Astrology: science or pseudoscience?

Investigating the scientific research

This post explores the West’s denigrating approach toward astrology and investigates scientific studies of the topic. It looks at how humanity historically used astrology to tie humanity as one microcosm of a greater reality, a reality which has since been severed by the modern view of mankind as superior to nature. This post also explores promising leads to hopefully one day tie us back to the cosmos.

“There is no bar to knowledge greater than contempt prior to examination.” - Herbert Spencer

“As above, so below.” - The Emerald Tablet

This is a post about astrology.

Vague, popular month-long horoscopes that one would find in a trashy magazine are universally understood as lacking validity, including by astrologers, and are not the subject of this post.

“Astrology” in this context means natal horoscopes (your chart at the time of birth) and progressed horoscopes (how your natal chart changes over time) utilizing the planets, houses, and aspects. This type of astrology can be descriptive (trying to help someone to understand himself), predictive (trying to forecast what will happen to him) or postdictive (trying to interpret and make sense of his past life). Predictive astrology can also concern itself with relationships (marriage, friendships) or significant events and history. There is also astrology in the sense of “cosmobiology” which will be described below.

A typical natal chart reading has an astrological sign for each planet in a specific “house” and each sign has a degree associated with it. Planets form good or bad “aspects” with each other.

There’s a lot of things that come to mind about the topic of astrology depending on your background, upbringing, and education. Opinions vary widely, but there is a general stigma of pseudoscience associated with it in the West. Before delving into this, though, there are some background points that I want to clarify.

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The culture ratchet effect

All of us in the West are steeped in Whig history. Whig history presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present". Society has handed us a distinct view of the past as backwards, ignorant, a dark ages full of dumb people with dumb beliefs. But this is wrong. While the scientific method has been great in supercharging the advancement of technology, our ancestors experimented with things holistically and passed on the knowledge gained via a cultural ratchet effect. Humans are unique in how they learn: they learn by imitation, tweaking and experimenting what they have learned to conform to the needs of current society, to the point where they often forget the origination of the knowledge that was passed down or the rationale for it. This partially explains why cultures are resistant to change because what they have done has worked for their ancestors. As Brett Andersen explains:

Some hunter-gatherers eat a plant called manioc that is toxic in its natural form and therefore requires processing. Sometimes the toxin takes weeks or even years to have an effect, meaning that it’s almost impossible to identify the source of the toxicity. Nevertheless, groups that eat these plants engage in complex processes that detoxify them. 

As Henrich points out, the individuals who engage in this process often have no idea what they are doing from a mechanistic, causal perspective. They don’t really understand that they are detoxifying the plant and they definitely don’t understand why (from a mechanistic perspective) the process they engage in makes the plant safer to eat. 

This is because the detoxification process did not result from rational contemplation or causal analysis. Rather, it evolved through a ratcheting process that is causally opaque to those who engage in it. This causal opacity is common with culturally evolved technologies and institutions. We often engage in adaptive practices that are the products of cultural evolution without having a causal understanding of why the practice is functional. 

An example of an ancient practice that we discarded as barbaric is bloodletting. There is ongoing debate about its health benefits and drawbacks (see phlebotomy and its use in alternative medicine) but I was intrigued by the theory put forth by the wonderful biologist P.D. Mangan, who theorizes that the reason women live on average five years longer than men is because they dump excess iron from their bloodstream via menstruation, while men have no way to dump that iron which accumulates and then causes negative health effects. He wrote a whole book analyzing the science of it. At age forty five, men have about four times the amount of iron in their bodies as women do, and they also have four times the rate of heart attacks. Blood donors who lower their iron levels when they give blood are significantly healthier than non-donors. The is true even after accounting for the "healthy donor" effect. "[B]lood donors had an 88% reduced risk of heart attack." Mangan’s answer for men? Donate blood regularly…i.e. bloodletting. I donate blood every couple months now to the Red Cross as a result of his research.

Another topic I investigated recently, mothballed by modern science, is the science surrounding physiognomy, which I did a prior post on. Physiognomy is real and important, even though de-emphasized by modern society.

