Astrological consultation: what to check beforehand

An astrological consultation is not a look into a crystal ball, it is a conversation about your life that uses a birth chart as its map. Whether you go home satisfied afterwards depends to a large extent on you: on whom you pick, on how you prepare and on what you expect. The points below will not take the decision off your hands, but they will spare you the most common disappointments.

How to recognise a serious consultation

In Germany, astrologer is not a protected job title. There is no prescribed training and no state licence, and that makes the signs you can check for yourself count all the more. The Deutscher Astrologen-Verband, the German astrologers' association, sets examinations; anyone who has passed one can show it. That is no seal of quality for each individual conversation, but it does at least show that someone has learned the craft systematically instead of picking it up along the way.

Pay attention as well to how the matter is talked about. Anyone who does a proper job explains the method used, the length of an appointment and the price in advance, clearly and with no renegotiating later. Good advisers are just as plain about their limits: no medical diagnoses, no legal advice, no statements about dates of death and no readings of third parties who know nothing about it.

The warning signs that let you walk out

With dubious providers the same pattern turns up again and again. First a problem is conjured up that you had no inkling of until that moment: a blockage, a dark energy, a curse, an old burden carried down the family. Then comes the offer to remove that very problem for money. What gives it away is not the choice of words, it is this order.

Manufactured time pressure is just as suspect, and so is an appointment supposedly free today only, and so are follow-up sessions presented as absolutely necessary. If someone names the sums only halfway through the conversation, break it off. And anyone who announces that something bad will happen to you unless you book is working with your fear and not with your chart. For a calamity invented in the course of the conversation, even the smallest sum is too much. Nobody can lift a spell that never existed.

One last point that often gets overlooked: a warm tone and big words about values, faith or vocation are no proof of honesty. Anyone caught in a hard patch of life is especially easy to win over that way. Check the matter, not the tone.

How to prepare

The most important thing is the time of birth, and as exact as possible. The point rising on the eastern horizon moves on by a whole sign roughly every two hours, and the whole house structure travels with it. If your papers give no time, ask the registry office of your birthplace for the recorded entry. A rough estimate is better than nothing, but it should be stated openly at the start of the conversation.

Then write your questions down; two or three are enough. Useful questions are the ones that stay with you: why you keep slipping into the same role in relationships, why nothing has moved at work for two years, what decision is coming up now. Useless questions are the ones whose answer nobody can know anyway, such as the date of the next great love.

Settle the practical terms last: length, price, place, whether you may take notes or take a recording away with you. A good conversation rarely lasts under an hour, because before that there is hardly time to listen at all.

What such a conversation can do

A birth chart describes dispositions, tensions and the quality of a stretch of time. It does not take a single decision off your hands, and it does not relieve you of responsibility for your own life. An hour that works ends with you understanding yourself a little better and with one concrete next step in view, not with someone having dictated your future to you.

If you want to read up quietly beforehand, an overview of astrology and its tools helps; anyone who notices along the way that the craft itself is the draw will find the road in through training at Becoming an astrologer. And if an appointment does turn out disappointing: say so politely, pay what was agreed and leave. You owe nobody a second session.