I’m not saying it’s bad that all those ‘star-sign’ horoscope newspaper and magazine columns ever started being a ‘thing’ back in the 1930s, because until then, even the slightest reference to the wisdom of the ancients had been defunct for millennia.
The feminine triple-aspected Moon had been whipped out of the picture and replaced by the patriarchal Holy Trinity…
and any notions of trusting one’s instincts and following the symbolic clues of nature had been overwritten by rules in a Book - that most couldn’t read.
Still, apart from a nod back to our roots, those columns did no-one any real favours…
The term ‘horoscope’ itself still makes me cringe.
(What can I say? Conditioning is real!)
It’s a bit of a shame, because as many of us know, the word refers to the natal birth chart, and not to what so many others still think it is. (I don’t know, what do they think it is? Bad entertainment? A stab-in-the-dark prediction or evaluation based entirely on the ‘star-sign’?)
Back in 2018, two years into my sudden (ok ok, ‘suddenly official’) left-field dive into the cosmic mysteries, I was in Singapore attending a Psychological Astrology intensive training led (in suitably paradoxical fashion) by Asia’s top Western astrologer, the inimitable May Sim.
One morning, whilst waiting on the platform of the MRT subway, a man in his late fifties struck up a conversation, asked what I was doing there in Singapore - and when I answered, seemed to retort with somewhat of a scoff, ‘Well, I work in this hospital. We don’t look at the stars’.
At the time, I’d thought his tone to be so clear (we = intelligent, reliable, successful people. You = moron), 'though I’ll admit that in hindsight (and with a full seven years of healing wounds and rewriting old beliefs behind me), I do now see that this was just an interpretation I’d made based on one of the limiting theories I was carrying about at the time: that better I keep large parts of me completely hidden from the world (because in truth, I was far, far weirder than even my high-school bullies could ever have even hoped to imagine).
Still, even if the man wasn’t being deliberately disdainful, it was clear he felt the two of us were not compatible enough to withstand even one minute more of conversation. It was at this point that he bid me goodbye, and starting ambling up the platform to wait for the train at (a presumably safer) distance further along of approximately 3.5 metres.
Now. I do speak just a little in jest. (What can I say? I’ve got both my Moon and jolly benevolent Grandpa Jupiter, in trickster Gemini (not to mention a Scorpio stellium in the 5th house of play and entertainment… all of which manifests in such a way that - as per the conditions of taboo-loving Pluto (Scorpio’s ruler) - there’s really not much (so long as it’s fun) that I might genuinely consider off-limits)…
I digress.
As we’re all no doubt very aware of, we’re not in 2018 anymore.
Attitudes to astrology have changed quite considerably since Covid times
as the world of esoteric, mystic and shamanic arts have blown up in so many spheres of influence. You can’t open up a single app without seeing astrology everywhere. Reading the cosmos has become de rigueur.
But this isn’t to say it gets its full dues. Astrology is not yet fully recognised for the jaw-dropping gift that it truly is, though I’m sure this will change in the coming years.
For now, though, even those who are interested in it on some level will still ask me things like, ‘but do you believe in it?’ ‘Does it work?’ ‘What can you tell me about Sagittarius/Pisces/Leo (or whatever sun sign they happen to be)?
And then there’s the standardized muggle opinion, which goes something like: ‘Well, of course it doesn’t make sense… If there are 7.2 billion people in the world, then how can 600 million all be Libra?’
I would actually tend to agree with these people. Although the question is actually much bigger than ‘how can 1/12th of the world be Libra?’ It’s more like, ‘how can even ONE person be just Libra?’
Seriously. My cat is more complex than that.
You may have done the Myers-Briggs test, whereby you get to find out which one of the 16 types you are: ENTJ, INFP..? It’s been labelled ‘so accurate, it’s creepy’.
Except, it’s still not that precise, is it? Back to ‘star-signs’, since when are you a ‘type’?
Take a look at this chart of Donald Trump - which, to the untrained eye, looks just like a circle covered by symbols and mathematically precise geometrical patterns. Once this is decoded, though, it reflects exactly who this guy is.
His Sun is in Gemini, and fortunately, there are millions and millions of Gemini Suns out there who are absolutely nothing like Donald Trump, and this is because they don’t have his birth chart.
Twelve signs..? Hell, no.
This is Donald’s birth chart; Donald’s life.
Each chart is effectively a snapshot of the Universe at the exact moment a baby takes its first breath. It gives us a 2-D representation of this very limited edition One-Time-Only-Playing-On-The-Big-Screen formation (that’s both the individual on the micro level and the entire cosmos on the macro). And we are, of course, all of it: all the signs, all the planets…
And the beauty? This galactic dance doesn’t stop at birth. It’s morphing and revealing itself every single moment…
broadcasting to us live from the grand cosmic stage of the Milky Way.
