Star Stuff

What's Your Sign, Baby?

Even for 2023, things are really grim out there. If the polls are to be believed, Trump is solidly ahead of Biden. Cries for Biden to drop out have broken containment and spilled into the mainstream but it is too late, filing deadlines have passed, we are stuck with a visibly frail 81-year-old who staunchly believed Israel’s WMD redux claims about Al Shifa hospital and vocally supported destroying it in violation of international law. There is no proof of the high-tech underground Hamas control center we were promised, of course, but a lot of Americans will apparently forget the story we were told in exchange for pictures of a hole and some AK-47s on a conference table. There’s a truce in Gaza for now, thank God, but 6000 children are dead and almost 9,000 adults are dead and 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes and antisemitism on the rise and Islamophobia on the rise and three Palestinian men were shot in Vermont two days ago for what appears to be the crime of being visually Palestinian.

I’m on assignment in Virginia, investigating claims of Wokeness and juggling two other major projects that should be way more done than they are. I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m not writing about any of that shit. Let’s talk about something absurd. Let’s talk about astrology.

Some are born into astrology, some achieve astrology, and some have astrology thrust upon them. I am, unambiguously, that third thing. Historically speaking I have skewed heavily towards FACTS and LOGIC, but you simply cannot hang out with as many queer people as I do without learning something about the stars and their various opinions. “He’s such a Libra!” Is that…bad? At a certain point you curl up with cafeastrology.com for an afternoon and educate yourself so you don’t have to derail the conversation to find out why your friend isn’t dating Sagittarians anymore.

Anyway, it’s been a few years since I gave in to peer pressure and it’s a Gemini full moon tonight, as I write this, which is a rather agitated sort of affair, especially considering Mars is opposed to it and Saturn is squaring it; all three celestial bodies are currently in mutable signs so it’s total chaos out there. My astrology app tells me it’s a great night for hot takes and connecting with friends. An excellent night to be vaguely unhinged.

After learning basic astrology in the name of not ruining happy hour, I quickly learned two other things: 1) no one likes a Gemini, much less a double one, and 2) non-flamboyant men really, really hate astrology. Holy shit. No one warned me, and I was not ready. The mere mention of a star sign causes you guys to channel the entire r/atheism subreddit. Fedoras and neckbeards materialize out of thin air. You guys get so angry about star stuff.

Is this why queer people love astrology so much? Is it a defense against The Straights?

I definitely thought astrology was silly at first, and I admit some part of me still does. I’m not committed or anything (I tell myself as I pay my Chani subscription and brace myself for mercury retrograde in a few weeks). It’s just a fun thing I enjoy. I like thinking about the archtypes. I like the idea that anything means anything, ever, at any point. That the stars spell out epochs, that things end and things begin. And I’ll be honest: my star chart is freaky accurate. I don’t think it’s just confirmation bias, either.

But even when I fully believed that astrology was absurd, it never for a second occurred to me to judge my friends for believing it. I found it strange, but no stranger than anything else people believe. Every religion is profoundly weird. None of them make any sense. Astrology meant nothing to me at the time but it clearly meant something to my friends so like, yeah, of course I’ll read up on it and dig out my birth certificate and find out what time I was born, let’s do my chart and talk about me for an hour or so — which, for the record, is a very Leo rising thing to say.

Maybe that last bit is part of what upsets people about astrology so much: it feels incredibly prescriptive. No other supernatural/spiritual practice I can think of will attempt to tell you who you are, where you’re going, and what kind of day you’re about to have. The fedoras are right about one thing: just as it is a bad idea to take every verse of the Bible literally, it is a genuinely terrible idea to treat astrology like gospel truth. If you live your day-to-day based entirely on your horoscope (or any other external text) you’re going to have a weird, bad time and so will everyone who knows you. As a Gemini, I am acutely aware of this, not because my sun sign gives me some special insight into the hazards of blind belief but because wow, star people really do not like Geminis very much. We get such a bad rap! Not even Scorpios endure such hate!

