Book of Life: where the title comes from

Personal chart readings are gathered into a folder under the title “Book of Life”. The phrase is borrowed, and it is far older than any folder. It is worth knowing where it comes from: it promises something that no reading can make good on — and the tradition it comes from does not promise it at all.

A book with names in it

In Judaism the image belongs to the turn of the year. At Rosh Hashanah, so the idea runs, it is written down who will stand in the Book of Life in the coming year, and at Yom Kippur what has been written is sealed. The Revelation of John knows a book of life as well: at the end it is opened, and what stands in it are names.

That is the first point at which the image and a chart reading lie far apart. In none of these sources does the book contain a description. No character, no dispositions, no gifts — a name is in it or it is not. It is a register, not a portrait.

Ten days in which the entry can still change

What is remarkable is what the tradition itself does with its own image. Between the two feast days lie ten days of repentance, and one of the prayers of those days holds that repentance, prayer and charity avert the severity of the judgement. So the book is written and still not finished. Of all places, where a fate set down in writing might be expected, a period is built in within which something can change.

The language is full of this image

The phrase comes so readily to hand because ordinary speech already runs on it. A chapter is closed, a new leaf is turned, a life story is written rather than lived. Thinking of a life as a text brings order into it: a text has a beginning, an order and an ending, and somewhere it already lies finished. That is exactly the reassurance the title carries.

What a birth chart is by contrast

A birth chart is the drawing of a single moment: where the celestial bodies stood when someone came into the world. In it everything is simultaneous. There is no first page and no last, no plot, no ending. If a story does stand in a finished text, someone has added it — not necessarily wrongly, but it was not in the drawing.

Everything that has to do with the course of a life is added from separate calculations and stays tied to periods. From the drawing of the birth alone no sequence follows, and certainly no order of events.

What is really in the folder

If anything, a stack of drafts. For every place in the chart it states what may come of it, and it was written by someone who does not know you. Anyone who reads it as a register in which his name is already entered is reading it back to front. Oddly enough: the older sense of the title is closer to the procedure than the newer one. There too something was written and nothing decided.

Why the title matters at all

A name on a cover is no argument, neither for the contents nor against them. It does set the expectation with which someone starts to read, though, and that expectation has a share in deciding what comes of it in the end. Anyone expecting information about what is settled finds in every paragraph either a confirmation or a disappointment, and neither takes him a step further. Anyone expecting a description of dispositions can work with the same paragraphs.

An overview of the individual kinds of reading is given by the Horoscopes page; what is to be had without ordering anything is listed under free horoscopes.