35 Years Later, I Finally Get Astrology

Howdy, y’all. Mak here.

I was in the third grade at St. Joseph’s Catholic School when I did my first psychological experiment for the science fair. My research question was, “Is astrology true?”

                              That’s me on the far left, being very skeptical.

Ignorant that I might not be the first scientist to investigate this question, I dug in hard. I knew I better be really thorough if I was going to get to the bottom of this thing. I got my hands on the books, learned the history, practiced creating charts, read the testimonials of true believers, and taped interviews on one of those sick Panasonic cassette recorders from the eighties.

10 experimental subjects. I read each of them their horoscope (the legit ones from the newspaper, so I knew it was quality), and I asked them to give their honest feedback on how it resonated. 5 of them got their real horoscope and 5 got someone else’s. After collecting the data, running my “analysis,” and chewing on the results for a few days, I concluded that astrology was, with great scientific certainty, a crock of shit.

Of course, years later, I realized I wasn’t alone in my findings.

In 1985, Shawn Carlson published a rigorous double-blind study in Nature (a highly prestigious scientific journal) that put professional astrologers to the test.

They were given real birth data and asked to match people with their correct profiles. The success rate was basically a coin toss: zero predictive capability.

So yes, my third grade experiment had basically been replicated, peer-reviewed, and published in Nature. By a nuclear physicist. No big deal.

Irony

I mean, how daft do you have to be to believe that some twinkly lights in the sky were controlling your destiny, am I right?

…said the devout alter boy who nearly fell to his knees and wept every time he saw Christ on the cross.

What I was too green to get was that my own deep devotion to the Heavenly Father and the tragic sacrifice of his son, Jesus, was also borne out of the dramatic storytelling that gripped me at the mythological level. The emotionality, the theater, and the grandiosity of the whole Catholic system was intoxicating. Belief is like a drug. And the only thing that weaned me off was a long process cycling through gradually less and less toxic belief systems. Going cold turkey would have been too destabilizing.

Ok, fine, I get it.

What eventually had me come around to “getting” astrology’s appeal was a study of Jungian archetypes.

I used to hard-reject Jung and Freud and the other early psychology mystics. They were too abstract, too symbolic, too unscientific. I could virtually smell the patchouli emanating from the text book.

Psychology was supposed to be about understanding the human mind and our place in the world. How you gonna do that with weird mystical abstractions??

Emotions and myth and drama are for experiencing life, sure. Not for understanding it.

But when I get out of my own way (which is hard to do!) I gotta admit… they were on to something.

When I experience a some difficult transition in my own life, my mind has a tendency to relate to that struggle as if I were living some epic, mythical drama. Everything is symbolic. The mundane feels monumental. And when trying to make sense of my life, engaging with my inner world on its own terms often moves the needle much more than rational understanding can.

Practitioners of “parts work” have different sets of cards a lot like the ones used in tarot.

There is no inherent meaning in any of them. The cards are simply a reflection of what’s already there. You pull one and watch your own internal theater come to life. There is no sage to explain anything for you, no cosmic code to be deciphered, no false hope to comfort you.

And I love it. That’s actually hard for me to commit to writing after so many years of being a hater.

I still love that pouty nerd who was trying to debunk all the bullshit and figure out what was real. But, one thing somebody could have told him is that mythology as a tool for exploration (rather than for divination) can be a beautiful thing.

But I still fucking hate Charlatans (I had to say it!)

-mak

Further Reading:

In 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer conducted one of the most famous psychological experiments ever. He gave a group of students their personal horoscope from the newspaper. Each student evaluated how accurate it was. The average score was 4.26 out of 5. Astoundingly accurate!

However! Every student received the exact same description. We have a tendency to agree with vaguely flattering assessments of who we are. That’s the Forer Effect (aka Barnum Effect).

Use Anna’s Archive to access research articles for free. Learn how HERE.

References:

Carlson, Shawn (1985). "A double-blind test of astrology"(PDF). Nature. 318 (6045): 419–425.