Place is Personal: the ELA Map beta is open
Get a free year of the Pro workspace - your complete astrocartography and Human Design cartography atlas - in exchange for your feedback.
Hey friends,
Tomorrow is the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer. And it’s also the official launch of the private beta of a new Astrocartography and Human-Design-Cartography workspace that I’ve been building with my partner Jackson.
It’s called ELA Map — your personalized Energy Location Atlas.
We still have a limited number of spots open for beta testers. Sign up by this Sunday, June 14, and we’ll be choosing thoughtfully from everyone who raises their hand - looking for people who are genuinely curious about the personality of place and ready to engage. Beta testers get a free year of the Pro tier of the app in exchange for their engagement and feedback.
After Sunday, new signups go to the waitlist for the official launch later this summer.
We also started a Substack, where our team will be writing and podcasting some personal stories about how astrocartography lines have shown up in our lives, educational 101s, and more. Follow along here!
What we’ve been building, and why this is the moment
Venus and Jupiter conjoin in Cancer only once every twelve years or so, and this meetup feels worth pausing on. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer, the sign of home - not home as an address, but home as a felt sense. The place where your nervous system settles, where you’re known, and where you stop bracing and can be your true self.
Jupiter in Cancer expands our relationship to belonging. It’s been in the sign of the crab since last summer, asking: where do you grow? and Where do you feel held enough to actually become more of yourself? Venus in Cancer is drawn to the type of beauty that feels like lingering nourishment and real care. Together in the sign of the crab, the creature who carries her home on her back and is therefore never truly homeless, this conjunction is an invitation to ask what home actually means to you and where on Earth you might find more of that feeling.
Finding belonging within the vastness of time and space is the question at the heart of my whole practice here at Hearth and Spiral. It’s also the question at the heart of ELA Map.
It’s not a coincidence that this is when we’re releasing it. Jackson was born with a stellium of planets in Cancer - Sun, Venus, and Mercury - and while I’ve been the one whose Sagittarius stellium has a hard time stopping the travel bug from biting, he’s the one who makes home wherever we land. His vision and so many weeks of hard work are the reasons this tool exists, and the conjunction it’s launching on feels like it was written for him. Venus and Jupiter are meeting right on his natal Cancer sun.
The Hearth, the Spiral, and Astrocartography
My work at Hearth and Spiral has always been oriented around the sacred center. The hearth is the heart - where the fire is kept, where people gather, and where the work of tending happens. The spiral is the path we walk that keeps returning, in widening loops that revisit the same territory from a higher vantage point each time.
Place is woven through all of my work. The Celtic wheel of the year, the Daoist Wuxing Cycle, the Indigenous Medicine Wheel, the Zodiac - all of them are inseparable from the land, from the place we stand on this earth. The charts are maps of who you truly are, and astrocartography is what happens when you ask where in the world that unique person comes most alive.
Hearth and Spiral has always been about that kind of deepening - exploring questions that don’t have easy answers, practices that ask you to pay attention over a long span of time. Astrocartography is one of those practices. You don’t check your map once and close it. You come back to it as you change, as the sky changes, and as you move through different seasons of your life. The map has a way of spiraling along with you.
Which is part of why I’ve wanted a better tool for it for years.
The Central American Epiphany
I’ve been an astrologer and Human Design practitioner for over a decade, and astrocartography has been woven into my practice for many years. I’ve used it in readings and applied it to my own life through many moves and travels - everywhere from New Orleans to Brazil to China. That Sagittarius stellium of mine has never really let me sit still, and astrocartography gave me language for what I was feeling in different places that went deeper than what was visible on the surface.
Last year my family spent part of my daughter’s kindergarten year traveling and world-schooling through Panama and Costa Rica. It was on that trip that my relationship with astrocartography took a real leap. We were considering an actual relocation, moving slowly and intentionally, and I wanted to understand not just where my lines fell but where all of our lines fell - and what the Human Design gate layer added on top of that.
