Photo: H.Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty.

Back when I was at university, I remember relishing a meme that roasted people based on their star signs. It wasn’t exactly the cleverest gag of all time, but each zodiac sign had its own cartoon, with a list of unflattering adjectives around it. There are few things more satisfying than telling your little sister, a Taurus, that she’s bull-headed and exasperatingly self-righteous. I also strongly identified with my own Piscean roast, which told me I was impractical, overly sensitive, escapist and absent-minded.
It wasn’t that I believed in astrology. In fact, I’d have taken pains to tell you that I didn’t. But I was of the age when your identity is up for the taking, and that central question — who am I? — needs probing from any angle you can find. Zodiac signs struck me as part and parcel of that mania for self-analysis. Knowing my sun sign was no more or less edifying than knowing my Myers-Briggs type or Harry Potter house. I knew these constructs were probably nonsense, but as an endlessly confused 20 year old, they helped me feel seen.
Fast forward to today, and all things zodiac-related are having a moment. In a Pew Research study from 2018, 29% of American adults said they believed in astrology, including 26% of Christians and 47% of those who believed in “nothing in particular”. If you were to ask people if they read their horoscopes, or know their sun signs, the figure would surely be higher still. The engagement is surely casual for some. But for rising millions, astrology offers a connection with the divine — even if its empirical claims are far harder to prove.
Astrology has been popular for a while. As far back as 2017, forecasting agency WGSN declared “new spirituality is the new norm”. That coincides with a steady fall in traditional religion in most parts of the world. In the UK’s 2021 census, less than half of British adults described themselves as Christian, with over a third of respondents (“nones”) stating they had no religion whatsoever.
Of course, a shift away from religion doesn’t necessarily mean a shift towards non-belief. In fact, many new spiritual fixations are being forged in the crucible of online spaces. The “nones” haven’t signed up to living a life devoid of purpose: what they want is to define that purpose in their own terms.
That’s where practices like astrology and tarot come in. Many of these practices are billed less as “spiritual” and more as “therapeutic” — sitting somewhere at the intersection of meaning-making and self-care. Introspection is the name of the game here: even if you don’t believe there’s anything inherently special about the cards you pull, or the planetary placements on your birth chart, you might see them as a storyboarding tool. Think of them like a kind of Rorschach test: “What does a Nine of Cups or Moon in Taurus mean to me today?”
But for other astrology enthusiasts, there is something far grander at stake here. If a Pisces really is absent-minded by default, and a Taurus self-righteous, then that says something big and startling about the nature of reality. It suggests that the various bodies in our solar system somehow imprint on a baby’s psyche at the moment of their birth. And it means that those lumps of rock and balls of gas, millions of miles away, have a bearing on our day-to-day psychodramas. If that’s true, the paradigm most of us are operating under is bust wide open.
“Astrology does raise philosophical or cosmological questions about the world and about what we’re doing here and what this means,” says Chris Brennan, host of The Astrology Podcast. “You know — does fate exist, or destiny?”
For Brennan, and others like him, astrology has both empirical pretensions and clear philosophical or religious components too. Know your history, and this isn’t so surprising. Until the 1700s, astrology was considered a respectable scholarly discipline, with just as much validity as astronomy. It was commonly accepted in political and cultural circles, and some of its concepts were used in other fields, notably meteorology and medicine.
Brennan himself discovered astrology, alongside many other New Age practices, in his early teens. While the crystals and tarot cards fell by the wayside, his interest in astrology persisted, thanks to its having aspects he could “validate” through repeated observations. Today, he remains convinced by the basic premise: there’s a persistent correlation between celestial movements and events on Earth. For instance, the last time Uranus popped up in Gemini coincided with the Second World War, and the time before that was the American Civil War. Many astrologers believe the planet’s forthcoming appearance in this sign — which begins this summer, and will last until 2032 — will presage another turning point in US history.
Not that everyone in the astrological community takes their discipline so literally. For the British astrologer Chris Odle, factual truth just isn’t part of the deal. He pointed me to a trove of empirical data that, in his view, sounds the death knell for astrology as a science. Consider the case of two psychologists working in the Eighties. They arranged for volunteers to visit top astrologers for a reading. The twist? They used the birth data of notorious child serial killer John Gacy. Even so, astrologers failed to discern anything untoward, with all five agreeing that the client should go into youth work.
