Free Horoscopes

Free horoscopes are everywhere online, and their quality varies enormously. Behind almost all of them sits the same principle: a program turns your birth data into planetary positions and strings together the ready-made blocks of text that match. That is less than an astrologer can give you in a conversation, but a good deal more than the three lines in the daily paper.

Three different things are called a “horoscope”

A lot of disappointment comes from one word being used for three things that have little to do with each other. How a horoscope is put together and what kinds there are is set out in more detail on the page about horoscopes.

• The star sign horoscope needs nothing but your date of birth and tells you which of the twelve signs of the zodiac – your star sign – the Sun was in. That is why everyone born under the same sign gets the same text.
• The birth chart, also called the radix, needs the date, the time and the place, and shows the whole sky of that one moment: Sun, Moon, the planets, the ascendant and the twelve houses. Two people born on the same day but four hours apart end up with two visibly different charts.
• The forecast horoscope compares today’s planetary positions with your radix. That is where daily, weekly and yearly horoscopes come from, such as the free weekly horoscope.

How a free calculation is made

The arithmetic is pure astronomy and can be checked. It rests on ephemerides: tables that give, for every day, the degree of the zodiac the Sun, the Moon and the planets occupy. A program reads those values off, looks up the longitude and latitude of your birthplace and works out the house cusps from them. Up to this point you do not have to believe anything – two programs that calculate cleanly arrive at the same degrees for Sun, Moon and planets.

The house cusps add a decision of their own: they also depend on the house system chosen. Placidus, Koch and Whole Sign carve up the same sky differently, which is why two programs sometimes show different houses for the same birth. Which system a provider uses is usually buried in the small print.

Only the second step is interpretation. What a planet means in a sign, or at a particular angle – an aspect – to another one, is not written in any astronomical table; it comes from a tradition that has grown over centuries. For that, a free reading falls back on a stock of ready-made blocks of text: one finished paragraph per configuration, lined up one after the other.

Why the birth time decides the quality

The commonest reason for a worthless free horoscope is a missing time of birth. The ascendant travels through all twelve signs in a single day – a new sign roughly every two hours on average. The Moon, too, moves about thirteen degrees a day and can change sign. If the time is missing, many programs quietly put in 12:00 noon: the ascendant and the houses are then pure guesswork.

The minute of your birth is on your birth certificate or in the register of births kept by the authority at your place of birth – in Germany that is the Standesamt, the registry office. As a rule the person concerned and close relatives can ask for it; what proof is needed and how long it takes depends on the country.

What a free horoscope cannot do

There are four things an automatically generated text simply cannot do:

• It does not know your life story. The same configuration reads differently at seventeen than it does with three children and a business.
• It does not weigh things up. Every radix contains contradictions; an astrologer decides which statement counts for more, while a program just lists both side by side.
• It does not predict events. Astrology describes themes and the quality of a stretch of time, not dates.
• It is no substitute for medical, legal or financial advice.

Here is how you test whether a free text says anything about you at all: read the interpretation for a sign that is not yours. If it fits just as well, the text is simply kept general enough to suit almost anybody.

How to get more out of it

• Enter the date, time and place as precisely as you can document them, instead of guessing.
• Look at the chart wheel first and the text afterwards: which of the four elements dominates, and which one is missing?
• Note down two or three statements you recognise in yourself, and test them in everyday life over a few weeks.
• Read up on the basics: the pages on astrology and Chinese astrology, plus the astrology books.

A free horoscope is a good way in. It is not a verdict on you. It describes dispositions and tensions – what you make of them is written in no ephemeris.