This week I am responding to a valuable question from 'Alice' who has asked about if I could: help me understand more about the choice between equal house and placidus

This actually isn't such an easy question to answer, without explaining about the two systems and how they differ and why I prefer the Equal House System (which is the oldest system)...Placidus came about in the seventeenth century....he died in 1688 (according to Margaret E Hone in her The Modern Text Book of Astrology 1980)

First off, you need to understand that if you were born higher-up the World as in Greenland, Placidus doesn't work because it uses time, and is based on an artificially equalised subdivision of the naturally unequal amounts of time a degree of the zodiac spends in each quadrant.

Here is the chart I tried to create on Astro.com. for Doris 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_J._Jensen

 

Astro.com automatically converted my request into the Porphyry System (second oldest system) you can see that written in red at the top of the chart. Reason being that you can't use Placidus when you're born in that location...

 

Here is where Greenland is on the map!

 

Equal House is the most ancient (house) system of all. Back in the day they wouldn't have used the M.C.

Here is Alice's charts using Placidus first, then Equal House.

You will see that chart shape (Seesaw) is the same, the Asc, Sun and Moon all that is the same but the planets full unevenly into random houses that are random sizes..

 

Alice Equal House. Asc Aquarius, Sun Aries in 2nd, Moon Cancer in 5th.