Of course, many people do find their birth chart readings to be uncannily accurate. But that might just be because they’re vague, couched in archetypes that would resonate with just about anybody. Psychologists call this the “Barnum effect” — named for the notorious showman P.T. Barnum, it describes our tendency to take generalised personality descriptions and believe they apply to us specifically.
Scepticism aside, I wonder whether checkmates ultimately miss the point. As I myself discovered as a student, most astrology-curious people aren’t really interested in what the data says; they care much more about what star signs and the rest can say about how to live their lives. After all, spiritual practices don’t need to be empirically verifiable to be personally significant or subjectively true.
Odle concurs. He notes that some astrologers are paranoid about being bracketed together with fortune tellers, and as such, cling to the idea that astrology is a data-driven discipline. But, in his view, a lot of what astrologers do is simple storytelling: far closer to the realm of religion than science. Perhaps that is what needs to change if astrology wants to broaden its appeal even further. Rather than making an intellectual case for its convictions, perhaps practitioners should encourage a leap of faith. “There’s something ineffable at the heart of it,” says Odle. “And that’s OK, because the heart of life is ineffable. We can’t approach it with our minds.” The absent-minded Pisces in me would be inclined to agree.
Adapted from The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age (September Publishing)
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SubscribeI don’t believe in astrology, but that is unsurprising, as I am a Libra, and we are known for our scepticism.
Ditto …
Very funny, more apposite is you had cited Scorpio instead of Libra. Back to the drawing board!
I’m curious that the author uses the word “spiritual” rather than “superstition” to describe beliefs of this kind. Spiritual sounds rather grand for beliefs of this type, as does introspective. These beliefs tend to be superficial, self centred and mundane in their content – they lack the depth or transcendence we would normally associate with the word spiritual.
What we’re starting to see here is the disparity that exists between the idea of belief (you can believe in anything including Father Christmas, astrological projections about the precise time of the next meteor hit some time in 2035 or Armageddon itself) and the idea of Faith. Christianity is premised on the latter. Faith, especially if it is a deep one, is in turn premised on Love, specifically on an encounter of some kind (including an intellectual one) with the Source of Love itself. Whatever we then purport to believe in in this context ( the beliefs we hold to be true about Christian doctrine) is understood from that place of Encounter, as a response to a personal invitation to be ‘at one’ (pun intended and worth thinking on) with Love itself. It changes how we see things and thence how we speak and act. Words and actions, as we all know, have a ripple effect for the good of all, or for ill.
You cannot claim that the appeal is a belief in superstition. If you take religion as an analogy they are many layers of how we respond to it. Superstition may be at one end but the other could for some be true spirituality. Just because many many people don’t get beyond the superstitious appeal of astrology, does not mean it cannot be understood at a higher level.
I do happen to get fed up when people want to display their superiority of intellect by decrying or mocking astrology. Naturally none of them has ever studied it. The author has made an effort, admittedly, to understand its appeal but the appeal has little to do with the discipline. As a practising astrologer of many decades I can confirm it is partly data driven. But there is something else at play – insight, divination, intuition? We don’t know. The answer may come, were one needed, when we understand consciousness.
Understanding its appeal is one thing, thinking it true is quite another. Indeed, its appeal is one good reason for suspecting its truth claims. People believe in it because of its appeal – that already gives them a good reason for believing it to be true, without it actually being so.
You are incorrect. I studied astrology enough decades ago to know that it was definitely bogus. Even if it had been accurate thousands of years ago, it would cease to be as the stars moved relative to us. I’m old enough to remember when British writer John Sladek under a pseudonym “discovered” a new sign of the Zodiac — with the spider as the symbol. Astrologers got excited about this and many adopted it, only for him to come out and show that he just made it up. The book was republished in 1979 under the title The Thirteenth Zodiac: The Sign of Arachne.
Pseudoscience is a term that gets thrown around too easily. Astrology is an excellent example of pseudoscience. It invokes entities with no evidence, utterly detached from science, and will not allow itself to be tested (vagueness helps).
Who did you study under? Astrology doesn’t pretend to be a science. You cannot use scientific criteria to describe it. You tell me how consciousness “works” and I will explain astrology.
