Why it is called the Book of Life

A collection of personal horoscopes is often called a Book of Life, and that title is already at work before you have read the first page. A book has an author. A book is finished. A book can be opened and consulted to see how a matter stands. So before you pick up a reading of that kind, one question is worth asking, and it is hardly ever asked: what sort of book is meant by that?

The phrase does not come from astrology

It is biblical, and it is old. In the book of Exodus, Moses asks to be struck out of the book that God has written. In the Revelation of John, books are opened at the end, and in one of them, the Book of Life, there are names: whoever is named in it belongs, whoever is missing does not.

That is not a guide, it is a register. It is kept by another hand, it comes about without any doing of yours, and it is opened exactly once, at the end. Anyone who puts that title on a horoscope report is promising something very definite: that somewhere it is set down how things stand with you.

A register has an author, a birth chart does not

This is exactly where the image breaks down. A birth chart is a calculation. Where the planets stood over a place follows from tables, and the same details produce the same drawing for everybody. Nobody decided anything about you along the way, nobody entered anything, and there is no office anywhere that was taking it down.

That sounds sobering, and it is good news. What nobody has decreed about you, nobody can hold against you either. A register is received. A calculation is examined.

A whole life, worked out from one minute

The second difference concerns the scope. A book about a life would contain that life. A birth chart contains a single instant: the positions in the sky over one place, in the minute of birth. There is nothing more in it.

Everything a reading says about later years is derived from that one moment, by rules handed down – derived, not read off. And because the moment is so narrow, so much hangs on the birth time: the ascendant, and with it the whole framework of the houses, belongs to that minute and to no other. A hundred pages worked out from sixty seconds – put like that, it sounds like presumption. As the description of a starting point, the same thing sounds sober and usable.

The other old book

There is a second image of a book, about as old and a far better fit: the book of nature. Scholars in medieval Europe, and long after them, meant by it the world itself, taken as something that asks to be read. That book lies open, to anyone who learns to decipher the script, and it is never read to the end.

The whole difference lies between the two images. In the first, something about you is written down, and you appear in it. In the second nothing is written about you; you are the one reading – and you can misread, look again, show the place to somebody else.

Which of the two books you open is up to you

The test needs no prior knowledge. While you read, try to contradict a sentence. Not out of stubbornness, but seriously: with a memory, a scene, an objection you would also defend in front of other people.

If that comes easily, you are reading the report for what it is – a description that may fit or may not. If instead you notice that contradicting does not even occur to you, then you are holding a register, and that is rarely down to the text and often down to the title above it. A register is not contradicted. You are entered in it.

What the name is still good for

Nothing against it. It is beautiful, it is old, and it goes straight to the hope with which most people open a report like this. Only, no text fulfils that hope, in any language or out of any tradition. What lies in front of you is not an entry about you, but an offer to tell your life once in another language. You will notice as you read whether that language gives you anything, and for that you need not order anything: under Free Horoscopes there is enough text to find out.