"I never studied astrology formally, but I was online a lot"

June 21, 2022 9:19 AM

The Stars are Blind (Anna Dorn for Granta)
posted by box (47 comments total)

Lawyers are absolutely just doing astrology. Fictional systems we pretend guide our lives and rule society.
posted by Ultracrepidarian at 9:58 AM on June 21, 2022

Apart from the small fact that you can trace back how a law is developed, understand the intention, while as far as I can see the 'rules' of astrology are just-so stories.
posted by Braeburn at 10:04 AM on June 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

Lawyers are absolutely just doing astrology. Fictional systems we pretend guide our lives and rule society.

Well, on the one hand, all man-made systems are "made up". On the other hand, laws actually do guide our lives and rule society and can cost you your money, freedom, or even life while the stars don't and astrology is nonsensical bullshit.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:05 AM on June 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

Basically, I though this article was going to start digging into the author's obsession and desire to control and manage her life, instead of being a book advert.
posted by Braeburn at 10:08 AM on June 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Well, no worse than Myers-Briggs though, amirite?
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:25 AM on June 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I thought 'the stars are blind' would be an allusion to one of the more desolate stanzas of Tennyson's In Memorian AHH:

The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:

I wouldn’t be too surprised if that's where Paris Hilton got it, though.

The astrology we use today was developed on a landmass above the 35th parallel for the most part, which had wide seasonal variations in daylength, temperature, and abundance as well as access to food; at a time when central heating was almost unknown, and when the little artificial light available was expensive and of a wavelength notably inefficient at resetting circadian rhythms.

Therefore it seems inescapable to me that the particular nine month period a fetus spent in the womb would have had a strong influence on the baby at birth, and on the quality of nursing the baby experienced in the first months and years of life, and that such factors probably had a significant influence on individuals throughout life.

Which means, in my opinion, that a Sun sign astrology with some valid elements was possible for that time, though I don’t know whether we ever got one.
posted by jamjam at 11:06 AM on June 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Even in Ancient Greece, somehow I think for two babies born at the same time on the same day, whether their parents were slaves or wealthy politicians is what determines their life path rather than where the Sun happened to be while they were in the womb.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:26 AM on June 21, 2022 [12 favorites]

People often say that they are into astrology "just for fun" and that they don't take it seriously; everyone I've ever met who does more than read the occasional horoscope actually takes it pretty seriously.

It isn't surprising that a lawyer would be interested in astrology; astrology is easier to bend than the law and it is, in a sense, applied equally - Elon Musk and Elon Musk's astrology-clone have the same horoscope even though only EM has the unearned and disgraceful advantage of the apartheid emerald mine, etc.

The part where she puts a positive spin on it for her friends and a negative spin on it for their exes/her enemies is pretty good; horoscopes purport to be some kind of neutral truth access but of course they aren't.

Not surprising that in an increasingly arbitrary and corrupt society astrology looks pretty good, as with Russia after the collapse of the USSR.
posted by Frowner at 11:49 AM on June 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

“I don’t mean to dismiss astrology or the immense importance it has for other people, and for me at times.”

Oh, please do.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:57 AM on June 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'd say that astrology is closer to economics rather than the legal system.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 12:01 PM on June 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Being pedantic, I believe the astrology "we" use today was developed mostly in Mesopotamia, which is mostly below the 35th parallel. Or the popular interpretations of Western astrology, focused primarily on personality traits, I think is actually pretty modern, like mostly 20th century, but I might be wrong. As far as I understand it, ancient and medieval practitioners of astrology were more interested in predicting the future than in explaining personality.
posted by biogeo at 12:01 PM on June 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

I will (at least inwardly) roll my eyes at astrology or anyone who I feel like takes astrology too seriously, but I'd much rather hang out with someone who's into astrology than someone who is way too into religion.

I mean, no one ostracizes or kills other people because they don't believe in star signs, right? No one tries to use astrology to force people who don't believe in astrology to live under astrology-defined laws and social codes. No one passes laws ensuring that "in the stars we trust" is printed on money or license plates just to make sure that the nonbelievers never truly feel comfortable in their own country.

