Hiring an Astrologer, Part Two: What You Should Know About Couples' Astrology

PRESENT...

Short note: These two articles on hiring an astrologer are complete in themselves, but if you navigate over and scroll down the rest of the blog, there's background that contributes a little more. Suffice to say, I've been in a very difficult situation with a married man that's contributed a lot to my understanding of affairs, childhood, love, and the purpose of life.) 

So you want to have your chart read with that of your significant other! The astrologer you hire should look at your chart, your significant other’s chart, and then compare the two in several different ways.

1.)    Usually the astrologer will do synastry first. This is a simple comparison of where stuff is in your chart vs. where stuff is in theirs. Chi and I have his Mars on my Midheaven. This isn’t so good…that’s the thing that warns a relationship may break up because the male dislikes the female’s career. Someone did a statistical analysis of divorced couples in Britain, and this aspect came up as the third most common. Ugh. Well, you can say that this doesn’t take into account the hundreds of couples who have this and don’t break up, but we have this both natally and by transit. There's a double whammy. If we ever ended up together, this would be a big, nasty issue we’d really have to work on. As another example, my Mars squares his North Node. And we have a Venus square Mars issue. You can look those up yourself.

2.)    Then the astrologer will do various things to each chart, read those, and do comparisons back to the natal of the other person. One thing Alice did for me was “harmonics.” All this does is take the number 360—the number of degrees in a circle—divide it by another number, and pick out all the angles and aspects that have the number of degrees of that answer you got by so dividing. If you’re looking at everything that aspects each other by 30 degrees in each chart, for example, it’s called the “twelfth harmonic” because you divided 360 by 12. Each harmonic is supposed to reflect certain specific things, and the more points in one chart where the other person has something in theirs in the same place, or something in significant aspect to it, you may be sure the meeting and the relationship are significant. Using this method, Alice was able to tell me that the relationship was not only very significant in both of our lives, but that it was fated, and that we each showed up to push each other to do specific things. Chi, for instance, was there specifically to wake me up to childhood issues I had not resolved yet, and part of his job was to hurt me very badly so I would be extremely motivated to find out what they were and resolve them. (Alice sure called her shot on that one!) One test of this was a mistake I made when I hired Alice a second time, to look at both our charts and not just mine. In typing Chi’s birth data to her, I made a mistake, and made the second digit of his birth date a full week later than the actual date. When she started work, Alice emailed and asked me to check the date. I did, and made the same mistake again. I emailed her that it was correct, and she went ahead and did the work. Then I realized my mistake, emailed with profuse apologies, and she had to go back and redo everything. When she made her recording and sent it to me, the first thing she said was that she was bewildered by the first date I sent her. She said she had sat there thinking, “I don’t know how these charts even know each other!” But when I sent her the corrected data, our charts lit up like fireworks. As she worked, Alice kept finding more and more and more aspects that coincided with one another. Some of these were harmonics that gave me a lot of information.

3.)    The astrologer should do a “composite,” which is a way of combining your two charts into one. The most common method is to take the midpoint between the two Suns, the two Moons, the two Venuses, etc. on down the line. Then the astrologer looks at that one chart and tells you the interpretations commonly assigned to each planet placement and aspect between planets and angles. These sound something like they would in a natal chart, but in the composite some of them have special meanings. The composite tells you how you are likely to get along, and what parts of the relationship will be easy and where you may have difficulties. The composite isn't a "real" chart, so they have to correct for some things, and some astrologers feel it isn't correct to do predictive astrology with it.

4.)    Your astrologer should also know how to cast and interpret a Davison, which is most important. If what you want to know most is why a disaster happened with someone, and you have limited funds, have your astrologer cast you a Davison and nothing else. Your Davison is created by finding the midpoint between your two birthplaces and your two birth dates and times and casting a horoscope for that entity. The relationship is treated sort of as a person in this chart. The Davison is said to reveal the purpose of the relationship, and suggests the future of the relationship when the astrologer computes transits and progressions to it. This is how Alice Portman correctly predicted that Chi and I would communicate again at this time. Its best use is to tell you what you are in for should you decide to accept that relationship. Chi’s and Rory’s is pretty accurate as far as the information I have. In my case, I really needed to know the purpose of the relationships, because I wanted to remain ethical in my behavior. If it looked like Chi and Rory’s purpose was to stay and do well together, then I could not stay and live with myself.

