Astrology shop: which material is good for what

Anyone looking for an astrology shop is rarely after everything at once, but after one particular thing: a table, a program, a form or a ready-calculated text. This page sorts out what astrological material there is at all, what each item is good for and how you tell whether someone has worked carefully.

Ephemerides, house tables, gazetteer

An ephemeris is a table of planetary positions, day by day, calculated for midnight or for noon depending on the edition. Which of the two versions you have in front of you is printed on the title page, and it decides every calculation you make with it. Two further volumes belong with it: house tables, which give the house cusps by geographical latitude, and a gazetteer with longitudes and latitudes.

Before there were calculation programs, that was the complete kit. Today it is above all learning material, and good learning material at that. Anyone who has once interpolated by hand between two daily values comes away with a feel for how fast the Moon travels and how long Saturn stays in a sign. For a single chart this route is cumbersome. For understanding it is the shortest one.

The time given is the weak spot

Nowhere else does so much go wrong. Daylight saving time did not run continuously in Germany, some years had special rules of their own, and the boundaries of the time zones have shifted more than once. A set of tables that comes with an overview of this is worth more than one that passes the question by. The same holds for programs: one that never asks for the time zone will at some point be quietly calculating wrong.

Calculation programs: three switches

A program takes work off your hands, no more than that. It calculates, it does not interpret. It is worth having if you can set three things yourself: the house system, the handling of time zone and daylight saving time and, if you are looking into Indian astrology, the ayanamsha. Where those switches are missing, the program makes the decisions for you, and you are not told which. One that lays its settings open is always to be preferred to one with prettier graphics.

Paper that is still needed

Blank forms with the zodiac printed on them, a transparent degree wheel to lay over them, a pair of compasses, a soft pencil, index cards for collected birth data: next to any program this looks old-fashioned, and there is still a reason for it. A chart drawn by hand sticks in the mind. As you enter the positions you see where the planets crowd together and where a whole half of the circle stays empty, and that observation is easily lost on screen, because there every picture looks finished from the outset.

Books and training

Briefly, because there are pages of their own for this: a good astrology book shows its arithmetic instead of merely asserting results, and it names the school it stands in, because there are several and they contradict one another in places. A selection is set out under Astrology books; anyone who wants to go further than reading will find the ways there under Becoming an Astrologer.

How you spot careful work

A good part of what is offered as astrological material is not an object at all but a machine-generated interpretation text. How such texts come about is set out under Free Horoscopes. Here the only question is how you tell careful work from slapdash work. Five marks are usually enough:

• Date, time and place of birth are asked for, all three of them. Anyone who does not need the time is not calculating a complete picture.
• The method is named: Western or Indian, which house system, which timing technique.
• It also says what cannot be said. Anyone who names no limit has none.
• No urgency, no countdown, no hint that you are missing something without this piece of information.
• No statements about illnesses, times of death or particular sums of money.

That is less a rule for buying than a rule for reading, and it holds for a short weekly horoscope just as much as for a detailed reading. If you first want to see what kinds of horoscope there are at all, start with the horoscopes.