Full Moon: Astrologia

It's Friday (barely), and it's the first day of a new month, with a blue Moon just behind us. Hello.

When I began Salt for the Eclipse, I knew I was going to write about astrology at some point, even multiple points, but it took me a while to feel ready. Astrology is something I have so many opinions about, and yet I'm forever reconsidering exactly what they are. Call it cognitive dissonance if you like. One reason I'm now committing my thoughts to writing is to try resolving that dissonance.

Another reason, the greater one, is that I've written and will keep writing about other forms of divination in this newsletter, therefore omitting astrology would be a serious mistake. It's one of the oldest forms of divination I've engaged with — oldest both in its raw history and in my personal history. I think the very first things I ever tried were palmistry and graphology (divination from hands and handwriting respectively), and much to my skeptical father's chagrin, I was experimenting with these things before the age of ten; but they didn't really take. Then in early puberty I ordered a fluffy, crash-course astrology book from those Scholastic student book catalogues, and this was followed by a longer one[1] which sent me far, far deeper than basic Sun signs. My undiagnosed autism rapidly escalated my idle interest into special interest, and this has never really changed.

Because of that special interest, I've also balked at talking about astrology very much when others bring it up because I know it can become very hard to control my verbosity. I don't want to get repetitive and pedantic, nor aggressively judgmental of people who appreciate "my" thing differently than I do. Astrology does not belong to me, or to anyone, and as stated I mainly need to give the subject its due because of how my writings on divination would be lacking without it.

However, with that preface also comes a warning: my perspective on astrology is very distinct from perspective on practices like tarot (which I've covered already) or practices with potential forthcoming posts like pendulum work, rune casting, scrying, etc. When I wrote about tarot, in fact, I considered that I might not treat astrology as divination at all. Having thought on it further, I would now say that astrology remains divination but of a separate class from those forms that rely on local, human-made objects as symbolic interpretive mechanisms; astrology overlaps with these forms in that they all rely on self-study, but it also bears more resemblance to forms like augury that rely on interpreting human-independent things around us, working from objects that have their own behavioral logic — that we have not simply fabricated or repurposed as analytical tools. Astrology thus forces us to directly grapple with our relationship to the natural world[2], focused on celestial bodies.

In the astrological mindset, that relationship is of a kind where you're supposed to say that planets, stars, and other things up in the firmament can exert some power on the Earth and those of us living here, besides scientifically measurable elements like gravity, light, radiation, and so on. Astrologers may refer to this power one iteration of the adage as above, so below. Of course, people who doubt, disprove, and sometimes harbor an exceptional dislike for astrology are all generally pointing at this kind of talk, citing it as the crux of their dispute: you see, they say, it just doesn't work!

Now I may be a witch, occultist, budding animist, and many related things, but my own attitude toward astrology is so skeptical about some things that what I'm about to say here may come across as heresy among astrologers. In turn this should beg the question from other skeptics about why I still practice and study astrology in my own way when I otherwise seem to be on "their side." I'm going to work through all of this.

So let me ask up front: does astrology "work"? I can't really begin anywhere else.

The 12.8 billion dollar question

According to a search engine result, $12.8 billion is the apparent worth of the astrology industry. Given how modern search engines are almost totally enshittified, make of that what you will, but I wouldn't really be surprised if it were true. The astrology industry itself is real: publications about astrology; individual psychics (or witches or whatever other label is trendy to toss about) offering natal chart interpretation and horoscopes; impersonal websites offering the same things; sleek apps offering horoscopes straight to your inbox; jewelry and collectibles themed around astrological symbols; and things I haven't even thought of. Not only do all these things exist, but in roughly the last ten years the demand for astrology has exploded on a scale maybe larger than the resurgence of astrological interest in the 1960s-70s that birthed the original New Age movement.

In just the United States — where astrology doesn't exist in the cultural mainstream to anywhere near the extent that it can be found in India, for example — in 2018 something like 29% of the people here "believed in astrology," and just a few years before that it was estimated that barely more than half the population believed astrology didn't work.[3] It's also widely understood and intuited these days that astrology is growing in popularity among queers, kinksters, goths, and other outsider cultures; it's always been more popular among us anyway, but now it's an outright assumption that someone with "blue hair and pronouns" must also know their rising sign. Under all these conditions, a $12.8 billion industry sounds plausible.