Because a Venus Midheaven line tells you one thing about a place, but when you layer in which Human Design Gates are activating in that region for each person in your family, the picture gets specific in a way that changes how you read a place entirely.
So I was doing what practitioners do when the tools don’t quite fit the question: improvising. One app for astrocartography, another for Human Design, another for relocation charts, multiple tabs open for each family member. I’d screenshot everything and drag it into a document just to get a full picture of how a place would affect all of us. It worked, for a time. It was also a mess.
Jackson watched me do this in cafés across Central America for weeks before he said the thing he always says when a problem has a shape he can work with:
I could build that.
(Did I mention that he’s a Manifestor with his natal Sun in Gate 62: The Gate of Details?)
Jackson comes from a lineage of mapmakers, watchmakers, and architects - people whose vocation has been precision in service of navigation and space and time. He’s an avid backpacker who knows how to read a landscape slowly, with his whole body, and who creates home wherever he goes. He builds things to last. So when we got back from our travels last summer, he started writing code.
And now it’s ready for you.
ELA: Energy Location Atlas
The app is called ELA: Energy Location Atlas. Every place has its own energetic frequency, and your chart is one way of reading how that frequency meets you specifically.
In a single workspace you’ll find: your astrocartography power lines alongside parans, midpoint lines, declination lines, aspect lines, asteroid lines, and Hermetic lots. Your Human Design gate activations and design planets on the map. Relocation charts. Synastry charts so you can layer your map with a partner’s or your kid’s or your bestie’s.
It also has a live world transit chart for socio-political postulating. A Conditions page with a daily read on what’s active in your chart and location. And a heatmap engine that scores over 14,000 relocated charts for your birth data and maps them by theme - career, creativity, love, grounding - so you can see the whole landscape at once instead of building it screenshot by screenshot.
We built it with a mission to be the people’s astrocartography workspace. Accessible, navigable, and robust - for seasoned practitioners and for people who are just beginning to feel that how we look at place matters.
Yes, the trademark is in the news
One more thing is worth mentioning here, because the timing is relevant in a different way.
If you’ve seen the news about someone in France trademarking the term “astrocartography,” seeking to also TM it across the EU, and sending cease and desist letters to practitioners who use the word to describe their own work - this is the uncanny timing we didn’t expect to be launching into.
Locational astrology has roots going back thousands of years. Astrologer Jim Lewis developed the modern practice in the 1970s and trademarked his specific stylized brand name “Astro*Carto*Graphy,” with the asterisks - but the un-asterisked word has always belonged to the field of study itself, not any one person. Jim’s trademark lapsed in 2011, and the idea of the general word being claimed now, fifty years in, by someone unconnected to that lineage, is the kind of thing that makes building open, accessible tools feel like exactly the right thing to be doing.
I believe astrocartography belongs to everyone who has ever felt a place have an effect on them. It’s not up for grabs.
The Astrological Association has a petition circulating to stop the trademark in the EU- click through to add your name.
If you want in on the ELA beta, this Sunday, June 14 is your deadline. We have a few spots left, and we’ll be hand-selecting testers who are a good fit. Sign up with the button below. You’ll get a free year of the Pro workspace, we’ll get your honest feedback and requests, and you’ll get to help shape something that I believe has real potential to bring clarity to your sense of home - or at least to learn something fun along the way.
And if you’d prefer to wait until any beta-wrinkles are ironed out, you can still join the waitlist for early access when we publicly launch too.
On this Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer - the sign of home, belonging, and the crab who carries his shelter wherever he goes - it feels like the right moment to ask: Where in the world do you come most alive?
ELA might just be how you find out.
Thanks for your support, y’all. Talk to you on the pod or elsewhere very soon!
Alison
PS» Here’s the link for ELA’s Substack, where I’ll be writing and podcasting from time to time- hope to see you there: Place is Personal.
sounds very very very cool. congrats!