Astrology course: learning astrology on your own

Astrology can be learned without a teacher, but not without a plan. Anyone who simply starts reading has hundreds of separate details in their head after a few weeks and still cannot read a chart. So this page is not one more article about star signs but a curriculum: an order, a working rhythm, five exercises and an honest idea of how long it takes.

The order to work through the chapters in

The pages of this website add up to a course if you read them in this order. Each step builds on the one before, and each comes with a small task you should have done before you turn the page.

1. Settle first what a horoscope actually depicts. As long as that is left open, everything else is decoration.
2. Then the overview of astrology. It costs half an hour and saves you a good many misunderstandings later, because you see that the word does not mean one procedure but a whole family of them.
3. The four elements come before the signs. They supply the grid that everything else hooks into later; anyone who works thoroughly here saves a great deal of drudgery further on.
4. Only now the twelve zodiac signs. Work through them in pairs, each one together with its opposite in the zodiac. Contrasts stick better than lists.
5. The planets, and with them, without fail, their orbital periods. They explain why one position concerns a whole generation and another only a few weeks of your life.
6. The ascendant and the houses. From this point on everything hangs on a reliable time of birth — get hold of it before you go further, or you are calculating on sand.
7. The aspects, that is, the angular distances in the chart. Five of them are enough for the first year; more confuses before it helps.
8. Finally, a glance sideways at Chinese astrology. Not as extra knowledge but as a comparison: a second system shows you what is convention in the first and what is substance.

Two rounds are better than one. Go briskly through all eight points first, without trying to retain anything, then start again from the beginning and go slowly. The second time the material sticks, because you know where it belongs.

Working rhythm and material

Three fixed half hours a week do more than one Sunday worked right through once a month. And do not read two accounts of the same subject side by side while you still have no overview of it: two schools contradict each other in enough places to discourage a beginner again and again.

You need little in the way of material. A notebook with your notes on the left and your open questions on the right. A few blank zodiac forms to fill in. And above all birth data from people you know: ask around among friends for the date, the time and the place, say what you need them for, and keep the details to yourself. Twenty charts of people whose lives you know will take you further than twenty volumes of theory. Titles that go deeper are listed under Astrology books — take on only one of them at a time.

Five exercises that are actually worth doing

• Four weeks following the Moon. For a month, write down every evening which sign the Moon is standing in, and add two lines on how the day went. At the end you have observations of your own instead of keywords picked up from books — and, along the way, a feel for how fast the sky moves.
• Reading blind. Have someone hand you a chart with no name on it, write five sentences about it, and only then find out whose it is. Uncomfortable and instructive.
• The counter-test. With every sentence you write, check whether the opposite would fit just as well. If it would, you have said nothing.
• In one sentence. Explain a position in a single everyday sentence, without one technical word. What you cannot say that way, you have not yet understood.
• The learning diary. Date, chart, your reading, and later the feedback. After six months you read your own first attempts, and that is the most honest measure of progress there is.

Mistakes almost everyone makes

• Collecting keywords instead of seeing through to the system behind them. What has merely been learned by rote collapses as soon as two statements contradict each other.
• Wanting to read the whole chart too early and seeing only the three positions most recently read about.
• Talking about areas of life although the time of birth is unknown. The houses are then estimated, not calculated, and that has to be said.
• Looking only ever at your own chart. From your own chart you learn little about astrology and a great deal about yourself.
• Noting the hits and forgetting the misses. Anyone who keeps the learning diary is never even tempted.

How you can tell that you are making progress

There are three recognisable stages. On the first you can draw a chart and name the basic factors. On the second you notice where a chart has its centre of gravity: a cluster in one element, a planet that outshines everything else, a strikingly empty half. On the third you can let two statements that contradict each other stand side by side and describe how both occur in one person at the same time. Anyone who can do that is really reading.

Reckon in months, not in weekends. For your own use, six months of patient practice is enough. Anyone who later wants to advise others needs considerably more, and what is added then is set out under Becoming an Astrologer. Along the way it is worth a look at the Free Horoscopes: see how finished readings are worded, and consider at every paragraph what you would write differently.