Let me first provide a little more of a setting by way of the skeptics. I have tried to track down the study I read in graduate school (way back in the early 1990's) that debunked astrology by giving a study group the same chart and interpreting the chart as the study member's chart. In the study they were able to get all participants to believe the chart being "read" and interpreted for them was their own chart. They did not change the interpretation of the chart, so each individual was essentially told the same thing about the chart and they all "believed" the chart to be "accurate." The final coup-de-grace of the study came when the writers announced that they had used Adolph Hitler's chart for all the participants. I have done my best to track down this essay, which I believe was published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences. As an former academic, I generally don't like to make references I cannot track down, but I think the spirit of the essay is pretty clear. I also think the conclusion is off; the study did prove something, but not about astrology. It clearly proved that people can be deceived when they are kept ignorant.
For those of us who work with Astrology and clients regularly, we know immediately that the entire study group would need to be born under the sign of Taurus to even get this deception to fly at the rudimentary level of sun signs since Hitler's sun sign is Taurus. You could have mixed signs among the group and press forward so long as your interpretation didn't begin with, "Ok, with your Sun in Taurus, your Life Path is guided by the energy of fixed earth ..." The first non-Taurus participant would go, "Now wait a minute, my sun sign is Aquarius," even if you hand them a chart with their correct birth information and the incorrect output. The interpretation instead began with, "You like to ..." It's easy to debunk bad Astrological practice; there's plenty of it out there. And its not much of a "win" for the skeptics when the research is so poorly designed. Too much of the skeptical narrative goes after "low hanging fruit" or what I used to teach in my critical thinking classes as "the weak form of the argument." Arguments and ideas have weak and strong forms, going after the weak forms is like plain old bullying, which is why debunking the daily horoscope is not really much of a challenge to the Astrological work of Robert Powell, Dane Rhudyar, Robert Hand, Demetra George, Richard Tarnas, Robert Blaschke, Jeff Green, Steven Forrest, and on and on. When you have informed participants and Astrologers who are willing to give clients a solid foundation in the basics of the Astrological reading, the Hitler study does not even happen.
And so, here's my very rich experience with Astrology from yesterday. Two of my regular clients (I see them yearly when they come into town to visit each other) came to see me for my Hot Spots Astrological reading. Both of them are nearing their 2nd Saturn return and are past their Chiron return (so they are between 50 and 60). They are highly intelligent, professional women. Not easily deceived and not going into a reading doe eyed. These are the clients you want because they can see through BS, so you'd better not be slinging any. We started bright and early at 9AM and were cruising through the reading for about 20 minutes when we discovered that I had cast the chart wrong. Instead of putting in her birth year as 1953, I had entered it as 1963. What make the mistake embarrassing immediately was the fact that I had used the hardcopy of the chart I cast for her 2 years ago to get her birth information to reenter the data into Astrodienst, a great free online service. I never even looked at the two charts side by side, which would have alerted me to the error before the reading began. And, I skipped a step in my reading that I never skip with new clients, I didn't read the chart information at the very start of the reading (these are the kinds of errors that happen when you have an Aries Sun conjunct Saturn and a North Node ... I'm trying to learn how to be more precise in this life time; it does not come naturally for me, so its easy to have a slip from time to time).
So, how did we get so far into the reading before the error was discovered and how was it discovered since everything I had said up to the point of discovery was "dead on accurate." Well, the only thing wrong was the birth year. I had the date and time correct, which meant that the house placements and the Sun sign would be and were the same sign and house in the 1953 and 1963 charts. And the first part of the reading dealt with the Ingress of all the outer planets we are experiencing right now, which meant I was talking about their movement along the line between the houses and signs (using the whole sign system, which I do, means they are the same line). Once we moved away from the Ingress discussion the reading started to "fail." When my client finally asked about relationships and children, the chart in front of us did not bear any resemblance to the chart used 2 years ago and then we started to struggle. In part the struggle occurred because I kept reading what was in front of me and the chart in front of me had no energy points in the 5th and 7th houses (children and partnerships). My client was doing her best to make sense of her previous experience and the current one and that's when she spotted the error on the chart (I always present my client with a copy of the chart and take them around it).
Two important factors helped us ferret out the error. She asked about information that was dominant from her previous reading, which at that time we did verify all her information before we began. And I did not try to read something into the chart in front of me about relationships that was not there. If I didn't trust the chart and I wanted to "keep my client on the hook" I would have done some fancy mind work to make the chart work on the relationship issues. That didn't happen. Like a pilot who has to trust the instruments more than his "feelings," because certain kinds of spiral dives will not feel like the plane is out of control, I have to trust the tool. In doing so, the reading created the situation where the error became obvious. This experience was ... profound. Fortunately, my clients were able to return later in the day after I recast the chart and redid the prep work. We did the other client's reading before they left and when they came back we read the corrected chart, which now had Jupiter in the 5th house, and 8 energy points in the 7th and 8th houses. Now were were on track.
I wanted to share this "mistake" with you because it shows the "strong form of the argument" of Astrology. The best Astrology will have involved clients who are self-aware and the tool has to be trusted. You have to read what is there. If the 7th House is empty, then partnerships are not emphasized in this lifetime. I give all my clients their chart, walk them through my process, and give them a couple of excellent beginning books as references in case they want to follow up behind me on their own or spend more time studying some part of the chart that I talked about (or did not talk about). Most are happy to leave all the work up to me, but I want them to know that I'm using data they can verify on their own and not just riffing my way through a made up story. An Astrology reading is a narrative journey, your narrative journey. Its all about you. And if you trust yourself and know yourself, you can even figure out when the Astrology is wrong. Pretty amazing if you ask me.
Below are the two charts (without the name of the individual). The first chart is the INCORRECT chart and the second cart is the CORRECT chart.
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