Flirt and erotic horoscope: a young chapter
A chapter of its own for flirtation and eroticism is standard today whenever a birth chart is analysed, and it is usually announced in the biggest words available. Before you read a text like that, it helps to have one piece of context that the text itself rarely supplies: this chapter is young — a good deal younger than the discipline it appeals to.
The textbooks handed down speak of marriage
Anyone who looks into the old literature does find detailed sections on love. They simply deal with something other than today's heading suggests. The business at hand is marriage: whether a match comes about, with whom and from which circle, whether it lasts, what it brings in property and standing, whether children are part of it. Desire appears, but at the margin.
That was not because people desired less in earlier times. It was because of the questions people took to an astrologer. A marriage was a matter between families, with consequences for property, rank and livelihood — something, in other words, on which advice was sought. What a person longed for, by contrast, was not a question anyone put to a third party.
How the eighth house got its reputation
The shift shows most plainly in the eighth of the twelve houses. Classically it holds the inheritance, the dowry and everything that belongs to the other: the field follows straight on from the area of partnership around the circle, and what was treated in it was the material side of a union — alongside that, within the same remit, dying. In present-day texts, by contrast, it is the field of sexuality and surrender.
In between lies a reinterpretation that took place in the twentieth century: what two people hold in common and neither disposes of alone became an inner process — letting someone in, handing over the controls, entering into something that cannot be taken back. The step is understandable, and what has come of it has proved itself in consultations. It is simply not old.
For reading, that means this: when a text puts all its weight on this field, it is working with a modern reading. There is nothing to object to in that, as long as it does not pass the reading off as ancient secret knowledge.
One minute of sky, fifty years of life
The second piece of context concerns time. The chart wheel such a chapter is calculated from shows the sky of a single minute and stays unchanged after that. What someone looks for at twenty and what still interests them at fifty, on the other hand, lie far apart — without a single point in their chart having moved.
A flirt and erotic horoscope therefore describes no stretch of life but a disposition: a way of being drawn to others that shows itself differently in different years. A sentence that is wide of the mark today may have been exactly right ten years ago; one that says nothing to you now will say something to you in five years. That is why it is worth taking a text like that out again after a while — not because it has changed, but because you have.
Two questions, one subject
The old question and the new one stand closer together than they look at first; they simply come at the thing from opposite ends. It used to run: does the union come about, and will it hold? Today it runs: what am I actually like in it? Both times the same piece of life is meant, once seen from outside and once from within.
The difference lies in who is being addressed. The older question was thrashed out in front of others, in front of families and neighbourhoods, and its answer had consequences that could be counted. Today's question has nobody outside it left to break against. That makes it more honest and at the same time more open to grand announcements: where nothing is checked against anything, a text may promise whatever it likes.
Such a chapter is useful, then, when it describes instead of revealing — when it says which kind of closeness comes easily to someone and which costs them effort, and leaves open what will come of it. What the other chapters contain, you will find under Horoscopes.