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying Whig history is wrong, our ancestors were smarter than we acknowledge through our modern prism, and that part of the job of reorienting the public away from globohomo’s toxic vision of humanity, life, and history is to re-engage with a better respect for why people did things historically.

And one of these things is the topic of astrology. Astrology has been practiced for thousands of years by civilizations which had no contact with each other, across long distances and even across continents, but in the modern scientific community it is viewed with disdain as a false pseudoscience for idiots, part of the general Whig history approach. Were our ancestors all just idiots, looking up to the sky and seeing patterns applying to their own lives that had no validity? Or was there something legitimate there? This is what we will explore in this post. And this has greater implications: when advances in astronomy destroyed man’s understanding of the Heavens (both religious understandings as well as ancient Hellenic understandings¹), where the stars served as hints at God’s divine plan and of angels in the Heavens, this greatly contributed to the advance of nihilism and man’s severing from the world around him. As George Santayana argued, “Before the days of Kepler, the heavens declared the glory of the Lord.” After Kepler, man was left adrift in a confusing world where his place in it was unstable and insecure.²

Zodiac constellations

If astrology is true (and there are different ways it could be true, as we will explore) this could re-establish man’s place within the universe as being interconnected instead of disconnected. According to Richard Tarnas in “Cosmos and Psyche”, p. 63-64, “Astrology is that perspective which most directly contradicts the long-established disenchanted and decentered cosmology that encompasses virtually all modern and postmodern experience. It posits an intrinsically meaning-permeated cosmos that in some sense is focused on the Earth, even on the individual human being, as a nexus of that meaning. Such a conception of the universe uniquely controverts the most fundamental assumptions of the modern mind.” Let’s first review science’s track record on how it treats theories outside of its existing paradigm, then review the science of astrology (or lack thereof), after which I will offer a bit of my own exploration of the topic.

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Science’s track record

Science has a track record of proclaiming things outside of its existing framework as impossible. According to Kuhn’s thesis in “The Science of Structure Revolutions”, the way science works is that it progresses within whatever the existing framework is, with all of its assumptions and blind spots, until enough “anomalies” build up — i.e. results that cannot be explained by the existing framework — that eventually results in a radical paradigm shift to account for the anomalies, after which normal science restarts based upon the new paradigm. The Copernican Revolution is one example of a paradigm shift. Because an existing paradigm cannot account for anomalies, and because our understanding of science has evolved over time, sometimes radically, a proper approach to unproven science is to retain an element of humility that we might later radically see things in quite a different way.

But scientists generally and naturally react with scorn and disdain to perspectives outside the existing paradigm. Per esteemed scientist H.J. Eysenck, who we will discuss shortly, Johannes Muller, one of the most widely respected physiologists of the 19th century, declared it would be impossible to measure the speed of the nervous impulse; three years later Helmholtz measured it quite accurately. The philosopher G.W. Hegel declared there would never be an eighth planet found, just before Herschel discovered Uranus. Galileo’s incorrect opinion of the theory that tides are caused by the moon was conclusive: “Astrological nonsense.” Einstein and Rutherford, the greatest physicists of the 20th century, declared that the splitting of the atom would never have any practical application, a mere decade before the nuclear bomb was invented. What would a physicist of the 19th or 18th century have made of black holes, quarks, quasars and the like, or even electricity and magnetism?

A lack of mechanism isn’t necessary for a theory to be revolutionary. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener, even though he turned out to be correct. Newton postulated a gravitational force, even though nothing was known about the nature of the force.

It’s better to keep an open mind about things and follow the science (which, to emphasize, is repeatable experiments by third parties, not “science” by committee consensus which is corrupted, bastardized Scientism) wherever it ultimately leads.

H.J. Eysenck was an interesting scientist, now fairly obscure, and I may do a future post about him. He was a German-born British psychologist who spent his professional career in Great Britain and at the time of his death, Eysenck was the most frequently cited living psychologist in the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature. He had a reputation for following the science dispassionately and methodologically despite any political sensitivities, and he had an interest in obscure topics that the scientific community avoided, like astrology — but also the link between race and intelligence, a link his enemies never forgot and who unleashed a vicious, politicized attack on his work twenty years after he died. Anyway, he wrote a wonderful book on astrology called “Astrology: Science or Superstition?” where he conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific studies available on astrology in 1982, placing emphasis on whether a study had been replicated, and which seemed to me to be written without an agenda or pre-derived bias. Much of the following discussion of astrological studies comes from his analysis.

