Do you believe in astrology?
and, if so, what's that do for you?
A word about mundane astrology: I am going to shift my focus in these little “astrology tasters” that I include in my newsletters. I’m not positive that they’re still right for this newsletter as it has developed, but I’m not ready to get rid of them entirely. Instead I’m going to shift from talking about planets and how they might affect your chart to talking about astrology on the social and community level. Not because I’m not interested in natal astrology, I’m as interested in it as anyone, especially in how your experience of spirituality manifests in the chart.
Still, the more I learn, the more I feel it’s not all that helpful to talk about transits in isolation from your chart and the story it tells over the entirety of the life. What might have some bearing on you, or at least be more interesting for you, is how astrology tells the story of our world. This is, after all, where the origins of astrology can be found. In the desire to make sense of a confusing world full of natural disasters, wars and pandemics, and the political movements of nations.
If you want a primer in the kinds of work that I’m talking about, I’d encourage you to go check out my friend Larry’s newsletter - she’s a really deep thinker and one of the best working academic astrologers. I’m also excited to say that I’m going to be helping her a bit in organizing some of the work she has coming. If you like what you see here, you’ll love what she’s got coming out!
Do you believe in astrology? Do I?
I hadn’t been asked by anyone recently if I believe in astrology, so I was a little surprised and unprepared to hear the question from my new friend over our non-alcoholic, botanically-infused mocktails last week. Not because it’s a bad question, but because I’d found myself on the other side of that question with my other friends and family for some time now. They’d known me before astrology, had known me to entertain plenty of odd, old, and seemingly absurd interests. I’m sure they’ve had their own moments of doubt as I’ve ventured into my more esoteric and fringe studies. But they tend to just let me run wild with my interests. I’ve always wondered what they’d do if I got involved with a cult, something insidious. Stop me, I hope, but I am unfortunately quite stubborn.
It’s an important question, I realized, because it illuminates what it is that drives me to write these little blogs and return to old and seemingly irrelevant texts and traditions and philosophies time and time again. What’s the thread? What’s the thing that ties it all together?
When Olive asked me about my belief (or whatever it is) in astrology, I paused. I felt myself reactively want to say something about how it’s a “lens” to look at the world through. That’s true, somewhat, but it’s also one of those phrases that’s become less meaningful over the years. It’s a kind of filler phrase that often means “I haven’t articulated to myself how this influences my thinking, but I guess it does?”—it’s a phrase I’ve used plenty, but this is a good opportunity to be more specific than that.
What kind of lens is astrology for me? Is it a lens like my understanding of gravity? Or a lens like my belief in the Enneagram? Or, even, a lens like a core value, like my belief in the necessity of hope and the essential dignity of life?1 They’re each a different kind of lens and I’m not sure immediately if my relationship with astrology, which I’ve been developing in earnest since May of 2022, aligns with one of those or represents something else entirely.
Gravity is something I don’t have to understand to believe in and even “use.” I know what happens when I drop a glass of water. The Enneagram, on the other hand, was a slow burn for me. However, after enough engagement, enough exposure to its rock solid and still expansive logic, I’ve found it to be a true way to describe and understand many of life’s patterns: social, emotional, and relational. I don’t know “why” and I don’t think that “why” is all that important here.
Astrology is something else. It’s more human in that it is more fallible, a philosophical construction that happens when you put people on a planet and leave them to respond to what they see. I see the lights up in the sky and I can wonder about them. Astrology, to my eye, is both a product of curiosity and a sustainer of curiosity.
The question of what astrology can “do” is similar to the question of what poetry can do or a painting can do. Art comes from constraints. Whether they’re self-imposed or externally-imposed, the constraints of your medium, your social world, your imagination, your symbols, your vitality, what you ate that morning, how much sleep you’ve had, how fascistic your government is, how communal your relationships are, and anything else, will define the limits of the creation. These constraints inform what you see and what you make and the same is true in astrology. So it might be better to say, when asked, “Do you believe in astrology?” that I believe in it as a medium to understand some kinds of important questions that I don’t access as readily in other media.
When I look at a chart or when I look at one of the planets outshining the light pollution in my city, I’m given the opportunity to ask questions. What might be revealed if we interpret these circumstances in front of us and describe them using language and symbols that have been developed by other, similarly oriented artists (astrologers) over the centuries? It’s not so different from learning what makes a villanelle and writing thousands of them to explore the limits of the form. Astrology uses a language of planets, their movement, relationships of light and visibility, and of elements and flavors of change. Most significantly, astrology is an artform that demands you consider time deeply.
I’ve written before about how a component of astrology that I started to appreciate early on is how it complicates units of time. The simplest example of this (which still isn’t all that simple) is that we have generally aligned on a solar system of time keeping. See the Sun rise 365 times and you have completed a cycle, right back where you started it. But if you try to square that to the number of times you see the Moon cycle from darkness to swollen light and back in that sequence of 365 sunrises, you’ll find that it looks a little different each solar cycle. That’s why many cultures in history made the natural choice to understand time by following these lunar cycles. They’re reliable and they reflect something familiar to us on Earth, the idea that change is inevitable and that it repeats. Like the seasons, like plants, like us, the Moon changes. So it wouldn’t be crazy at all to understand time from a lunar perspective first. By that method, I’m not thirty years old, I’m about 405 Lunar Cycles old (celebrating number 405 on April 29, 2025, actually).