So if it's a fraudulent industry as well, what a profitable fraud. All the more galling for an observer to witness if they believe — not even believe, they would say, know — with every fiber of their being that astrology doesn't work. If someone could prove that astrology did work, maybe they should be awarded $12.8 billion, like how James Randi offered the sum of $1 million to anyone who could definitively prove anything paranormal was real.

It would seem like a simple enough proposal, but what's never asked or answered to my satisfaction in these debates is what astrology "working" should mean. Does that mean scientists would have to prove a hitherto unmeasured physical force in the heavens was acting on newborn babies and global events? Or does it mean that an astrologer's predictions must simply match consensus reality so well that even without an explanation for why the predictions are right, the astrologer at least seems trustworthy? Would it have to be more than one astrologer, for a better sample size? What is the margin of error that would be accepted — would the astrologer(s) have to be correct absolutely every time? And what is it that people who believe in astrology are actually seeking to gain from their natal charts and horoscopes: concrete accuracy, or tools for understanding themselves and each other? If the latter option were clearly demonstrable, would that mean astrology pragmatically "worked" and could be embraced, or should a proper skeptical mind still see it as a deplorable charlatan's game?

If I seem to be mocking the skeptical, rationalist approach here, let me now state very plainly than what I've suggested so far: I do not think that planetary and astral influence on the Earth is "real" in any way that astrologers typically claim. As I'll get to more near the end of this post, too, I have many, many qualms about how people use astrology, both in the past and present. I don't even personally use horoscopes, just natal charts.[4] But I think I'm turning skeptical rhetoric back on the skeptics with good cause: we can decry the fakery all we wish, but I'm a Jamesian pragmatist. To me, something not being objectively real is not the same thing as something not working. In that respect I would say that even if astrology doesn't describe anything real, to leap from that to "it doesn't work" is an indication that we are having the wrong conversation.

Regardless of reality, I am interested in astrology for three overarching reasons. First, it is interesting as a phenomenon. Secondly, it is useful — that is, "it works" — for some specific purposes. And lastly, when many people are instinctively engaging with it, this speaks to a deep need for connection with the cosmos that should not be ignored, whether or not the exact language they've chosen is appropriate. Each of these overarching reasons can then be broken down into several sub-considerations, and so I'm now going to write my way through all of them. By the end, I won't have earned myself $12.8 billion, but I hope that anyone reading, whether they do or don't practice astrology, and perhaps even if they feel hostile toward it, might have found a new way to think about it.

Astrology as esoteric knowledge vessel

This is what I mean by an interesting phenomenon. Anyone entirely opposed to witchcraft, ceremonial magic, and the occult would of course gain nothing by reading this section, but I would be rather bemused if someone in that mindset had subscribed here. In any case, I find the actual substance of astrology — at least the Babylonian-rooted astrology of many millennia, which is what I'm familiar with — to be like a cauldron and conduit for what the modern occult even is. It's a nexus, a matrix. To leave it out of one's active practices is fine, as there's no sense in using a tool that has no resonance; but I find that at least including astrology in one's studies is invaluable.

The knowledge that astrology offers can be looked at from at least three different angles.

Alchemical heirlooms

Astrological symbols — for the planets, zodiac constellations, and more — were not invented in a vacuum. They are part of the much larger system of alchemical symbols that date back a millennium and a half to the eastern Mediterranean. Besides being the progenitor of many sciences, alchemy was and remains an occult, magical discipline (this being of course why science is often keen to distance itself from its origins). It is also older than its post-Roman symbols, arising no later than a couple centuries BCE, either in Egypt, India, China, or somewhere in between.

Indian and Chinese alchemy are not the same as "Western" alchemy, insofar as differences can be mapped between them, but the similarities are not accidental and the only real question is from which direction everything developed and spread.[5] I know almost nothing of the Indian or Chinese traditions, whereas I've spent years very (very) slowly learning about the "Western" tradition — which I keep putting in quotes because aside from my ongoing quibbles with conceptualizing "the West," the "Western" alchemical tradition had further early development beyond Egypt in the Levant and Greece, and despite Euro-imperialist narratives even Greece has long had just as many cultural ties to "the East" as "the West." I lean a little more toward saying the Mediterranean alchemical tradition since it's both neutral and geographically accurate, especially once the Mediterranean-surrounding Roman Empire also took up alchemy and laid the foundations for it to spread even further through northern Europe in the Middle Ages.

