Astrology books

Astrology is a craft, and a craft is learned from books. The problem isn’t that there are too few – there are far too many, they contradict each other, and the cover almost never says who the book was written for. This page sorts the shelf out.

Four kinds of astrology book

Almost everything published on the subject falls into one of these four groups, and they don’t replace one another.

• Introductions. They work through the zodiac signs, the planets, the houses and the aspects one after another. A good beginner’s book calculates at least one complete birth chart from scratch, instead of just describing the twelve signs.
• Reference works. Interpretation dictionaries, position by position: “Mars in the tenth house”, “Moon square Saturn”. Handy for looking something up, useless for learning – they break a chart into separate pieces that you then have to put back together yourself.
• Single-subject books. An author takes one planet or one question in life and writes three hundred pages about it. This is where the most stimulating writing is – but it is only of use to you once you have the basics.
• Tables. Ephemerides, that is, tables of the planetary positions day by day, plus house tables. Indispensable for decades; today any program does the job in seconds – including the one that calculates the free horoscopes here.

How to spot a book worth having

A few things can be checked just by leafing through it:

• It keeps calculation apart from interpretation: wherever there is a figure, it also says where the figure comes from.
• It names the origin of its rules – tradition, a more recent school, the author’s own observation. An author who admits that much isn’t selling you an opinion as a law of nature.
• It shows complete example charts and carries one reading through from beginning to end, instead of stringing single sentences together.
• It has an index and a glossary. Without an index, a book of interpretations is worthless once you have read it.
• It doesn’t promise events with dates attached. The moment a book announces when you will marry, put it back.

And one very simple deal-breaker: books arranged purely by Sun sign, that is, by the position of the Sun alone, tell you roughly as much about your chart as a first name tells you about a person.

What order to read in

Most people plunge into the interpretation books too early and lose heart. An order that has proved itself:

• First the four elements and the qualities – they put the twelve signs in order, so you don’t have to learn them one by one by heart.
• Then the ascendant and the houses. Only with those does a birth date turn into a chart.
• Then the planets one at a time, along with the signs they rule.
• Last of all aspects and the timing techniques – the part that will take you longest.

Only after that are the single-subject books worth it. Read them earlier and you will take one interpretation for the whole of astrology.

Classics that appear on almost every reading list

Four titles that later writing keeps measuring itself against:

• Ptolemy, “Tetrabiblos” (2nd century, Alexandria): the oldest surviving systematic text of Western astrology and the source of many rules that are handed on today without anyone naming where they came from.
• Thomas Ring, “Astrologische Menschenkunde”, four volumes from 1956 onwards: the great German-language attempt to ground astrology without the rhetoric of fate.
• Liz Greene, “Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil” (1976): a whole book about a single planet – the model many single-subject books have followed ever since.
• Stephen Arroyo, “Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements” (1975): the book that put the theory of the elements back at the centre of popular astrology.

Older books often spend pages on ways of calculating that you no longer need – skip those chapters and read the interpretive ones.

What even the best book cannot do

A book interprets building blocks: a sign, an aspect, the planetary position in a house. Your birth chart, though, is not a sum of building blocks but an arrangement in which every part changes the others. That weighing up is exactly what no reference work will do for you.

And there is an admission you rarely read in the books themselves: the authors contradict each other, and no book can decide who is right. Astrological interpretations are not tested in any sense that would let you count their hits. What a book offers is a language for questions about life – not a measurement. A decision you would otherwise make differently should not rest on it.

And no book knows anything about you: it reads a Saturn position the same way for a man of twenty as for a woman of sixty. If you want to go beyond reading, the page on becoming an astrologer says what a training course asks of you on top of that.