5.)    Professional software exists that automatically counts the number of “easy” and “hard” aspects between two charts. When Alice did mine with my late husband Simon’s, we had just about all good aspects and very few bad ones. And I can vouch for the truth of this—Simon and I were very happy together, and had a very happy relationship overall. Alice kept remarking about what good charts we had, and one of her comments was that it would be hard for me to find a relationship after this one that would come up to this quality. I would also like to note that when I hired Anne to do Chi’s and mine, I heard NONE of the foregoing steps being followed. Be careful who you hire, and you might want to inquire of the professional you are considering, what they do for the fee they ask. If you don’t see all of these steps, consider hiring someone else.

Computerized versions of all these reports can be ordered at the Astrodienst website, astro.com. Astrologers have created programs that choose the most important aspects and compile you a short report of what they mean. The interpretations are done by some very good and well-known astrologers, and it saves significant money over hiring an actual person to do the work, in the case where one cannot. If you don’t have an accurate birth time, however, or you are missing some other requested data, I wouldn’t spend the money. In perusing the astro.com Davisons for several couples I have good information about, I have noticed that the astro.com Davisons, in addition to some esoterica with somewhat stilted wording, give you both the highest and the worst potentials of the relationship. They tend to concentrate on the highest potentials of the relationship, giving the worst potentials short shrift. In the case of a couple I know has a terrible relationship, the good stuff in the Davison doesn’t seem to apply, but the few paragraphs about its worst potential are dead on. 

In the few cases I'm familiar with, the reason the couple isn’t reaching its highest potential seems to be that one or both parties are being assholes. Sorry to say it, but it’s true. According to their Davison, the relationship of a friend of mine and the guy she lives with had tremendous potential at its outset, but from hearing about it over the years, I can see why only the worst potential is manifesting. In that case, it’s both of them. People have to be willing to look at themselves, to buckle down, and to do some serious internal emotional work. When they aren't, the worst potential of the Davison seems to manifest. If you've got some bad stuff in your Davison, ask yourself some serious questions about whether you and your significant other are brave enough to do some difficult work on yourselves, not on the other person.

As I said, Astrodienst Davisons are heavy on positive potential, so if you get one where half the report is talking about negative potential, forecasts an affair, or mentions several times that you might need to break up (guess whose Davison this is?), be very, VERY careful about committing to that relationship.

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A New Type of Astrological Reading?

Basically, what I have done over the past two and a half years is a whole life progression for all three people in my triangle. I have to say that it’s been very, very informative, but I don’t think you’ll find this discussed in any astrological literature, or offered anywhere. That’s because no one I know of will do this! for reasons articulated in the previous blog.

Because this process has been so beneficial to me, and I have learned so much, however, I think professional astrologers should consider offering a whole life’s worth of progressions and transits. In the case of this particular relationship triangle, it has been so, so helpful, taught me so, so much, and may save all three of us an awful lot of heartbreak.

It would be tough to hire any astrologer to do this, though, I think, partially because of resistance to the idea that looking longer than two years down the road can be useful, and because of simple economics. 

I’m sure doing the natals, progressions, and relationship horoscopes for the three people in my triangle took me longer than it would a pro just because I’m untrained, and had to save the money to buy reports rather than just casting everything and having it all to look at at once. And now that I know how to get the actual charts for free and read what's in them, I still have to look up others’ interpretations; I haven’t done enough chart readings to have much of an idea how to interpret most aspects myself. But professional astrologers, especially busy ones, have dozens to hundreds of clients and can only afford to spend one to two hours on each reading. Digging as deeply as I have has taken me many months. I think it would be cost prohibitive for an astrologer to do that. 

Also, I have a lot of background reading in psychology, which has made the information I uncovered much more meaningful to me, and I had much helpful information regarding each person’s life that I started out with.

Maybe I should become an astrologer instead of a novelist, and invent a new type of reading: the Whole Life Progression!

Should you elect to pursue astrology to help you resolve a love life issue, good luck, and please comment and let me know how it turns out for you!