I don’t think he’s talking about somebody studying under a teacher of astrology, but of researching it objectively and rationally. Astrology is a bit like homeopathy in that it is easy to devise ‘proofs’ of its efficacy, but objective, rational investigation always finds none. If you believe something works for you that’s fine, but it is dishonest to suggest that it works without belief. In medical studies efficacy due to belief is the placebo effect, and yes, belief can create metabolic responses, but the aim is to do better than placebo, not settle for it. Astrology never beats the equivalent of placebo; in other words it’s a poor predictor.
What astrology does is provide an insight into the nature of all ‘belief’ systems.
To paraphrase that hoary old GK Chesterton quote: Humans want to believe in something rather than nothing, and that is often the religion inherited from their culture.
What actually matters is whether our beliefs lead us to a more or less successful accommodation with our fellow men and the world at large. There’s a constant seeking to bridge the gap between each of us as individuals, with our own unique consciousness, and the rest of the world; with “otherness”.
Into that gap can spring all sorts of ideologies, some more destructive than others. The key is to understand that none have any objective foundation other than that which we choose to attach to them.
What we’re starting to see here is the disparity that exists between the idea of belief (you can believe in anything including Father Christmas, astrological projections about the precise time of the next meteor hit some time in 2035 or Armageddon itself) and the idea of Faith. Christianity is premised on the latter. Faith, especially if it is a deep one, is in turn premised on Love, specifically on an encounter of some kind (including an intellectual one) with the Source of Love itself. Whatever we then purport to believe in in this context ( the beliefs we hold to be true about Christian doctrine) is understood from that place of Encounter, as a response to a personal invitation to be ‘at one’ (pun intended and worth thinking on) with Love itself. It changes how we see things and thence how we speak and act. Words and actions, as we all know, have a ripple effect for the good of all, or for ill.
It would have been more interesting if the author had included more sociological and psychological information about these beliefs. Are they held more by women than men, for example. Anecdotally this seems to be true and it would be interesting to know why.
Are they held equally across all demographics? Is the apparent increase in believers related to other phenomena such as a rise in narcissism and self centredness? After all thinking that your own rather ordinary life is somehow linked to the universe on the grand scale is pretty narcissistic.
Are the believers more or less materialistic than others, more spiritual in that sense? In my experience just the opposite is true, which calls into question the “spiritual” nature of these beliefs.
What we’re starting to see here is the disparity that exists between the idea of belief (you can believe in anything including Father Christmas, astrological projections about the precise time of the next meteor hit some time in 2035 or Armageddon itself) and the idea of Faith. Christianity is premised on the latter. Faith, especially if it is a deep one, is in turn premised on Love, specifically on an encounter of some kind (including an intellectual one) with the Source of Love itself. Whatever we then purport to believe in in this context ( the beliefs we hold to be true about Christian doctrine) is understood from that place of Encounter, as a response to a personal invitation to be ‘at one’ (pun intended and worth thinking on) with Love itself. It changes how we see things and thence how we speak and act. Words and actions, as we all know, have a ripple effect for the good of all, or for ill.
Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.
Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.
In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.
This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.
Buridan’s pupil Nicole Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University.
They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.
Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.
The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.
And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.
In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.
At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.
Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.
In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing.
That’s all very interesting from a historical perspective, thanks; but tells us absolutely nothing whatsoever about what’s true and what isn’t. It’s certainly true that clerics have always bent over backwards to defend their patch of human influence, which you describe informatively.
In addition, there’s nothing “disastrous” for art in the way our civilisation becomes more insightful into the universe we inhabit. Art is our primary means of expressing how we experience the world around us, and as such needs no lessons from any particular group of vested interests. How we relate to each new era will naturally evoke new and/or different ways of seeking to communicate our experience through the arts.
I would give main credit for developing scientific method to Francis Bacon (1561–1626) – who developed inductive reasoning and the Novum Organum, which refined and formalized the scientific method into a structured approach.
Of course, there were earlier precursors including Aristotle and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (c. 965–1040).
Hesitating to jump in here as engaging in apologetics re astrology is generally a zero sum game, and pretty exhausting to boot, but I do feel compelled to make a few points.
Firstly, one has to understand astrology as a centuries old tradition, spanning from Mesopotamian times through to the present day, and occurring in various forms in many cultures, Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec etc etc.
