Faith and time and belief and astrology.

thoughts on the christian horse-girl to bisexual astrologer pipeline

The Sun moves into Gemini on Monday! Around 9AM ET on Monday, 5/20, we will see the Sun move out of Taurus and into Gemini. This precedes a lot of planets joining together in Gemini, a place in the sky that doesn’t mind busy-ness. Enjoy the shift, consider tending to some Mercurial activities to celebrate. Write letters, make phone calls, go to a local market and exchange cash for goods. A little chaos can be good, especially if we are connected to our local community, another Gemini quality. 

Hello to you - glad to have you here and a little perplexed to have you here. Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a swell of support for this newsletter (I asked for it directly). Still, even when you ask for support, it’s startling to receive it. Maybe that’s when it’s most startling?

another recently developed photo from back when the buds were just beginning to bud

Some thoughts on situating yourself in time and wondering why we like astrology now.

I’m drinking overly sweetened iced coffee on the northeast regional train somewhere between Philadelphia and New York as I write this. It’s a sunny Saturday morning, the Moon is in Cancer, and the Sun is creeping toward his yearly meeting with Uranus. 

My friend Kelsey assigned me the task of writing a series where I talk honestly about how astrology is a replacement for a lot of faithless or lost faith people. Another friend, Lauren, and I talked about how she saw a meme about the Christian horse-girl to bisexual astrologer pipeline and laughed because… accurate. It is a familiar trek and it’s easy to spot others who have walked that same line. Many of us were good at youth group, really good at reading and discussing at Sunday school, good at “required volunteering”, and good at talking about the complicated theological concepts with some kind of humility¹. I gestured at this idea last week, I think, but it’s a big topic and one that’s hard to look at head on. There are a lot of little splintered pieces to consider. 

First there’s the question of what astrology offers with regards to faith. Does it demand any kind of faith? Free will is immediately complicated by nearly any kind of religion and astrology definitely checks that box. Any astrologer has to eventually consider whether one can “fight” their chart or if we’re all just going through the motions, dominos knocked over by the dominos that fell before. I always wonder about this when I see the mainstream astrology content. Writers (who may or may not be good astrologers) take old techniques and perspectives and water them down into vague statements that receive earned eye rolls from “serious” people. These serious people believe astrology’s popularity reflects an anti-intellectual trend. The assumed incompatibility of seriousness and astrology is another thing that it shares with mainstream religions. 

And then there are the holy texts. Does reading a chart count as a kind of exegesis? I’m speaking outside my depth, but I know Judaism, for example, centers the review and debate of what the holy texts say, those interpretations ultimately becoming holy in their own way. Grappling with what other people have interpreted regarding our purpose in life and holding conversation or debate across time seems like one of the great offerings of any religion. I see the same happening in astrology, especially with the resurgence of traditional techniques in the late 90s and early 00s.  

Liturgy and prayer are also interesting to think about. There are of course deep traditions of incorporating or centering astrological tradition in ritual. It’s a major component of Vedic astrology, one of the most consistent traditions, more or less unbroken for thousands of years. We also see astrology and ritual married in magic². As it stands, it seems there are relatively few people using astrology ritualistically or liturgically today, but check me if you disagree. The general vibe for late millennials and gen z seems to be that we’re more open to worshiping the Moon than anything else, so maybe the past is the future. 

I haven’t figured out how to make the connection in a newsletter, but since before I launched Ask Good Questions I’ve wanted to write about the Catholic liturgical calendar and how it structured my life growing up. As a little kid in Sunday school I remember frequently playing with a little wooden “puzzle” that contained colored pie slices corresponding with seasons of the year. There were the green Ordinary Time slices, red for Pentecost, white for Easter and Christmas, and purple for Lent and Advent. 

from the australian good shepherd website

The colors corresponded also to the colors that decorated the church throughout the year. These visual changes were up there with school holidays as a way for me to understand what time of year it was as a very small kid. Santa came after a purple period, my birthday was in the green following, and summer vacation wasn’t long after the red Pentecost services. Kids largely don’t think about what their calendars will look like months and years down the line. Before I had any option but to be present, the cues I relied upon to tell me where in the year I was were these liturgical visuals.

What am I getting at here? I guess I’d say this is the first and perhaps most central offering of astrology for those who have been spit out of Christianity as adults, craving some kind of faith.

Astrology is about time. I talked about this somewhat incoherently much earlier in this newsletter, but the idea that this moment you’re living in right now is connected to all the moments that led up to it and all the moments that are to come is meaningful. This feels like knowing that God is always there for you, holding you in some way. You can map life along real and symbolic cycles, known about and articulated by people thousands of years ago and still seen today. I think we need something like this, ups and downs that feel bigger than us. Without them we can slip away into the falseness, the algorithm, the endless feed that alternatively prioritizes recency, loudness, or intensity.

I’m not the first and won’t be the last to talk about the Algorithm and how it is God now, whether we want that to be the case or not. The endless feed loves astrology and is ready to gobble up whatever there is about astrology that draws your attention because the endless feed wants to gobble up your attention and you along with it.

I’ll talk more about the endless feed, especially as Jupiter moves into Gemini in the coming weeks. I’ll also be talking more about the complicated ways that astrology as a “faith system” just does and doesn’t work. Especially interesting to me is how popular astrologers work with this bizarre flock on social media that they maybe didn’t ask for (or that they begged for) and that they now have responsibility for. This, the exegesis question, and considering how community does and doesn’t play into the astrology of today are all on deck.

Thank you again for reading! As a reminder, I’m starting up a paid level for this newsletter. I plan for these weekly essays to remain free and for the paid level to primarily include the monthly horoscopes (times to come out before New Moons) and occasional subscriber-only essays that are more experimental or unformed.

You won’t have to do anything to access the benefits at first, as I’ll keep things free for everyone the first two cycles. I want you to get a good sense of what my horoscopes will offer before you decide if you want to contribute financially.

If you have any topics you’d like me to focus on or explore, please let me know! My inbox is open. 

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.

1. Humility, imo, is Queer™, especially in children.

2. Google “theurgy” and can you see how in a different timeline Emperor Julian might have managed to usurp Christianity with the theurgy of Neoplatonism and set off a very different (or not? who knows?) series of events in the West.