14.09.2026
The astrology consultations
I had studied astrology since I was very young, so at a certain point I decided to make a living from it. I bought the tables for calculating sidereal positions and worked mostly from one book, El hombre y su estrella.
People gave me their date, their hour and their place of birth, and I drew up the chart. First you calculate how the sky stood on the day that person was born. There’s no mystery in that: it’s arithmetic, and what comes out comes out.
The other half is interpreting it, and that’s where all the work is.
El Hombre y su Estrella gave nearly half its pages to that, with a difference that mattered to me: the interpretations weren’t guessed, they were built backwards. Instead of deciding what a position ought to mean, they had gone and looked at real people —their bodies, their illnesses, their trades, what had happened to them— and seen which positions it coincided with.
That produced very detailed charts. Detailed enough that more than one person asked whether I knew them already, because concrete things came out, like their profession.
Interpreting is like painting. You have a list of positions in front of you and out of that you have to paint a life, a whole person. And it doesn’t fit cleanly: one trait shows up once and its opposite shows up three times. So you go with the one that repeats. That’s the hard part, and it’s the part you’re paid for.
Then I’d meet the person, hand over the chart, and we’d sit down and go through it.
That’s where I learned what actually stayed with me, and it didn’t come from the sky.
The attention of someone while you’re talking about them is total. I’ve never seen anything like it since. It’s their chart and it’s their life, so they don’t drift, don’t check the time and don’t interrupt. A full hour of a person listening with everything they’ve got.
And the second thing: nobody came to be told how their life was going to go. They came to be told what to do with it. They listened to what the chart said, yes, and the moment it was over they asked the next question: so what now? They wanted a way out.
So I became a counsellor without setting out to. If the chart spoke plainly about stomach trouble, I’d suggest they turn vegetarian, or at least eat decently. If they came with a leaning towards the spiritual life from birth, I’d recommended the Bhagavad-gītā.
I never made anything up: I always went from what the chart said. But I’m not going to play innocent. I knew perfectly well they were more open than they’d be normally, and I used it.
What I took from all that isn’t in any astrology book: nobody listens to people. They paid for a map of the sky and went home grateful that somebody had listened to them for an hour.