What is astrology? How you answer this question may well reveal more about you than about the field itself. The definition in Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary (fifth edition) – ‘a study which assumes, and professes to interpret, the influence of the heavenly bodies on human affairs’ – is not only condescending but centuries out of date. Little do the ivory-tower word nerds suspect how much they have in common with astrologers – as keepers of a language that never stops evolving.
Yet the nature of astrology is such that nothing escapes it: at least, no one (or thing) with a birth (or start) time + place. So our use of the discipline, and what it can teach us, however adept we may be, reflects our own natal dynamics, subject to transiting factors. Whatever objectivity ensues is always relative; just as any map betrays the biases of its maker. The same conundrum bedevils science and mainstream psychology, both of which are forever at pains to disavow astrology (and which, if they doth protest too much, sound suspiciously religious). And indeed astrology differs from these systems of knowledge (both of which have enriched it despite their dismissiveness) by virtue of its age-old resistance to institutionalisation; its feral capacity to flourish in the cracks; its seemingly endless potential for reinvention.
In its most visible guise today, astrology is a commodity – typically in the form of information marketed to consumers. What happens if it’s offered on a not-for-profit basis? So far, and it’s early days, people lack interest or else want to pay. Monetisation confers worth in our capitalist age. But commercial pressures limit the interpretive possibilities. One of my astrologer friends suggests it’s gone underground – necessary for all subversive activities by definition. But if so, what does astrology – the real deal – look like now?
In the popular imagination, it tends to show up as a series of characters (ram, bull, twins, crab etc.), two thirds of them animals, but often personified as or merged with a young woman – presumably the leading consumer of ‘star sign’ predictions – and represented in columns, calendars and almanacs by fairytale/fashion-style graphics. However, for those with enough patience and interest to study in depth, whether as an amateur or a professional, the covers of many handbooks bear pictures of planets, stars, symbols, ancient gods or some idealised mixture thereof: images that could be read as cues to leave Earth and/or your body behind, to enter the abstract dimension of archetypal mind. As if astrology (whatever it is) happens elsewhere, in some rarefied realm – a sacred space remote from the immediacy of the mundane, a reflective place above and beyond the present. It looks like a sober and serious subject, not a form of entertainment. But what does astrology look like stripped of the packaging?
Philosopher Ian Hacking, in his review of DSM-5, the latest version of the manual often described as psychiatry’s bible, identifies ‘a fundamental flaw in the enterprise’ of classifying mental disorders. The high incidence in those deemed mentally ill of comorbidity – ‘systematically overlapping diagnoses to the point that it is unclear that it makes sense to talk of the primary ailment’ – means such illnesses can’t be usefully classified in the same manner as plants.
To take a random example, my bipolar neighbour, a stay-at-home whose eyes dart wildly when she talks, clearly suffers from one or more anxiety disorders; typical of 75% of those with a Bipolar I diagnosis. Her proneness to outbursts of verbal abuse and gratuitous noise (‘disruptive, impulse-control or conduct disorder’) and binge drinking (‘alcohol abuse disorder’) applies to over 50% of those diagnosed with Bipolar I. So even if she didn’t exhibit a mash-up of most of the symptoms of all the ‘Cluster A’ personality disorders, no single category could do her dysfunction justice. The botanical model of classification can’t help us understand the full complexity of insanity.
And it’s this sort of reductiveness that gets stuck on the zodiac (‘circle of animals’). So-called star signs (named for constellations) are only sun signs, the backdrop to the apparent annual movement of the Sun. Which means that, much as an alcoholic can be schizoid, paranoid, manic and disruptively antisocial with the balance in constant flux, someone born as the Sun passed through, say, Scorpio displays traits that also reflect Moon or rising signs, planetary aspects and more.
The starting point is in external reality: shifting alignments of planets seen at night or mapped on an astronomical ephemeris. But the more you look into astrology, the less rational it can seem. Most people, sceptics included, know that astrological forecasts are based on actual movements – transits – of the Sun, Moon and planets. Events occur in synchrony, as if sky and Earth were connected, akin to how lunar and tidal cycles coincide. Of course, things get more complex when we introduce a horoscope: a virtual snapshot of where the planets were at a person’s time of birth (though not quite, due to the slippage of signs called ‘precession of the equinoxes’). But if you can conceive that each moment in time might possess its own unique quality (as expressed or embodied in various art forms, e.g., haiku, improvised dance or jazz, impressionist painting, photography), doesn’t it follow that some moments – or periods – harmonise with that of your birth, while some don’t?
And some concepts are more abstract still, involving more purely symbolic equivalences. A few months ago I attended a seminar on the use of secondary progressions – a subject I’d once taught to my advanced students because, though beginners would understand, I viewed it as backup: useful to reinforce the transiting story or fill in its gaps. How do you apply this standard old technique? The qualified astrologer explained that each day after your birth equals a year in your life. So if the Sun changed signs when you were 18 days old, some sort of significant change would occur when you reached the age of 18. That’s the basic formula used for progressions: nothing to do with what’s happening in the sky now. So how – or, rather, why – do they work? That wasn’t discussed. And the speaker failed to demonstrate that they do discernibly work by using such loose criteria for assessing their relevance that she always got results, but of a sort too inconsistent to use predictively, which might be why she’d minimise the value of predictive work and assert the importance of letting the client talk, as if to provide too much perspective would be unsympathetic.
Most of my clients over the years came to pick my brains, not bend my ear. While I talked with the tape recorder running, they felt they were getting their money’s worth. Yet they had ample time to ask questions, and kept the tapes to replay, reflect on at leisure, and share with friends, some of whom came for readings too. Was my informative style any better? That the speaker on progressions presumably gets repeat business, like I did, suggests to me that most clients are seeking reassurance and don’t give much (if any) thought to the logic that supports it.
Why do patterns that escape the notice of most others live so vividly in an astrologer’s head? Do we simply project them onto the outer world and ignore contrary evidence? That astrology tends to make more sense retrospectively – the meaning of events becoming apparent only after they happen, often with greater clarity as more time elapses – could suggest that astrologers somehow create their own kind of narrative.
Every narrative demonstrates some sort of thought process. And astrology, in all its diverse forms, is a way of thinking. Or (and this can be true of science and religion too), a way of not thinking – if it involves recycling received opinion. We can’t (or at least are trained not to) grasp and communicate concepts without words, symbols or images. Which makes astrology first of all a language. And so, much as a given language conditions the thoughts of which we’re capable, astrological language enables a distinct way of thinking. Conversely, some ways of thinking seem conducive to its use. Not so in the case of those who, with their vocab confined to the twelve signs, zealously generalise about Taureans etc. they’ve known then say, ‘I’m not sure I believe in it’. Yet even astrology’s fiercest critics (e.g., Richard Dawkins) don’t think it through, while true believers refuse to subject their faith to rational scrutiny, as if they fear it has no more substance than a soap bubble.
And that’s what most of astrology’s sceptics and its believers have in common: they’re making a category mistake. Belief or its opposite is possible only if we treat astrology as a belief system. In fact, its practice involves other fields of knowledge. It can’t be neatly detached from astronomy, maths or psychology.
A hallmark of any religion is its claim to provide an overarching belief system, a unified theory of everything. For instance, veganism – a practice defined as abstinence from all consumption of animal products – behaves like a religion when adherents believe that eating the meat or secretions of suffering animals is the root cause of all violence and fear on the planet. Ditto, astrology starts to look a lot like a religion to the extent that we use it to account for all phenomena, inner and outer, making it the source of all meanings instead of a frame of reference for them.
virtual stargazer 