So yeah, astrology is pure unmitigated bullshit with no grounding in reality. But it's also not actively harming anyone. It gets a pass in my book.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:21 PM on June 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

I feel I would have understood more of the jokes in the article if I knew (or cared) more about astrology, at least whatever variant of it the author subscribes to.

I understand that shared context is necessary for any kind of communication, and especially so for humor, but it felt kind of lazy writing to just shout out astrological signs and expect people to understand why they were funny.

I used to design my university's student council news sheet back in the '90s. I added a horoscope and wrote whatever I felt like for each sign each week, mostly things like "You do not accept that your fate can be decided by the position of stars at your birth," or "You do not have a horoscope this week," and added a lot of specific advice and shout-outs to friends. Really specific, like "Your girlfriend will return from her trip to Brazil, you will be happy to see her."

I got a surprising amount of positive feedback on it.
posted by signal at 12:25 PM on June 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I like jamjam's take in a way, think of your preschool life and when you started talking or walking and what season did that happen? Were you a toddler in the summer? Or the winter? When were your parent's fucking? Winter or summer? Why?

But in the extreme, we have the "where is there no gravity?" question that is best answered 'nowhere'. Every star in the visible light-cone (and you can't actually perceive them all with the naked eye) have an epsilon (tiny tiny tiny tiny ...) bit of gravitational effect on you all the time, and the same goes for their magnetic fields.

Who's to say that in our part of the universe that the path of our planet around our sun doesn't have a periodic waveform that can influence development in a subltle way from parents and conception through early life... Keep adding the cycles. Think of local space-time as being fields that are a summation of the universe and the periodicity of the orbit. Feel the universe and it's influence, it's all there if you feel it. Down to the epsilon.

Now let's do Biorhythms, musch simpler... The I Ching... I Ching Online.NET - the Online Book of Changes, Question: "What the fuck?"

Cast Hexagram:

32 - Thirty-Two
Hêng / Durability

Arousing Thunder and penetrating Wind.
Close companions in any storm:
The Superior Person possesses a resiliency and durability that lets him remain firmly and faithfully on course.

Such constancy deserves success.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:
Endurance is the key to success in this situation.
However, durability is not synonymous with stone-like rigidity.
True resilience requires a flexibility that allows adaptation to any adverse condition, while still remaining true to the core.
Can you maintain your integrity under any circumstance?
Can you influence the situation without giving opposing forces anything to resist?
Then you will endure to reach your goal.

It's the woo-woo train.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:53 PM on June 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

In the land of "woo", my last two fortune cookies had "Love is around the corner" and "You will meet an alien very soon!" Sadly, neither was true, individually or in combination. It's been several weeks.
posted by maxwelton at 1:13 PM on June 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

zengargoyle: "Who's to say that in our part of the universe that the path of our planet around our sun doesn't have a periodic waveform that can influence development in a subtle way from parents and conception through early life... "

Regardless of an imagined mechanism by which it might operate, if astrology had any power whatsoever to predict people's personalities it would take a first-year psych major about fifteen minutes to think up and conduct an experiment to prove it works. The fact that no such proof has been forthcoming is enough to disregard the entire enterprise.
posted by signal at 1:14 PM on June 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Hello, nice people on Metafilter who are fond of astrology. I hope you are having a nice day.

I'm not a believer myself, but the article was interesting enough, and their stated POV included enough shrugging and self-deprecation, that it really didn't call out for trip 41,372 on the "Okay, I'm Going Explain Why This Thing You Goobers Like Is Ridiculous" Express.

I hope you get to have that talk in peace after people finish flexing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:21 PM on June 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

But it's also not actively harming anyone.

You have no say in when you are born, so judging someone on that basis is surely as intrinsically unethical as any other judgement along those lines. How does this practice mesh with other beliefs about how to treat people based on traits they are born with such as skin color, gender identity, etc? Even if you could demonstrate that there is a mechanical relationship between human bodies and celestial ones, you're still just doing night sky eugenics. At best, it's tacky as all get out.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 1:29 PM on June 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: At best, it's tacky. At worst, it's eugenics.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:36 PM on June 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought this article made some interesting connections, though it was a little short. Like the author's law career, my career is technical in nature but essentially revolves around gathering knowledge about esoteric topics and crafting a narrative. I like the connection they drew between doing that sort of work and seizing upon patterns in other aspects of your life as a way to excise anxiety about the modern world.