Why the history lesson? In a way I'm only trying to emphasize how old and complex alchemy is, without even delving into what it teaches. As Ronald Hutton observes by the end of The Triumph of the Moon, on the one hand there is no pagan religious practice in Europe that has demonstrably, incontrovertibly survived in its original form from the pre-Christian era — but on the other hand the European esoteric tradition, which is heavily interlaced with alchemical knowledge transmission, does have a traceable, uninterrupted lineage going back for more than two thousand years. It is often that very lineage, preserved through occult grimoires, that people like Britain's cunning folk actually relied on for plying their trade, no Diana-worshipping witch cult required. Ever since I read that comparison, I've been stunned by how exciting that is. There remains the tragedy of European indigenous animist sites and knowledge bases being severed from the present day by intracontinental colonialism and Christian ideology; but those of us Euro-descendants seeking occult practices that are at once ancient, culturally diverse, and entrenched in our own ancestral backgrounds need look no further than the same school of inquiry that's permeated the likes of Freemasonry and every ceremonial magical society inspired by it.

That includes making a place for astrology if we like. Besides the symbols, astrological considerations are front and center in alchemical lore. Metals belong to planets; the elemental correspondences of the zodiac signs also come into play. I fully credit my astrological fascination with giving me easier access to exploring alchemy and wider esotericism. I'm partway through a 12 month commitment to better centering animism within my rites, but when that's finished I'm going to pivot to 12 months of the esoteric, and astrology will no doubt serve as my guide again. None of this requires belief in astrology "working" — only a curiosity about the history of all things ritual, magic, and mystic.

Kinship traditions

The above was astrology's significance as macro-inheritance. It is also a micro-inheritance. Like tarot, a few other divinatory practices, and any number of folk medicines and apotropaic protections, astrology comes to many of us not through arbitrary book purchases but as something passed down through the odd ducks in our families, most frequently through women.

I think this is often what people mean when they say they're hereditary witches: it's not a deliberate religion into which someone is initiated, but they have at least one immediate older relative who's casually to not-so-casually interested in ritual and magic, and this relative has passed their knowledge on to the next generation. There may be no discipline in it, and frequently the relative in question would say they follow the majority religion in their area, or conversely have no religion.

Nonetheless, the knowledge is handed off successively; and that said, there are also authentically inherited initiatiory religions from non-European origins, whose members have syncretically adopted astrology, as I've encountered or read about with practitioners of Vodou, Candomblé, Santería, and other African diasporic traditions (or in the case of an entirely mainstream religion like Hinduism, astrology is so commonplace that I imagine it's passed down in a less clandestine fashion).

Whatever the case, the connections between the family members who keep this knowledge are vital connections, sometimes even when we feel ambivalent about them. Many, many years after my paternal grandmother died, I finally found out she had a tarot deck. Putting other pieces of her personality together I'm now also more than a little suspicious that she enjoyed astrology as well. I don't relish this discovery insofar as my relationship with her was always awkward; I would have called her my least favorite grandparent. But how might our relationship have improved if we could have talked divination together?

Astrolomy

A tradeoff might have been that we might have both sent my skeptical, science-focused father to his wits' end. But whether members of his own community like it or not, the science of astronomy was only recently divorced from astrology. Their original union reaches back to ancient Babylonia and has equally old Chinese and Mayan parallels, not to mention the star-tracking traditions of virtually every indigenous culture that's ever existed.

Although combining astrology and astronomy back into one word as astrolomy is linguistically nonsensical, I've lately been toying with the neologism in order to nudge the two disciplines closer together again, at least within my worldview. Science in its best moments has worked so well for studying the cosmos that bringing astronomical literacy to astrology is, I think, fairly important; likewise, though a great number of astronomers are mystically minded in a humanistic sense, e.g. the lovely Carl Sagan, the night sky's cultural and spiritual value is not properly accounted for in "pure," decontextualizing, abstracting astronomy, and in order to do that accounting some astrological literacy is also required.

For anything else I could say on that front, I'm saving it for the animist section further down, but as this perspective about astrology equally matters to the shared roots of science and esotericism, I had to mention it first up here.

All the above is why astrology is bound to millennia of knowledge transmission; again it has no bearing on what astrology pragmatically accomplishes in its own right. So before I get to the animist implications, now I'm at last going to address the specific contexts in which I believe astrology does "work" or at least offer interesting practical possibilities.

