Fair point but we risk going into the 21st century with a whole new generation of astrologers having sex in the eighth house and starting a delineation with pluto and ending with uranus.Do you think I am kidding?I have seen them at it.

I once listened to a woman who only used asteroids. However this is a step up. One of the reasons Marc Edmond Jones was moved to reorganize the astrology of his day is that he watched a woman give a reading simply by putting her hand on the chart. I told that story online to a group of young astrology students and a few them saw nothing wrong with that approach.

Oh and Welcome Joseph.

Tom

Hi Joseph - I didn't mean any insult - just bemoaning the lack of introductory material for people. And welcome to the forum!

Steven - suppose I'm a reasonably intelligent person and I'm having a house built. Now, I may not know all the details of structural engineering, but it's my house - I want to understand at least some of the basics and some of the process. Maybe I'll get interested enough along the way to want to go to engineering school - we don't know.

By your analogy, is this impossible for me unless I go to engineering school before I have my house built? And how on earth can I know if I want to go to engineering school if all I know is, say, I have an aptitude for maths?

Or was all that as clear as mud?

Well, I'm very much an amateur but also one who has been slowly dragged into using traditional astrology because the techniques work.

The book that got me started, and which was extremely accessible to me when I only knew 20th century psychological astrology, was Horary Astrology by Anthony Louis--the first version, now out of print.

I encountered the author on a early online forum--before the advent of the Internet, and he read a lot of horary charts there quite brilliantly which raised my interest in the topic, which until then had sounded too superstitious for me. He read a horary chart for me in 1991 which made a prediction that extended out 18 months and came true very dramatically. So that motivated me to put some time into studying his book.

I could not make head nor tail of Lilly for many years because there were too many terms in it that were unfamiliar to me which I didn't even realize were astrological terms. It took a long time until I crossed some kind of threshold where suddenly his books started to make sense to me, mostly because I'd read many modern discussions of many of the concepts he breezes by without explanation. Now I return to Lilly a lot, but there is no way I'd recommend it to someone who wanted to start learning traditional techniques.

I was also inspired by Frawley's The Real Astrology Applied, too, but I didn't come away understanding how to apply the techniques he cites to charts I was reading. I have to say many of the essays posted on this site were as helpful as any published book.

Horary Astrology by Anthony Louis--the first version, now out of print.

I thought about mentioning Louis' book and although it is not strictly traditional, it is a good introduction to traditional ideas in horary. Horary is a good place to start, too, as it is easier to work with a few planets than it is to try to incorporate the entire chart.

I'm glad you mentioned it.

Tom

I also thought about that - the original is best, I think. Problem is, it probably is a little dated now and in need of an update, but then that's true of them all. When I was a student I learned a lot from Anthony Louis.