bhagolblog

Founder notes · The gist

Why there is no daily horoscope

The most requested feature at an Indian astrology company is a daily horoscope, and the founder explains, properly rather than dismissively, why it will never be built.

The essay6 minThe gist2 min

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

Twelve signs, 365 days. A daily horoscope is a promise to produce 4,380 paragraphs a year, whether or not the sky has done anything about you. And in India each of those paragraphs is written for roughly 120 million people at once.

A daily horoscope, called a rashifal (राशिफल) in Hindi, is a short paragraph for each of the twelve signs, replaced every morning. It is the thing readers ask this company for most often, and the essay opens by counting the paragraphs such a slot demands and then refusing to fill it.

The essay takes the request seriously first. A daily costs nothing and asks for nothing: no birth time, no fee, no form. It is short. It gives two people something to say to each other. It offers a way of holding a day loosely. And the tradition already has a daily document, the panchang, the Indian almanac, so wanting the sky to say something about today is nothing to be embarrassed about.

Then the reasons against. The first is about supply. The slot has to be filled every day, and what the sky does in a day is small and the same for everyone in a city. So the gap gets filled with writing, and writing that must be worth opening again tomorrow needs a small edge: one thing to watch, one thing to expect. Nobody chooses that. The format chooses it.

The second is arithmetic. India has about 1.45 billion people. Divide by 12 and each paragraph is addressed to about 120 million. A paragraph specific enough to act on is wrong for nearly all of them. A paragraph true of 120 million people is not about anybody. Also, the thing that puts you in a box does not change: the sun's position at your birth holds for about a month, and the moon's sign at your birth never moves at all, while the paragraph changes every morning.

The third is that it would feel right anyway. In 1949 Bertram Forer gave a class of students the same personality sketch, assembled out of astrology writing, and each student thought it was theirs. They rated it better than 4 out of 5. The founder says this is not about gullible people. It is about a kind of sentence that fits everybody, so writing the daily more carefully only makes it feel more personal.

What the company offers instead is the panchang: the day computed for your city, reported, and then no further.

Words decoded

rashifal (राशिफल)
the daily horoscope paragraph written for your sign
sign (rashi, राशि)
one of the twelve divisions of the zodiac; Indian practice usually names the one the moon was in at your birth, not the sun's
panchang (पञ्चाङ्ग)
the Indian almanac, a page of computed facts about the day
tithi (तिथि)
the lunar day, one of the units a panchang reports, which turns at a stated hour rather than at midnight
birth time
the hour and minute of birth, the input a genuinely personal daily would need every day
Forer effect
the tendency to accept a description written for everybody as an accurate description of yourself
Why anyone should careThe most popular astrology format in the world is the one that computes the least about the person reading it, and the reasons it stays that way are built into the format rather than into the people writing it.
Read it properly, 6 min Why there is no daily horoscope