Astrology as psychotechnology

What is a psychotechnology? This is a good word. It can sound painfully contrived, but broken into psycho- and technology the definition is rather straightforward. I understand a psychotechnology as a tool for transforming our own minds, for shifting existing thought-paths. This can include things that fall directly into therapeutic psychology's various modalities, such as cognitive behavioral therapy; it can also be material technology like drugs or neurological interventions; but a psychotechnology does not wholly depend on established scientific disciplines. Art is also a psychotechnology. So is ritual, divination especially, though the part of the mind that divination benefits can vary by the divination type.

Here, then, are the psychotechnological transformations that I believe astrology can offer when practiced appropriately.

Personality transformer

I know that among other astrology enthusiasts who, like me, doubt actual planetary influence is happening with people's personalities when they're born, a common thread for our interest persists with this assertion: that astrology provides a narrative device for analyzing ourselves through the language of planetary placements and interactions. This includes recognizing parts of our personalities that we do like and don't like, as well as what parts we would like to develop better or would like to do away with (I recommend meditating, by the way, on how this is not the same as raw liking vs. not liking).

Astrology's critics usually raise that the language of many natal chart analyses is so vague and arbitrary that you can read just about anything you like into them — or that you may find lots of things that don't make any sense, that you can't work with. I believe that a good astrologer should work with their client (free or paid, though I'll get to the payment problem later) to help them make sense of it, but also to intentionally offer as many flexible interpretations as possible. The arbitrariness is a feature, not a glitch. It's a fiendishly clever trick to make somebody think about their identity and behaviors in a language that's fun and engaging. As with tarot, the results of their reflection should actually be self-guided, not imposed by the astrologer.

I don't think astrology could ever replace therapy, but it's something I discuss with my therapist at times, and she utilizes it herself. Astrological questions offer an oblique form of roleplay, as we imagine models of personalities that we believe we should be. And because our personalities are as plastic as our neural connections, simply by envisioning a new model, someone can shape themselves into it. Though this can be authentic and healthy, of course there are many situations in which it isn't, which I'll get back to in a little while. But my point here is that astrology does create a transformative effect among people who believe in it; even if planetary influence doesn't affect us, the study of it does.

Behavioral translator

Once our natal charts have given us an opportunity to better understand our own personalities and consider what behaviors to be mindful of or to enhance, astrology also provides a shorthand language for interpreting other humans' behavior. This is one of the things that anti-astrologists abhor the most, and I can't say that I blame them. The arbitrariness of astrological trait assignments demands a certain rigor that many people lack, thus causing people to chalk up extremely disparate behaviors in their friends (or family, or foes) to somehow all be related by sharing the same sign — or to pigeonhole these peers into expected behaviors that the people themselves absolutely don't exhibit.

I will also come back to that problem further down, but for now I'd like to highlight one counterpoint: when you look, and I mean truly look, at many psychological schemes for personality sorting, the criteria are just as arbitrary, and the implications have sometimes frankly been more damaging to marginalized human populations. Not coincidentally, accusations of pseudoscience are hurled back and forth with great frequency in psychology, even though psychology is more or less accepted these days as a legitimate scientific field. Reproducibility of psychological studies is a serious problem, contributing an outsize number of examples to what scientists of the past decade have been calling the replication crisis across all disciplines.

One could argue as a result that psychology is "just as bad" as astrology; I have plenty of faith in psychology, so never mind that. One could also argue that it is simply bad (or, as I've seen some people claim, evil) to sort personalities into categories at all; I think it's impossible to convince humans not to do that. Where I come down instead is that astrological classifications should only be performed among people who are all "in" on the language with you, able to understand the implications — but at the end of the day, it isn't any less rational than Myers-Briggs, DiSC, tests to prove whether someone's a sociopath, and so on. It's a social analysis game.

Gender transcender

As mentioned already, this game is particularly common among some outsider cultures and has lately received marked attention as a facet of contemporary queer and trans communities. I do not find this popularity accidental. Why have a gender binary, when we could instead explore a minimum of twelve default personality types and social roles?

This of course presents its own pitfalls — no number of rigid social classes is good, even when there are more than two — but it still functions as an experimental binary-splinterer among people like myself who desperately wish to move away from operating in strictly woman/man, femme/masc paradigms. I often think that people who dismiss astrology as a pastime for bourgeois white women are forgetting about something important on this other gender front, where the interest is very much not limited to white queer/trans people.[6] It tempts my provocative side to include "Leo" when asked to describe my gender. Or perhaps, given my rising sign, I'm something like a Leo in Sagittarius drag.

