Book of Life: several horoscopes for one birth

Book of Life is a title under which several personal horoscopes are gathered into one collection: different analyses of a single birth, often from different traditions, printed or supplied as a file. This page explains what such a collection contains, what its separate parts rest on and how you read them.

What such a collection is made of

These compilations resemble one another closely. The usual parts are these:

• The birth analysis as the main western section: the planets in signs and houses, the ascendant, the aspects.
• The Sun sign, a detailed portrait of the star sign and usually the longest as well as the most general section.
• Karma or lunar nodes: the nodal axis formed by the two nodes, read as origin and direction.
• The Chinese picture, that is, the animal and the phase from the calendar of Chinese astrology.
• An Indian part, worked out on the sidereal zodiac and therefore giving different signs.
• Partnership: either a comparison of two charts or a description of what you look for in a relationship.
• The forecast for the months ahead, worked out from transits or from the ruler of the year.

Each part rests on a basis of its own, and that explains the commonest confusion on reading. If the Indian section names a different Sun sign from the western one, that is not a mistake: both calculate correctly, only from a different zero point.

Why almost every paragraph fits

Reading soon brings on the feeling of having been recognised. That feeling is reliable, and all too reliable at that. Descriptions that fit almost anyone are felt by almost everyone to be personally accurate. In psychology this is called the Forer effect, after the experiment in which students were all handed one and the same text as their individual analysis and almost unanimously judged it to be true of them.

One simple move helps against this, and it needs nothing but a pen: take a sentence that struck you and turn it round. “You come across as confident, but inside you are more sensitive than people can tell” becomes “You come across as sensitive, but inside you are tougher than people can tell”. If the reversed version sounds just as convincing, the sentence says nothing about you. What is left are the passages that commit themselves, the ones you could also contradict. There are fewer of them than you think on a first reading, and those are exactly the ones worth marking.

Length is no seal of quality

Page counts are reassuring, but they say nothing. Forty pages come about quickly when every single placement is given its prescribed paragraph. What counts is whether anything is weighed up anywhere. A sentence such as: this planet is well placed, so the tension weighs less than it looks, is worth more than ten pages without one. As you leaf through, watch out for words like nevertheless, admittedly, outweighs. Where they are missing, nobody has weighted anything.

How to read an analysis of this kind

The first time straight through, without a pen and without judging. The second time with three kinds of mark: what surprised you? Where would you disagree? And what comes back in more than one part? The third group is the most important. If a theme turns up in the western section, in the Chinese one and again in the forecast, then it appears at more than one point in the picture and not just in a ready-made block of text.

The chapter that ages

One part of such a folder is not made to last: the forecast. It holds for a particular stretch of time, and once that is over, so is it. That is no reason to throw it away, quite the contrary. An expired forecast is in fact the only piece of the collection you can check afterwards: read up what was announced for a year you now have behind you. Did the text name a theme that really did play a part? Or would it have fitted any year at all?

That single test tells you more about the worth of the whole collection than any foreword. And it shows in passing where the limit of the method lies: texts of this kind describe themes, and periods in which a theme grows louder. A date on which something happens is not among them. What other kinds of reading there are and what each of them answers is set out in the overview of horoscopes.