I may be slightly exaggerating my oppression here, but it’s not my fault: I’m a Gemini, we do that sometimes. Which is another reason people have a problem with astrology, I suspect. “It’s not that I’m a shitty person, it’s the stars, baby. If you can’t handle me at my Mars in Cancer, you don’t deserve me at my Venus in Taurus.” Gross. We’re supposed to work on overcoming our challenges, astrological or otherwise, not demand that everyone else accomodate them so we can keep emotionally flailing without consequence.

But it’s not like astrology is the only thing people use to justify being an asshole and avoiding the hard work of change. Plenty of men I’ve known haven’t even bothered to find an excuse for it. “This is just how I am, baby. Take it or leave it.” I’m 36 years old and I’m leaving it. Goodbye.

A couple months ago I was sitting at the bar with a male friend and a woman came up to us and said hey, I’m doing tarot readings, would you like one? He said “No thank you” at the exact same time I said “Oh my god, absolutely” and I went over and got a mediocre reading and gave her money and returned and he was like, do you actually believe that shit? To which I said, yes, I’m actually a semi-serious practitioner. And he was like, Are you fucking serious. You know those cards aren’t ancient, right? They were developed in, like, the 1700s.

And this was confusing to me, because would cards with pictures on them somehow be more impressive if they originated in the bronze age and came with ancient, established tradition?

The answer, of course, is yes.

For all our mid-aughts laughter about Flying Spaghetti Monsters and sky cake, big-R-Religion still carries weight and always has. Big-R Religions tend to have three things in common: they are ancient, they are organized, and they are patriarchal. You can go to a synagogue, or a church, or a mosque, or a temple. Or, for a completely different experience, you can go to a psychic fair where hippies will sell you crystals and read your future. Those hippies selling and reading will be women or nonbinary or very queer men. I’m sure there are exceptions, I’ve just never personally seen them.

If you like sky cake, you’ll love this story: almost every ancient Eurasian religion from Gaul to India begins in the same way. A female earth goddess reigned supreme, until a sky god dethroned her.

Here, look at these two tarot cards:

That guy on the left is the Heirophant. His religion is one of tradition and authority: FACTS and LOGIC, if you will. The woman on the right is the High Priestess. She is intuitive and spiritual. Her realm is shrouded from the conscious mind. There’s sky imagery in the card, but she represents the thing the sky god conquored.

Later religions dropped the earth goddess entirely, but the sky god very much remains. Neopaganism is neo because Christians destroyed original paganism, successfully wiped it from the face of the earth: it’s gone forever. Tarot and astrology and other vaguely witchy arts are, I believe, an attempt to reclaim what was lost. A return to the earth and the rhythms of the universe, for people who prefer that approach.

It’s fine if you believe both types of spirituality are nonsense. In a strictly literal sense, they probably both are, though both of them speak to me. But the modern world believes one of them is a lot more nonsense than the other, and I don’t see much difference in absurdity between the two except that, thousands of years ago, the sky god won. The earth goddess lost. Men won, and women lost. Women are silly creatures, prone to emotionality, not to be taken seriously (unless they become ambitious, aggressive, lean-in boss-ass bitches like me). So too with their cards and their star charts. Not like the book where the father takes his son from his mother’s arms and places him on a rock intending to slit his throat and bleeed him dry for God like a goat or a sheep. Or the one where we nailed a prophet to a tree and watched him die and then pretended he secretly wanted us to torture him to death for the next 2000 years so we could feel better about it. That’s real religion.

There is no order of astrologers. There is no church of tarot. These are forms of spirituality you can do alone in your room, or with your friends after a bottle of wine or three, or in some tiny rented shop with a neon crystal ball in the window. I’m not saying you should believe or not believe, or even that I believe, deep down. I am saying that, even for 2023, things are really grim out there. If the polls are to be believed, Trump is solidly ahead of Biden. 6000 children are dead and 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes. Sky God is dead; we killed him; nothing has replaced him. I am not here to tell you what you should turn to instead, or that any God is real; I am here to tell you that every single civilization yet discovered has developed a religion, that belief in something beyond this plane seems to be a universal human need, and that your stupid sky god got us into this mess. Hand over your birth certificate. What do you have to lose?

If you’d like to read something actually relevant to conservatism and politics, check out Ettingermentum’s very good article about how Biden might lose the popular vote but win the electoral college in 2024.

(May 28th, 1987: 11:35 AM, pacific time)