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Signs of the times: astrology and horoscopes have become hip again.
Illustration: Phil Hackett/Observer |
When people contact the women’s website Broadly, to ask why it runs horoscopes, as it has done since its launch in 2015, the UK editor Zing Tsjeng directs them to a video she uses as a catch-all response. It’s the figure skater Adam Rippon, discussing his unexpectedly good run at the Winter Olympics. A reporter asks him why he’s now skating better than ever before. He shrugs gently, with a glint of mischief in his eye, then says: “I can’t explain witchcraft.”
Many people over the age of 35 will have grown up with astrology as a form of light entertainment: big, cartoonish, campy personalities like Mystic Meg and Russell Grant, hidden away in the back pages of newspapers and women’s magazines, picking lucky numbers and promising the intervention of tall, dark, handsome strangers. But the women (and men) who Broadly speaks to may have a different grasp of astrology. That’s why traffic to the site’s horoscopes is growing so rapidly. At The Cut, a site focused on fashion and trends for a similar, millennial audience, staff say that a typical horoscope post got 150% more hits last year than in 2016.
There is a growing familiarity with the patterns and positions of the planets, and it’s not uncommon to hear people in their late teens and 20s talking about, say, “Mercury in retrograde” and “Saturn returns” with confidence and authority. They know that a “star sign” is a sun sign, and that for any half-decent attempt at a reading, you need to know your exact time and place of birth, so you can discuss, with equal reverence, the influence of your rising sign and moon sign, too.
It’s part of a broader shift, one that finds magic and mysticism referenced regularly in popular culture. In the fashion world, labels such as Vetements and Valentino have featured zodiac signs, constellations and cosmic patterns. The high street has followed the trend. An episode of TV show Broad City used a coven of witches in Central Park as its way of digesting the election of Trump – it makes more sense if you watch it. Especially if you’re one of the estimated 800,000 Wiccans in the world. In the UK alone, 60,000 people identify as pagan.
There’s also a social networking app, Co-Star, which sees just how compatible you are with your friends and lovers, based on their birth charts. “My personal belief is that people tend to turn to mysticism, spirituality and the occult in uncertain times,” Tsjeng suggests. “And I feel that young people, especially, are living in one of the most uncertain times ever, at least in my living memory. There’s an increasing willingness to question the arranged order, break out of pre-defined social norms and look for answers elsewhere.”
Recently, I interviewed a young rapper, a man in his early 20s, as he was about to release his first album. On a break from a photoshoot, we got talking about the emotional ups and downs of suddenly finding oneself in the spotlight. “I guess I’m a Cancer as well,” he said, casually. “I try to be tough on the outside, but inside, I’m soft as shit.”
“Are you needy?” I asked him. “That’s a Cancer thing, right?” He laughed. “I’ll never tell anybody, but I really am needy. So needy.” The ease with which we fell into using astrological language as a shorthand for personality traits was striking. It also felt like a gentle, unthreatening way of discussing deeper emotions.
“Like many people, I came to astrology at a moment of personal crisis and feeling lost,” says Francesca Lisette, 30, who has spent the past decade studying the subject. “I had gone from being able-bodied to suffering with chronic and life-restricting pain, and the invisibility of my pain also led me to wonder about the invisible DNA of my personality. Perhaps I solve my pain, or at least rationalise it.” She recently completed an apprenticeship in traditional astrology and now practises readings under the name the Glitter Oracle. “I quickly drummed up a birth chart on astro-newbie favourite Café Astrology and read through it, thinking it sounded exactly like me, but was also full of contradictions,” she explains, and put its inconsistencies down to it being computer-generated. “That was the moment at which I became obsessed with understanding how to read a chart with the skill of an experienced astrologer.”
The idea of turning to an existing belief system in a time of crisis is as universal as it is familiar. Daisy Jones, 25, grew up in a household where astrology was “like a religion” and regularly had her tarot cards read by her grandmother. “But I would say it was a relatively background entity until just over a year ago, when I went through a major break-up and moved house, and my life felt like it was in a state of flux,” she says. “So as somebody who isn’t religious, it felt like something to embrace during a particularly uncertain period.” Both Lisette and Jones point to the popularity of astrology among women and those who identify as queer, partly, Lisette thinks, because astrology offers an alternative to systems that no longer seem to be working – especially for outsiders. “That’s definitely something I like about it. It’s a system of beliefs not defined by hierarchy or power structures,” adds Jones.
Roy Gillett is president of the Astrological Association of Great Britain, and has been a practising astrologer for the past 40 years. He says he has noticed an uptake in millennials turning not only to sun signs, but also seeking out a deeper understanding of the science on which the system is based. (Sceptics will say that it is not science-based; practitioners will argue roots in astronomy and connections to quantum physics.)
“I think what’s happened to people in their late teens and 20s, and younger people even more so, is a sense of betrayal by conventional knowledge,” he explains. “I know that’s a strong statement to make, but if you think about the circumstances that a person at university finds themselves in right now, compared with me when I was at university, or even my children… There is a lack of values everywhere you look. The things you relied on don’t seem to be reliable. In that sort of culture, you look for something underpinning everything.”