And what a broadcast it is. Can’t beat it.
It’s actually the only one I feel is truly worth its chips.
Because, while pooh-poohing those magazine horoscopes is one thing, I’ll go one further and admit I’ve been pooh-poohing the general media ever since I refused to work for the Orpington News as a 20-something post-graduate. Following a degree in Modern Languages, I’d trained as a journalist (hello, chart ruler Moon in Gemini and Jupiter in Gemini at 0 degrees!) - but as I would soon discover, there was never any part of me that wanted to do anything like write for newspapers, or broadcast ‘news’.
I wrote for the likes of Mixmag and Ministry instead… and then, just over a decade later, for an entertainment travel magazine, where my moniker was Mop (a nod to my curly black afro at the time), and my tagline was: Party Queen: Out Till The Sun Comes Up.
I wasn’t entirely sure why I was so anti-news back then, apart from the obvious fact I preferred to write creatively. To boot, I was a wildchild who preferred to spend most of her time inside booming bassbins in darkened cellars under bridges and railway arches (hello, Scorpio ruling the 5th house of entertainment!). I remember having to call in sick once because I’d been jumping up and down to hard house for three days straight - my calves were in such agony, I couldn’t even get down the stairs in my house unless I was sitting on my arse.
So yes, I wrote for the music mags instead. But not just because I was a wildchild. Because, here’s the thing: while Gemini absolutely loves a good joke - there’s really nothing less appealing than being part of a joke that most other people are taking seriously… mainly because one of the only things Gemini does take seriously is accuracy (and paradoxically, we will forgo any dogma of so-called morality to honour this).
And I sensed even then that the news was not so accurate. I also sensed the same in relation to governments, which was why (to the horror of many of my would-have-been-suffragette friends), I’ve only ever voted twice in my life.
I’ve never been fooled by false authority, and I never believed what they said ‘in the papers’.
At Uni (University College London), we had a student radio station, and my role was ‘news hound’. I’d be going around campus with a mic, asking students about their views on the day’s ‘burning issue’ (which, somewhat predictably, I rarely had either interest in or clue about). Then it would be back to base, where I’d have to edit it all up ready for the newsreader to play during the live show. Of course, by this point, I’d usually be bored and feeling mischievous - whereupon, in true Gemini fashion (as well as that of my packed 5th house), I displayed a natural demonstration of not taking it seriously: I would regularly splice up people’s answers ever so subtly so their opinions wouldn’t end up making much sense in the final cut.
Some of the results I got were absolutely bloody genius (or so I thought, at least - these newly manufactured sentences would fit together perfectly, but would make people sound like they were contradicting themselves and all sorts)... I used to be dying with laughter in the editing room. No-one ever questioned any of it, or even wondered why I was always sitting editing in absolute fits of giggles. It was hardly a biggie, of course (did anyone ever actually listen to Rare FM?!).
Looking back, it feels almost prophetic: that little Uni editing room was a microcosm of the larger newsroom. Cut, splice, rearrange: reality conjured up for broadcast. (In contrast, of course, the sky never edits its messages). Another reason why I’d never trusted the newsroom - I’d already seen how easily a truth could be spliced. Hell, I was myself a master of it!
Tabloid journalism is by far the trickiest, but the ability came naturally to me and I loved this power to draw people in with words. Choose them carefully, and twist them around… create a result, a kind of magic, a spell … with an emotional texture that invokes whichever response you want to cook up. If you’re having a particularly good stab at it, you don’t even have to say things directly.
One of my tutors would virtually salivate over the desk in front of me. ‘You’ll excel at this; you’re a natural’, she’d be saying, whilst giving me all the tips re. getting good stories, including constantly knocking on people’s doors. Giving them my card. Harassing them, basically. God, I couldn’t imagine doing that. People always told me all their secrets anyway. I could read them easily; see through them like a laser-beam. ‘You know which questions to ask’, a good friend of mine confirmed to me recently - which was something that the plants had told her a few days earlier in a medicine ceremony. Imagine that! Tsss, I’d thought, following her comment up with a simple, ‘haha, yes.’ And then… ‘errrm. What else did they say?’ - all the while thinking, the bloody plants… telling people all my tricks.
Again, I digress.
So, then. Let’s just get back to the fact that we’re a living, breathing snapshot of the cosmos - captured in the symbolic language and mathematical precision encoded inside the exact time and place of our birth. The micro and the macro (or even ‘same-same, but different’, as we say here in Thailand). And, lest we forget that the stars keep telling their stories, endlessly transmitting across the vastness above us.
So, speaking as a former trained journalist who was always so disbelieving of ‘the news’…
I’ll say that - amidst the modern-day chatter of swiping, posting, scrolling and algorithms - the magic night sky remains the oldest newsroom of all.
And it’s the one channel I’ll forever recommend tuning into.
Just like our ancestors did.