How to choose an astrologer

Most things you pay for can be checked afterwards. A tailor's fit is right or it is not. A reading resists that. Careful practitioners avoid claims that can be scored: hand somebody a date and an event and you have given them something testable and almost certainly false.

So if you cannot grade the output, grade the encounter, much of which is visible before any money moves.

Start with price. It should be a number, stated up front, without your having to ask twice. More importantly it should not move. Once the fee responds to what was found in the chart, everything honest that follows stands on a rotten floor.

Then the first five minutes. You want somebody who asks what you came for before looking at anything. Someone who opens by telling you what they see has picked performance over work. Those five minutes have a shadow: alarm. If a person who has known you three minutes has already told you something worrying, look at the clock. Alarm before they know anything about you turns a browsing customer into a frightened one, and frightened people do not compare prices.

Somewhere in a good hour they will say I do not know, out loud, and tell you where the method stops. Every real craft has an edge, and people who know a craft can describe it precisely. Vagueness about limits is not modesty. It is coverage.

Two things work against you. Certainty, which is soothing and often sincere, and whose real effect is to stop you asking questions. And secrecy about method: do not concern yourself with the calculation. That sentence needs you not to ask. Ask what software they use, and see whether the answer comes without irritation.

Remedies are about direction. A fast, then a stone, then a better stone, then a ritual with a fee. In an honest practice a fix that fails means the reading was wrong. Here it means a bigger fix is needed.

Finally, a good hour lets you leave: no follow-up booked before you have stood up, no window closing on Thursday.