheel with no gap wide enough to divide it, touching most of the twelve signs. Nothing is heaped and nothing is missing.
This site requires no empty arc of 60 degrees anywhere and at least eight signs occupied. Both numbers are conventions and other tools use others, which is the general caveat about all seven.
How it reads
Range. The tradition associates a splash with somebody involved in many things rather than committed to one, and with an ability to find something of interest almost anywhere.
The standard caution attached to it is scattering: a chart with a foot in every area has nothing forcing it to choose. Jones himself was more interested in that risk than in the breadth, and the shape is usually written up as a question about focus rather than as a compliment about versatility.
Where a splash chart does concentrate, it tends to be because something else in the chart does the concentrating, an angular planet or a tight pattern, rather than because the distribution does.
How common it actually is
The rarest of the seven under the thresholds this site uses, at 0.21 per cent of charts, and the number that best shows why those thresholds are printed rather than hidden. Relax the required empty arc from 60 degrees to 90 and the same charts give 8.76 per cent. The mechanism is real regardless of where the line falls: Mercury never strays more than about 28 degrees from the Sun and Venus no more than about 47, so three of the ten planets are always bunched, which works against an even spread.
What to watch for
Reading breadth as depth. The shape says where the planets are, not how much attention any of them gets.
Is your chart a splash?
The birth chart tool names your shape along with the span it occupies and the widest empty arc. Bear in mind that the thresholds are a convention rather than a fact, so a different tool may reasonably give you a different word for the same chart. The hub prints the exact numbers this site uses.
The other shapes
- BundleAll ten planets inside 120 degrees
- BowlAll ten planets inside one half of the wheel
- BucketA bowl, plus one planet standing alone on the other side
- LocomotiveAll ten inside two thirds, leaving an empty trine
- SeesawTwo groups of planets facing each other across two clear gaps
- SplayIrregular clumps that fit none of the other six