Most people who ask this question have already spent money. A stone was bought and worn on the right finger on the right day. A pooja was done exactly as it was prescribed. A fast was kept for the full number of weeks. And then the year went by and the thing that was supposed to change did not change.
The question is usually asked with some embarrassment, as though the person is confessing to having been foolish.
He was not foolish. He was given an answer to a question that nobody had framed properly in the first place.
This article is about what that question should have been. It does not prescribe anything and it does not tell you that remedies are a fraud. Both of those are easy to write and neither is honest.
A Remedy is an Answer. What was The Question?
Every remedy is aimed at something. A planet, a house, a period. It is not a general blessing sprayed over a life. It has a target, and somebody chose that target.
So before asking whether a remedy worked, there is an earlier question. What was it aimed at, and on what basis was that decided?
In most cases, if you trace it back honestly, the target was chosen from the complaint rather than from the chart. Marriage is late, so something for Venus. Money is short, so something for Jupiter. Health keeps breaking down, so something for the Sun.
That is not reading a chart. That is matching a word to a word.
A complaint is a symptom. The planet that produces a symptom in one chart is very often not the planet that produces the same symptom in another, and there is no way to know which one it is without opening the chart.
There is a plainer version of the same problem, and it is more common than people admit. In a good number of cases the chart was never opened at all. The remedy was given over a phone call, or from a birth sign alone, or from a list that pairs a problem with a planet and a planet with a stone. Nothing in that sequence required a chart, and nothing in it could have been specific to one person.
If a remedy would have been the same for any stranger who walked in with the same sentence, then it was not a remedy for you. It was a remedy for the sentence.
The Planet That Stands for a Thing is Rarely The Planet That Causes it
This is the single most common place where a remedy goes to the wrong address.
Venus stands for marriage in general, across all charts, as a matter of what Venus is. But in a particular chart, marriage is the business of the seventh house and of whichever planet owns it, and that planet may have no connection to Venus at all.
If the seventh lord in a chart is Saturn, sitting in the twelfth, then the delay being complained about is Saturn’s doing in that chart. A remedy for Venus will not reach it. The remedy has not failed. It was never pointed at the problem.
Money works the same way. Jupiter is associated with wealth everywhere, so a shortage of money is routinely answered with something for Jupiter. But in a chart, earning belongs to certain houses and their owners, and Jupiter may own none of them. In some charts Jupiter owns houses that have nothing to do with gain at all, and strengthening it will faithfully strengthen those instead.
What a planet stands for in general tells you its interests. What it owns in a chart tells you its responsibilities. When those two point in different directions, responsibility decides the result, and a remedy chosen from the general meaning is aimed at the wrong planet from the start.
Strengthening a Planet does not Make it Kind
This one does actual damage, and it is worth being plain about.
Most remedies work by strengthening a planet, by giving it more of its own quality, more attention, more of a channel. But strength is capacity, not kindness.
A planet made stronger does its job better. If the job that planet is holding in that chart is a difficult one, then what has been strengthened is the difficulty. The planet is not being persuaded to be gentler. It is being handed a bigger instrument.
This is why some people find that things became sharper after the remedy rather than softer, and are then told that their faith was not sufficient, or that they did it on the wrong day.
Usually neither is true. The planet did exactly what it was asked to do. It was the wrong planet to ask.
There is a second half to this. Not every remedy is meant to add to a planet. Some are meant to take the edge off one, to reduce rather than increase. These are opposite instructions, and which of the two a chart calls for is itself a decision that has to be made from the chart.
Getting that choice backwards is a quiet and common error. A planet that needed to be softened is instead fed, or a planet that needed support is instead pacified into doing even less. In both cases something was performed faithfully for months and the direction was wrong from the first day.
And a Remedy Cannot Shorten a Period
Some of what a person is living through belongs to a period rather than to a problem. A dasha has a fixed length. Nineteen years is nineteen years, and it does not become fourteen because something was done in the second year.
A remedy performed early in a long period, in the hope of ending it, is being asked to do something it has no ability to do. When nothing visible happens, the conclusion drawn is that remedies do not work. The more accurate conclusion is that this one was asked the wrong thing.
What can change inside a period is how a person goes through it. What he understands while it is happening, what he stops fighting, what he stops expecting from it. That is not nothing. But it is a different claim from the one that was made when the remedy was prescribed.
If nobody told you how long the period runs, nobody was in a position to tell you what the remedy would do either.
An Episode and a Pattern are not the Same Thing
A hard year is an episode. It has a beginning and an end, and it may well be the only one of its kind in a life.
A pattern is different. It is the same shape arriving again, in different clothes, with different people, at a different address. Three businesses that failed the same way. Three relationships that ended on the same sentence. The details change every time and the shape does not.
A remedy aimed at an episode can be useful, because an episode is a single event with a single cause.
A pattern has a cause further back, and until that cause is named, every remedy aimed at it is aimed at the most recent symptom. The symptom clears, the shape returns in the next decade wearing something else, and the person concludes that nothing works.
Something does work. It was just never aimed at the right thing.
And Sometimes it Did Work, and Nobody Noticed
The opposite case deserves a mention, because it happens and it is never counted.
A remedy is often prescribed with a vague promise attached, or with no promise at all, and the person fills in the gap himself with the thing he most wants. He wanted the marriage settled. What the remedy was actually capable of touching was something quieter, how a period was carried, how much damage a difficult stretch did on the way through.
When the marriage did not get settled, the verdict was that nothing happened. But nothing was measured, because nothing specific was ever claimed.
This is not a defence of loose prescribing. It is the same complaint from the other side. If what a remedy is meant to do is never stated plainly, then it cannot be judged, and both the person who praises it and the person who dismisses it are guessing.
None of This is an Argument Against Remedies
It would be easy to read all of the above as saying that remedies are useless and that the people who prescribe them are dishonest. That is not what is being said, and it would be a cheap thing to say.
A remedy chosen from a chart, aimed at a planet that was identified by reading that chart, for a reason the astrologer can state in plain words, is a completely different object from one chosen because a complaint sounded like a planet.
The problem is not remedies. The problem is prescription without diagnosis.
Nobody swallows medicine before being told what the illness is. In this one field people do it regularly, and then blame themselves when it does not help.
Four Questions to Ask Before the Next One
If a remedy is being suggested to you, these four are fair to ask, and any astrologer who has actually read your chart will be able to answer them without difficulty.
- Which planet is this aimed at, and why that planet rather than another?
- What does that planet own in my chart, and where is it sitting?
- Which period am I running, and how much of it is left?
- Is what I am describing a single episode, or a shape that has repeated?
These are not difficult questions and they are not rude ones. They are the same four that had to be answered before the remedy was chosen, so if they were answered then, repeating them costs nothing.
If they cannot be answered, then what is being offered is not a remedy. It is a guess with a price on it.
There is a further question underneath these four, about what decides whether the person answering them is in a position to help at all, and that is taken up separately.
Where This Actually Gets Settled
Everything in this article points in one direction. The question is not which remedy to try next. The question is what is actually producing the thing you keep meeting.
That is not answerable in general, and this article has deliberately not tried to answer it. Which planet, which houses, which period, whether it is an episode or a shape. Those four answers exist in one place only, and it is the chart.
Until they are known, anything done is done in the dark, and doing more of it in the dark does not improve the odds.
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