How To Astrology - Test Yourself

Astrology may not use scientific kind of proof, but that doesn't mean you should simply accept it. There is a way in which you can test astrology for yourself, much like you most definitely do with many things in your life - try it and see. You can try to find out if it works specifically for you, and not only on the level of belief. The more of these little personal tests described below you try, and the more you check if you are not just fooling yourself while doing them, the more reliable should your findings be.

Even though it is all about if it works for you, just feeling it is certainly not enough. I will even recommend several astrological reference texts which I have found to be well written and therefore useful, since whatever you find in sun sign astrology columns in magazines is most likely not astrologically accurate. But it's not only about what you can read in books, there are even some direct experiments. Alright, let's dive right into it.

1) Celebrity Affinity Check

CONTEXT

Assuming you don't already know the horoscopes of your favorite stars, this is one of those direct experiments. It is most likely not accidental that famous accomplished individuals are often described using celestial metaphors, since they are as close as a human can get to larger than life personality archetype with god-like status. If you want to know what exactly particular sun signs or other planets in signs mean in terms of real manifestation in a given time period or culture, it should be quite literally defined by the elite individuals of that time period and culture - by who they are, how they experience life, how they think, talk and act. Which ones you like or dislike, or especially which ones you identify with the most, shouldn't therefore be random.

TEST

Write a list of names of your favorite or despised celebrities in order from the most personally important to the least personally important (that you still care about at least marginally). You can also choose various different values as criteria for the list, much like you can make a top ten list of anything. The important thing is that it needs to matter to you, personally, and the more, the better. The more celebrities you can think of, the better also (since it increases the sample size, which helps to control for simple randomness). If there is a significantly non-random pattern to what their sun signs or planets in signs are, especially if related meaningfully to your own sun sign or planets in signs, the test shows that astrology works for you.

EVALUATION

What is significant or meaningful? Everything that really differs from a random outcome. Random result would mean that all signs repeat equally often, especially sun signs, meaning that the people you strongly identify with or loathe are being born equally often at any time of the year. It is not significant, however, if all of them are of similar age and the slow moving planets (gas giants) are therefore always the same. Unless you include people from multiple centuries, the slow moving planets are virtually irrelevant for this kind of test, anyway.

If you focus on fast moving planets up to Mars, even a few decades of difference in age would make their repeated appearance only in a few signs matter. You should just be aware that Mercury can only differ from Sun by about one sign at any given time, so Mercury being the same as Sun isn't very significant. Make sure you also take into account how intensely you care about each of the listed celebrities (since the more intensely you do so, the more they matter as an example), and that you are not mistaking their personality for a made up character - actors can easily pretend in roles that they are different personalities. Similarly, duplicitous people, like politicians or criminals, can also confuse the results.

The meaningful configurations are if the signs are the same very often, especially if they are the same as your signs, but also if they are opposite to your signs or in a trine or square with your signs. If you like or dislike people with signs exactly like yours, it means you like or dislike them for what they have in common with you. The same to a lesser extent applies when the signs are in trine (in the same element), since trine means broader (and therefore weaker) similarity.

If on the other hand you like or dislike people of opposite signs or those in a square (in the same quality), it means you do so because of where they differ significantly from you. In terms of randomness and significance, in a large enough sample, all signs should always be represented equally often (or at least nearly so). Which means that the test is significant if all the people you like or dislike are of few sun signs only (especially if they represent just one element or quality related to you), or even among their planets in signs all lack some signs entirely. Such as it happened to one of my strongly skeptical friends, who listed a dozen of her favorite celebrities and they all were of one sun sign, hers. Suffice to say, she was not amused.

2) Comparative Reading

CONTEXT

Astrological descriptions are often thought to be vague and written in such a way, that most people will identify with most of them most of the time. There is a simple way to discover how untrue that is, it just requires reading from decent astrological sources. For beginners, I would recommend anything from Linda Goodman. She is the best author within simple sun sign astrology, in my humble opinion.

If you are going for planets in signs, the best author I have encountered so far is Lyn Birkbeck, also responsible for multiple publications, all of them adequate as a starting point for this kind of astrological self-assessment. Simple google search should easily uncover which of their works are accessible to you. If you are going for something deeper (which I recommend as a follow up), you could try Astrology of Sex and the Sexes by Starsky and Cox.

Or Mythastrology: Exploring Planets and Pantheons, a delightful work linking astrological configurations to mythical figures, written by Raven Kaldera. This book can even be used for a sort of inverse celebrity test, where you can look at which mythical figures are supposed to be in your personal horoscope, and then judge for yourselves how much or how consistently you either like or dislike them.

To my personal astonishment, my planets in signs corresponded with majority of my all time favorites - King Arthur, Shiva, Kali Ma, Zeus and Chiron. I was completely unfamiliar with the rest, but I still found a lot to identify with in regards to them after I read up on their legends. I also partially identified with every single one related to my sun sign, with some related to the signs in which I had one of my planets, and with a few in other signs within my dominant element.

But I didn't care at all for the mythical figures corresponding to planets in signs that I don't have in my horoscope or dominant element, which is still about a half of the zodiac. By chance, it would make sense to like about half and dislike about half, but it doesn't explain why they should divide according to astrological lore, including those I didn't know before at all. Not to mention that the attribution of mythical figures to astrological symbolisms beyond Greek and Indian mythologies is Kaldera's unique interpretation, unknown to me in advance - he included also many British, Sumerian, African and Chinese mythical figures, not traditionally linked to celestial phenomena.

Given how random astrology is supposed to be, it is also strange that I didn't encounter an interpretation in that book that I would strongly disagree with. Overall, myths and stories are particularly good at explaining astrological view of personalities, and it is quite common for astrologers to use classical fictional characters as examples of astrological archetypes. It is therefore likely that you could find other texts to do similar kind of mythological comparative reading.