Hope the mods clean up this comment section, so many lukewarm takes from people who didn't RTFA but just wanna air their grievances about astrology in general.
posted by Emily's Fist at 1:51 PM on June 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I did RTFA, and I agree: it's a book puff, disguised as an essay.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:58 PM on June 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

In the land of "woo", my last two fortune cookies had "Love is around the corner" and "You will meet an alien very soon!" Sadly, neither was true, individually or in combination. It's been several weeks.

Yeah, nothing ever comes true for me either. Especially disappointing that you didn't meet an alien lovah.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:04 PM on June 21, 2022

Wow I knew this topic is hardly a MeFi fave but I didn't think we'd get to "this is basically eugenics" in fewer than 20 comments.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:15 PM on June 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

(To be fair I really should have known after the "the first ten minutes of Up are crime, actually" thread.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:16 PM on June 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I am a child of the late 70s. My sun sign is a Space Shuttle. I was raised to believe that astrology is nonsense.

Now that I live in Southern California and am practically single, I am at a distinct disadvantage because I don’t speak fluent Aquarian.
posted by infinitewindow at 2:38 PM on June 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

It really sounds like she wrote the book to purge herself of her obsession with astrology.

And it didn’t work.
posted by jamjam at 2:57 PM on June 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

The rabbithole she went down reminds me a bit of Qanon, in form if not in content. Signs and portents are everywhere; if you have a big enough spreadsheet you can work out the real forces that are controlling the world. Do your own research online. And while it "started as a fun way to get close to people, joke around, boost myself and others, it was becoming a way to judge, criticize, isolate."

It seems like it filled a similar space in her life to what Qanon does for some people, and had a similar corrosive effect on her relationships with others.

Not sure what to make of it, other than maybe this shape of belief system- very online; very participatory; totally reorganizes your worldview; both peer- and self-reinforcing; nonhierarchical and yet still isolating- might be getting more common.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:57 PM on June 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

(I'm not saying astrology per se is anything like qanon, but the way she describes how it took over her thinking and became woven through every interaction and decision she made... maybe the throughline is just, well, that's how religion can work. But the overlap doesn't seem coincidental- these sorts of not-quite-religions coalescing online seem like a distinct phenomenon)
posted by BungaDunga at 3:06 PM on June 21, 2022

Anyone I’ve met who takes astrology seriously has been kind of a dimwit, sorry. And the author lives up to it in the blathering way she writes. It comes across as so rushed, even accounting the point being “read my book.”

One statement I found especially odd was:
“Something about being surrounded by people (playing slots) making petty cash doing essentially nothing inspired me”
Huh? Those people were losing cash, not winning.

As far as Astrology, it doesn’t align to people I know…. Sagittarius on a quest for knowledge? Not the narrow-minded November born person I know…. The author says “Like most Virgos, I’m anxious as hell.” Okayyyy….everyone born in August/September is an anxious perfectionist? I know at least three people born then who are lazy and indifferent….

However, I once had a co-worker who was physically strong and had a broad frame. They were hardworking and had a healthy stubborn streak. When the hippy on our team said, “She’s a taurus”, it did make sense.

So if it gives a framework for thinking about people, why do I care?

Probably won't read the novel, but if anyone does and it is good, let me know?
posted by rhonzo at 4:25 PM on June 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like too that it transcends class, gender, sexuality. We all have a birthday and a birth chart, and while some signs are more demonized (Scorpio, Gemini) than others (Taurus, Pisces), all traits have good and bad qualities, and they have nothing to do with where we grew up, the hue of our skin, our gender presentation or the prestige of our jobs. -- Demonized?! TIL I'd been reading all the wrong columns

My iPhone was a Gemini, annoying but addictive. -- HEY

I would write off entire signs (cough: Tauruses), half-joking but not really, while romanticizing others (cough: Geminis). -- all is forgiven

Per that first line in the excerpt, the responses to this 2019 "How to relate to astrology fans" Ask are illuminating. For instance: Forgot to add, I don't know if you're queer but if you're not, consider that queer people have been historically pushed out of mainstream religion and it's not that surprising that we would gravitate towards more welcoming spiritual spaces instead. - posted by coffeeand
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:26 PM on June 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

bit of gravitational effect on you all the time, and the same goes for their magnetic fields.