Eysenck concluded that much of the published research in support of astrology was of poor quality, badly designed, and with many statistical errors in its evaluation. Something like 80-90% of the book is picking apart the poor methodology of such studies. But not all of it. According to Eysenck:

What we ourselves find exciting, however, is that when everything that will not stand the test has been put aside, there does remain a body of extraordinary evidence that cannot readily be explained away. It lies mostly in the area of what we refer to as cosmobiology.

Cosmobiology studies the ways in which vegetable, animal and human life is influenced by bodies in the solar system other than our own earth. We are none of of us surprised to know that the moon governs the tides or that the seasonal rhythms of many forms of life follow the yearly orbiting of the earth around the sun. Because we are so used to these facts we find them unremarkable. But what about the ability of certain marine animals to follow the phases of the moon even when they are cut off from its light and are many miles away from the wash of the tides? What about the effect of the weather on our own moods, the apparent connection (in turn) between the weather and the incidence of sunspots, and the strange and little-reported work of researchers linking sunspots with the motion of the planets….

Above all, there is the work of the Gauquelins... We deal at length with their findings and with the impressive evidence which seems to show that, however weird it may appear, a baby predisposed to develop a particular type of personality will tend to be born at the moment when one of the planets is at a certain critical position in the sky.

Let’s discuss some of the problems facing the scientific study of astrology, and then some of the studies themselves.

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Problems facing the scientific study of astrology

One of the problems facing the science of astrology is that there are very few agreed upon rules in its practice. “When [an astrologer interprets] each factor individually, the astrologer then brings them all together and carefully synthesizes the overall interpretation of the chart. This is where the problems start, because the factors are both numerous and often contradictory, and it is all too easy for astrologers to see in a chart what they want to see…clearly everything depends on the process of chart synthesis, and one would therefore expect unambiguous rules to say just how one factor should be weighed against another. But astrologers have been unable to agree on such rules (in fact many claim that rules are irrelevant to what they feel should be a purely intuitive process), and the only generally accepted rule is that no factor shall be judged in isolation. Thus from this point on anything goes - including any hope of quick results by investigators of astrology!” A lack of common astrological rules makes the study of astrology itself much more difficult.

Other points of concern include the following:

1. The stars in the constellations do not really fall into groups at all; it is only by chance that, seen from our earth, they appear to cluster together.

2. The patterns they form bear no relation to the objects they are meant to represent.

3. The moon and the planets appear to be inside the constellations only because of the misleading effects of perspective. The founders of astrology thought they all lay close together, a few miles at most away from the earth. Mars was believed to be near the sun and to be hot and arid, having a drying influence. The moon was believed to soak up moisture and to have a dampening influence; both wrong.

4. Because of axial precession there are in effect two zodiacs, one favored by the West and one favored by the East, meaning that almost opposite meanings can be given to the same piece of sky.

Precessional movement of Earth. Earth rotates (white arrows) once a day around its rotational axis (red); this axis itself rotates slowly (white circle), completing a rotation in approximately 26,000 years

5. Why can the birth chart not easily predict basic things such as sex or race?

6. What can explain an individual’s chart where a whole community is wiped out by a disaster and such disaster is not reflected in the charts of the dead?

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A look at the science: the negative

According to Eysenck the vast majority of scientific studies showing positive results for astrology suffer from three types of errors: (1) inability to replicate the studies, (2) inability to take normal astronomical laws into account when conducting such studies, and (3) distortions caused by demography. Additionally, there are plenty of errors in the research, with many being poorly designed, carelessly analyzed, and inaccurately reported. Then there is the problem of biased selection of data and the question of bias generally. And another factor is that people’s knowledge of astrology impacts their self-conception of their personalities which distorts results. When one takes these factors into account, there is very little supporting scientific evidence for traditional astrology.

Michel Gauquelin looked at many astrological experiments and claims that alternative explanations can be found for the results obtained, where he stated: “No law of classical astrology has been demonstrated statistically by astrologers or scientists.” Culver and Ianna (1979) reached a similar conclusion. They tracked over a number of years of specific astrological predictions made in the predicted media; altogether 3,011 predictions were tracked and only 338 (11%) came true.

