Book of Life: what each chapter is calculated from

Book of Life is a catch-all name. It means a folder in which several readings of one and the same birth lie side by side: a Western main section, a Chinese chapter, an Indian one, an interpretation of the name. You cannot order anything here. This page does something else, something that helps more when you read such a folder: it sorts the chapters by what they are actually calculated from. For they do not all rest on the same foundation, and it does not show on them.

Chapters that need the exact minute of birth

These are the most demanding: the Western main section and, where there is one, the Indian. Both set the celestial bodies at a place and at a particular minute. Only from that does it follow which degree of the zodiac was rising in the east, and the entire division into areas of life hangs on it. If the birth time slips by half an hour, this whole framework slips with it. If your birth time is uncertain, that affects exactly these chapters — and only these.

Chapters for which the day is enough

The detailed portrait of your Sun sign, the Chinese animal of the year, the overview of the elements: for those the date is enough. Such sections stay usable even when nobody remembers what time of day you came into the world. There are two traps all the same. The turn of the year in the Chinese calendar does not fall on 1 January but some weeks later; birthdays from that gap are regularly filed under the wrong animal in popular tables. And the Moon moves so fast that it can cross into the next sign in the course of a single day; on days like that a Moon chapter without a birth time rests on a guess.

The chapter that is not in the sky at all

Name interpretation, and everything that turns the date of birth into figures, does without astronomy: letters are translated into numbers and added up. That is worth no less than the rest; it answers a different kind of question. For this sorting only one thing about it counts: this chapter hangs not on a moment in time but on a decision. Somebody decided which spelling of your name goes into the calculation, and a different decision would have put a different result there. Two people born at the same place in the same second share every other chapter of the folder — this one they do not.

Chapters that come out of a table

Two classics of such collections are the flower horoscope, often offered as Atlantean, and the so-called Native American horoscope with signs such as woodpecker, salmon or otter. Nothing is calculated here: your date of birth falls into one of twelve or more periods, and each of them comes with a ready-made emblem. That has one advantage — a wrongly noted birth time cannot spoil anything in a table — and one limit: both schemes are considerably younger than their names suggest.

Shift the clock by an hour

The sorting can be tried out on your own folder in five minutes. Suppose your birth time had been noted down an hour wrong, and go through the chapters one after another: would it now say something different here? For the first group, yes, and considerably. For the rest, not a word.

The gain lies less in the answer than in what comes to light along the way. Almost all the chapters speak with the same self-assurance, although they are sensitive to very different degrees. If the text nowhere says which of its statements hang on the birth time, then nobody has taken the trouble to name that difference — and now you are taking it yourself.

What ought to be at the front of a folder

The sorting shows what such a collection ought to state about itself, and it comes to three lines: the birth time it was calculated with, together with a note on whether it was given that way or assumed as a stand-in; the spelling of the name that went into the numbers; the period a forecast chapter covers. If those are missing, every chapter is equally credible and equally uncheckable. If they are there, you can weigh the parts one by one.

The page Horoscopes lists the kinds of interpretation there are; Chinese astrology explains the system behind the animal of the year; the free horoscopes gather material for comparison.