If this had literally anything to do with your personality or life path, the relative positions of the obstetrician and any other attendants during your birthing process would be orders of magnitude more important than your star sign, to say nothing of the size of the building you were born in and the position of other nearby structures.

...yet I don't see anyone proclaiming their "obstetrician was three feet to the left, one point five feet away for minutes nine through twenty four, in a concrete tower block nine stories tall, just across the street from a steel framed skyscraper twenty stories tall, while a large concrete mixing truck drove by. Also, there as an active MRI machine in the building, but no CT scanners were operational in the relevant timeframe and the lights were predominately fluorescent rather than incandescent" birth sign.
posted by aramaic at 4:37 PM on June 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

Data Scientists Find Connections Between Birth Month and Health (Columbia University, 2015) Overall, the study indicated people born in May had the lowest disease risk, and those born in October the highest. (Link to the retrospective study; "We found 55 diseases that were significantly dependent on birth month.")
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:16 PM on June 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: I didn't think we'd get to "this is basically eugenics" in fewer than 20 comments.
posted by signal at 6:21 PM on June 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

The astrology joke is usually that Capricorn (men) don't believe in astrology, so I guess I know what sign is predominant in THIS thread.

I'm kind of on astrology-Tok and it's interesting to see several women leaving their traditional jobs to do astrological readings, which is kind of like what this woman sounds like she did. It's mostly entertainment for me and I find it kind of aimlessly funny. Whether or not it's "true", I think some of the results of chart readings highlight areas that nearly everyone could stand some personal growth in, so whatever. It's not actually hurting anyone.

For example, this piece caused me to look at my astrocartography to see where favourable places were for me to live. My Jupiter line - which is supposed to represent favourable, lucky places for me - goes right through Sevilla, Spain, which is a place that I travelled to and ended up with one of the worst glutenings I've ever had (I have celiac disease) and barely saw the city because I was so sick. I had a good chuckle.

(hey, I don't know if people know this but if you don't like a post topic you can just not click on it. You don't have to come in to comment that you are so smart that you know better than to like it. It fosters a much nicer community spirit around here.)
posted by urbanlenny at 6:37 PM on June 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

Overall, the study indicated people born in May had the lowest disease risk, and those born in October the highest.

That study expects that they're really measuring the effects of seasonal environmental variation. These environmental effects are going to be totally different in different populations; rerun the study in the southern hemisphere or in tropical climate and you'd likely see a totally different result. For example, it "found a 2-month shift in the birth month-asthma pattern that corresponds with a shift in the peak sunshine (a factor in asthma complicated by dust mite allergies) between Denmark and NYC"- so the ultimate cause of the asthma variation is put down to seasonal variations in hours of sunlight, and the peak sunlight month in Denmark comes two months earlier.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:40 PM on June 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I like astrology enough because of my sense of vanity but am either too ADHD or fundamentally don't believe it enough to actually remember any of the readings in any particular detail. Admittedly while I enjoy the storytelling aspect to it, and while there's some utility to it as a framing device to understand certain... psychologies, I get extremely leery when I encounter people who takes astrology-as-an-organizing principle too seriously. It's one thing for me to joke about my own sign's foibles but I really hope the stories I've read about dating and even rental discrimination are merely people putting on affectations.

Still, on any given day, my world is full of people operating on at least one more astrological system and a whole bag of other superstitions so while on one hand people talk about in an offhanded manner without being too serious about it, actual weddings can or not happen if the dates aren't right. But at least planning auspicious days seems fairly harmless, or maybe I'm used to it. Profiling people beyond feel-good annual almanacs though ...