Shawn Carlson conducted an experiment where 28 astrologers matched over 100 natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) test using double blind methods. The astrologers helped to draw up the central proposition of natal astrology to be tested. Published in Nature in 1985, the study found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better than chance and that the testing "clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis.”

Scientist and former astrologer Geoffrey Dean and psychologist Ivan Kelly conducted a large-scale scientific test involving more than one hundred cognitive, behavioural, physical and other variables, but found no support for astrology. A further test involved 45 confident astrologers, with an average of 10 years' experience and 160 test subjects (out of an original sample size of 1198 test subjects).  The astrologers performed much worse than merely basing decisions from the individuals' ages, and much worse than 45 control subjects who did not use birth charts at all. A meta-analysis by Dean was conducted pooling 40 studies consisting of 700 astrologers and over 1,000 birth charts; no significant results were found to suggest there was any preferred chart.

Various studies relating to effects of astrology on marriage, on psychiatric disorders, on medicine and surgeries, on suicides have been contradictory and non-replicable. Studies on twins demonstrate it is rare for twins to develop the same illness at the same time and even rarer for them to die naturally or commit suicide on the same day. Gauquelin (1973) looked for examples of cosmic twins (unrelated people born on the same day and year) in his collection of over 50,000 horoscopes; he concluded that no one had demonstrated similarity in the lives of people born on the same day of different parents.

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A look at the science: the positive

Eysenck mostly dismissed the scientific literature around traditional astrology as poor, as discussed above. But he thought the science surrounding what he called “cosmobiology” showed more promise. Cosmobiology is defined as follows:

"Cosmobiology is a scientific discipline concerned with the possible correlation between the cosmos and organic life and the effects of cosmic rhythms and stellar motion on man, with all his potentials and dispositions, his character and the possible turns of fate; it also researches these correlation and effects as mirrored by earth's plant and animal life as a whole. In this endeavor, Cosmobiology utilises modern-day methods of scientific research, such as statistics, analysis, and computer programming. It is of prime importance, however, in view of the scientific effort expended, not to overlook the macrocosmic and microcosmic interrelations incapable of measurement."

Eysenck looked at studies relating to sunspot activity, which occurs in regular cycles. There is some evidence that the weather may be affected by sunspots, with such things as temperature, rainfall and barometric pressure fluctuating with the sunspot cycle through the years. A study at Eskdalemuir showed a relationship between higher temperatures and sunspots, which was confirmed by Hughes in 1977 for the period of the Maunder minimum. Looking at rainfall historically via tree rings in ancient trees such as the bristlecone pine, which is the oldest living thing on earth, the sunspot cycle tracks the width of the rings which are affected by drought. And weather has an impact on human mood: there is a seasonal effect on suicide, for example, and temperature variances have an impact on aggression, cognition, creativity, and working. There were even studies conducted in Germany which analyzed 362,000 industrial accidents and concluded that accidents were 20-25% more likely to occur during days of strong electromagnetic disturbances of the kind known as ELF (extra low frequency).

But such sunspot activity may impact biology directly and not just indirectly affecting mood via weather changes. A Berlin bacteriologist, H. Bortels, noted that the freezing point of water strangely varied. To investigate this variance he studied pure water in sealed containers, and the variance only stopped when he surrounded the containers with a metal screen that would block off outside radiation. Giorgio Piccardi was studying an inorganic colloid and he noticed changes in the speed at which particles precipitated out of the fluid; he studied this effect for ten years. When the solution was shielded by a copper screen the effect was inhibited, as it had been in Bortels’ experiment. Piccardi believed that ELF waves might be responsible for this effect, as the reactions varied with sunspot activity and the time of year. If the sun can have this effect, it is possible it could have a similar effect on living creatures, including ourselves, given we are 65% water. Guaquelin (1970) describes an experiment in which microbes reproduced more rapidly with changes in the weather, which, when controlling for temperature and barometric pressure, stopped when the microbes were put inside a lead or iron screen.

Man as a microcosm; illustrated in Robert Fludd's Utrisque Cosmi, 1619. “As Above, So Below.”

