Twitter Astrology Debates Are A Waste of Time

Another significant ingress, another tedious debate on astrology Twitter about what planet or signs are or aren't associated with what things. This time, it's the Sun and Pluto's ingress into Aquarius and whether or not Aquarius signifies technology. One person says: Aquarius does not rule technology! (Note: technically correct. Aquarius doesn't rule anything, because signs don't rule anything. Planets do.) After all, AI advancements happened in 2022, when ChatGPT was created. Pluto wasn't in Aquarius then! (Note: the field of AI research, including GPT-based tech, has been ongoing for the last three decades. This is like saying that planes aren't associated with Jupiter because Jupiter wasn't in Sagittarius when the last Boeing plane model was released.)

Another person asserts they'll never understand the "obsession" with Aquarius being related to technology. After all, Aquarius is orthodoxy, hegemony, systems of oppression, patterns in how people behave. Aquarius is a fixed air sign! (Note: All three of Aquarius' decans--the three 10° of each sign which describe the narrative themes and stories associated with the signs running back over four millennia back to astrological practice in ancient Egypt--tell the story of rejection of mainstream culture and society in literal opposition to the throne of the planetary king, Leo, ruled by the Sun. Another note: Saturn, the day sect planet ruling diurnal Aquarius, is notable for being associated with the oppressed, suffering, and disenfranchised.)

There's plenty of evidence, both in classic astrological texts and the symbolism of core astrological concepts that support the idea that Aquarius has something to do with technology. The constellation Aquarius which the sign gets its name from is called the water bearer, a deity or other mythical figure bringing the promise of life itself. One might be drawn to consider the aqueduct as a telling association if they could remember that a technology doesn't have to have buttons and a screen to be a technology. Or, you could look around at events which were happening during Pluto's ingress into Aquarius, such as Schiaparelli's 2024 alien-themed couture show that happened on the very day, featuring exotic futuristic constructions and a literal baby made of circuit boards.

There are many other good arguments supporting Aquarius' association with technology: Mercury's triplicity rulership of all air signs, casting a technological flair over all air signs; the changeover between Mercury when technology is innovated and produced to Saturn where it is systematized, controlled, and deployed at scale; Saturn as dire straits, survival, and the long-term trajectory of what technology is concerned with for civilization at scale as it spends 30 years transiting the zodiac while Mercury spends roughly one.

It seems we have a problem as a community: we're bad at astrology. Missing fundamentals, confused thinking, confirmation bias, attribution errors, and a ream of cognitive and social biases make us fucking terrible astrologers as a whole, and extraordinarily annoying. The loudest voices seem to know the least, chasing notification dopamine hits or trying to attract someone else who loves to argue to their client intake form. Unfortunately, it seems like we're not any better than the average community when it comes to the Dunning-Kruger effect. We're worse.

As an incendiary cherry on top, some of the most precocious pre-Saturn return astrologers somehow devolved into a personal flame war, criticizing each other and talking shit on the public internet in Twitter spaces, getting upset when it got recorded, and proceeding to talk even more shit in another place where their takes would get recorded and stored forever. Part of this included pulling up the personal natal chart of another astrologer and proceeding to criticize and bash their placements, which I consider a significant ethical violation. I didn't watch either of the spaces where this played out; someone sent me the recordings. It seems like many younger astrologers don't understand that the online astrology community is so small that when they fling shit in a public forum where anything and everything will be kept as receipts, their comments will follow them around for literal decades.

Astrology Debates Have No Impact

The worst part of all of it is that the outcomes of debates and discussion are inconsequential and immaterial. They simply don't matter. One person shows up, says that something in astrology does or doesn't mean some thing, another person shows up to disagree and proposes abstract astrological language reasons why not, people pile in on both sides. Discussions splinter. No one has clarified whether they mean modern or traditional rulerships. Every now and then, someone actually shares an example chart, and it is bad. Almost never, someone shares one that is good, and it is ignored. Everyone goes off to their own corners to count their likes and new followers, bond with the people who already agree with them, and soft block new enemies.

The next time a key ingress rolls around, we'll do the whole thing over again, trotting out the same arguments (probably from the same people), and new students get swept up in the discourse, learn that this is how astrological debate happens, and help perpetuate the pattern over again. Astrology truly is the study of cycles.