On that note —

Astrology as animist tinder

Since I gather that a fair amount of Tinder profiles include astrological information these days, I couldn't resist a pun; however I mostly mean tinder as in starting a spark. Astrology is a gateway not just to esotericism, but also to animism. I can once more think of at least three dimensions to this, all closely interwoven.

Seasonal guidance

All peoples have looked to the heavens for predicting certain things, even if some of us have forgotten how. It's old, deep, sacred knowledge, both indigenous and animist in form. There is far more to it than marking the broad seasons by tracing the Sun's angle, or reckoning tides by phases of the Moon. It's about the stars far beyond the Sun. When certain stars or constellations become visible again in the night sky, this coincides with certain blossomings, migrations, ripenings, births, witherings, ruts.

This is not planetary influence, but interlocking rhythms. Patterns. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors learned those patterns and remembered them. The patterns to watch for vary, of course, by exactly where each of us dwells — by our specific ecosystems.

It's significant, I think, that astrology itself became so concerned with the movement of planets. These have their own rhythms, but they move out of phase with the Earth's own rotation, so although the Sun and Moon and stars give us a means to genuinely predict natural events on our land and in our seas, the planets — whose very name in English comes from the Greek for wanderer — present absolute mystery. What could be predicted by planets? It's as if an entire practice developed to apply the predictive instinct to the things in the night sky that otherwise seemed vestigial.

So the stars are absolutes, and the planets are relative, symbolic, whatever we want them to be. With or without astrology itself, I think that when modern people ask celestial bodies for guidance, they — we — are following a practice as old as our species. The instinct embodied here should not be ridiculed, and it should not be ignored.

Mythic systems

As I said before, I think that it is past time for astrology and astronomy to join anew. This does not mean making no distinction between what science can measure of the cosmos and what it cannot; but it means letting myths of the planets, stars, and other celestial objects once more cavort through our senses and our hearts. Let gods and heroes and creatures and monsters live there again, not only as quaint tales mentioned as "the inspiration" for a constellation's name but as nightly guides and guardians and friends — not only as things named for abandoned idols, but as living, surviving powers.

This is, again, not quite what astrology attempts to do, but astrology is borne out of an age before awe for the firmament was diluted to a thin broth of platitudes about discovery. Frankly, I have encountered just enough career astronomers who hold a deep, staggered reverence for their subject that I'm uncertain this specific science has reached anywhere near the degree of de-sacralization as some of its companions — yet all too often, pop astronomy is still wielded as a reductively rationalist cudgel, declaring that because no creator-deity can be sensed in outer space, we have no deities at all, and need none. Science, the embodiment of human's mastery over nature, rather than union with nature, is all we need. That's what we're told.

I am done with that. We must walk away from that. We need our myths and stories for understanding the part we play as the star-namers, the star-navigators. Put those stories in the sky again.

Animism beyond Earth

Since discovering Aboriginal writer, academic, and woodworker Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech Clan), I have been raptly listening to every interview of his that I can possibly find. I've also read his book Sand Talk and feel irrevocably altered by it as few books have achieved in a long, long time. I'm going to have much more to say about him in a couple of weeks. And although the essential substance of what I've written here so far I might have largely written without yet encountering Yunkaporta's ideas, I can feel his perspective shaping the language I choose to discuss some of this, animism especially. Now I've come to one point in this post that I must credit fully to him, because it's a story he told in one interview — or yarn, as he prefers to say — about a time he and some of his indigenous academic colleagues were being consulted for a space program.

As I write this now, I unfortunately don't remember exactly which program it was; NASA feels most likely since I think this was being done for the ISS, but Australia does have its own space program, technically. However, that detail probably doesn't matter much. It was a settler-colonial program seeking suggestions for some form of land connectedness ritual work to help astronauts not feel disconnected from the Earth while orbiting above it. What was the response from Yunkaporta and his colleagues?

That the astronauts should be helped to feel connected not to the Earth, but to space, where they are in that moment.

That's paraphrased, and perhaps I'm biased from how my witchcraft focuses so closely on the night sky in the first place — lunar witchcraft, stellar witchcraft, galactic witchcraft — but I nearly felt the crown of my head burst open when I heard such a statement. Because of course. Of course.