Okay, but what do sunspots have to do with astrology and planets other than the sun? There are two main theories for the cause of sunspots: the first is that sunspots are caused by an internal process in the sun, probably to do with some slow magnetic oscillation. But the other is that sunspots are caused by forces exerted on the sun by the planets. Morth and Schlamminger (1979) make the point that gravitational forces between the planets cause mutual perturbations of their orbits and this could cause a periodic transfer of angular momentum within the solar system that could affect the pattern of vortices on the sun’s surface. Dean (1977) suggests that the major planetary resonance stems from the movement of the midpoint of a line joining Jupiter and Neptune, a movement which has remained in synchronization with the solar cycle over the 320 years for which records of sunspots exist. Another interesting combination is that of Neptune and Pluto which, as Dean points out, since at least 2000 BC every time Neptune and Pluto have been both opposite each other and in the solar equatorial plane there has been a prolonged period of solar inactivity.

According to Eysenck, though, Michel Gauquelin has had the greatest success with demonstrating a scientifically defensible link to astrology, given the sample sizes used, correct statistical analysis, and most importantly its replicability by third parties. Gauquelin conducted a series of studies which suggested that there was a statistical link between eminent doctors who were born when Mars or Saturn had just risen, or had just passed the midheaven. He found this link only for those who were in eminent positions, not for normal people. Through additional studies he concluded the relationship was not with destiny but rather with the qualities of a person’s character or personality that makes for success. He then ran similar tests on sports champions, finding the planet Mars to be in one of the critical astrological zones in a large study, which was then independently confirmed. In the original study, 21.4% of the champions were born in one of the critical sectors, while in the replication the proportion was 22.2% (chance expectation in both cases is 16.7%). This is what has been termed the Mars effect, although the validity of the effect remains up for debate.

Lastly, there has been found to be a link with respect to planetary heredity, where children have the same astrological signs as the parents. According to Kepler, “There is one perfectly clear argument beyond all exception in favor of the authenticity of astrology. This is the common horoscopic connection between parents and children.” Gauquelin tested whether this was true, and he found that the planetary effect did exist - but only for natural births, not for cesarian births, and that its intensity increases if both parents have the same planetary heredity.

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My exploration of astrology

In terms of my research into astrology, my interests have led me into one specific niche: degree astrology. Each planet in a natal chart has a sign and a degree associated with it, anywhere from 0 degrees to 30 degrees, and each degree carries with it its own interpretation. These interpretations can be very specific; some are good, some are bad, and many are just OK, all within the same overall sign. And then the planets and their associated degrees still need to be interpreted against the other planets and their own associated degrees. This may be part of why so many astrological studies have been so inconsistent with replication problems; the astrological degrees may have misunderstood importance.

There have been a number of astrologers who have released their interpretations of astrological degrees. Most share similar interpretations although some vary significantly. Here is a PDF with about a dozen astrologers and their interpretations of degrees; I’ve found the most accurate to be Carelli’s, although I also like Weber’s.

I’d like to give a couple of simple examples of degree interpretation; just the degrees and Carelli interpretations of the natal sun sign degree of a couple of famous people: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and let’s do Hitler and Nietzsche as well. This is not meant to be comprehensive as it is only looking at the natal sun and not the other planets or the progressed chart, but it should give a little sense of things. The natal sun sign is supposed to form the core of a person’s personality. Each sun sign degree changes on a daily basis (i.e. someone born on January 1 will have a different degree than someone born on January 2), while other planets change much faster; the moon degree changes every half hour, the ascendant every couple minutes, while the slower moving planets like Uranus and Neptune can take weeks to change a degree, for example.

Trump: Trump’s Sun 22°56' Gemini.³

Here is Carelli’s interpretation of 22°:

“Symbol: A withered, ragged old man, bent by age and by suffering, standing alone, leaning on a stick in an attitude of utter dejection.

If the horoscope at large does not offer any particular hints of good luck, the battles of life will prematurely sap the native’s energies. He will feel powerless to put his otherwise original ideas into practice, will not only refrain from reaction, but from action as well, and will give up the struggle and waste away. His breakdown ought to be followed by the estrangement of his children and everyone else; his old age will be miserable and lonely.”