TEST

There are two clearly distinguishable categories of astrological texts in any comprehensive astrological book - those that are supposed to match your personality (what is in your horoscope), and those that aren't (what isn't in your horoscope). The test is simple, read both, and then decide which matches you better (or if there is any difference). Do it first for sun signs, and then go planet by planet. If you don't have the time to read all signs every time, you can always choose only that which is in your horoscope, and in contrast, that which should be the most conflicted with it (sign in opposition or in a square).

EVALUATION

Admittedly, at first glance, there is a bit of a grey area, so you do need to think about it a little before you start jumping to conclusions. Each sign is in fact a unique combination of element and quality. That means that as a whole, your horoscope is a singular blend of elements and qualities. Only the elements or qualities that are completely absent from your horoscope are supposed to be nearly completely unlike you. For that reason, there is usually a question of degree to which something is or is not supposed to match you, so you need to keep that in mind.

For instance, if your Sun is in a sign of leo, all planets that are in leo should logically seem similar to you in some aspects, that is why you should make each comparison primarily for the same planet in different signs, not between different planets. Also, if in your horoscope you do have some planets in conflicting signs (opposition or square), that whole complex conflict is a part of you, which is why either of the conflicting signs could sound like you, even though they represent normally exclusive traits. In that case, it may be better to contrast each of your planets to signs that you do not have at all in your horoscope, or those that are the most marginal (least amount of planets in them and/or the outermost planets in them).

But whatever you do, just don't be intellectually lazy. It is not enough to just read a sentence or two out of context. People are not robots and their personalities are not digital yes-or-no programs. No matter what psychoanalytic language you're using, you cannot escape the complexity and often paradoxical nature of mental states, emotions or experiences. The texts I have recommended above try very hard to put the basic astrological statements into proper context, so that it is easier for the reader to understand what they actually mean. It is not as simple as saying geminis are curious or tauruses stubborn, when any sign technically can be any of that at times. The context are things such as what makes them like that, in what situations they tend to act on it, and how exactly, what does it mean when they behave in a particular way, etc.

It is more an explanation of "why", than it is an explanation of "what". If you are at all familiar with the concept of qualitative social science and case studies, it shouldn't really be that hard to get. You also need to account for possible biases and logical errors - try hard to remember not only hits, but also misses, and compare their frequency accurately; try to distinguish vague and precise statements, and attribute more value to hits of more precise statements; always try to accurately determine the statistical rarity of a hit (how often something happens to how many people) and attribute more value to more rare hits.

3) Self-Selection and Social Circles

CONTEXT

If you aren't already very astrologically minded, you couldn't have possibly chosen your friends on the basis of what their horoscopes look like. And even if you were always aware of their sun signs, chances are you haven't looked at their planets in signs yet, which can at times diverge significantly from the sun sign. The point of this test is the fact that if astrology is just random nonsense, then there should be no statistically significant or meaningful pattern among what the planets in signs of your friends are, or those of the people who surround you in general, including groups you haven't chosen, such as your family or various interest groups that you are a member of. I wouldn't count normal classes at school, though, since those are essentially perfect random samples, not reflecting individual agency, genetics or even memetics in any way.

TEST

Write a list of your best friends, or of all friends in order of their importance to you, or you can do a list of your enemies, or just a list of your family members, or members of some other group you're in where membership is based on shared interests. In the groups where you don't have control over who the other members are, you can order them based on how much you like or dislike them, identify with them, etc. Then look at their horoscopes and compare them among themselves and to your own.

EVALUATION

This is basically the same as the celebrity affinity check. If all signs are represented about equally often among their sun signs and planets in signs, the result of the test is not significant. Otherwise, especially meaningful are frequent repetitions of signs same as yours, or those in trine, square or opposition, while the less signs are represented in total, the more statistically significant the result is. The especially interesting case may be the family, since that is a group neither selected by you, nor by any shared interest. It should be entirely circumstantial, unless there is a functional relation between the horoscopes of children and their parents, or in a broader sense, between children and those who raise them.

For that reason, an orphan should count as parents whomever stands for a motherly or fatherly authority in their life, or even children with biological parents that do not in reality fulfill those roles should instead look at the horoscope of their real authority figures. Reversal of gender roles should also be taken into account, since Sun in the horoscope is supposed to relate to the actual traditionally masculine father figure and Moon to the traditionally feminine mother figure, regardless of biological gender of the people who perform those archetypal roles in reality for the person in question. 

In my anecdotal experience, the kind of unlikely things that tend to happen is repeated "inheritance" of the same signs for the same genders in a family, or having children in the same age/sign/gender combinations as one's siblings, or having tight-knit family units comprised of people born in the signs of the same element (with family members of conflicting elements or qualities often expelled out of that family unit or to its periphery). It wouldn't probably be genetic in the conventional sense, even though who knows, no research has been done into that at all. It most likely has something to do (if it works at all) with the view of existence where nothing is really circumstantial or disconnected. If you have anything in your horoscope, it means that you are supposed to be raised in a certain way, allowing for some variability, but only to an extent.

For that reason, your circumstances of birth will result into a situation, where particular people will have to be responsible for raising you, and it doesn't really matter if they are biologically related to you, if they choose to take care of you or if it all transpires seemingly accidentally. In that way, no matter what social conventions are, they will never be able to control this process, since it would be able to use essentially a tantamount to hand of god to always make sure that every individual's upbringing plays a specific, predetermined role in their life. But who knows, in all probability, only you can fully crack the code for your own circumstances. As always with astrology, it would only be a personal proof, but an actual one. Unless you are an uncritical delusional idiot, utterly incapable of reliable introspection or rational judgment, in which case, astrology is not for you.