Because, as someone who likes learning about the various systems especially the history of their development (and learning how they mingled e.g. vedic and western, and then Islamic astrology too somewhere there especially in the medieval period, and East Asian and African systems just minding their business) which includes the eventual split with astronomy etc I find a lot of the more strident purveyors in public aren't actually that rigorous about their own discipline, so why would I take their pronouncements seriously? I barely take the ustaz/ahs seriously in my community seriously and at least 30% has some kind of academic qualification.
posted by cendawanita at 10:20 PM on June 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

The Fault, Dear Reader, Is Not in Our Stars (The Walrus, Sept. 28, 2020) Mental health care is pricey and inaccessible. Online astrology is rising to take its place.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:50 PM on June 21, 2022

Yesterday mine said I was going to yuck where yum was needed and that having an understanding of what's going on isn't the agency and empowerment I crave to feel safe in the difficulties of the world at present. It wasn't clear when "look for the helpers" in the short term transforms into longer-term "become one of the helpers."
posted by k3ninho at 11:47 PM on June 21, 2022

Mod note: A couple deleted. This thread (that I woke up to with a pile of flags, and had to try to make sense of before coffee) is pretty messy, but then the overall topic is pretty messy, so carry on, I guess ... but just a few things: 1) our guidelines say to speak for yourself and not to make it about other people in the discussion. Please do this. 2) TFA says it is about the author's new book, so yes? It's about the author's new book, which is an extremely common thing in articles linked and discussed on the site, and not really such a shocking J'ACCUSE moment. 3) I get the idea that a lot of commentary is reacting somewhat angrily based on the idea that the linked piece is promoting astrology ... which it isn't. 4) Likewise, if you've read this thread and are somehow angry that "Metafilter" is promoting astrology, please take another look. Because no. 5) It would be nice if people would not melt down about this. I'd much rather read interesting ideas about why astrology as a popular interest has woken from it's slumber (I have a guess, and the linked article suggests pretty much the same), or interesting background and history tidbits, or pretty much anything than more [OUTRAGE] about [THING]. Sorry for so many words, but see above about coffee. ☕️ Leos do need their coffee, you know.
posted by taz (staff) at 12:14 AM on June 22, 2022 [17 favorites]

Ha, I saw jamjam's comment and wanted to chime in with "Right on! Another one on board with the biocultural developmental determinism explanation!" Living in Portland, astrology is, well, fucking everywhere and in lieu of being a dismissive jerkface, I had to come up with an approach that would be satisfying to me so I could be a part of the conversation. That took the form of said explanation of putative correlations between astrological sign and personality arising from the general tenor of behaviors we engage in with our parents resulting from, for instance, the weather or the culture around the time our birth are internalized. And that they are reinforced every year by association with the usually positive experience of our birthdays. Like "I am sitting in a room" or one of the means of determining the primary eigenvector of matrices.

That said, I'm plunking this down after jimjam's comment and an apparently contentious thread. So... uh, I hope everyone's doing and feeling respected, and that this comes off accordingly.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:57 AM on June 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

DeepSeaHaggis: "putative correlations between astrological sign and personality arising from the general tenor of behaviors we engage in with our parents resulting from, for instance, the weather or the culture around the time our birth are internalized."

Right, that's why the signs are shifted 6 months in the Southern Hemisphere.
posted by signal at 4:29 AM on June 22, 2022

one time a visiting buddy asked about my young child. i waxed expansive, launching into anecdotes and musings, in the setup for one of which i said, "[my child] has more toys than god," fully expecting to have several more clauses to draw out my wry observation of my child's character and toys to a satisfactory conclusion, but i misjudged--"_i_ don't believe in god" my friend, who ought to have known that i already was aware of this factoid, interrupted me. to make that point. in case, by comprehending my hyperbolic comparison, he should permit someone mistakenly to get the impression that he might not be an atheist. it was the least cool thing i've ever witnessed him do. (which, in the grand scheme, should make him a superfuckin cool dude, if you can let your self imagine believing in the grand scheme). so i confirmed that he did, in fact, understand the concept of god sufficiently to recognize that god would have all the toys god wanted and, so, that my child had a lot of toys. but i had forgotten by then where child-related whimsy had been leading us.

i did not rtfa; may.

