I suppose you could say this is kind of a sequel to my past article “Top 10 Problems Astrologers Have That Are Just the Worst”. People have asked me why my articles tend to skew towards the negative and profane. And the answer is, because it’s funny. Though the more I thought about it, being an astrologer isn’t all bad. And with some of the worst transits of people’s lifetimes going on right now, we need to find the things that we can be grateful for. So here is an arbitrarily quantified list of 10 reasons why being an astrologer is the tits. Or in my case, the moobs.
10. You Know What You Look Like Naked
Astrologers are one of the few groups of people who upon first meeting each other, exchange nudes. And by nudes, I mean the nudes of one’s life and soul, the natal chart. When you first start learning astrology, you usually start by looking at yourself naked, by examining your own chart. My friend Nick Dagan Best has called this the navel-gazing period. And boy can it get linty if you stay there too long.
One of the upsides though is it prompts you to reflect on yourself in a way that you might not otherwise. This is productive if in the course of reading your own chart, you are forced to acknowledge your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Hubris is not a good look, and being honest with yourself about the less pleasant parts of yourself is humbling. And humility is not a bad place to start when attempting to be a less terrible person. Even if astrology was total junk, that it can facilitate such sincere self-reflection to help understand yourself better is not altogether a bad thing.
9. You’re Less of an Ass Toward Others
After finally emerging linty-faced from your own navel, it’s hard not to be more sympathetic towards others. Each person was born at a unique time and place, with their own strengths and weaknesses, their victories and struggles. You tend to judge people less and try to understand them more. You discover that people mostly want the same things, but you also appreciate their differences and unique features. People usually don’t come to you for your services because everything is going fine. You’re not so full of yourself. For astrologers, truly listening to the concerns of others and practicing compassion is part of the deal. And hey, it’s harder to forget birthdays.
8. You’re Less Boring
Even if you are the most boring sack of potatoes anyone has ever had the misfortune of meeting, you are instantly a little less boring once they find out you’re an astrologer. Not a lot, but a little. You go from invisible schmuck to bemusing oddity. From sack of potatoes to plate of very average fries. Panties and boxerbriefs aren’t dropping at the sound of the a-word is what I’m saying.
Of course it can be a little annoying when people want to ask you all kinds of questions you probably can’t give a detailed or satisfactory answer to at that specific moment, but you won’t be boring. Even if they are total skeptics of astrology, they may be rolling their eyes at you and judging you to be weak-minded, but they probably wouldn’t describe you as boring. Let’s be honest. Would skeptic conferences be even half as fun without people like us to rag on? No, so, you’re adding something to the world.
7. You Understand Obscure Idioms and Etymology
- “Thank my lucky stars”
- “Their star is rising”
- “The stars aligned”
- “written in the stars”
- “star-crossed lovers”
- “loony”, “lunatic”, “lunacy”
- “mercurial”
- “venereal”
- “martial”
- “jovial”
- “saturnine”
Every so often, you’ll hear a turn of phrase or hear a word and you get to have the pleasure of knowing the person who used it has no idea they’re actually making quasi-astrological references. Even the days of the week have etymological origins with the planets. Everyone’s favorite day of the week (Friday) is the one ruled by Venus, and you just have to chuckle at that.
6. You’re Better Than Tinder
Now, I’m a super boring squeaky clean ultra-vanilla faithfully married father, so I wouldn’t use this knowledge for myself. However in theory, getting an astrologer to determine periods when your chart supports the topic of relationships might at least save you time swiping left to oblivion. There are statistically better times of the day, week, month and year to use dating sites anyway, so what’s another variable like transits to and from Venus/ruler of your 7th in the grand scheme of things? Why skulk through the muck of Plenty Of Fish if you know you’re in a terrible period on your Zodiacal Releasing from the Lot of Eros to begin with? Should you bother with Craigslist’s Missed Connections with Saturn on your Venus? But maybe that’s why you’re there in the first place with a transit like that…
5. You Actually Like, Appreciate History
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”, said Mark Twain, allegedly. Before you study astrology, history can seem old, stuffy, dusty and irrelevant. After you begin studying astrology, history becomes vitally important, living and breathing in the present. The planets at any given time coincide with events and themes from previous iterations, which reappear in continually surprising and inspiring ways in the present. You see how global and national histories have played out against major outer-planetary alignments, and it directly connects you to the ongoing drama of humanity from the distant past and into the far-off future. You appreciate the well-researched documentary and biography, because it becomes so satisfying to see how what actually happened matched the descriptions of transits. It’s almost frustrating to read historians talk about the cyclical nature of history when they are so close and yet so far from its “cause”. It’s like, okay guys, you discovered the Uranus cycle’s coincidences with generational revolutions, big whoop!
