The King of Cups and My Twin

     When I went away to college. one of the great things that happened was that I was able to finally form a real relationship/friendship with my estranged father. My parents had divorced years earlier and to be honest, he was basically a Sunday father to my brother and me. That said, I was aware of why my parents divorced and what my father now did for a living. Nothing nefarious, mind you, but things that were, out of the philosophical mainstream, as it were. Many of you know the story but for those who don't...feel free to read here. One of the things that my father did and counseled people about was their astrological charts. He even did a chart for me! According to him, my Sun was in the highest point in my astrological house. I had no idea what that meant, but Dad said that it was the epitome of greatness and huge things were in store for me in life. Well, now. Let's just say that I think my father was being a Dad. 

    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 IQ or whether or not I was more like Hamlet or Romeo. 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 while I am as much a non-believer in astrology as I was back then, it seems that 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.” And those percentages have only gotten higher in the last few years. 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 just as hard to prove.

    Astrology has been popular for a long time, as far back as the ancient Egyptians. But more recently, as far back as 2017, it was being declared “new spirituality is the new norm”. That coincided (and still does) 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. In the United States, in that same vein, we have been reading for years about the decline in church attendance, along with a precipitous decline in normative belief.

    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?” Personally, I'm always hoping for the King of Cups to be turned over! Get it? The King of Cups?! Pretty good, huh? You're a moron.

    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. That's me, baby! A Gemini! There's two of me, and all bets are off! Good, lord...

    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. His essays 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 Wayne Gacy. Even so, astrologers failed to discern anything untoward, with all five agreeing that the client should go into youth work. Oops...!

    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 generalized personality descriptions and believe they apply to us specifically.

    Skepticism aside, I wonder whether checkmates ultimately miss the point. As I myself discovered way back when, 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, much like Christianity and Judaism. After all, spiritual practices don’t need to be empirically verifiable to be personally significant or subjectively true. Again, just like more normative religions.

    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.” So if you're an absent-minded Pisces, you would be inclined to agree. And as I hold on to my non-belief in most, if not all things religious, I'll keep the astrological door ajar, as well as hang on to the King of Cups card and my Gemini Twin. Hey, you never know! 

 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com