How did we get here? I think the greatest blame for the state of contemporary astrological discussion (besides shortened character limits and a scarcity mindset problem in areas of the community) is the epistemic culture which has developed over the past century in the astrological world. Epistemic means "of or relating to cognition or knowledge, its scope, or how it is acquired", so our epistemic culture is essentially how we as astrology practitioners and students think about what we know about astrology and what we think astrological knowledge itself is.

The epistemic culture of the ancients was essentially that astrological knowledge--that is, identifying the planets in signs and houses and delineating them and so on--provided a system of visible omen-signs which could provide concrete information about one's current reality both inside and out, as well as the future. This was taken as simple fact, because it was constantly evident. Many traditional astrologers who practice in these traditional methods do a chunky, satisfying sort of reality-predicting-focused astrology: what problems are you having this year, when will you marry, will you have children, and so on.

However, the ongoing revival of traditional astrology techniques and ancient perspectives is relatively new; our practice goes back millennia but broad availability of translated ancient texts have only really occurred within the last two decades. Most astrological practice is centered around modern psychological astrology, which owes its roots to Alan Leo. In 1917, Leo was charged with unlawful fortune telling and died a few weeks later, but not before rewriting hundreds of his astrological texts to "recast the whole system and make it run more along the lines of character reading and less as the assertion of an inevitable destiny", which was completed by his friend, H.S. Greene.

This set the stage for an astrology that was liability-free: it's not destiny, it doesn't predict anything, it's just a system for understanding character through symbolism! This may have prepared astrology to move with culture in a more palatable form, but the strands of real nuts-and-bolts astrological practice had been fraying up to that point under an increasingly secular culture with the rise of mass industrialization and material sciences. The rest of the 20th century would see the core fundamentals of traditional, predictive astrology discarded for wholly subjective, internal, "it's just an interpretive language" astrology which frequently claimed it was both impossible to predict anything and unethical to perform predictions (which are, of course, impossible). The inevitable outcome you see today is the daily "horoscope": singular paragraphs in newspapers and blogspam written by non-astrologers that say everything and nothing to anyone who reads any of them.

This isn't to say modern astrology doesn't have things going for it. It can be very powerful, and there is a lot of nuance and depth behind the deepest thinkers (including Carl Jung whose explicitly astrology-influenced work informs much of modern archetypal thinking in philosophy and occult practice in general), and some practitioners do perform prediction. But on the broad whole, psychological astrology defers to the individual's interpretation of their own psyche, not tangible, material, external realities. No one can tell you what your own experience is, and if the chart only reflects that, you are the final arbiter of what anything in astrology means, for you.

Our epistemic culture now broadly appears to be such that evidence doesn't really matter, and the abstract world of debate and pushing words around on a plate is totally fine. It doesn't matter, right? After all, you can't really check any of this, and who wants to do the onerous work of proving one's assertions? It's just a language, after all--it's totally open to interpretation, except of course when we're arguing that certain interpretations are wrong.

But that's not how this shit actually works.

Astrology is Deep and Real

Astrology covers--and has always covered--far more than the inner psychological workings of the mind and soul. It consistently and perpetually points to the themes, actors, and events happening around the individual and in the world at large. Natal astrology shows the character, purpose, disposition, and health indications of a person. It also shows their parents, both as a family unit and as individuals, siblings, pets, the local environment, habits, wealth and resources, friends, romances and children, career and religious tendencies. With predictive techniques, you can lay out a map of someone's entire life, showing precise indications for both timing and what happens. Mundane astrology uses the birth charts of countries or of quarters of years for the entire world, dividing the houses and planets into relevant players and concepts: workers, heads of state, churches, industry, other countries, assets, military forces, and so on.

