The Vertex: A Twentieth-Century Calculated Point

The Vertex is the point where the prime vertical, the great circle passing through the east and west points of the horizon and the zenith, intersects the ecliptic in the western half of the chart; the opposite point is the Anti-Vertex. It is a calculated point of the same family as the angles, depending on the exact time and geographic latitude of the chart, and it moves quickly. Its introduction into astrological practice is generally credited to L. Edward Johndro in the middle of the twentieth century, and it is read by those who use it as a point of fated encounter, of meetings that arrive from outside one's own initiative, often in synastry between two charts. The dating is worth stating: this is modern technique, not traditional. The name is also shared with a fixed-star entry for the Andromeda Galaxy, which is an entirely different thing.

Johndro worked largely outside the astrological mainstream of his time, publishing through his own small press, and the Vertex remained a minor, specialist technique for decades after its introduction before a wider audience of synastry-focused astrologers took it up more widely from the 1970s onward; because it depends on geographic latitude as well as time, the Vertex changes noticeably for people born at the same moment in different places, a sensitivity to location even sharper than that of the ordinary angles.