Just as we are not separate from nature, Earth is not separate from the wider cosmos. It's all one immense, impossibly complicated system. If animism connects us with the Earth, it should connect us with the space beyond it as well.

That only deepens my conviction above about restoring myth to the heavens. It likewise gives a framework for why it feels so wretched and violating to hear talk of mining the Moon, or mining Mars — let those distant lands be! How dare anyone transfer extractive colonial behaviors beyond our home planet, ravaged enough as it is? Why venture to other planets and star systems if it's only to exploit them and disrupt their own rhythms? The thought repulses me to my very core.

This is to say nothing of desecrating the night sky with excessive satellites. The likes of Elon Musk are unforgivable. If astrology has more than its fair share of charlatans, the "pro-science" Musk is enough of a charlatan to surpass the damage of ten thousand others.

In defense of the skeptics

But well, now I will come back to the astrological charlatans indeed. I've finally articulated all the ways in which I find astrology interesting, useful, or at least a token of something that we would all do well to seek more closely; but as the practice is powerful in these specific ways, so too can that power be turned in the wrong directions or mistaken.

Here I am with the skeptics, offering most of my reservations — about what astrology is not good for at all, and what worries me in some astrological practices.

1. Astrology is not a reliable predictive mechanism for human events. I would say this even if planetary influence could be proven. For if that were the case, surely we would also be influenced by other powers on Earth.

2. Using astrological considerations for agriculture or foraging likewise should mean paying attention to more factors than just the heavens. In my opinion, though planetary hours and Moon phases can help to create a pacing system for managing and harvesting plant life (I've either written about this before or will write more eventually), I've never felt willing or able to commit to such things very closely. That's despite my love for neat, orderly cycles. What I've found is that when it comes to matters like astrological gardening, it feels impossible to get locked into a single factor determining what happens when. The plants themselves can give opposing directives, as can the soil, the air, the promise or threat of rainfall. The dependent animals and fungi make other suggestions as well, I'm sure, though I haven't yet learned to listen to them. What I know for certain is that all of this should stay aligned rather than subject to the one rule, otherwise the imposed order will wreak havoc.

3. A self-appointed expert's one-size-fits-all advice for someone with [planet] in [sign] is useless. Understanding a natal chart is an intense exercise in analyzing a highly complex system. I don't see how astrological personality help from a complete stranger, or from an SEO-optimized website, could possibly do anyone any good. I feel like forging a long-term relationship with an astrologer acquaintance would surely be better, as they would come to recognize and know your chart extremely well. It's partly for this reason that my own brief foray with offering free chart readings to other people online was discontinued.

4. Even a very thorough computer program's advice, no matter how algorithmically tailored, is reductive. I don't judge people I know who use astrology apps if they find that it works for them, but for me they simply would not, and not only because of my reluctance to engage beyond natal charts. An app is unable to work in dialogue with me; it coldly imposes an interpretation and assumes I will understand.

5. Personality sorting systems should not have rigid boundaries. This is the problem of how even by reaching beyond the gender binary with twelve astrological genders of sorts, the real number does not especially matter if the restrictiveness is the same. When someone I know conforms to a particular sign's stereotypes — I know quite a few frighteningly classic Geminis, Cancers, and Leos, all in a summertime row — I recognize it and that becomes part of my private vocabulary for interpreting their behaviors; but if that language doesn't resonate with them, then I need to leave it out around them. They do not have to be part of that symbolic system. I find that when other people simply impose astrological opinions on their peers without asking, it's wildly presumptuous and rude.

6. Natal charts are not destinies, and they are also not excuses for never changing how we act. When I described astrology as a personality transformer, that last word is the key: transformer. I am responsible for myself. My Moon placement is in Capricorn, which aptly aligns with my nearly lifelong tendency to distance myself from my emotions, pretend I'm doing well when I'm not, and bottle inner turmoil up for months until it becomes a private meltdown. But I say nearly lifelong because recognizing this trait was the first part of overcoming it. (Recognizing my autism was the next part.) I can choose to let my Capricorn Moon define my emotional life, or I can use it as a shorthand for describing an older personality tendency that I'm capable of moving beyond. I prefer the latter.

7. Paying money for astrological services as an inescapable ethical challenge. In fairness, this might be said of paying money for nearly anything. Capitalism's commodification of anything we have a name for will be our undoing. No wonder the scam artists exist. But since they do exist, and since (spi)ritual matters tend to create greater vulnerability than other matters, it can be harder to be as honest with ourselves as we need to be in order to avoid being exploited.

