Astrology Debunkers Debunked: Part One
“Astrophysicist Debunks Horoscopes with Basic Astronomy”
I value skepticism. I think it’s healthy. I also believe it’s part of a broader suite of principles that embody epistemic humility as a whole. But there are certainly times when genuine skepticism devolves into snide, mean-spirited critique. And, unfortunately, I found several examples of this devolution while watching astrology debunker videos on YouTube.
My heart was in the right place – I honestly wanted to see what some of the better arguments against astrology were, just so I had as nuanced a view of the art/science as possible. But what I most often found were posts by people whose smug, positivistic arrogance almost made me feel sorry for them. That they live in such a mechanistic and disenchanted cosmos – a random mess of “stuff” devoid of purpose and meaning – is actually quite sad.
Anyway, this will be my first installment of “Debunking the Debunkers,” and for this post we’ll be addressing a video entitled “Astrophysicist Debunks Horoscopes with Basic Astronomy.” Let’s start by watching the video first, and then we’ll address some of the salient points…
First of all, happy birthday to her and congratulations on her new book. That’s very nice. In celebration, she decides to look up her horoscope for the month (May, 2019). Apparently, her natal Sun is in Taurus which, as any astrologer will tell you, doesn’t give us much to go on. She, correctly I think, has a pretty scathing critique for how vague and arbitrary Sun sign astrology can be. This is the type of fare one finds in tabloids and women’s magazines and is the laziest form of astrology imaginable. Of course you can’t sort humanity into twelve personality types. I don’t know one astrologer who believes that.
Anyway, she goes on to read her horoscope from Elle Magazine for the month of May which, ironically, is pretty accurate considering she (Sun in Taurus) just wrote (chances are Mercury, the scribe, was also being transited by Uranus around this time, since he is always within 28 degrees at his very furthest elongation) a book about Space (Uranus/Ouranos/Urania, transiting her Sun) and how her “entire life and identity” (natal Sun) are being revolutionized (again, Uranus). It doesn’t really help her argument to pick reasonably accurate delineations. But she still goes on to say that it’s ridiculous to consider that a planet in the solar system could have any effect on her (apparently, she is the only human being unaffected by the Sun and Moon).
She reads another tabloid-style horoscope (admittedly, trash) which mentions Venus transiting Taurus that May and some vague delineation about the love lives of those with a Taurian Sun. But before addressing that, she critiques the very notion of constellations themselves, reminding us that the celestial sphere is not a flat, two-dimensional plane and that the individual stars of a constellation are, in fact, very far apart in depth – thus making the idea of a constellation quite arbitrary. For being an astrophysicist – a fact of which she repeatedly reminds us – I would have expected her to bring up the phenomenon of stellar parallax at this point, but she doesn’t. Maybe she thinks we’re too dumb to grasp the concept?
Besides, NASA and the IAU recognize 88 constellations which, I think, include those 48 that were catalogued by Ptolemy (an astrologer), two millennia ago. So, yeah, what’s her point again?
She then finally moves on to the idea of Venus’ rulership of Taurus. She doesn’t know this, but the doctrine of essential dignity in domicile (as well as that of aspects) is based on a Hellenistic astrological cosmological model called the Thema Mundi. I don’t want to unpack that right now but, suffice it to say that this doctrine precedes the positivistic extraction of astronomy from astrology by something like 1,800 years, so she’s just as much debunking astronomy as astrology, at least in the historical context.
The Thema Mundi
Next up is a sequence in her video she titled “Planets don’t have Personalities.” She asks, “[…] who decided that Saturn was a solemn planet? Because it definitely wasn’t Greek or Roman mythology because Saturn was the god of, like, wealth and prosperity and agriculture and time, I think, as well.” She has apparently yet to unpack the multivalence of the Saturnian archetype here, all the way back through Cronus and Ninurta, which actually supports the astrological delineation of Saturn quite nicely. She says she dug into the astrological “literature” (those are her obnoxious air quotes) and found little agreement as to the delineations or characteristics of planets, which is nonsense because they’ve changed remarkably little over the past two millennia. Even in Homeric and Orphic poems and myth, we find tales of Saturn-Cronus’ malefic qualities, such as cannibalism, infanticide, imprisonment/confinement (e.g., Tartarus and the Cave of Nyx), castration (on both the giving and receiving end) and his ancient conflation with Kronos/Chronos (Father Time, essentially – the old man with the scythe). Saturn’s astrological delineations are also reinforced by his association with alchemical lead (the “heaviness” to which she alluded) as well as his being the slowest orbit among the ancient planets, observable by the unaided eye.
So, yeah, the planetary archetypes commonly used in astrology (ancient and modern) are actually quite developed, specific and consistent over a very protracted period. (Strangely, in this section she references an article from MSN and has to qualify it by saying, “You’re better than this, MSN,” as if they are the arbiters of positivistic science and her Holy Secularism.)