Gillett also points to the internet enabling people to share ideas on a scale not seen before. It’s no coincidence that there is a thriving astrological community online, from Tumblr culture to YouTube astrologers to straight-talking daily sun sign advice, even if it is communicated in pop-up notifications from an app giving an emoji thumbs-up to, say, “sex and magic” for the day. “Over most of the years I’ve been involved, the relationship between astrology and popular culture and society in general has been rather frozen in an extreme, of most people thinking it’s just the sun signs in the newspapers,” explains Gillett. “They think that anybody who follows it is away with the fairies, because it’s just so generalised.” Now, he says, there’s an articulate and informed discussion going on based on the massive expanse of knowledge people have at their fingertips.
The “away with the fairies” argument is a default criticism, whether it’s Richard Dawkins debunking star signs on his documentary The Enemies of Reason, or the notion that astrology is akin to clairvoyance, that it can be used to predict lottery numbers or who’s going to win the Grand National. Lisette says she is not very good at arguing the benefits of astrology to those already set against it. “I’m not terribly invested in convincing people to see the world the way that I do. I already know that astrology works. It’s rather like somebody saying: ‘Kicking a ball around is boring and pointless.’ OK, but there are still billions of people around the world who get something out of it.” Besides, she adds, you have to extensively engage with astrology to see how it might relate to your life, and most sceptics won’t do that.
With this in mind, and having spent weeks talking to people about their experiences of astrology, I decided to get my birth chart read. I found Leigh Oswald, an astrologer in my home city, and sent her an email asking if she’d give me a reading, and let me write about the experience. Oswald has been an astrologer for more than 40 years, and wrote regular columns for the magazine Artnet that leaned towards socio-political interpretations of planetary positions. After some discussion, she said she would be happy to meet me and read my chart, and answer my questions, if it would help explain some of the misconceptions about astrology. There were unavoidable issues – she was sorry she already knew I was a journalist but, of course, she would not look me up before we met. I know cynics will doubt this, but I’m certain she’d stuck to her word. Besides, Mercury rules my ascendant Virgo, so my intuition is strong.
The reading was uncannily accurate and I have thought about it every day since it happened. She offered clear and precise pictures of the kinds of people I am drawn to, as friends and as partners, and why that might be. We talked about health, diet, political and social leanings, and ways of seeing the world. It felt like a detailed dissection of my personality, including parts of it that I would not offer up willingly to a stranger. It was a personal, probing and, at times, therapeutic discussion about vast, emotional life issues. It made me think about how I can address things that I have been unhappy with, and push myself in areas that I have been too afraid to.
At the end of it, we hugged, and I felt extremely grateful for her time and insight. It is not a common experience, for me at least, to take that kind of time to stop and think. Whether that’s because I believe the position of the planets at my time of birth shaped my personality in some as-yet-inexplicable way, and as such can offer lessons as to how to navigate life, or whether it’s because it was a moment to stop and think about what was weighing on my mind seems largely irrelevant, given how galvanising the whole experience was.
“There’s a saying that sun sign astrology is a silly nursery rhyme. A proper birth chart is a complex symphony, because we’re all so complicated,” explained Oswald. “We’re all a mess of contradictions. I’m a great believer that the more we can know about ourselves the more we can accept ourselves, and make good decisions between our weaknesses and strengths.”
Zing Tsjeng has a more pragmatic approach, but nevertheless, it’s one that gets to the same beating heart of why astrology can hold such fascination, and how that can, in turn, be made useful. “When I read stuff like: ‘Pisces season is an important time for Librans not to get walked over,’ I don’t believe I’m doomed to get walked over that month just because of some random celestial moment that I have no control over,” she explains. “It just prompts me to think, hmm, is there a part of my life where I feel this way? What can I do to avoid that? It gives me a chance to check in with my own thoughts and where I’m at in my life.”
Astrology: reading your stars
The app: Co-Star This relatively new app provides a basic birth chart and daily horoscopes, but with the social network-ey addition of letting you see how well you’re suited to friends and loved ones who have done the same.
The online horoscope: Annabel Gat – Broadly Since 2015, Gat’s monthly horoscopes for Broadly have been conversational, frank and big-sister wise. Little wonder she has such a devoted cult following.
The book: Sextrology Stella Starsky and Quinn Cox’s classic 2004 book has had a long afterlife, particularly among LGBTQ readers, thanks to its same-sex compatibility pairings and frank and funny advice on which peccadilloes may be tied to your planetary positions.
On Twitter: @themeccanism Mecca co-hosts a chatty, funny podcast, Stars on Fire, which talks pop culture through an astrological filter, and it’s as fun as her Twitter feed. She does private readings in the US and has contributed to Essence, Bustle, Teen Vogue and Refinery29.
The classic: Sun Signs May be knocking around on a dusty bookshelf but Linda Goodman’s classic is as entertaining to read as it is easy to understand.
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