Gender and all that, Part 1.

which gender team are you on? why do we care? who are you?

Mercury is queer and moving into their favorite place: If you’ve read this newsletter for very long then you are likely familiar with my common refrain: Mercury is queer. If you have not read this newsletter for very long, now you are familiar.

What I really mean by this is that Mercury is our representative of the nonbinary or gender fluid folks. Sometimes Mercury carries a “masculine” signature and sometimes they are decidedly “feminine”. This is technically determined by their relationship to the Sun and whether they are a morning star or an evening star at the moment in question. Morning = masculine, evening = feminine. 

Another way to think about this is to understand which “team” Mercury wants to hang out with. When Mercury is a morning star, they want to hang out with the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn. As an evening star they seek out the company of the Moon, Venus, and Mars. There’s something interesting to me (as you’ll see in the rest of this week’s newsletter) about how gender in this case is tied to community, to the “kinds of people” Mercury wants to be around. 

When Mercury moves into Virgo on Thursday evening, 7/25, they’ll be an evening star. This is a nice moment for this funny little mutable planet to shift into the sign of their exaltation, their feminine home of Virgo. While they’re there it’s a good time to take stock of your supplies, both literal and metaphorical. Do some tidying up before summer ends, make sure you’ve got enough of your meds and essential home goods, and schedule any doctor’s appointments you’ve been avoiding. You’ve got just about a week before we start to feel Mercury’s pre-retrograde shadow. Enjoy it 💃💃

nude male but also nude angel. squint and it’s just a body!

Gender in the sky with diamonds, which are a girl’s best friend. Part 1. 

Writing about the moon last week and Cancer not so long before, I started to think again about gender. With the Sun freshly moving back into Leo for his yearly stay, sharing that space with Venus, it seems as good a time as any to break into this tricky, fraught topic. There’s way more than I can cover in a single newsletter of course, but let’s just start and see where we get. 

In modern astrology and in the modern resurgence of traditional astrology there have been many attempts to deal with its patriarchal history. Sometimes it’s a move to cut out gendered language, to add nuance by using more palatable binaries like “passive/active” or “yin/yang”¹, or calling in humor and an artistic looseness to reimagine gendered symbols (take Grandmother Saturn instead of the more traditional grand pappy of the Hellenistic era). 

My approach for dealing with this issue up to now has mostly been to try and do a hand wavey thing where I say something like “earth signs are feminine, but of course that doesn’t mean the same thing we think of today, it’s more nuanced, does that make sense?” and then before the listener can answer or push back, I move right along. It does the job of directing the conversation where it needs to go, but doesn’t do the harder thing of looking at gender. A friend at one point told me: “I hear you, but that’s not really possible, to just divorce the idea of gender as it plays today.  It carries baggage.” And she’s right! I really can’t disagree or simplify, as much as I’d like to. So, what’s gender mean in astrology? What do we do with it?

I think there are two ways of looking at this right up front that are worth spending time on: (1) what were the intentions of the people who first fleshed out these concepts in the Hellenistic context and (2) what are the intentions of astrology now? They’re interconnected, I think, but we can take them one at a time to get a better grip on this.  

The earliest astrologers in the Hellenistic tradition were not feminists. While there are glimmers of acknowledgement of women as non-objects, as subjects in their own right, they typically only get shoutouts in the ancient texts as either unfaithful wives, poor temptresses, or, sometimes, as mothers who may or may not survive childbirth. Usually they’re only referenced to help the astrologer figure out what kind of woman he or his client would marry or have sex with. Dorotheus says: “if Venus by day was in the Ascendant or Midheaven, under the rays of the sun and Mars was in the stake or with the Lot of Wedding, then it indicates for the native a woman of the underclass, foreign, needy. And if with that Mercury and Venus looked at the Lot, it indicates a female singer or dancer.” Very helpful.

That does not give an optimistic view of the potential to rehabilitate gender in ancient astrological texts. And, if your goal is to simply transpose the theory from then to now, I think that pessimism is right. But we’re not going to do that. Instead, we’re going to look at how these early sources are predominantly focused on context. When it comes to both gendered topics and not, they care about circumstance. *Insert joke about future President Coconut Tree.* 

Traditional astrology, though capable of engaging with the individual, was born out of a desire to make sense of world events. There is a bias in these techniques to describe what will happen to a group or world leaders—the development of focusing on an average person requires an additional cognitive step. You have to ask: what are the personal implications of these impersonal happenings? 

