Horoscopes for every star sign: twelve texts, one sky

Free horoscopes for every star sign: the offer sits on countless pages, and behind it there is almost always the same way of making them. Once you know it, you read texts like these differently — with no more faith and no more scorn, but with more care.

How one sky becomes twelve texts

It begins not with a look at you but with a look at the table of planetary positions. For the period — day, week, month — it has long been recorded where in the zodiac the celestial bodies stand and what angles they form with one another. That sky is the same for every reader. Twelve texts are made out of it by starting the count again twelve times: each star sign is taken in turn as though it were the beginning of the chart, and then the current positions are looked up to see which section they fall into, counted from there.

An example makes it concrete. If Mars is in Taurus, then for Taurus it falls into the first section, the area of a person’s own self: the text is then about drive, bearing, perhaps about irritability. Counted from Leo, on the other hand, Taurus is the tenth section, and that one stands for profession and standing — the same Mars, and suddenly it is about work and superiors. A single planetary position thus yields twelve different sentences. That is not a swindle, it is a procedure. It has only one condition, and hardly anyone talks about it.

The condition usually does not hold

Where your chart actually begins is decided not by the day you were born but by the ascendant — and that hangs on the time of birth, which a newspaper, or a form with no field for it, does not know. In a star sign text the Sun sign therefore moves into that place, because the date of birth is the only thing known about you. Unless your Sun happens to stand near the ascendant, the whole assignment of the areas of life shifts with it, often by several sections. What is said then drifts into a part of your life that is not the one at issue.

What is never calculated

A second point is noticed even less often. When a star sign text speaks of an angle — Venus trine Jupiter, Mars square Saturn — it means the angle between two planets in the sky as it stands today. It has nothing to do with your birth chart, because nothing of that chart is to hand against which anything could be measured: your own Venus, your own Mars, your house cusps — all unknown.

That is the difference from a personal reading. There the question is whether today’s position touches a point of your birth chart; with twelve texts for everyone that question cannot even be asked. What you read is a description of today’s sky, cut twelve different ways — and not a comparison with your own chart.

Why all twelve are the same length

The sky spreads its events unevenly. In any given week there are signs where a good deal is going on and signs where simply nothing is due. The format does not know that difference: twelve boxes have to be filled, each of them the same length. You can tell the filler by the fact that no event in the sky is named, only a mood — and by the fact that the same paragraph could just as well run in February.

Where the format comes from

Sorting by Sun sign is far younger than astrology. It became popular in the 1930s through British newspapers, for a sober reason: a column had to make do with the one piece of information a newspaper has about its readers — the date of birth. The twelve tiles on a home page follow the same arithmetic: the widest reach from the smallest piece of information.

The way out is unspectacular, and it costs nothing either. With date, time and place the whole chart can be calculated; there is an overview at free horoscopes, and the page Horoscopes explains how it is put together. That does not refute the twelve short texts. They are a beginning — and they stop exactly where it gets interesting.