Astrology and ethics (or, What Not to Ask)

Shortly after I posted Friday’s blog entry, the learned Yuzuru called me to task for accepting a question like “Does my ex have a girlfriend?” As he said in his comment,

There are a lot of astrologers who would accept this horary without any problem. I wouldn’t. I think that the right of the querent to ask questions ends when they are not related to their lives anymore.

Quite right, and if I hadn’t been so interested in helping the student understand which parts of her analysis worked and which I thought could be clarified, I might have realized that my response to her should at least have included that caveat.

What’s wrong with asking questions about third parties? Don’t we do it all the time when we wonder who’s going to win an election or a sporting event? The distinction is that those are public matters, whereas questions that pry into someone’s private life must be considered very carefully, and the motivation of the querent clearly understood. There is a difference between “does he have a girlfriend (just curious)” and “does he have a girlfriend (or will he come back to me)”: one is just idle wondering (or “gossip” as Yuzuru puts it), the other may indeed be an urgent matter for the querent deciding on a course of action.

I think that, as a student, it’s good to try your hand at all sorts of questions in the name of practice. Thinking like a traditional astrologer, reasoning through the question and assigning houses and significators, is a good mental exercise and helps you narrow in on the chart analysis when you do start accepting clients. (“Let’s see, the ex is 7th house & its ruler… is he conjunct anyone? Okay, do the receptions show he’s interested in anyone? What has his planet been doing?”)

But even if “in Nature’s infinite book of secrecy / a little I can read,” ability does not grant permission. Just because you can read the chart (or think you can), doesn’t mean you should.