Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post for the week. This is a different look for this Substack — sometimes personal, sometimes whimsical reflections on lived life. At the companion site,
, discusses Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux.Best,
Sam
THE CASE FOR ASTROLOGY
I came across astrology, like most people do — in middle school. There was a certain kind of girl (it was all girls) who were interested in palm readings, in zodiacs, and also in ‘soul mates’ and ‘destinies.’ I remember glancing at an astrology book and my mother saying — in the faraway voice that I recognized from the girls in middle school — that she had once been very interested in it too.
Not too long after that, my dad, in one of our moments of masculine confidence, gave me the low-down on astrology. It works, he said, because it was vague enough that everybody could hear what they wanted from it. And that so-rational perspective was, for a long time, what I took to be the truth. By the time I got to college nothing seemed more down-market, more risible, than astrology — The Onion’s ‘horoscopes’ thoroughly took care of the topic for me.
But something in me stayed interested in it even so. I had a friend, who I’m calling Samantha, who talked constantly about horoscopes — in a very ironic, very millennial sort of way; that I was doing such and thing because I was a typical Sagittarius, etc. It struck me as funny and fun, but when I introduced her to another friend, that friend said, “Samantha is an idiot. Astrology!” And that taught me to shut up about it.
But, later on, I got into psychedelics, spirituality, most importantly, moved to L.A., and little by little astrology moved to the front of my consciousness and I talked about it with less irony and then, really, with no irony at all. For one thing, astrology really seemed to have about 100% accuracy on anybody I’d ever met. This seemed particularly easy to verify when I was dating. People led unabashedly with their star signs — it was a big part of dating small talk — and as I got to know people a bit better, some patterns were almost eerily confirmed. Capricorns were really determined and really fixated — the thing that they fixated on could seem really arbitrary to an outsider but would clearly be of utmost importance to them. The Taureses were fixers — they never gave up on anything. The Geminis were incredibly changeable, the Leos ferocious, etc. The feeling was that as soon as I heard somebody’s sign I knew, either in a dating or friendship context, what the dynamic would be with then — like having some sort of a cheat sheet on human interactions. I really did notice that I’d gravitate to other fire signs. That I got along very well with Sagittariuses and Leos and astonishingly well with Arieses — almost regardless of whether or not we had anything in common on paper. And there was a very bittersweet sense with the signs I was ‘incompatible’ with, that however much we might try it just wasn’t going to work out.
I found — very anecdotally — astrology to be deeply accurate, but even if it turns out that I’m imagining things; that the stars have nothing at all to with, like, my love life; that, as the scientific community triumphantly declared about a decade ago, the earth itself had shifted on its axis so that astrology might be true in principle and yet everybody for the last millennium would have been reading the wrong horoscope, even granted all those things I would find astrology worthwhile.
For one thing, it’s so deeply embedded in human culture that it’s the height of Western ‘rationalistic’ prejudice to dismiss it all as superstition. The ‘cradle civilizations’ of the West, the Greeks and Romans, were, together with the entire ancient world, avid astrologers. There was no problem, from the vantage-point of astrology, with the ascendance of modern astronomy. The stars could exist as they did in a Copernican framework and still, as scientists like Pythagoras insisted, exert energies that affected faraway people on a day-to-day basis. Once I got interested in astrology, I found myself tapping into a counter-cultural, and very feminine, energy — I have, I am pretty sure, yet to have an actual conversation with a male about astrology, but I talk to women about it all the time. Women are very aware of the connection of their own physiology with the movements of the moon, and much of the conversation about astrology is about the sensitivity of energy, about a particular sub-dominant, non-patriarchal way of understanding human dynamics.
But I also found astrology to represent an extraordinarily beautiful way of thinking about who people are and what our life trajectory is. There is a great sense of equality in astrology — but an equality that is not flattening. In the astrological mindset, everybody at the moment of their birth has a distinct character — their character is of course not just their sun sign but a highly specific matrix of energies that shapes them, really, for the rest of their lives. Think about people from an astrological point of view and it is almost impossible to not be forgiving towards them. Somebody is hot-tempered? Well, that’s the Aries in them. Somebody seems scattered and has trouble getting it together? Well, that’s probably that their chart is in very different houses. Above all, there is no sense of homogenization — of feeling that everybody must do very well in school, or be very industrious, or anything like that. There is an inbuilt recognition of the diversity of human character — the assumption that people cannot be bent into a shape that is not their nature is part of the underlying belief system of astrology. But, at the same time, there is a pronounced sense of fatedness and a humility that comes with it. Much of the anxiety of our modern, ‘scientific’ way of living comes from the idea that we can shape ourselves into being anything we want to be — or, as the apposite phrase would have it, ‘the sky is the limit.’ In the framework of astrology, the sky, har-har, really is the limit. The constellations impose a certain limitation to what a person’s life will look like — a Sagittarius can’t do the things a Taurus can do and vice versa. Limitations — failures — aren’t some sort of verdict on the value of a person; they are just a reminder of fatedness, of certain natural limits, a gentle push to be closer to one’s true self.
Astrology is one of these places where I find myself at a surprising distance from my super-rational, highly-educated upbringing — and am pleased to have taken that journey. The belief of the dominant culture is that the old superstitions were supplanted by modern science — with the dethronement of astrology, together with something like alchemy, the prime example of how the world has gotten more rational, more scientific. That vision of one-way progress, though, is belied by the startling trenchancy of beliefs in astrology throughout the population. The scientific tend to view this trenchancy as a sign of how backward the population at large continues to be, but that’s not what it is. There’s a schism in the culture between those who believe that science, technology, reason blaze the path towards a better future, and those who don’t buy it, are more interested in maintaining continuity with the past and in a human-first approach. Astrology is one of these fault lines. I happen to think it is based on something — an ancient science — but I’m actually not interested in tackling its efficacy in the domain of ‘proof.’ Its value is in its conception of character and fate — very powerful, very wise ideas and almost completely missing from the scientific dominant culture.
It's true: men don't talk about astrology together. They talk about it with women. And when it's brought up amongst each other, men often say something similar to what your dad said to you.
I think though, that even if his intent was to do so, his explanation, however true it might be, doesn't necessarily discount the practice of astrology. I don't personally pay attention to my Sagittarius-ness, but I can't help but see the similarities between the critiques people have against it and the critiques people have toward other spiritual or religious practices.
Your case for astrology sounds very similar to the arguments I give myself for following a spiritual path—humility, self-reflection, compassion for others, etc. And you touched on a strong reason to respect astrology: it creates space for less patriarchal ways of thinking about ourselves and people in general.
I don’t necessarily “believe” in astrology as any hard and fast rule, but like you I’ve found it to be almost 100% accurate in my life. I’m an Aries and a hot head and etc. etc. My friends and family all live up to their signs. That said, I have noticed that I tune out when people are too reliant/excited about the subject. Is that an Aries trait too 😂