Is Astrology real?
Without fail, whenever I start talking about Astrology with someone - which is a lot - I get asked the question, “So, do you actually believe in Astrology?”
This is a complex question.
If the question is about whether I think the planets and other celestial bodies are somehow influencing us with their energy from far out in the solar system, then no, I don’t.
But, if the question is about whether Astrology works, then the answer would be a definite “Yes!”
Before I get into my feelings about Astrology and whether it is real, let me just say this - it doesn’t actually matter. Like so many methods and practices that evolve our understanding and development of the self, Astrology deals with the subconscious. The world of symbols, detached from the language-based thinking of our conscious mind. The other mind deep inside that has been collecting, storing and swirling around below our awareness. This is a part of us that controls our opinions, beliefs, thinking, and behavior far more than we understand. In fact, in studying the mind, we have found that much of what we consider rational is actually a process of rationalizing as we slap meaning and purpose onto actions that were triggered by the subconscious before we were even aware of anything and able to think about it.
Rider-Waite Tarot Deck
Have you ever had your tarot cards read? It was probably a fairly enlightening and positive experience. The reading probably “worked” for you. Do you really think that particular deck of cards was magical, though? Or, maybe any deck printed with those specific pictures holds some kind of power? There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of different decks now. Do you need the right “magic” one(s), or does just calling them tarot or oracle cards transfer some power to rectangular card stock. How would you know which ones are magic? Or, maybe the person telling you what the cards mean is tapping into some power in the universe that you don’t have access to? What makes them so special? If we’re really honest with ourselves, we would probably stop short of committing to any of those ideas. At some point, magical thinking always falls apart as you play it out.
There is something amazing about this access to our subconscious mind, however. Because of the hidden, deep nature of it compared to our conscious awareness, when we seek to engage with it, we seem to always find what we are looking for. Pictures and symbols reach deep beyond our thinking mind, pulling up what we need to deal with and address, stirring that deep knowing that we seem to feel more than understand. We’ve all been swept up in that strange emotional state of almost leaving your body as you hear a charismatic preacher, the crowd singing in unison at a concert, a political speech promising enduring hope, a self-help guru, or business coach superstar. They make us feel and act in ways that we don’t really understand. Hypnotizing us as our subconscious is engaged through symbols, rhythm, narrative, and our connection to the group. We are also incredibly suggestible in this state, so be careful. These experiences stir thoughts and emotions in us, and we don’t really understand where they are coming from.
Story and archetypal representations are also very powerful ways into that part of our minds. Tarot is a story full of archetypes, no matter if they are depicted by traditional Rider-Waite designs, or cats dressed in prairie period clothing (those exist). Symbols that humanity codified long ago and seem ingrained in us. They make us feel something. They show up in virtually every movie or TV show we have ever seen. Our books and novels are full of these symbols that seem to resonate deeply with the human experience. When we see one of these characters act outside of their archetypal model, it catches us off guard, even bothers us a little.
Astrology is no different, using ancient symbols, archetypes, and stories reaching back to our very beginnings, archetypal representations that connect to our human experience and activate the subconscious so we can deal with it consciously.
Now that I have gotten that little disclaimer out of the way, let me get back to the question of whether Astrology is “real.”
The question of whether Astrology is real is complicated because the world we live in is literally chockfull of everyday realities and experiences that are based on things that are not real at all. Think about money. It’s not real. And yet we have built our societies, our very lives - for the most part - around it. Even when money was related to physical objects such as precious metals, gemstones, pelts, shells, or the myriad of objects we have ascribed value to, it still only held value because we decided it did. We made money real, and our whole world revolves around it. Not real. Yet very real. Though it is a sensitive subject, religion falls into this category as well. I know you believe your religion is “true”, but so do all those heathens believing different religions from yours that you consider “false.” And yet, all - yes, even you - believers, across a highly diverse set of ideas and doctrines, order their lives around how they perceive the world, ideas that are, at their core, made up. In other words, not real, yet creating real actions and ideas in the real world. What about Human Rights? Is that really a thing? Are baby humans born with a right to exist, live, and succeed? No. Also yes, though. Human Rights are made up. They aren’t real in that sense. At the same time, Human Rights are completely a real thing. Go out and violate someone’s and see what happens. We have ordered our world around a concept we thought up, and then made real, even though it isn’t. My point is, reality is a funny thing, and the list of “real things” out there is more complicated than we think, and includes a giant list of ideas and practices that “work” more than they are “real.”
