Astrology: As Above, So Below?

Skip the BS.

by Skip Eisiminger

“The celestial bodies are the cause of all that takes place in the sublunar world.”—St. Thomas Aquinas

“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”—Arthur C. Clarke

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—12/6/10—When I was 13 or 14, my father caught me reading a horoscope in the comic pages of the local newspaper. Understand that Dad was an industrial engineer who retired to teach among other things celestial navigation. Reading the “horrorscope” in our family was something akin to reading the Koran at Bob Jones University. “Don’t believe everything you read,” Dad said. “The stars incline, as they say, but the inclination is too small to measure.”

He then scheduled a meeting for that night in the backyard, where he pointed out how the Big Dipper (“Do you see a bear? Well, I don’t, either.”) was useful in finding north, which might keep one from walking in circles if lost in the woods. Fortunately, I’ve never needed to use that kernel of knowledge, but I keep it tucked away in an idle neuron just in case I misplace my GPS.

When it came to pseudoscience, my confirmation teacher was of a similar no-nonsense cast of mind, but the Bible was immune to criticism. Discussing Deuteronomy, she said that Moses warns us against palm-reading and “bowing before the sun, moon, and stars,” because “God alone is privy to the future.” The deity’s favored creatures, she said, have been blessed with free will while astrology implies that we are puppets manipulated by the Gemini twins, not our genome or the opportunities offered to us.

This squared with what I believed and my father had taught me, but when the book of Job came up for discussion, I was puzzled. One of the questions Jehovah has for Job is, “Can you bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion?”

Job, of course, is dumbfounded and eventually answers, “Of course not.” But given my father’s lecture on the staggering light years between us and the stars, I wanted to know what “sweet influences” the Pleiades could possibly have. Furthermore, I wondered why Jehovah was using terminology from a pagan religion. The teacher said she would get back to me, but Christmas was drawing near, and she had planned a special class for us on the Magi.

In college literature classes, my interest was often piqued by stars, comets, and such. Though astrology’s seeds are believed to have been sown in Mesopotamia about 3000 BC, Aristotle and Ptolemy are probably most responsible for spreading the practice to the West.

Given an unmoving, geocentric Earth, it is little wonder that ancient people thought the macrocosm affected the microcosm. Clearly the sun’s annual ascent was tied to the productivity of the fields, just as the moon’s phases affected the tides. The intellectuals, and these included giants like Galileo, reasoned that the stars’ strongest influence is when humans are most vulnerable—at birth. But why the determination wasn’t calculated based on the instant of conception, when our weight is a fraction of an ounce instead of five to ten pounds, has never been answered.

After the “evil conjunction” of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter was blamed for the Black Death in the mid-14th century, the Renaissance began to question why planets barely visible could be so influential. More typical of the Middle Ages is Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, who thought the stars “allotted death and hell.” But Shakespeare’s “Renaissance” Edmund thought star gazing “the excellent foppery of the world,” whereby a lustful man could blame his indiscretions on a goat named Capricorn. And though he lived in the 1st century BC, Shakespeare’s Caesar mirrors the thinking of the 17th century, which thought it odd that comets only blaze forth when princes die.

After 20^th-century studies of unrelated people born at the same time were completed and a “confirmation bias” was found (we’re more likely to recall the hits than the misses), it appeared that astrology did not have a leg to stand on. But, in the 1960’s, the Age of Aquarius materialized from a cloud of marijuana smoke, and writers like Kurt Vonnegut were saying that astrology “makes people feel vivid and full of possibilities.” After the attempted assassination of her husband, Nancy Reagan began consulting a California astrologer before arranging the president’s schedule. And Shana Alexander, an essayist for Life, wrote in 1985, “Faithful horoscope watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start.”

Reading that, I decided to take up Alexander’s implied gauntlet. I checked out a copy of Herbert A. Löhlein’s Handbook of Astrology and read his insights for a few weeks. According to this “standard text,” I am a better husband after sex. If my wife doesn’t listen to me, I’ll find someone who will. My luck lies in the distance. For me, nothing is final. I’m the sort of guy who likes to get to the bottom of things. I’m sometimes down. I’m often undecided. If I make a mistake, I try to straighten it out. I occasionally argue with my wife. I’m not happy in a subordinate role, and I’d rather take a walk than do the dishes. What profundities from a man who has never met me and never will: he died in 1987 on a day when his horoscope said . . . don’t believe anything you read today.

Nevertheless, astrology rebounded from its moribund state in the early 20th century to become a $200-million-dollar-a-year business whose daily prognostications are published today in 1,200 U.S. newspapers. Though you’d think a more precise number would be written in the stars, polls reveal that somewhere between 39 and 59 percent of Americans believe in astrology. And for each of the two thousand professional astronomers in America, there are currently 20 astrologers. In 2001, the Astrological Institute won full accreditation from a federally recognized body; its students are now eligible to apply for federal grants and loans.

Following one of my rants about the navel gazing that was returning to the fore in the early1970’s, one tie-dyed Clemson student informed a word-study class that most prescriptions still include an implied prayer to Jupiter Rex. He said the Rx symbolic abbreviation, freely interpreted, means, “May the god Jupiter bless the recipe to be filled by the pharmacist below.” Not only is there an off chance my erstwhile student is right, but there’s no doubt “Annuit coeptis,” on the Great Seal of the United States, confidently predicts Jupiter’s approval of our national undertakings.

Moreover, I’ve reason to believe that my 401(k) is in the hands of a “market astrologer.” To this anonymous analyst at Merrill-Lynch, I can only say, “Mazel tov, Brother,” or, loosely, “I wish us both good stars.”