This past week, many of you pointed me to the New York Times’ takedown of astrology. You may be surprised to learn that I’m not angry - only disappointed.
As someone who lives in Los Angeles and has built their life around astrology, I’m willing to bet good money that I find astrology in the current zeitgeist more insufferable than any snarky intellectual at the New York Times.
If I have to endure one more conversation where someone attempts to chalk up all of their life woes to Pluto on their descendant, or proceed to tell me why Chiron (wherever this asteroid falls in their chart) is the reason they’re unlucky in love, I’m going to lose it.
THE STORY
On Monday, the New York Times released a click-baity piece with interactive graphics titled, “Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date” A PSA informing us our sun signs are wrong.
Their thesis: due to the Earth’s wobble the constellations no longer align with the time of year we associate with them in the Tropical Zodiac. For example, the constellation of Aries no longer stands behind the Sun during Aries Season.
The thing is, astrologers have been aware of this for thousands of years. Vedic astrologers even use a different zodiacal system, the sidereal zodiac, which has taken this slippage of the stars into account.
Every few years the self-proclaimed scientists among us find a new way to debunk astrology, usually employing the help of the 13th sign, Ophiuchus. Which (surprise!) this latest Times article also does.
And I don’t blame them. If your only understanding of astrology is basic horoscopes and TikToks, that makes sense.
I even have days when I lose my grounding in this practice — where I get lost in my head and catch myself imposing archetypes onto everything. I forget to look up. I forget that this art was born out of observation.
This piece is my reminder to myself that sometimes the most potent act of astrology is getting lost in the sky.
SIGNS & PLANETS
To paint in very broad strokes, we can trace the origins of horoscopic astrology back to Ancient Hellenistic era the territory of Alexandria, where its early users built upon knowledge inherited from the Babylonians and Egyptians.
When these people, and many people before them, looked to the sky, they saw dozens of constellations. Within each of them, a story. The twelve that became the signs of the Zodiac represent a band of sky along the ecliptic — a menagerie of creatures and objects whose rise and fall in succession trace the passing of the year.
These ancient peoples never imagined these constellations falling into twelve equal portions of the sky any more than they imagined all of humanity fitting into twelve simple archetypes.
Astrology has always been a symbolic language.
These constellations of fixed stars provide a stage for astrology’s players, the planets aka wandering stars — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon.
Today many of us think of time as a linear process: night into day into week into year, rinse and repeat. But the earliest astrologers tracked multiple timelines simultaneously.
Each day the sun rises and sets, marking the hours of the day. The moon’s cycle of wax and wane allows us to accurately track time over the course of a month. Standing outside every night over time, one can watch the month unfold in a stunning interplay of light and dark.
Similarly, the other five planets each dance with the Sun to their own unique beat. Mercury’s playful, shifty movements—from evening to morning star—mark the retrograde cycle of death and rebirth. And over eight years, Venus tracks time by tracing a five-pointed star across the sky
Astrology is perhaps our greatest tool in the fight against what Dr. Ali Olomi calls “empty homogeneous time”. The 365 day cycle of Monday following Monday, marching on indefinitely at a monotonous pace with no ties to the natural world.
At its most fundamental, astrology is the ancient, living, art of timekeeping.
THE SEASONS
Yes, the constellations are falling out of line, but astrology remains tied to the seasons, a foundation of its symbolism.
From the perspective of the Tropical Zodiac, our astrological year begins at 0 degrees Aries, a point corresponding to the spring equinox in the Northern hemisphere. This is the time of year where light begins to dominate the dark. The days grow longer, as we move out of winter.
To be born during Aries season is to be born into spring, the time of year when life comes out of hibernation. It is to be imbued with a sense of the new, the tenacity and passion to fight as new growth fights to emerge from the soil.
Just as Aries is a season of growth, its opposing sign, Libra, marks the Sun’s decline and the shortening of days. You don't need to be an astrologer to grasp how the excitement of spring feels qualitatively different from the slowness of fall.
From this Zodiacal perspective, the seasons become a conversation in time, with each sign marking a phase of initiating, enduring, or transitioning
Aries and Libra denote the beginning of seasons, but the mutable sign of Pisces orchestrates the transition from winter to spring. It's the sign of winter’s edge, where ice thaws into waters that will nourish the coming spring soil.
These Earthly observations are what give meaning to the signs and form the backdrop of astrology. None of this has changed over 2,000 years, even if the constellation of stars behind your sign has fallen out of place.
A DIVINATORY SCIENCE
Dating back to the ancient Babylonians, astrological scholars across the globe have devoted their lives to tracking the planet's movements across the sky, creating sophisticated techniques for interpretation. This in no way minimizes their contributions.
For example, our colleagues have been tracking the interplay between the planets Jupiter and Saturn for thousands of years. Using this data, the most skilled among us are able to accurately predict world events.
The most gorgeous part of all this is no one knows exactly why! You’d be hard-pressed to find a reputable astrologer who can offer a clear, rational explanation for why Jupiter's alignment with Saturn yields any particular outcome.
But it does. And we witness it time and time again.
Astrology is not a replicable science, that’s part of its charm. Like the humans who created it, it’s an imperfect tool, and the fact that it works at all defies conventional reason.
To take a nod from the late Geoffrey Cornelius, astrology is divination masquerading as science — technique and intuition.
I’ve looked at hundreds of charts with Saturn transiting the moon. While this is a signature that speaks of difficulty, I can’t tell you why I can look at a particular chart and know someone’s mother has recently passed. There’s no easy equation for that!
What I can tell you with absolute certainty is that sitting with someone and seeing their story reflected in the sky creates a unique and powerful intimacy. It’s one of astrology's gifts: a brief glimpse into an order to the universe, even if you can't explain it.
This is an art that is complex, messy, and when approached with rigor, hauntingly accurate. When we reduce it down to sun signs and psychological sketches, we throw that all away.
When I say the New York Times is 'right' that your sign is 'wrong,' I'm not being literal. What is ‘wrong’ is the notion that one’s life and personality, or even that totality of the cosmos, can be distilled into a sign.
Your sun sign marks a symbolic slice of sky that the sun was illuminating at the time of your birth. But astrology is so much more than that. The sky, and in turn one’s birth chart and the life it reflects, are an ecosystem of complexities: an interplay of planets across constellations in time.
I’m not calling for a dismantling of the Tropical zodiac. If you were born on April 14th, and you identify as an Aries, go ahead and keep on. Just know that’s only a small part of the story.
The fact that even the fixed stars move over time is a reminder that we are part of a living universe.
Let’s imagine, as many astrologers before me have imagined, that the zodiac is a tarot deck spread across the sky. Over time, the Earth wobbles, the constellations fall away in the same way that one pulls a tarot spread and clears the table.
The power of the omen is that it continues to speak long after the cards have been removed.
FOLLOW ART of the ZODIAC & Vivi Henriette on INSTAGRAM+YOUTUBE+SPOTIFY for the latest TALKTALKTALK
Your headline worried me for a moment, but the article itself was really interesting, thankyou! I love a bit of stargazing where I live and there's not too much light pollution, thankfully. You mentioned ancient scholars, I find it fascinating that in history astrologers and astronomers were often the same people. Just as cosmologists were often also priests. Science and art or "magic" (for want of a better word) can and do coexist in the natural world and human history. It's just our modern world has seperated them, labelled one credible and the other frivolous.
Phew—I almost wrote you a whole email on this (of course). I’m so grateful for the way you explained and grounded it; for the reassurance to keep doing what I do best~getting lost in the sky..