8. Commercial, mass-produced astrological baubles often lack the potency, heft, and crafting skill of something handmade. When it comes to the merchandising of astrological themes, I have a few little things in my jewelry box or around the house, including a zodiacal shower curtain of all things, but I could acquire so much more than I do. So many trinkets, posters, etc. are so cheap, tawdry, poorly made, probably plagiarized from a more talented creator in the first place. Is "interest in astrology" as substitute for a personality, as the memes might ask? I will never know, because I would have to find enough aesthetically satisfying methods by which to advertise that interest in the first place. That day is a long way away.

9. I have used far too much space and time to delve into arguments among astrology enthusiasts about which is the best or most legitimate way of reckoning the positioning of zodiac constellations; but those arguments are quite exhausting. A summary would be that some people rely on the tropical zodiac, and others rely on the sidereal zodiac; this is partly divided between "Western" and Indian astrology, but the "Western" astrologers are also divided between tropical vs. sidereal advocates. The tropical zodiac presumes that the Earth's axis still points (in crude, non-technical terms) in the same directions throughout the year that it pointed at the corresponding times in the star charts of ancient Babylonia, and therefore that on the March equinox the Sun is squarely within Aries. The sidereal zodiac accounts for precession which means that the timing of the Sun's position in this system matches what actually happens in the heavens today; this means on the March equinox the Sun is still within Pisces. To me, it does not really matter, because of what I do or do not use astrology for. I learned the tropical zodiac first and I neither dismiss nor particularly care to learn the sidereal system.

My own astrology

This brings me to where I see my astrology going in the future — not to predict too rigidly, of course. Since as mentioned I briefly experimented with free natal chart interpretations but quickly stopped, that was both my first and latest time actively and intensely using astrology in a while. I do not have friends begging me at all hours to do their own charts, so practice options are limited.

Given what I've written today (and tonight), I don't see this as a bad thing. However, I do think I've ignited in myself the desire to learn more than I already do about astrology's history, and to learn more layers of interpretation than I knew before, so that whenever it comes time to make and interpret another chart, I can go deeper.

And I believe I'm overdue to study my own natal chart again. Until next week: this Leo Sun, Capricorn Moon, Sagittarius Ascendant salutes you.

[1] Ada Aubin and June Rifkin's The Complete Book of Astrology. This is still availabe for purchase in a new edition, but I have no idea how many other astrologers or enthusiasts ever relied on it, nor do I have any idea whether Aubin and Rifkin (now both deceased, I believe) were especially reputable or ethical. I only mention their book because it remains the original long-form text underpinning my own astrological interpretations even if I harbor the same reservations about it that I do about any other astrology book or website, as the rest of this post has addressed.

[2] As I'll be getting to in an upcoming post, "the natural world" is not really a thing we ought to distinguish from humanity, but I digress.

[3] According to a Pew Research poll and a National Science Foundation study.

[4] People who are both pro- and anti-astrology conflate this terminology frequently, so let me distinguish: a natal chart is a diagram of exactly where the planets were located in relation to the zodiac at the time of somebody's birth (hence natal). A horoscope may sometimes be used in a broader sense of a diagram for where the planets were located (or will be located) at any time, such as on the date of an upcoming event or a major moment in world history, or what's going to happen tomorrow; but a horoscope is also colloquially used to describe the ensuing verbal forecast for how somebody's day, week, month, year, etc. is going to go, based on the combination of current/upcoming planetary positions and the personality of the reader (divided up by Sun signs and occasionally by more refined groupings). The verbal forecast sense is what you'll find in a newspaper or get delivered to you by apps like Co-Star. I do not use horoscopes in either of these senses; I only create and interpret natal charts specifically.

[5] I have no opinion here and for the purposes of this post it's not important.

[6] I am again less equipped to speak on this, but the cultural significance of further-eastern astrological systems seems implicitly subject to colonial treatment in the way that some people dismiss astrology as well.

Thank you for reading this very late, nearly 7,000 word missive. Next week I'm going to almost certainly ease back on the length to take stock of my mental health through a seasonal lens, and then the following week I'll write about a mystery of human experience that I'm excited to tackle as an excuse for spending time with one or two transcendentally good books I've read over the past few months, Sand Talk included.