Allusions to Trump’s ineffective presidency and upcoming imprisonment and abandonment by friends, allies, and family, especially Jared and Ivanka. It would have been hard to make sense of this prior to the last number of years for this frame.

Biden: Sun 27°34' Scorpio. Carelli interpretation of the 27th degree of Scorpio:

“A faith ready to stand any test is the keynote of this degree, where the word faith may be taken to mean anything within the limits of the meaning conveyed by such an extensive word. In a good sense, this will be faithfulness to a religious ideal, apt to create perfect human relations. Were it bad faith, this would turn into lasting grudges and ill-will, or Mito treacherousness in trade; viz., cheating; and it may bring about an accomplice’s solidarity and a tendency to stick together in crime.

Certain virtues, however, are sure to be there: scrupulousness, reserve, earnestness and firmness in purpose, consequence in one’s views.

Whether honest or dishonest, the native, is of an austerity bordering on prudery; he will appear sometimes priggish but always will make a thoroughly spiritual impression. Therefore his trespasses are so much more dangerous, and his crimes so much more intentional.”

Allusions to Biden’s corruption.

Obama: Sun 12°33' Leo. Carelli’s interpretation of the 12th degree of Leo:

“Symbol: A black ball.

All good and bad features of an extreme steadfastness and positivism; on one hand, firmness, constancy, sturdiness, endurance in exertion and a sense of phenomenal reality; on the other hand, stubbornness, restiveness, pigheadedness, hypercritical skepticism and unappeasable lustfulness. As a result, the sources of income and means of subsistence are lastingly assured—nay, too lastingly— which might hinder and thwart progress, even mobility in general.

There is no enthusiasm, no spiritual urge, no faith in men or in the future, not to speak of faith in God. The character is, therefore, skittish, sullen, sometimes cynical, often unpleasant on account, or in spite of, the fact that the native professes very firm principles and sticks to them.

Whatever his luck, the subject never feels happy and is therefore in a state of constant dissatisfaction.”

Obama as never satisfied, ultra rich from corruption, his pragmatism and hypocrisy.

Hitler: Sun 0°48' Taurus. Carelli’s interpretation of the 0th degree of Taurus:

“The native will have to stand forever on the lookout ready to parry unforeseen attacks, as his destiny has fierce struggles in store. But in struggles he surely will thrive and revel as if it were his own element, and he will engage himself in them to his utmost. He has a great will power, is versed in tricks and makeshifts, and can be very reserved in spite of his liking for arguments and polemics. Churlish and insensitive to pain, he seems born to have things his own way in spite of the war furiously waged against him on all sides. He may even be endowed with magic powers.

This hard character’s failing is ungenerous; it may even become cruelty.”

I could highlight that whole description, but it speaks for itself.

Nietzsche, 22°07' Libra. Carelli’s interpretation of the 22nd degree of Libra:

Symbol: An old physician intent to a urine test

The native is a tireless researcher who will inquisitively pry into nature, snatch her secrets, analyze them and methodically pigeonhole the results. A restless urge to change subject and shift his grounds of observation will make him loath to stay put, so that even when penned within four walls he will try to change his room from time to time. He may be fond of journeying to unexplored countries and will certainly worship knowledge. The branches most congenial to him seem to be chemistry and medicine (this one perhaps in a spiritual sense). Occultism is not to be ruled out in branches akin to the ones quoted: viz., alchemy, the mother of chemistry, and pastoral medicine.

Success ought to crown his efforts; public recognition, though belated, may ratify his discoveries. Either for this or other reasons there will be a certain self-assurance, a somewhat consequential mannerism in his speech, as if he were delivering abstruse truths to a large audience.

Attention is to be paid to the urinary system. On the other hand the whole organism is subject to precocious decay, either owing to the stuffy laboratory air or to the unhealthy atmosphere of close rooms.

This one also speaks for itself.

I wouldn’t say the natal sun nails their personalities exactly or even to a very large extent — the other planets all have a role to play⁴, as well as how the personality progresses via the progressed chart — but I would say these degree interpretations are specific and not vague, and that one can likely see many attributes of their personality reflected in the interpretation of the natal sun sign.