Why does this matter? Life is short and life is long. You might have heard of or read the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. A few years ago it rocked the worlds of most of my friends and myself. The basic premise is that if we think about making “the most” of our lives, we think “I’ll get to the important stuff eventually!”, but if we think about making the most of four thousand weeks, we might plan differently. That’s interesting, because four thousand weeks is just about 77 years, which is a lifespan that many of us in privileged countries might hope to achieve. By the time you reach 20 years you’ve already used more than 25% of those weeks. Reframing your life using different timing systems gives you a different perspective.
Imagine a world where people saw the rising and setting of the Sun differently. They noticed that it happened pretty much the same way every day and decided it wasn’t all that interesting to keep track of. Saturn, on the other hand, is a little more dramatic. For as long as humans have been aware of Saturn he has marched through the sky on a predictable, reliable, slow trek. These imaginary people might have set their sights on that dimly lit wandering star and given it priority.
We know that Saturn returns to the place he was when you were born after you’ve seen about twenty-seven solar returns, but, remember, this imaginary world decided the Sun wasn’t a very interesting method of keeping time. Too fast, too uneventful (except for the occasional eclipse of course, yikes…). But these very serious people noticed that Saturn is as reliable as the Sun, just slower. They noticed that in the time it takes Saturn to complete one full cycle through the sky, a child becomes an adult. In the time it takes for him to complete a second cycle, that adult might have grandchildren of their own. They might have become a leader. If you live to see the completion of a third Saturn cycle, you’ve gained significant wisdom and perspective.
What would it mean to take Saturn’s cycles as a form of timekeeping seriously? It might mean a slower life. It might mean longterm plans, thinking far ahead to consider consequences that run deeper than those felt after two sunrises or two lunar cycles. If I thought primarily in terms of Saturn cycles then it might feel especially dire to spend the entirety of one of my three working to bring value to shareholders.
There are countless natural phenomena that offer means of complicating our experience of time passing. You don’t have to use the planets, they’re just the ones you can usually see easiest. There are the seasons (though we’ve generally messed that up since the Industrial Revolution), there are the lives of animals, planets, and the people around us, and there are our own biological cycles. Each of these tend to have some kind of interplay, cycles that respond to the cycles unfolding around them. The real value of any of these, I think, is in avoiding certainty and avoiding the exclusion of possible forms of wisdom, whether that be from nature or art or wherever else you can find it.
So, do I believe in astrology? Yes, in a sense. It is a lens, really. It’s a telescopic lens that I like to look in backwards as much as I like to look in it forwards.
With astrology I can zoom into some fraction of a moment and look at it in relationship to the moments just before and after or I can zoom way out and consider a span of years or decades or centuries as one infinitely complicated picture. Where I sense that I and most astrologers I know well drift from the more typical conception of “believing in astrology” is that we aren’t all that quick to predict what will happen or seek out solid answers. Sure, it’s baked into the tradition, and anyone who tells you they’re an astrologer and they don’t believe in some form of fate is either lying to you or they’ve avoided thinking about it which is a kind of philosophical negligence.
No, the astrologers I know and like to work with the most are the ones who are devoted to ambiguity and humility. This question, to be certain or to be questioning, is where the possibilities and problems of astrology mirror religion. I don’t trust any religious person who asserts certainty. The religious life that I respect is one that’s sat firmly in a state of contemplation and wondering and the same is true of astrology. If someone is certain about what will happen or why it happened or what you should do, they are selling you something. Whether they say it from behind an ephemeris and a natal chart or behind a Bible, a Quran, a Torah, or any pulpit in the world, they are selling you something, something dangerous.
There’s divinity in ambiguity, which is to say there’s something divine in curiosity and wonder. It takes cultivation and practice and I’m far from an expert at it. It’s so much easier to close down the investigation and just write down your findings in permanent ink. That’s all the more appealing when you consider the social pressures of political party identification, nationalism, and even the best intentioned social movements. Consider that context and what are you supposed to do when someone puts tools like astrology or religion in your hands? Remaining committed to openness and curiosity is no easy feat, but it’s worth it, even as you take action and move to make your world better. With each day (or lunar cycle, or Saturn cycle) you have to wonder, what else might be true? What else might be useful? What else might we do?
Thanks for reading, I hope this offered some kind of food for thought. There are a few more ideas to explore here, specifically about how thinking about time can serve some spiritual purposes. A few questions for you…
Do you have any thoughts on the above? Let me know!
What (if anything) gets you excited about astrology?
Where do you look for wisdom? Are there any “unusual” sources that you return to, maybe without even thinking of it as wisdom?
Some things to look into:
A good overview of the life of Pope Francis following his death. My one critical note is that it doesn’t address my favorite Papa Francis moment of late, what I like to call, “Vatican Pride”.
On that note, an oldie but a goodie. One of about three reasons I miss Instagram is because I can’t as easily watch Vinny Thomas videos.
And, keeping the theme, this piece in the New Yorker that my friend Cullen alerted me to about Mary Magdalene. Love having a strong enough brand that when new Mary Magdalene content drops I am immediately made aware.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I don’t love saying “life” here, I’d rather say something like… “the essential dignity of everything that exists here with us,” but that’s also not quite accurate. A thought for another blog…