Karma horoscope

“Karma horoscope” sounds like a great mystery, but it means something quite precise: a reading of the birth chart that looks for a common thread. It looks for what a person evidently already brings with them, and for the direction their development points in. Whether you share the underlying idea or not, it is worth knowing what this way of reading is pinned to before you ever have such a text in front of you.

Where the idea comes from

Classical European astrology did not know the term. It came in during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when ideas of rebirth from Eastern teachings migrated into Western schools of interpretation. Since then part of the astrological world has understood the birth chart not only as the description of a character, but as a stage reached so far: as one moment in a longer development whose beginning is said to lie before this life.

That is an assumption of faith, not a finding. You do not have to adopt it to get something out of the readings. Many people simply read the same statements as a description of deeply ingrained patterns, of what has grown out of background, childhood and years of repetition. The sentences lose nothing by it; only the explanation behind them becomes a different one.

What this reading is pinned to

Within this approach there are fixed areas of responsibility in the chart. Anyone who knows what they are can place a text of this kind more accurately.

• The nodal axis. Two opposite points where the Moon’s orbit crosses the apparent path of the Sun. In this reading the descending node stands for what is familiar, for what is available without effort and therefore quickly turns into habit. The ascending node stands for the direction that is unpractised and takes an effort.
• Saturn. Is taken to be the place where something takes repeated work until it sticks: responsibility, patience, the task that cannot be got around.
• The twelfth house. The area for everything that works out of sight and is rarely said out loud.
• Retrograde planets. Planets that, seen from the Earth, appear to run backwards for a while, which is an optical effect of the orbits. This school reads them as themes that need a second round.
• Pluto. Stands for upheavals, for what cannot be repaired but only replaced.

These are the conventions of one school of interpretation, not measured quantities. Another school assigns the same places differently, and both have good reasons for it within their own system.

What a personal reading actually contains

It always starts with the arithmetic. Date of birth, the most exact time available and place of birth give the radix, the drawing of the sky for that one moment. Every single statement is built on it. If the time is missing, the houses and the ascendant are missing with it, and a large part of the interpretation stays out of focus. Serious texts say so.

The text itself usually consists of chapters, one for each placement. Many extensive readings are assembled from ready-made blocks of text, chosen according to the positions calculated. That is not dishonest as long as it is said openly, but it explains why sections sometimes contradict each other: two blocks that are right on their own do not automatically fit together. An interpretation written by hand weighs exactly that. In exchange it comes out shorter.

What such a text cannot do

• It does not name any past lives for you — no names, no places, no years, no stories. Where details of that kind turn up, they are made up.
• It cannot be checked. There is no way to confirm or to refute a statement about the time before birth.
• It replaces neither medical nor legal nor financial advice.
• It must not lay blame on you. The claim that a misfortune of today is the deserved consequence of an earlier mistake is a moral statement without any evidence at all, and it does more damage than any imprecise reading.

You should be suspicious wherever the subject is turned into something to be afraid of, or wherever someone offers, for a fee, to dissolve, lift or clear something away.

How to read an interpretation like this

You get the most out of it if you read every section as a question and not as a verdict. “Do you tend to stay with what is familiar?” takes you further than the bare finding. On the first pass mark only what touches or annoys you, and bend nothing into shape so that it fits. Then put the text away for a few weeks. What still holds after that was more than the mood of one evening.

If you want to know how the individual blocks come about in the first place, it helps to look at the planets, at the ascendant and at the overview of astrology. You can get a first impression with no effort from the free horoscopes.