I really don’t believe the planets are impacting us with some “force” they are streaming towards us through certain constellations. I understand that the architects of early Astrology did, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to it being true. Consider the fact that Pluto, at its furthest point from Earth, is 4.6 billion miles away. That is so far our brains can’t even really comprehend it. We reduce it down to “really, really far”. But it is unimaginably far. Combine that with the fact that we know it is made up of rock and ice. Not exactly a furnace of energy. It is -400 degrees on the surface of Pluto, it’s so cold it actually has ice volcanoes. The reason it is so cold is because it is so far from the Sun that its solar energy is all but dissipated by the time it gets out to distant Pluto. So, what exactly could it be sending our way that makes it such a great distance intact? Its small size and slow rotation means it has no detectable magnetic field, so there doesn’t seem to be any reality to the idea that Pluto is doing something that is impacting life on Earth. The point is, we know quite a bit about these planets now, so archaic ideas of their “powers” are tough to hold onto..
While our ancestors could only wonder about these glowing lights in the sky, we send spacecraft to them taking images and measuring everything about them we can - capabilities that are growing all the time. People have walked on, and brought back data and samples from, the Moon.
Read more about The Moon in Astrology here.
At this very moment, multiple manmade vehicles are on the surface of Mars, two are roaming around, observing and measuring the surface while our lives continue here on Earth. If there was some force coming from the planets impacting us here on Earth, you would think we would be able to detect something. What we have come to know about the planets in our solar system doesn’t seem to support the idea that they are energetic bodies or gods influencing us with their power.
Turning our attention to the constellations, we have learned quite a bit about them as well, thanks to advancements in technology and fields such as astronomy, optics, and astrophysics. For instance, we now know that the brightest star in the constellation Cancer burns 660 times hotter than our Sun, yet it is perceived by us as a tiny light. This is because the star is 290 light years away from Earth. That’s 1,700,000,000,000,000 miles away. That means that every twinkle we witness from Cancer is reflecting events that happened 290 earth years ago. It’s part of a binary star system. The other star is so far away from its companion, you could travel from the Sun to Pluto 65 times in the period it would take to move between Cancer’s twin stars. Their orbit around each other takes 76,000 years. The point is, these things appear very simple when we consider the sky from our viewpoint and throw around the idea of a planet being “in” a certain sign. They never are. They are literally separated by unfathomable distances and never so much as cross each others paths. To us, they appear to, but what we now know makes that idea untenable.
Above everything, Astrology is based on observation, and our ancestors watched from the only vantage point they had before the 1960s brought about space exploration - our observational platform of Earth. From here, things are not what they seem. We perceive the Sun rising and setting. It isn’t. We trace and track the paths of the planets and stars in the sky, but they aren’t actually where we perceive them to be, and nowhere near each other, though they look like they are from Earth. In fact, these groupings of stars are so far away, where we perceive them to be at this moment was actually where they were hundreds of years ago, their light is just reaching us now due to the vast distance it has had to travel.
So what could be happening? Why does Astrology work? The possibilities are limitless and so many variables are in play that maybe we will never figure it out.
