The Pnictogen Wing

If you believe you have astrological skill, you can also put yourself to the test by taking the same challenge that we used in the study! We're making this challenge permanently available so that anyone can test their own abilities at any time. At the same link, we also offer a practice test (based on matching celebrities and events to an appropriate chart), which is less scientifically rigorous but can be used to practice before taking the official test. Additionally, we've released the anonymized data from our study, so that anyone who wishes to can analyze the data for themselves.

so some folks did a study to test out the idea that astrology works if you use the whole chart instead of just sun signs or whatever. based on their data it very much does not, & also i'm obsesssed with the cheerfulness with which they say "try it yourself bitch!"

Horoscopes: a little bit of fun. Taking them seriously is harmless but odd

Basic Astrology: On the surface, fine but can be annoying. Taking them seriously bumps it up to off-putting but I guess some people are just desperate for magic to exist which I can understand

"Advanced" Astrology: Probably still a good person but has fallen down a rabbit hole of self-selected confirmation and doesn't realize how deranged it sounds. You don't really get this far without taking is seriously but if you go even farther you're doing weird calendar eugenics and are either a dangerously stupid person or a scammer

I was at a party once, and I was asked by someone who was flirting with me what my star sign was. I said I was a Leo (which is a lie). They immediately gave me the stink eye and refused to talk to me for the rest of the night.

cool: "my birth was untouched by the stars of your sky, seer. my fate is my own"

I've chewed over astrology considerably, because I could glimpse some mathematical justification for the method. It's difficult in these contemporary times to grasp how astrology, in older days, was more less equivalent to timekeeping today. There was value in using the motions of the planets as a sort of clock, a measuring-device for time using celestial mechanics instead of technology (which was designed to replace the need for astrologers.)

Long story short, it's as good as any other method of divination or farseeing, I guess. One might as well inquire into how the weather tracks with our lives, or the harvest-seasons, or any other natural cycle.

~Chara

the earlier Discourse™ about astrology inspired some vague ideas about explaining why I think the standard dismissal of astrology doesn't actually make much sense to me. it's the evening now and the ideas are still vague. the words aren't flowing well, and the topic seems too large for a few paragraphs, and our thoughts aren't all that clear anyway.

at some point I realized that it was possible to rationalize astrology in a way that required absolutely zero assumptions about an actual physical or material influence exerted by celestial bodies. it was possible to regard the celestial mechanics simply as clockwork, as a handy source of periodic motion against which to compare and gauge the unpredictable ups and downs of human life. it's like having a whole family of calendars, not just a solar or lunar calendar. the orbit of the Moon round the Earth supplies a short baseline in time, about a month of solar days; the orbit of the Earth round the Sun supplies a longer baseline; the orbits of Mercury, Venus, &c. supply yet different baselines against which to reckon one's changing fortunes. in mathematical terms, the various cyclical motions of the celestial bodies furnish a basis set, a set of independent functions that can be used to approximate a more complex function. in sum, it's not necessary to invoke any mystical explanation at all in order to rationalize astrology...and I rather wonder why the rational and skeptical crowd haven't noticed that, in their rush to chuck astrology into the wastebin.

the haste to dismiss astrology as mere fraud and flim-flam has led to a lot of "debunking" that doesn't actually hold up to much scrutiny. "the Moon can't possibly exert a meaningful effect on human life" honestly seems like the outlandish claim to me, if for no other reason that all human society is influenced (directly or indirectly) by Earth's tides, in which the Moon plays a central role. indeed the entire Earth changes shape slightly as the Moon orbits her, leading to slight but measurable periodic changes in Earth's surface gravity. AND there's also the fact that the Moon is the next most obvious object in the sky after the Sun...are we really supposed to believe that humanity isn't influenced en masse by the visual spectacle of the Moon, even if the influence is slight?

the answer to that last question is "yes", in American society at least. we are not supposed to think too hard about how human beings and humanity are under the influence of forces beyond its control. instead we are taught a form of individualism so extreme (and to me, grotesque) that it amounts to the assertion that a free human being, if they're worth anything, should have total self-control over what happens to them. only weaklings blame external circumstances or outside forces for their woes. did a flood wipe out your harvest? it must have been your fault somehow—you should have anticipated it and prepared for it. is an epidemic going round? it'll only hurt you if you're scared of it. did your boss screw you out of your pay again? if you really wanted it, you'd be the boss. &c.

I think there's something faintly sinister in teaching people to scoff at the very idea that there can be any personal reason for keeping track of what's up with the Solar System and the stars. the contemptuous attitude—"it's negligible, it doesn't matter, you shouldn't care"—is how Westerners are taught to regard huge swathes of human experience, not just astrology. feelings are negligible. dreams and ecstatic experiences don't matter. heck, we're at the point where diseases don't matter; they're being thrown into the same "negligible" bucket, dismissed without real thought...and I do genuinely think that astrology is dismissed without much real thought, because it's what "smart" and "intelligent" people do.

and I also think we're subtly encouraged to think the same way about astronomy—the heavens aren't supposed to be a source of awe and wonder, they're meant to be a source of dry Facts™, expert information to be smug about knowing. I reminded of how Neil Tyson's chief public response to the New Horizons Pluto mission was snide remarks about how Pluto isn't a real planet—no wonder, no awe, no humility in the face of a cosmic mystery, just...snobbish pedantry. it's like the Solar System and the heavens don't really matter any more; they're a solved problem, something best left to the people who know better, like Tyson and Elon Musk. I feel (irrationally perhaps) that astrology is a necessary counterbalance to this flattening and deadening tendency to regard space as just another body of scientific data and resources to be plundered.

yes, astrology has been a fertile growth medium for fraud—so have a lot of more legitimate pursuits. I think we can mostly agree, for example, that psychology in general is a solid branch of science, but it's been every bit as fruitful a source of scam artists as astrology, perhaps more so because psychology enjoys official respectability and mainstream marketing whereas astrology is compelled to live in the margins. yes, there's people who pretend that astrological correspondences are absolute and completely predictive and deterministic; there's people who say the same thing about economic forecasts and SAT scores. I suggest that astrology is not really the problem here.

well, that was some words, anyway.

