why astrology will become a dominant belief system
Two centuries on, the God-shaped hole that the Enlightenment shot through the heart of the West remains unfilled; neither totalizing ideologies nor endless circuses and bread will suffice. As our decadence may not only portend another Great War but also a cataclysmic Fall, concerted efforts to break through this ‘meaning crisis’ are bubbling in digital cauldrons outside the mainstream, coalescing into two general approaches:
The first offers syntheses of modern scientific insights with ancient wisdom of the world like never possible before, centering on the development of the individual for collective change; think New Age integralist Ken Wilber to meditating anti-theist Sam Harris. This East-meets-West method has its WEIRD fans, but critics call out its eggheaded elitism, the privilege of time and intellect required to carve out a practice of one’s own, or else its eliding of the irrational needs and contradictions of the human condition.
Others, like Jordan Peterson, advocate for a return to Christianity, the withering root at the base of the West, revitalized by contemporary wisdom. I see the appeal; traces of its ethos still permeate the civilization, and perhaps its ordering narratives and rituals could be made seductive again… or, maybe God can’t be resurrected to mass consciousness any more than the pagan gods could have been after we lost the bicameral mind. We are something new, needing something new.
For these reasons, I’m placing my bet on a more unsuspecting and laughable faith rising to dominance: astrology. We are certainly a long ways from its earnest rise, but in the death throes of the current order, the birth bangs of this new religion can be seen.
To start, astrology is experiencing a kind of Renaissance, both from within and without. While horoscopes have been ubiquitous parts of the media landscape most of the last century, receiving much criticism from cultural philosophers and scientific skeptics alike, they are no more representative of the craft than self-help blogs represent the field of psychology. Worse yet, much of its modern formulation has been a thin continuation of the millennia-old practice, based on a few ancient texts and more than a little reinvention by the Boomer generation. In the past decade, however, a concerted effort to translate ancient texts and reincorporate their methods is underway, bringing the practice back in contact with its pre-Enlightenment and pre-Christian roots. For Western astrology, the old is new, and tradition is not a dirty word.
Simultaneous with astrology’s internal transformation is its booming popularity, and not just in the form of “star sign” myopia. Where it was once difficult to do the math or obtain the knowledge for real chart analysis a few decades ago, calculators and readymade interpretations are becoming common and clearly resonating with young Westerners. Gone are the days of superficial aphorisms written by non-astrologers for print media sideshows; apps like Co-Star and The Pattern are introducing how much more there is to correlating the cosmos to one’s psyche and the daily goings on, and figures like Chani Nicholas are making astrology relevant to the broader social and political dimensions of life without the deluded toxic optimism woo-woo is known for. Astrology fans may quibble over what they ‘believe’ over what is ‘just fun,’ but actions speak louder than words, and there is a lot of action going on.
In light of astrology’s rise, three criticisms are commonly leveled against it:
There’s no causal mechanism
It enables self-indulgent navel-gazing and facile pigeon-holing of others
It brings a false comfort in higher powers for the uncertainty in life
I am circumventing the first point by addressing astrology for its religious dimensions over its pseudoscientific ones, though I’ve written elsewhere how this argument is often overstated.
For the second, I have to agree. There are ample anecdotes of spurned dates and roommates based on nothing more than the time of year someone was born, but this problem isn’t limited to astrology but any system that dares to categorize people. It would be fair to hold this against astrology if it suggested some types were better than others, but as even Sam Harris admits, astrology is “profoundly egalitarian,” and so is user error the fault of the program? Regardless, as I intimate above, astrology is not just about twelve types of people, but if anything an excessively complex blend of multiple archetypes in unique harmony and tension with one another.
In this light, astrology affirms one of the better insights of modernity: each human is a world in itself, a unique unfolding in time and space, while simultaneously a product of a finite set of qualities that are universal to all. Everyone has their ways to get what they want and produce results, their Mars. Everyone has their ways to relate and harmonize with others, their Venus. This goes beyond nebulous bromides of self-evident truths about humanity and provides more specific rationales, albeit still an irrational axiomatic one. But that’s belief for you.
When taken as a whole, the plethora of interpenetrating systems in astrology can produce a combinatorial explosion of interpretation that can lead to the natal chart serving as Narcissus’s watery reflection, but again any system that provides a map can be confused for the territory. It’s more fruitful to consider the best of what it offers, as I will do further below.
In the context of astrology as a religion, the third criticism can be reframed as a more interesting question: what makes this leap of faith more appealing than all the others on offer?
Astrology’s power is independent of any central authority or dogma and puts the individual in direct communion with the Divine. Traditional religion canon is guarded and static, of a particular provenance that must be protected by ordained leaders; in contrast, astrology is always a dynamic relationship between the world and sky, something that can’t be gatekept, for better or worse. There are astrologers pushing for certification programs to keep out grifters, but this leaves the problem of many overlapping and contradictory interpretative systems throughout the astrological canon. These are problems for a science, but not a religion. Perhaps these differences can be reconciled, but its more likely that the future of Western astrology will come to mirror the unbroken Indian tradition, where techniques are passed from guru to student and down the family lineage, leading to myriad variations on astrology’s fundamental precepts: planets in cycles and relation to each other from the vantage of the Earth. The West may currently have the influencer and app, but the end result may grow similar: practitioners develop their craft through their self-determined participation in the collective wisdom that cannot be reduced to hard rules.
The lack of a single absolute methodology to astrology doesn’t necessarily slide into an anything-goes relativism -- at least no moreso than the typical religion, embodied in old sacralized tales. We certainly wouldn’t hold onto them if they didn’t carry some profound meaning, but the modern period has shown how their grand values and the arbitrary particularities of their time and place of original are hard to tease apart. For this reason some religious thinkers turn to contemporary tales to find analogues to sacred myth, or else distills them into an Ur-myth of a thousand faces, but the former too is a comparison of admixtures to admixtures, and the latter strips narrative of the iconological potency that makes it a fundamental vessel for moral instruction. Can’t we do better?