If you’d like to investigate your own or other’s signs and degrees, Astrotheme is a great website. There is a search on the left that allows you to search the chart of any well known figure; then just look at their sun sign, find the degree, and use the above link for Carelli’s interpretation of it. You can look at your own or others you know horoscope’s here.

I have probably looked at hundreds of charts (although I am no astrologer) to get a sense for whether its basics and the degrees have validity to them, and while there is plenty of subjectivity involved, I am confident that, from my own research⁵ and exploration, that there is something here beyond chance. Whatever the exact effect is I don’t know exactly, but it has to do with the development of the personality and how it changes over time, even if the mechanism of astrology is unknown.⁶

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I hope this post opens up some new possible ways of looking at our relation to the universe, as well as the possibility of reconnecting to it in order to rekindle our sense of meaning from this ubiquitous, horrible nihilism pervading society.

Thanks for reading.

1. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle believed in the influence of the stars on human behavior. Hipparchus and Ptolemy, Plotinus and Proclus, Galen, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Ficino, Kepler, Goethe, Yeats, Yung believed as well.

2. Richard Tarnas, “Cosmos and Psyche”, 62: "“Astrology has not been held in high esteem during most of the modern era, for a variety of compelling reasons. Certainly its popular expressions have seldom been such as to inspire confidence in the enterprise. More fundamentally, astrology could not be reconciled with the world picture that emerged from the natural sciences of the 17th-19th centuries, wherein all natural phenomena, from the motion of planets to the evolution of species, were understood in terms of material substances and mechanical principles that functioned without purpose or design. Nor could it prevail against that tendency of the modern mind, established during the Enlightenment, to uphold its own rational autonomy and to depreciate earlier thought systems that seemed to support any form of primitive participation mystique between the human psyche and a world endowed with pregiven structures of meaning….

I noticed that the history of astrology contained certain remarkable features. It seemed curious to me that the historical periods during which astrology flourished in the West - classical Greek and Roman antiquity, the Hellenistic era in Alexandria, the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethan age in England, the 16th and early 17th centuries in Europe generally - all happened to be eras in which intellectual and cultural creativity was unusually luminous. The same could be said of astrology’s prominence during the centuries in which science and culture were at their height in the Islamic world, and so too in India.”

3. There are 60 “minutes” per degree. If the minute is after 45 minutes, then the next degree starts bearing influence. In other words, 22°56' Gemini means that the 23rd degree bears considerable influence.

4. For example, the moon astrology sign and degree describes one’s emotional makeup. As mentioned above, the moon degree changes about every half hour so having the correct time of birth is important. Here’s mine, per Carelli’s interpretation:

“28-29 deg Gemini

A rather pessimistic degree inducing skepticism and mistrust, apart from which its influence is a typically divalent one.

Helped by other astral aspects, it will confer kindheartedness coupled with ability to command; an imaginative, manifold mind; the makings for occupying a high position and for nobly exerting the attending authority; skill in hunting and sportsmanship.

On the contrary, where other aspects are mainly negative, these features will shift into opposite polarities or will stray into corresponding vices. Kindness will become affected courtesy, prestige will be disfigured into autocracy, love of hunting into cruelty or even sadism; there will be misuse of power closely followed by ruin and misery. Likewise, imaginative power will sidle into fruitless daydreaming, too many plans will cram the mind, all shifting and inconclusive, as no steady power behind them will help carry them out.”

One could interpret this as an astrological explanation for the high pessimism expressed in this Substack, and that I am merely acting out my physiognomy.

5. The other thing I like to do is run a progressed chart of an individual and compare it to their natal chart, but only with respect to the slow moving planets which take many years or decades to move a degree on the progressed charts — the sun, moon, ascendant, etc. change constantly on it. Specifically, I look at the changes to Pluto, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Chrion and the true north node (each of which have specific aspects of personality associated with them).

6. Another possibility other than the planetary impact on sunspot activity in turn affecting biology on earth is one of synchronicity. According to Richard Tarnas,

In the perspective I am suggesting here, reflecting the dominant trend in contemporary astrological theory, the planets do not "cause" specific events any more than the hands on a clock "cause" a specific time. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state or archetypal dynamics at that time.