My current favorite theory is, if anything is at work, the likely culprits are the Sun and Moon. Not because they are magical, but because their energy and force can be observed, measured, even felt, by us on Earth. We might need to imagine that the planet Venus is sending her energy our way, but we can feel and/or see the effects of the Sun and Moon. Just walk out onto the street barefooted on a hot day - the Sun’s energy is very apparent. Without it, there would be no life on Earth. It is connected to processes in our physiology. In fact, everything on earth depends on it. Plants harvest photons streaming from the Sun, producing food and releasing Oxygen. Reptiles use the Sun’s radiant energy to warm their bodies, readying them to fight for survival once again. It creates processes needed for plankton to live, feeding huge numbers of seal life. Sea life that eventually dies, sinking to the bottom where their carcasses support deep sea creatures. Even those hidden deep below, never in their entire life exposed to the Sun’s rays, depend on it for their very existence. Hit the beach all oiled up on a sunny day and you change colors! We know the Sun is influencing the Earth with energy, we watch the transformation that comes across Earth as its motion changes how this energy hits it, bringing about seasonal changes. Really, everday, all day, The Sun’s energy is changing as the Earth's rotation generates the periods we have divided into morning, afternoon, evening, and night. We call it “evening” because the Sun is “even” with the horizon - its constant presence is unquestionably impacting us everyday, all the time. And we have been worshipping, observing, tracking, and seeking to understand its impact on us for as long as we have been around it seems.
To a lesser, though still measurable, degree, the Moon is also impacting the earth. The proximity of the Moon to us allows its gravitational force to have dramatic interactions with our planet, literally dragging vast oceans back and forth. Stand ankle deep at the shore in late afternoon. Before you know it, you are chest deep and need to get on land quick. The Moon’s force is powerful and we can see its influence on our planet in at least some ways. The Moon’s changing face impacts the behavior of many creatures on Earth. For example, science has determined that prey animals tend to be most active during periods when the Moon is fuller due to reduced vulnerability. Conversely, predators tend to be more active during New Moons and when the light being reflected is low. They have evolved night vision and other keen senses to hunt under the protective cover of darkness.
There are also, of course, anecdotal and superstitious ideas about the Full Moon. We have adopted this belief into our lexicon as lunatic - being driven crazy by the mysterious power of the Moon. We’ve encoded these ideas into our stories as well when you consider werewolves transforming under the power of the Full Moon. However, even without these more mystical, fanciful associations, we understand that because of its size and how close it is to us, it is absolutely exerting force upon our planet, even if we don’t fully understand everything about it yet.
However, remember that even what we call “moonlight” is actually reflected Sunlight.
So, let’s assume that the Sun and Moon are the real influencers behind the observations that are encoded n Astrology. What role do the planets play then? The nature of the size of the universe and how distant these objects are from us, and each other, mean observable changes are very, very slow. So slow, that in any given lifetime, to a human, the observable sky doesn’t alter. In fact, over generations and generations and generations of humans this is true, let alone one lifetime. It’s predictable and appears to move like clockwork to us.
What if we are dealing with correlation rather than causality in Astrology? What if the Sun and Moon are doing their thing, creating patterns happening on Earth, and in us, as they move through their daily, monthly and yearly cycles of change, while at the same time, due to our observation and mapping of the highly predictable movement of the heavens, we were able to correlate these changes (again, coming from the Sun and Moon) to the positions of the planets and signs? Maybe they were acting more as signposts than sources, providing us with markers which we connected to our experience on Earth.
Our charts are oriented to the sky as seen by the Babylonians and the Greeks. However, our sky doesn’t look like the one they observed. The Precession of the Zodiac (you can read more you that here) has continued since that time to the point that today, when you are born between March 21st and April 19th, the Sun is not observed to be in Aries as it was by our ancient ancestors and as it is depicted on our charts. It actually rises in Pisces during that time.
Does that mean your chart is all wrong?
Well, not if the planetary positions weren’t the actual cause of what they were observing on Earth. If the Sun and Moon were exerting their constantly shifting forces, impacting us in all these observable ways, and if the planets and signs merely served as corollaries to mark these mysterious patterns, it doesn't matter what planet is in what sign. We could use the predictable nature of the sky to divide it up in a way that correlated with what we were observing. If we invented Astrology from scratch today, we would likely have a very different system because our signposts would need to be different. We would employ different imagery and symbolism to communicate our observed experience, but it would likely reflect a similar experience to the system we inherited from the Greeks because the same influences are at work -The Sun and Moon
So, if you ask me if Astrology is "real,” my answer is, “No…Maybe...Doesn’t matter. What's your birthday?”
Heretically Yours 😈
