Chart shapes
Splay
The catch-all, and it is one in the tradition too
- The rule
- Irregular clumps that fit none of the other six
- Read through one planet
- No
What it is
Planets gathered into clumps at uneven intervals, with gaps that do not divide the chart into two and a spread that is not even enough to be a splash. It is defined by exclusion: a splay is what a chart is when it is not one of the other six.
That is not a shortcoming of this implementation. Jones treated it as a catch-all as well, and it is the one entry here that has no threshold of its own.
How it reads
Individuality, which is the tradition making the best of a category defined by not fitting. A splay is read as a person whose emphases are their own and do not follow a recognisable arrangement.
The honest version is that this shape says less than the other six. A bucket names a handle and a bundle names a concentration; a splay names the absence of a tidy description, and any reading drawn from it is really being drawn from the individual clumps rather than from the shape.
So the useful move with a splay chart is to stop reading the shape and read the groupings: which signs, which houses, which planets are together.
How common it actually is
Second only to the seesaw, at 30.5 per cent of charts, about one in three. Between them those two cover nearly two thirds of all charts, which is a deflating and honest fact about the classification rather than about the charts: the category defined by not fitting is very nearly the biggest one there is.
What to watch for
Reading significance into it. This is the one shape whose main honest content is that the classification did not apply.
Is your chart a splay?
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
- SplashSpread all the way round, with no large empty arc
- 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