Initially, astrology/astronomy was a calendar, a way of calculating and measuring time. Studying the planets etc is still that of course, a year is one orbit of earth around the sun, seasons are based on solstices and equinoxes, all the planets have regular and measurable cycles that further segment time. In more rural based societies, understanding cycles in nature was essential re planting, harvesting and tending food crops, understanding tides and river flood cycles. Of course knowledge of the skies was also essential to all forms of navigation. There was a direct correspondence between heavenly patterns and terrestrial events, weather, seasons etc. In early Western thought the celestial sphere was seen inextricably linked to the Terrestrial sphere, it was thought to be inconceivable that God did not control both spheres and that one did not influence the other, ‘as above, so below’. Hence astrology and astronomy were taught side by side in Medieval universities, and hence Galileo’s blasphemy re heliocentrism. To really understand astrology and its development in Western thought I would recommend reading ‘A History of Western Astrology’ by Jim Tester, a wide ranging scholarly study for those who want to really understand this field.
The observation of heavenly bodies and correlation with events on earth expanded beyond just weather and seasons, and associations were made with events like war and various character traits.
As for ‘modern’ astrology again I see the same old arguments brought forward: progression of the equinoxes (the stars have moved!), the 13th sign (there are more than 12 constellations, ye gads), which only indicate ignorance on the part of those who bring them up as some way of debunking the whole system.
Briefly there are two main zodiacal systems- the Sidereal system used primarily in India, and the Tropical zodiac, which is used throughout the western world. Wikipedia explains it in this way:
Sidereal astrology accounts for the Earth’s axial precession and maintains the alignment between signs and constellations via corrective systems known as ayanamsas (Sanskrit: ‘ayana’ “movement” + ‘aṃśa’ “component”), whereas tropical astrology, to reiterate, is based upon the seasonal cycle of the Northern hemisphere …
Astrologers are well aware of the progression of the equinoxes and this is incorporated in the various systems.
The 12 signs are based on the Hellenic divisions, and always contained more than just 12 constellations, as any cursory look at a star chart will reveal. Just because someone is canny enough to make a quick buck writing a book about the ’13th sign’, doesn’t make it true neither does it debunk all astrology.
A distinction needs to be made between ‘pop’ astrology and a serious study of the field. Just as one cannot judge psychology, philosophy, nutrition, fitness and any other number of fields on the latest easy to understand paper back release that summarises the whole field in 100 pages, neither should one judge astrology based on similar publications.
Serious astrology is a lot more than star sign astrology, (which basically looks at the position of the sun at the time of birth). An actual astrology natal chart places every planet in its place at the time of birth and calculates their relationship to each other and the elliptic. It is in fact an analysis of a moment in time and space, and is unique for each individual (as it is impossible for two people to be born at exactly the same time and place). Understanding the unique quality of a moment is a common feature in Eastern philosophy and certainly part of many philosophies that explore our search for meaning and purpose. Of course, the time and place of someone’s birth is going to be hugely descriptive of the influences and environment within which a person entered this world.
There are many fields of astrology and many different understandings of planetary influences from the symbolic to the physical (magnetic fields etc). Is it truly completely ridiculous to think that the environment in which we are born, including the weather, the season, the epoch, the geographical position would have some correlation with our unfolding destiny? To me it seems far more stupid to think we occur in isolation and we are not deeply connected to our wider environment in some way.
We mostly no longer hear the language of the stars sadly.
‘It is said that the stars sing loudly over the desert. That’s what the Bushmen in the Kalahari believe. Attuned to the energies of the Earth and the Universe, they tell stories of hearing the star soaked music filling the night air. Some say that they’ve woven these star songs into their own music. The Bushmen also believed that those who could not hear the stars singing suffered a terrible sickness of the soul, for they were not attuned to the invisible strings and threads that tie us all to Spirit and to the land.’ (Jodi Sky Rodgers)
A real exponent of astrology will tell you that it is a map, a way of navigating through life’s many vissisitudes, a way of having a perspective which is a step removed from a rational or purely emotive response to one’s life. It isn’t a substitute for reality and it certainly doesn’t explain everything, but for those who are interested it can certainly provide some sort of timetable and direction which can be helpful and meaningful.