The next section is on retrograde motion. She explains, fairly well, how we experience the illusion of retrograde motion (at least for the superior planets – those concentrically outside of the Earth’s orbit – but stumbles on how this might happen in the case of inferior planets, which it of course does, hence “Mercury retrograde” seasons – the bane of transportation and communication in astrological delineation) from our perspective on the surface of the Earth – a relatively simple concept. Then she says she doesn’t understand why astrologers generally delineate this as something vaguely “bad.” To be honest, I can’t really defend astrology’s delineation of retrograde motion other than by saying that it is an ancient “accidental debility.” (But I don’t do reversals in Tarot either, so…)
Her next argument is that chart delineation is inconsistent while simultaneously saying that all of the Taurus Sun sign horoscopes she pulled up mentioned the New Moon on May 4th which, to me, sounds pretty consistent. She reads a few and scoffs at how differently each astrologer interpreted the New Moon in this placement. Fair enough, but she’s missing a very crucial point:
Astrology is both a science and an art.
Astrology is a science because it contains all of astronomy – it is the mother of astronomy. If you don’t believe astrology is a science, then try erecting a chart from scratch. You will encounter spherical geometry and trigonometry and all kinds of science-y operations, I assure you. There’s a reason astrologers were called “mathematici.” Astrology is also an art because it involves interpretation and creativity – but so does medicine, right? Is medicine a pseudoscience?
al-Biruni’s lunar phases, 10th century
And here’s where she really states her position: she says, “[…] the movements of the planets [have] nothing to do with humans on Earth.”
This is the height of hubris.
She is so confident that the cosmos is devoid of any inherent meaning and that she is the sole locus of meaning, purpose and consciousness in the known universe. It’s not a gigantic leap of faith to consider that we are in a sympathetic or resonant relationship with our surroundings. It is not inconceivable that the microcosm and the macrocosm are in a constant dialog which renders both transformed in some way. We know this from epigenetics: the organism and its ecology communicate with and transform each other. Why, as an astrophysicist, does she assume that the terrestrial and celestial spheres are unconnected when the entirety of her science partakes of that very dynamic?
What am I missing here?
Next, she starts to use actually pretty fascistic and authoritarian language, saying that people aren’t knowledgeable enough to make their own decisions on whether to believe their horoscope or not. The implication, of course, is that the monitoring and dissemination of approved content should be meted out by some benevolent third party. Good luck with that noise. She also says the whole situation is “damaging, first of all, to science because people don’t know the difference between [astrology] and actual science.” She says astrology “needs to stop” and that “we should petition for major publications that still publish these horoscopes.”
This is just crazy talk. Actual “Thought Police” stuff.
The last section of her video deals with what she calls “cracks in astrology’s foundation,” and she thinks these are “hilarious” all of a sudden (they were dangerously subversive ideas just a couple minutes ago, weren’t they?). She begins by saying that astrological theory is “reliant on a person being a specific star sign,” which is absolutely false. That is a relatively modern and dumb idea that comes from Linda Goodman and her ilk, and propagated by myriad hippies, new agers and flakes who all but ruined the astrological tradition in the 20th century through their oversimplification of the art/science.
NO ONE IS A ZODIACAL SIGN. If anything, we are all the planets (compartmentalized aspects of the psyche, if you prefer the psychological model), which are zodiacally conditioned by signs and find themselves in houses, which are the arenas of action, or experiential domains in which the zodiacally-conditioned planetary energies manifest. Furthermore, these planets, or archetypal concentrations, are aspected (in geometrical relationships on the ecliptic) with one another, forming patterns of consonance and dissonance, just like chords in music – because they form chords of a circle.
Lastly, she evokes every astrology debunker’s favorite argument: axial precession. Due to this phenomenon, the fixed stars no longer align with the equinoctial point (“the first point of Aries,” which NASA uses as its celestial prime meridian from which the zero-hour right ascension is established). We’ve known about this phenomenon since at least the 2nd century BCE, in the work of Hipparchus of Rhodes. It basically means that the Sun is not actually rising in the sign that Western Astrology would indicate. And this is true. Due to axial precession, the zodiac and the actual constellations are off by something like 24 degrees. BUT ASTROLOGERS KNOW THIS. This is why some astrologers, like the Vedic and Jyotish, use the sidereal zodiac, which corrects for precession – but does not account for the seasons (and don’t forget that all forms of Indian astrology – except the relatively underdeveloped omenic tradition of nakshatras, or lunar mansions – stem from the relatively late introduction of Hellenistic/horoscopic astrology, in the form of the Yavanajataka, which literally means “Greek natal astrology”). Western astrology, however, is tropical, meaning it uses fixed solstitial and tropical coordinates on the ecliptic. It accords with the Empedoclean elements and the seasons. It is the same reason we call the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn by their zodiacal names and don’t bother switching them to the Tropics of Leo and Aquarius. That would be silly and it wouldn’t align with the preceding two millennia of symbolism and mythology. Western astrology’s elements (triplicities) and modalities (quadriplicities) are based on a fixed equinoctial point in Aries, just like NASA’s zero-hour right ascension. The signs are symbolic and they denote areas of spacetime that zodiacally condition archetypal planetary concentrations.
In the end, we can see that the poster of this video actually knows very little of astrology – only that which she stumbles across in the pages of Elle Magazine or on some MSN news app on her phone. That sort of research does not qualify as “scientific method” in my estimation.
It, in fact, reminds me of a quote from William Paley…