When astrologers face confirmation bias

Mar 19
3 min read

Confirmation bias is our shared tendency to look for information that confirms what we already believe, and to overlook what contradicts it. In horary astrology, it’s the astrologer’s main enemy. And I ran straight into it.

One of my dreams is to live on a farm, in step with the rhythm of agricultural work.

When we first arrived in Portugal, we met a French couple who had been living on a farm for 20 years, growing vegetables. One day at the market, they told us they were thinking of selling their house. We let ourselves dream a little — if only we had the funds to buy it, it would be the perfect place. And then time passed. One day, they told us it wasn’t selling as quickly as expected, and that they were seriously considering renting it to us if the agent’s mandate expired without a sale.

That’s when we got carried away. I had just started studying horary astrology, and I couldn’t stand the suspense: would they sell the house, or might we end up with it? I spent the day imagining it — what animals we could keep, what we could grow, how we would organise our work. In short, I was daydreaming.

I cast the chart the next morning, when the question had become almost overwhelming. As the french saying goes, the cobbler always wears the worst shoes.

What a joy it was to see the chart confirm my dream! They really were going to rent us their house. I was on cloud nine. Then I wanted to know how long we’d have to wait, so I went back to the chart to look for timing. And that’s when I realised I might have rushed things a bit. I hadn’t been looking at the right planet.

Before burying all my hopes, I returned to the original chart and tried to find the right information… but it just wasn’t there. Nothing in the chart indicated that they would rent it to us — in fact, it suggested we wouldn’t have liked living there at all.

I turned the chart every which way, trying to force a confirmation, even bending a few essential rules and stretching the logic to fit. But nothing worked. It never once gave me the answer I wanted.

This example taught me two essential lessons.

The first has to do with the predictive nature of horary astrology. It is precisely because mistakes are visible and verifiable that it remains an honest tool. How many divinatory systems shield themselves behind interpretation, intuition, or “the energies of the moment” — answers so flexible they can never be wrong, and therefore can never truly be right?

The second lesson is simpler: horary astrology has no regard for our hopes. It shows reality as it is, not as we would like it to be. Closing your eyes has never stopped a car from crashing into a tree.

It was one of my first lessons in humility. I learned to be wary of myself — of my desires, my projections. John Frawley warns his students:

“The difficult part in judging one’s own questions is not the choosing of the time, but the setting aside of one’s natural partiality.” The Horary Textbook

Horary astrology does not answer our desires. It presents things as they are.

We are truly the worst judges of our own cases.

To go further, without illusions — The Phlogiston .