The Age of the Prophets Has Ended (Or So We Thought)

January 20, 2022 | By Vienna Scott BF ‘21

image description: the rosy blush of a galaxy blooming amidst a sky full of stars.

This piece was written at the Veritas Forum 2020, an annual writing program offered by the Augustine Collective. Students from various universities work with writing coaches to write articles about virtue in the sciences or social sciences.

---

I was vaguely aware of astrology in high school but my real introduction occurred in my freshman year at Yale. As far as I was concerned, Leo was an actor and Cancer was a disease. But when a classmate offhandedly mentioned that there hasn’t been a Pisces president since 1897 in a seminar and the professor didn’t guffaw, I realized I needed to study up on all things above the stratosphere. By the end of my first semester, I could spew hokey jargon about Mercury retrograding around the dining hall dinner table or offer a sympathetic “of course he’s a Scorpio!” to a friend after a bad date. Taurus, Virgo, and the rest of the lot have an omnipresent campus existence. 

People—even smart ones—are looking to the stars now more than ever. With the surging popularity of astrology, it’s clear they’re expecting the stars to speak back. Henry Weingarten, a talented stockpicker, founded the AFund (the Astrologers Fund) and told investors at Princeton that Financial Astrology is the future of reliable market predictions. University of Michigan economists are even tracking how lunar cycles impact the returns on global portfolios. The tools of astrology are used to describe every part of life, from the kind of investments you should make to the kinds of people you should date. It’s not just lowclass superstition anymore.

A quick primer for those who aren’t astrology buffs: astrology uses astronomy to connect the movement of heavenly bodies to human affairs. There are 12 “sun signs” dividing up the calendar year. Those signs are grouped according to the four elements: air, earth, fire, and water. Supposedly, air signs are intellectual and communicative. Earth signs are practical and grounded. Fire signs are passionate and confident. Water signs are sensitive and compassionate. Horoscopes use these basic divisions of sign and element to discuss personality and compatibility. (An Aries and a Leo dating? A match made literally in the heavens). 

Beyond the groupings of people that rely on broad characterizations of personality, natal charts curate individualized advice. Cafe Astrology advertises that it is obvious that just the 12 sun signs cannot capture the complexities of human character. People input their exact birth time, date, and location into various apps that map the stars that twinkled above the individual the moment they were born. This specific astral geography births “moon signs” and “planetary signs” that layer detail atop the basic trends. Each planet, the moon, and the sun all move through the twelve sections of the sky—“solar houses”—and astrologers impute significance to each movement. Natal charts are unique, just like the people who order them. This builds a structure for daily advice that is highly individualized, based on the regularity of patterns and motions, with an edge of mystery from the providential tone and the far-out source. 

***

As the primer evidences, astrology entails its own language and logic. The brave new world of retrogradings and returnings, solar houses and signs, doesn’t mesh with the scientific or religious vocabularies most are accustomed to. For many, this move away from the familiar dichotomies of science and faith is an unwelcome change.

Astrology has the reputation of a pseudoscience: something between scientism and faith. Exactly what it is seems unclear. It loosely follows the scientific method. Astrologers observe the natural world (outer space) and use patterns (empirical evidence) to infer conclusions. But by post-Enlightenment standards, astrology is just bad science. The content of horoscopes can’t be proven or falsified by any method or experimentation. As hard as it is to believe, all Pisces won’t fall in love every February, but some will (thanks Saint Valentine!). Astronomy is science; astrology takes the interpretive license too far. 

On the other side, religious people are also deeply suspicious about astrology’s claims. It seems like a more dubious form of determinism (things external to people determine their actions). Free will and divine omnipotence are crucial elements of monotheistic religions. If stars determine actions, people are non-agents. If God is not guiding the movements of the stars, God is not all-powerful. 

If, by some Leibnizian system, the stars just happen to describe the happenings of earth, then human actions aren’t compelled. This iteration preserves more space for monotheistic free will and divine omnipotence but leaves more room for accusations of witchcraft and demonic influences. Religious Americans are particularly wary of the vacuous and idolatrous foundations of this movement. In the evangelical imagination astrology is akin to yoga and crystals: barely understood and potentially demonic. 

In the Christian lexicon this may not give demons enough credit. Leaving demons with power over tarot cards, Ouija boards, and astrology circumscribes the eerie supernatural to a particular domain. Demons taunted everyone from the desert fathers in caves to Martin Luther in a castle tower. As haunting entities, they aren’t constrained to specific vocations.

Nonetheless, it is possible that the higher order knowledge of the natural world that demons possess has worked through history to inspire astrological systems. They lend a veneer of accuracy to some astrology and suck people into a gilded New Age spirituality and away from true faith. 

Still, for the Christian, denouncing astrology as totally demonic is an imprudent rejection to make. In the apex of the great Christian narrative, “He who made the Pleiades and Orion” (Amos 5:8) guided the wise men to the manger with a star in the sky and darkened the sun at the crucifixion. The life of Christ is bookended by astrological phenomena: events in astronomy that have interpretations which bear on the spiritual life. The Christian cannot a priori reject astrology as a source of divine information.

***

In Christian history, sometimes the Church employed a simple counter logic to circumvent those objections. God is the master of the physical universe, so as long as the faithful Christian attributed the chain of causation correctly—God controls the stars so they signal his messages—astrology could honor God. Some members of the clergy even trained in astrology just so that they could plan church ceremonies at times that were most pleasing to God. Pope Julius II sought out a horoscope during the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica to determine the most opportune time to lay the cornerstone: April 18, 1506, 10 AM.  