Could we say that having highly active Virgo signatures in a birth chart cues anxiety? Sure, but I’d argue this is mostly because Virgo has a long history being associated with circumstances that reasonably generate anxiety. Virgo is associated with the harvest, with securing enough food for winter, with planning ahead and adapting when someone else didn’t, and, of course, with afflictions of the intestines. If your chart emphasizes circumstances like that, then you might be interested in meeting my good friend Lexapro. 

this woman, probably a virgo, is anxious, but not because she’s a virgo so much as because being a virgo has made her be responsible for all that wheat and that baby eating an apple and no one even gave her a shirt!

Skeptics of astrology see a birth chart as a random arrangement of lights in the sky that can’t possibly have anything to do with someone’s personality. I think ancient astrologers would have tended to agree with that. Instead of personality (a concept they’d be baffled by, probably), someone like Vettius Valens would use a chart to understand how the life will unfold around the native, rather than within. It wasn’t until the 1930s and onward that people like Carl Jung suggested your birth chart reflected your inner journey and it wasn’t until even later in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s that people like Howard Sasportas and Liz Greene really laid the foundations of psychological astrology. 

These days we have an interesting thing happening: the idea that astrology predicts future events or at least describes possible futures is becoming popular again. For a long time this was way too close to suggesting we don’t have free will. While the idea “we don’t have free will” is still not popular, it seems from how this traditional version of astrology’s appeal has grown that we might at least have room for some cognitive dissonance or suspension of disbelief.  

I think part of how this happens is that the most popular apps and media outlets rely on a fuzzy half-circumstantial, half-spiritual approach. Rather than saying something like, “You can expect the return of an enemy” they say, “As Mars enters your Seventh House, protect your energy and maintain your boundaries.” Not bad advice, but it assumes a lot about the person on the other end of the statement. There’s no accounting for the rest of the chart, for racial, gender, or economic privilege, or any other extenuating circumstances. Partially that’s because there isn’t a technology yet that can spit out the nuanced interpretation that a birth chart requires, but I think it’s also because it’s a safe thing to say. It’s safe and vague. 

Another way astrologers skirt past the free will question is through memes—much less socially risky to joke about how Saturn’s move into Pisces (co-present with Neptune) aligned pretty closely with an uptick in whales sinking yachts than it is to suggest whatever is happening way up there mirrors in any sort of way what happens here. Culture in 2024 allows for big statements from astrology, but mostly when there’s a wink attached.

Still, bubbling underneath these caveats it seems that one big reason for astrology’s resonance today is the certainty it offers when there otherwise isn’t any. That’s not especially different from recent decades, though my guess is that, along with the humor and entertainment in astrology, there’s greater appetite for it to be a “serious enough” lens to look at real things. What I sense as a departure from recent history is the idea that astrology reflects, duh, circumstance.

Yes, there’s the increased memeing and the evil VC money pouring into the space, but there’s also the wildfire adoption of the Saturn Return. I know this intergenerational cohort of late-Millennials and early-Zoomers didn’t invent losing your mind between 25-30 years old, but, if Google Search data means anything², it does seem like we’ve all become much more aware we might be able to blame Saturn.

In my experience, the Saturn Return rarely gets talked about as a reflection of personality, though the events that occur during that time are guaranteed to impact how you move through the world. When people talk about the Saturn Return, they usually say something like “Oh, yeah, I got divorced and moved.” or “Before my Saturn Return I was an accountant. Now I breed angora rabbits.” or even “I don’t feel that different, but I don’t hang out with any of the friends I had before. Not sure why…”

All of this indicates to me that at the very least we are beginning again to see astrology as describing context at least as much as if not more than personality. This is a significant shift. I think this shift opens the door for astrology to be materially useful. I think this shift opens the door for astrology to be used for all sorts of important progressive cultural and intellectual projects, including as a field to break down “gender as archetype”.

Okay, if you have made it this far, thank you. Having now wandered through all that, I think we’re ready to start really talking about gender in astrology. I have some thoughts about gender as performative, about the baggage we bring to chart readings, and about gender-weird people’s example. All this and more coming your way next week because this email is long enough!

A taste of where we’re going, to give you something to think about in the meantime. Feel free to discuss in the comments. I love comments!

1. If gender is performative and the options for what you might perform (any notion of choice being a bit of an illusion) are pre-defined, does that mean the chart’s potential is restricted to the social rules of your world? 

2. Are there lessons to be learned by considering the planets as independent subjects or agents in their own right? Hint: yes, I think so, especially about gender.

3. What can we learn from the birth charts of “gender outlaws” and other people who create “gender trouble”?

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. To be clear, I don’t know much about the definitions of “yin/yang'“. But I’ve heard it used in several astrological contexts, especially from Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees, two astrologers I really appreciate. “Eastern” astrologies and spiritual concepts are areas that I need to give myself a lot more time to understand and reference correctly. Apologies for any errors here. 

2. It might not.