Unlike the historically-bound tales of most religions, astrology isn’t wedded to sacred narratives of its own, but serves as a Rosetta Stone of meaning-making by which all subjective experience can be interpreted through its plurality of archetypes. Of course, there still is old fashioned myth in astrology; the deities and stories by which the planets are named are often evoked in astrological practice, tapping into the intuitive reservoir of the unconscious, as are other deities: Pluto is associated with Dionysus and Kali, and Uranus with Prometheus. Traces of these archetypes are even constellated in the social sciences, as my research into psychological type and Moral Foundation Theory suggests. Pluto corresponds with the seething instincts of the id and coercive webs of Foucauldian power; wherever you see Prometheus evoked in the humanities, Uranian revolution, genius, and paradigm-shifting technology follows. The accessibility of astrological archetypes also extends to vertical conceptions of the cosmos: from the reactive habits and comforts of the Moon to the divine unitive compassion of Jesus-like Neptune, astrology intimates a great chain of being that unites everyday immanent experience to the eternal and transcendent, something traditional religion struggles to do.
A final benefit of the astrological worldview is the overcoming of the Manichean inheritance of an essential nature to Good and Evil. As Solzhenitsyn said of our hearts and the Cherokee of wolves, good and evil are found in everything; as Jung warns in Aion, placing an all-good Creator above deludes us into thinking of the Devil as remote and outside. Astrology implicitly acknowledges this, as each archetype has its good and bad sides, its temperance and extremes. They are not mere dualities but interdependent pluralities, embodying the Hegelian dialectical synthesis and complexity theory’s dynamical pursuit of homeostasis endemic to all functional and purposive systems.
For all these philosophical strengths, astrology currently lacks the mundane structure that a good religion offers for ordering life, but it’s not hard to see how it may do so, and at the same time reconnect us with the natural world through personally and historically meaningful ritual and celebration. The discovery of heliocentricity may have cleaved astrology from astronomy, but it wouldn’t take much to reunite their practical relevance. The concept of months comes from the Moon, the year from the Sun. Each day is named after these Luminaries or one of the five visible planets. Astronomy, and therefore astrology, already underlies the vulgar systems of timekeeping we moderns live by, systems of measurement and control through which we exploit the planet and ourselves, conveniences that have exacerbated our collective amnesia to the natural cycles of death and rebirth of which we are part. A return to these pagan roots could bring us back into alignment with the natural cycles and symbolic potency of our solar system.
Contrary to popular skeptic belief, the Western zodiac isn’t tied to the constellations but the seasons -- Cancer marks the Summer solstice, for instance. Further, Christmas approximates the Winter Solstice, Easter the Spring Equinox, Halloween the Autumnal; these Christianized celebrations retain traces of our erased past that could be reclaimed and further developed if their appropriation is reversed.
Of course, celebrations of the solar cycle hardly make a robust system of belief; we require more frequent reminders of our participation in something greater than ourselves. For this there’s the lunar cycle, with weekly shifts in brightness that are ritualized into periods of reflection and intention-setting. This practice can bring family and community together as regularly as any attendance of church, and instead of following the whims of a religious leader, be customized to the nativity of every member and the present unique moment of time reflected in the wandering stars above.
The cycles of other planets can also provide individual and collective points of ritual and self reflection -- every twelve years is a celebration of Jupiter’s return to its location at a nativity, bringing inspiration and opportunity; every twenty-nine sees Saturn demanding we take stock of responsibilities and the structures of our lives. Further out, the planets discovered in the modern age connect us to historical cycles and trends and unite us with our ancestral past as its themes re-emerge in novel forms.
Cycles of growth and change in the individual and the collective, the historical and the cosmic, are all overlaid and interpenetrating in astrology. It contains the ultimate unitive vision.
As was the case with nascent Christianity, women and queers are leading the charge in astrology’s uptake during a time of the Western empire’s decline. Its appeal to people-preferencing subalterns and cultural proletarians is clear, but what about more hard-minded folk? I believe this next decade will confirm or falsify my hypothesis, as it will test the most central and universal aspect of astrological theory – the coherence and cogency of planetary archetypes and their cyclical unfolding. It just so happens that this decade will see the return of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto to their location during pivotal moments of United States history, the nation whose birth concretized the Enlightenment project and the modern age: Pluto is returning to where it was during the Revolution; Neptune is returning to where it was during the Civil War, and Uranus is returning to where it was for both these and the Great Depression and World War II.
Does our moment of polarization and populism rise to these past events? The non-astrological theories of statistically-minded Peter Turchin and historiographically-minded Bill Strauss and Eric Howe predict so, but only time will tell. Unlike astrological testing that center on individuals and remain mired in the subjectivity of self-reflection and semiotics, these long-term cycles offer a natural experiment beyond the manipulations of any single actor. If a Great Event indeed comes to pass, it seems rational to consider what other grains of truth may be found in astrology, a small step that may become a giant leap for humankind.
Even if astrology doesn’t rise to dominance, it’s naive to think it’ll ever go away, as astrology is one of the oldest and most universal belief systems. It’s traceable to the time reckoning of our oldest known artifacts and monuments, first formalized into a recognizable iteration in the Hellenistic era. Evidence suggests astrologies sprung up and evolved independently across the world, often producing similar mythologies and interpretations. So if nothing else, it’s a safe bet that as long as humans can track the movements of the sky, we will seek meaning in it that’s relevant to our lives. Whatever faith may ultimately rise to satiate us, astrology will likely still be there.