Karmic horoscope: why a birth chart has no direction in time

A karmic horoscope promises to link three times: what was before this life, what is now, what is still to come. Before you decide what to make of it, it is worth looking at one property of the birth chart that this promise hangs on: the drawing itself has no direction in time at all.

The picture does not age with you

A birth chart is worked out for one single moment and stays as it is afterwards. At eight you have the same drawing in front of you as at eighty; not a line shifts because you have moved house or married. Something unremarkable follows from that, and it has large consequences: the drawing knows no earlier and no later. It stands wholly in the present. Any statement about a direction in time is added from outside.

Time only comes in with a second layer

That is what the timing techniques are for. They lay something movable over the fixed picture: the sky of today, a point that edges forward a little with every year of life, the return of the Sun to the position it held at birth. Different as they are — they all hang on the same zero point, the moment of birth.

Some of them can be run backwards as well; that is a recognised variant, not bad practice. It changes nothing about the zero point. The counting always starts from the birth, in one direction or the other; none of the techniques reaches back behind that moment. You can of course have a chart calculated for a day in 1780, and the arithmetic runs through without a hitch. Only, no line leads from there to you. No calculation draws that line; somebody has to assert it.

Why so much of it still feels brought along

The feeling is real and it is not silly. Everyone finds traits in themselves that are older than their memory: a way of reacting that was already there before they could have taught it to themselves.

No earlier life is needed for that. What an infant already brings with it in irritability and calm, what is learned without words in the first years and then repeated a thousand times over, lies so deep that nobody can date it — and what cannot be dated soon feels as though it came from far away. In its best paragraphs a karma text describes exactly this material. Whether it calls on an earlier life for that or on the first years of life changes nothing in the description; it changes whom you have to believe for the description to hold.

The question that gets you further

When you are sitting in front of a passage that deals with the time before your birth, put one single question to it: what would be different on Monday if this is true?

Often the honest answer is: nothing. The advice that follows from it — be more patient, finish something off, risk a step you have been putting off for years — holds without the back story too. The back story is then decoration. You can take the advice with you and leave the decoration where it is.

Sometimes, though, the answer is: I would stop trying, because it is all settled anyway. At that point the text has taken something away from you, and that is the moment to close it. Whatever leaves you unable to act has missed its mark, however coherent it may sound.

Two piles as you read

On one pile goes whatever you recognise in your own life: leanings, difficulties that keep returning, situations you land in again and again. That can be worked with, and if some of it does not fit, you will notice as much yourself. On the other pile goes everything that tells of a time before your birth. Nobody can back those sentences up, neither you nor the writer. They may set you thinking, as long as you do not take them for a finding.

Where the individual statements come from in the first place is something you can look up: how a birth chart comes about is set out under Astrology, and you will find finished readings at the horoscopes and the free horoscopes.