Horary astrology is the art of answering questions by casting a chart for the moment the astrologer receives the question such as "Where is my cat?" or "Will I get the job?" or "Does Sarah love me?" Identifying the correct signifiers of the key people in the situation is of utmost importance and makes the difference between a wrong or right one. (My friend @taalumot who provides professional horary services publishes any results he gets permission to share on his website with the full process and writeup. Each post is an excellent demonstration of how this works and how much it matters.) Horary is a form of astrology that is much closer to pure divination than anything else, yet as a system it refers to concrete, real-world objects, people, and concerns. Charts cast for omens or waking up from dreams will correctly describe the elements in the experience and their relationship correlated by their signifiers' interactions in the chart. Even in the realm of the psychological, intuitive, and interpretive, astrological charts still correctly refer to experiences in an orderly and consistently interpretable way. (A must-read on this topic in general: The Moment of Astrology by Geoffrey Cornelius.)

An expert astrologer can extract a mind-boggling amount of verifiably accurate information about anything which has a birth time and place. The implication, then, is that when you say something about how astrology works, you are saying something about reality. And those things you are saying can actually be verified. This means that talking about astrology without evidence is exactly as convincing or productive as talking about politics or economics or philosophy without grounding in something tangible that demonstrates the correlation.

On top of this, astrology is wildly complex. It can, and does, encapsulate literally all of reality and experience because it is a complete sign-system arising from a deep mystery, presenting overwhelming implications about the nature of reality and existence itself. To deal with this complexity are many techniques, such as bounds (the five uneven divisions of each sign belonging to the non-luminary planets), the decans (the three 10° divisions of each sign telling the narrative and mythical arc of the sign), the 12th parts (the 12-fold division of each sign into another whole zodiac), lots (invisible planet-derived points which talk about the material realization of different planets), and these are just traditional fundamentals, nevermind the vast amount of techniques and contemporary practice.

Perhaps we should give a little grace to interpretations and ideas we don't personally understand before saying things like we'll never understand a certain way of thinking? Unless, of course, you prefer a crow-exclusive diet.

What We Say Has Impact, for Better and Worse

Whether or not they realize it, any astrologer with a modest online platform can have a significant influence. The things that we say and how we say them affects our peers, students, and potential clients. I often wonder how many clients we're all losing collectively when astrotwitter erupts in a conflagration of half-baked takes and shit hurling. The best possible outcome here is that the astrologers who do engage in this activity attract clients who conduct themselves the way the astrologers do.

Of course, the things we say can also be legitimately damaging, because astrology is real and the things we are discussing are real. If an esteemed astrologer communicates in a way that is reductive and totalizing, it has the side effect of telling real astrology enthusiasts without better knowledge about themselves and their charts. I can't tell you how many times I've heard of clients and enthusiasts who felt shamed about their placements or afraid to get readings because of actual astrologers bashing certain signs or planets--obviously, only because of their personal biases and lopsided perspective.

Our behavior affects real people who don't know any better, and it makes us look bad. I originally came to astrology from a skeptical, materialist background as a software developer and architect. I couldn't understand why astrology isn't taken seriously in the mainstream, when good astrological practice so clearly demonstrates its own efficacy. Of course, now I realize why: first, because astrology requires years of practice to become even moderately proficient at. Secondly, because as a whole, our community is rather difficult to take seriously.

Doing better is simple, but not necessarily easy. It's not wholly our fault: social media has very knowingly designed app algorithms to reward poor behavior which drives attention and engagement, and ultimately, ad revenue. Deeply-ingrained habits formed on years of scrolling are hard to change. However, there are real people on the other side of the algorithm, and the silent majority is very large. The only move that keeps us united as a community and worthy of respect as an art form is to demonstrate the wisdom and perspective which astrology so desperately requires from us. The culture is against us: we have to build our own new ones.

Instead of using hyperbolic language and dying on every hill one thinks will get the most likes, is there a way to say something as thoughtful speculation rather than handing down law? Could it be posed as an interesting question rather than a domineering answer nobody asked for? (A simple life hack: prefix “In my opinion” or “I think” or “is it possible” to that hot take.)

I recommend simply asking yourself if you actually *know* what you're claiming. Have you worked more than a single chart, looked for examples that invalidate your own thinking, thoroughly tested an idea for the days or months or years some techniques demand? Would you bet money on it? Would you bet a client's important life decision on it?

I have seen many astrological careers go up in smoke due to burnout or scene infighting. If we can't solve the basic problem of interacting with our fellow human astrologers without pissing them off, we won't last long as practitioners, let alone a community.