~Chara

it's honestly such a relief to meet gay people who hate astrology

i will go further and declare that astrology is easily one of the most hetero things imaginable. how would any queer person proclaim "i can tell everything about you from a field on your driver's license" with a straight face

The most good faith understanding I have for the popularity of astrology among queer people is, okay you have a population of people who have childhood trauma from being placed in boxes without their consent, now they're processing that experience with a different set of arbitrary categories. Which makes astrology a lot like kink. But the key thing in kink is consent. So I'm just like, I won't clip a leash on you without your consent, and you won't refer to me by my sign without my consent. Capisce?

Aisling is correct as always lmao

the best explanation of astrology that I ever heard was in Adams's last Hitchhiker's Guide book, someone explaining why they could practice astrology for others without believing it:

In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.

in this way astrology joins a long tradition of knowing-without-knowing, a staunch holdout from empiricism and rationalism. I still hate it tbh, but I have to respect it a little.

I never quite know what to say about such threads. I don't really practice astrology but it makes perfect conceptual sense to me as a sort of applied mathematics—numerical analysis, with the predictable motions of celestial bodies as a universally accessible point of reference. it also makes intuitive sense that a human being will be influenced along slightly different lines according to such things as when they were born during the solar year (imagine the cumulative effects of having a Christmastide birthday, for example) and what the phase of the Moon is (because lunar cycles are stamped onto human society in multiple ways.)

clearly, however, "astrology" has a very particular and pejorative meaning in discourse like I'm seeing here—a meaning that has almost nothing to do with astrology itself, and everything to do with the application of dogmatic determinism to astrology...and that sort of dogmatism easily attaches itself to other things. so... why blame astrology in particular? ~Chara

it is possible to rationalize astrology in a way that requires no belief in mystical forces exerted by the planets.

the most important thing about the celestial motions of the planets, from the standpoint of the astrologer, is that they're predictable. they are like clockwork, there for anyone to see and observe for themselves. reliable artificial timekeeping is a new thing for humanity still; for much longer than we've had precision clockwork and frequency standards, humanity had the Sun, the Moon, and the stars to supply a reliable sense of time and periodicity. it must have seemed quite natural, then, to compare the predictable cycles of celestial bodies with the unpredictable happenstances of human life, and hope to find some correspondence—some evidence of pattern, some hint of cyclic regularity to be found in events that were otherwise baffling and chaotic.

in modern terms we call this frequency-domain analysis, and use the methods of mathematics and numerical analysis to tease out hints of cyclic and regular behavior from masses of data collected over time. one doesn't always need to know the reason behind such periodic behavior; if a cyclic pattern is there, it's got predictive value for the future, even if the reason for the cyclic behavior is unknown. let us hypothesize, for example, that one conducted frequency-domain analysis on stock-market data and detected a cycle with a period approximately that of the lunar month. have we somehow proved that the Moon exerts an effect on stock-market trading? the answer to that is question is, "no, we haven't, but we can still make testable predictions on the basis of the apparent lunar cycle."

people who find value in astrology believe that they can see and feel the cyclic patterns of celestial bodies impressed on human lives, in some way. I myself think the idea isn't an unreasonable one, especially as regards the Moon—the Moon is bright, she's easily seen and remarked upon, her cyclic motions have definite physical effects on the Earth, and many human calendars and religious holidays track the Moon in some fashion; it seems only logical to assume that human society has some trace of a lunar cycle stamped on it. one need invoke no special mysticism to imagine such an influence.

but this prompts an important question: is it actually wise to regard oneself as governed by the Moon? the danger that many reasonable persons see in astrology is that it's regarded as infallible, as if its predictive value were total and applicable to everyone. it's one thing to say, in a general way, that the Moon exerts some indirect influence on human affairs; it's quite another thing to say stuff like "when you were born the Moon was in this particular constellation so that means you must possess this laundry list of traits." THAT is what annoys people the most about astrology as it's popularly imagined: the fact that it's used for profiling, as a way of matching people to stereotypes. I don't think this is the fault of astrology per se. people do the same things with "physiognomy" and multiple-choice tests and government records and every other scrap of superficial data they can collect on a person. applying the same bigoted method in an astrological context, purporting to read people's minds and souls from times and dates and the positions of celestial bodies, is a commonplace evil—but (call me foolish for saying this) it's not enough to make me happy with the idea of throwing away all of astrology.

I'm reminded a bit of genealogy, which is surely a valid enough pursuit if done in the right spirit, but beyond doubt people want evil things out of genealogy, whether it's their own ancestors they're researching or someone else's. they want to put their finger on something "objective" that they can grab onto, a sure-fire guarantee of salvation or damnation—proof of unquestionably superior "genetics", or evidence for the opposite. more insidiously, people hope that their ancestry might somehow define them, and show them what sort of person they're supposed to be—as if (say) finding out that one of your great-grandmothers wrote novels "proved" that your own destiny was to become a novelist. does the fact that people undoubtedly read too much into genealogy mean that genealogy itself is vain and damaging? I don't think so. and I think astrology is like that, too—it's a tool readily abused, but still a worthwhile tool. perhaps.

~Chara