Iris Gambol, i follow @ZodiacFacts (and a smattering of other astrology twits), where there is sometimes an undercurrent of elevating or deprecating persons as a class based on sign in kind of a playful sun-sign-insights-into-dating way in the crosstalk where tongue may be deep in cheek. @KramerGreg, on the other hand, is gnomic and esoteric, no eugenics there (though possibly some in the authoritative antecedents -- lots of the lore gets to us, now, necessarily through late 19th and early 20th century spiritualists, theosophists and third-wayers, many of whom appear to have been execrable people entertaining horrible ideas and to have associated with worse).

i wanted to dismiss astrology, based on my exposure to horoscopes and sun signs, as not worth my precious attention and reason, but thought the exercise of rational choice required a fair examination of the available evidence, so i peeked beyond sunsigns and, dear reader, it gets quite complicated very fast. the lore is deep enough, and authority hard enough to find and authenticate, that i have been unable to develop what i would deem to be sufficient grasp of the ... culture? corpus? whole thing or essential core of astrology ... to dismiss it in whole as bunk reasonably. i did, for the most part, despairing of attaining that sufficient comprehension whereof to judge, stop spinning my wheels there. still dabble occasionally. i almost never attempt to discuss astrology with anyone, except to encourage those excited about sun signs to look into the other planets and aspects.

i also studied law.
posted by 20 year lurk at 8:05 AM on June 22, 2022

Thinking about the reasons for the recent-ish rise of astrology's popularity, I also wonder if it has something to do with the lack of access in many countries but especially the US (I am not American) to mental health care. It does have an element of therapy to it, by providing explanations for why people are the way they are. It's WAY more complicated than just sun signs and infinitely fascinating; anyone who seriously dismisses anyone else for their sun sign knows nothing whatsoever about astrology and either way is probably not someone most of us want to associate with anyway, as it speaks to a lack of character in the one making the pronouncement that goes far beyond their interest in astrology.

You can work with what comes out of astrological charts in all sorts of ways, not only to address your own personal areas of weakness, but also you can do composite charts with other people to find areas you need to work to address together. Because the interpretation of astrology is so wide as to be universally applicable, there is always a kernel of truth in there, always something to work on. It's a pretty reasonable stand-in for therapy, in some ways, particularly for those who don't have access to it.

I think I also like astrology because I have always struggled to understand who I am as a person, something that I think is linked to the fact that I have lived with ADHD for my whole life (I was only recently diagnosed at 40) and spent all that time hiding several aspects of myself and being confused about why I am the way I am and why other people are so different from me. I also love doing any personality test I can get my hands on, probably hoping that I'll uncover some kind of truth about myself there, something to hang onto and feel comfortable in and, maybe most importantly, something I can use as a shorthand to explain myself to others.
posted by urbanlenny at 9:56 AM on June 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

So yeah, astrology is pure unmitigated bullshit with no grounding in reality. But it's also not actively harming anyone. It gets a pass in my book.

TheWire.in:

"So, not only did the Government of India, and the Government of Uttarakhand not cancel the Kumbh Mela, which they could easily have done, so as not to endanger the lives of millions of people by causing a super-spreader event for COVID-19, [...] they did much worse. In consultation with the Akhil Bharatiya Akhada Parishad, they ‘advanced’ the date from 2022 to 2021 – knowing fully the dangers of the pandemic – because some astrological mumbo-jumbo told them that this was desirable. ?

posted by Freelance Demiurge at 10:44 AM on June 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

President and Mrs. Reagan relied on Joan Quigley, after Nancy asked Merv Griffin if he knew of a good astrologer. At the PBS Quigley obit, from Quigley's memoir, What Does Joan Say?: My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan: Before Reagan’s 1985 summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, Quigley said she advised Nancy Reagan that “Ronnie’s ‘evil empire’ attitude has to go. [...] “Gorbachev’s Aquarian planet is in such harmony with Ronnie’s, you’ll see … They’ll share a vision,” she recalled telling the first lady. Quigley also claimed she'd helped shape Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the "Star Wars" program.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:30 PM on June 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

My favorite horoscope reading comes from GreedyPeasant on Tiktok. It's a DO on bloodletting!
posted by PussKillian at 8:15 AM on June 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

My favorite horoscope reading comes from GreedyPeasant on Tiktok. It's a DO on bloodletting!

I *love* this. I laughed so hard. This is exactly the type of astrology I like. Amazing. I sent it to my Cancer sun friends so they know bloodletting is ON this Cancer season.
posted by urbanlenny at 3:52 PM on June 23, 2022 [3 favorites]