Although even the Pope at one point used astrology, the Church was still conflicted –– opinions ranged from witchcraft to the will of God. John Dee was a court astronomer, alchemist, and occasional astrologer in sixteenth-century England. In 1555, Dee was arrested by Queen Mary I for the anti-Catholic offense of “calculating,” the treasonous charge of casting horoscopes. He appeared in the Star Chamber, an ironic name for an English courtroom, and was eventually exonerated. After jumping through legal and religious hoops, he returned to court as the astrological advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He chose the exact time of her coronation and planned out dates for exploratory missions to new lands. Dee’s life well represents the schizophrenic relationship between Christian authorities and astrology, bouncing within one lifetime from affirmation to rejection and back again.

During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther preached a Christian astral epistemology based on the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle set observation by the naked eye as the limit of human knowledge, which pushed celestial knowledge to the fringes of epistemology. In the second century, Ptolemy tried to reconcile Aristotelian reason with astrological phenomena so that people could continue to divine knowledge from the motions of heavenly bodies. But Luther built on Aristotle and Ecclesiastes 1:14: “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Man is made to live under the sun. His intellect should stay there with him. Astrology is fundamentally opposed to this Christian epistemology, an Icarus flying beyond the appropriate bounds of human knowledge. It is vanity to play God and vault science into the heavens. 

Then, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Copernican Revolution reformed the heavens. Copernicus realized that the earth is not the center of the universe; people realized that visual data betrayed them. Aristotle and Luther were proven right. The eyes are fallible and can give people the wrong epistemic instincts. Unreliable observation means that astrologers could have affirmed some things that are true, almost by accident, but they clearly didn’t understand the motions of the sky. 

***

The resurgent interest in astrology in the West is a baffling trend. The fascination is unrivaled since the 1600s. The Enlightenment cast aspersions unto such pseudoscientific endeavors but the pervasive individualism of modernity resuscitated old superstitions to fill a vacuum in mainstream culture. The quack astrologers aren’t speaking to the hoi polloi from the back page of a newspaper. They’re speaking to a generation of intellectuals and average joes who have rejected traditional Christianity but aren’t comfortable with pure scientism either. Young people find comfort and community in the zodiac as a liminal space between institutional faith and dogmatic atheism. They split the difference and land on cheap religion that never condemns and prophesies prosperity over every individual. 

Astrology pares down the supernatural and doesn’t make a lot of claims itself beyond the vague idea that stellar influences play a role in the natural course of human life. Without much substance, there is a low barrier to entry and constant regeneration of content. In this way, astrology is perfectly fitted to the twenty-first century. Millennials and Gen Zers increasingly get daily horoscopes from Co-Star (“hyper-personalized, real-time horoscopes”) or The Pattern (an astrology “social network that helps you better understand yourself and connect with others on a deeper level”). They get their natal charts from Cafe Astrology (an online salon for students of astrology run by a former accountant) . The sudden popularity may be just another facet of the social media revolution, a reflection of the same search for stranger’s platitudes and fortune cookie wisdom as Buzzfeed quizzes, ask.fm, and Instagram “ask me anything” stories. 

Because major media outlets use horoscopes to get clicks, the language of astrology has become familiar to the internet savvy generations. Its terminology is canonized in the shared vocabulary of the young. Much like Enneagrams and Myers-Briggs, astrology provides a language to discuss complex emotional life in quotidian contexts. A generic dating horoscope might discuss what cooperation looks like between two people with different guiding elements (that is, personalities) or, more seriously, might advise supposedly headstrong fire signs to avoid emotionally abusing their partners. Emily, a senior, said:

Basically how I see it is that astrology is fake but real. I don’t believe that the stars control who you are but that astrology does serve as a useful ‘language’ for introspection. You can figure out how to process things and grow as a person. I use it to think about myself and why I am the way I am and what I need to do to be a better version of myself. It’s fun for the most part. I don’t think I use it in the sense to predict my future or, like, read my zodiac every day.

Horoscopes have appropriated the talking points of wellness movements and provide a common vocabulary to discuss communication and compatibility for a demographic that exists in a spiritual vacuum. Adherents of astrology don’t have to be devout, even if they reject the metaphysics, they can still reap pragmatic benefits. 

It’s not your (church) father’s astrology anymore. 

***

Although astrology isn’t a Christian tool, CCC 2216 officially disavows it, a recognition of the integrated history of astrology and Christianity should arouse some sympathy for modern adherents. Astrologers are idolaters because they hold something in the place of God, but so are run-of-the-mill atheists, polytheists, and Jediists. Christians once flirted with astrology as a spiritual tool too. The instinct to look at the sky and think that there must be something out there is at least recognizable to Christian metaphysics. 

The Christian faith demands both the destruction of falsehoods and the positive construction of worldview that accounts for all things that are good and true. Don’t throw Orionists out with the bathwater. At least astrologers can affirm certain Biblical truths like “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory” (1 Cor. 15:41, ESV). 

Younger generations haven’t become entirely sterile, secular, atheistic automatons. They accept a lot of the grandiose and mystical ideas that Christians advocate (although not while they’re tied to institutional Christianity). For Christians who are too used to hearing that the world is secularizing, these conditions might conjure some optimism. 

On the campus that Bill Buckley christened as a secularist, irreligious, machine, the intensifying trend of astrology is a welcome change. Sometimes, late at night, my friends and I like to sit in our dorm’s courtyard hammock and look up at the stars. They might say “I’m trying to find my guiding constellation” or “I bet Jupiter’s position there is why I’m sad” but at least they don’t laugh when I say “I wonder which star signaled that the Savior was born…”