What a horoscope says about attraction

Attraction is a legitimate subject for astrology, and the tradition has more to say about it than the newspaper columns suggest. It also has clear limits, and they ought to be named.

What it is read from

Not from the sun sign. Four factors matter:

Venus — what appeals, what is drawn in, taste. Its sign and its condition.
Mars — desire, drive, the way of approaching someone.
The seventh house and its ruler — the bond as a relationship, not as a feeling.
The Moon — what is familiar and gives a sense of safety, often weightier than Venus.

How Venus and Mars stand to each other describes the way affection and desire work together in one person — or fail to: if they stand in tension, that is a real configuration, and one often described.

Comparing two charts

What counts in synastry is set out more fully under partnership in the chart. In short: the cross-aspects of the lights, the cross-aspects of Venus and Mars, the rulers of the first and seventh houses — and above all reception, which modern accounts almost always leave out and which counts for more in the tradition than the aspect itself.

Three limits

A third party's chart. The chart of someone who has not asked for it is not interpreted here to find out something about them that they do not tell of their own accord. That holds for attraction as for everything else.

No statement about orientation or identity. The tradition contains claims on that score which come from its own time and which are not repeated here. A chart says nothing about whom someone loves.

No prediction of events. A favourable configuration describes a period in which something can move. It names neither a person nor a date — and where one is named, it does not come from the chart.

What is left

A usable description of what someone is looking for, what they chafe against, and what kind of bond comes easily to them. That is less than the columns promise, and it can be checked — which is worth more.