4. You Ask Yourself Super Deep Questions And Actually Have To Think About Them
Astrology is a gateway drug to philosophy. Fundamental questions about our existence suddenly become very important on a personal and practical level for an astrologer, in a way that they are not for most people. Do we have free will or is everything fated? Your perspective on that is going to change how you present information to a client. How do we know what we know? Is there a God? Did Taylor Swift approve Kanye’s lyric about her or not? Y’know, the biggies.
If it were not for astrology, and encountering skeptical arguments about astrology, I would not have learned about the demarcation problem, empiricism versus rationalism, Aristotle’s four causes, Plato’s theory of forms and various epistemological issues and biases which threaten to undermine the validity of observations of astrological correlations. I know this all sounds dry and boring, but understanding and grappling with these ideas is vital to understanding why astrology is worth anyone’s time in a society that is increasingly polarized between an excessively reductionist materialism-empiricism which dismisses everything that doesn’t fit in its own paradigm and an aggressively stupid anti-intellectualism which dismisses everything that does.
3. You Get The Cosmos’ Inside Jokes
The idea of an acausal synchrony between one’s inner state and external environment, (or indeed, as above so below), must sound like insane squishy New Age bullshit to smart people with materialist/empiricist outlooks. But it’s easy to ignore how important squishiness is to all of us. The feeling that our lives are meaningful and purposeful is important to our overall happiness. That’s Aristotle’s final cause, which scientism awkwardly attempts to fulfill while otherwise insisting there is none.
The only way out of this confusion is to truly embrace nihilism or compartmentalize. “It’s the meaning you make for yourself”, they say, an unwitting admission that one’s subjective inner world still longs for and recognizes some form of transcendental meaning and purpose. The meaning for yourself might not be objective or scientific, but personally important nonetheless. One may notice the weird patterns and personally meaningful coincidences, but ultimately they’re shrugged off. One might see how life is strangely ironic and poetic at times, but swat away at the idea that there might actually be a poem, or even a poet.
What if these privately held intimations are not all bullshit? What if this subjective/objective-inner/outer divide exists in a broader shared reality? Where does the “in here” end and the “out there” begin? Ironically, quantum physics tells us that the observer affects the experiment. It’s not some kind of magic, it simply means on some levels we are not completely separate and independent from our environments. We might just live in a world that is both knowable and mysterious, material and transcendent, mechanistic and meaningful. A world that is not indifferent but responsive, a world of causes and signs.
When you entertain this possibility, the world opens up. You don’t dismiss critical thought or accept anything that happens as symbolic and significant, you just know the difference. The natural world follows laws, but it also has a character. Sometimes it gives you a wink and a nod, other times it hits you in the face. Astrology seems to be a preferred language of this invisible consciousness, this anima mundi. It’s the Pokemon Go of internet fan theorists, the ultimate easter egg hunt for the story behind the story, the unseen connecting threads and curious timing which scream purpose while eluding a conventional explanation.
2. You Get A Free Existential Snuggie
Astrology is not a religion even though they both deal with teleological questions. It has its own perspective which can exist in many different cultural, philosophical and religious contexts. It’s not something that is at the forefront of my mind, but the spiritual implications of astrology are yuge, yuuuuuge. What does it mean for us, if our lives are actually mapped out? What does it mean for us if there is a cosmic sympathy for our plight on earth? This may not be the same for everyone, but for me it’s comforting knowing that there is something out there which is somewhat invested in what happens down here, and that there’s order, purpose and meaning, even if it doesn’t turn out in my favor. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Cough.
We’re better able to deal with bad things because to some degree, they’re expected. We’re able to stay tempered during good times because we expect they’re temporary. All transits pass. We can have an idea of where we should be headed because we can see how humanity has handled similar transits previously. This knowledge gives us the mission for our time here, a sense of our place in the ongoing unfolding human drama, and this makes life so worth it. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Also grant me tacos, I seriously need a good taco right about now. Kthx.
1. You’re Not The Only Freak Out There
Being an astrologer can feel a bit lonely and isolating at times. After all, our work is largely shunned or ignored by most sectors of society, even those with a casual interest in their horoscope. At best, you’re seen as dumb and naiive, at worst, you’re seen as the devil or amount to some anti-science creationist type. And hey, none of that is true, but that’s fine. It makes you that much more grateful for all your connections with other astrologers online and offline. I can’t tell you every detail of everything I’ve learned at a conference. What I do remember are all the fantastic conversations and great laughs had with other astrologers, who are some of the most friendly and funny people I’ve ever known.
The astrological community has your back. Time and again, I’ve seen the astrological community pitch in for one another when we’re ill, celebrate each other’s successes, come together to mourn a lost one and support those they left behind. I know this from personal experience. Last Christmas Eve, my house was broken into and hundreds of dollars worth of stuff was stolen, including a brand new laptop my wife had gotten as a gift for me. The astrological community banded together and generously covered the expenses. I was floored.
And that’s why being an astrologer is the tits. Or in my case, the moobs. If you look up at the night sky, and you don’t just see stars and planets but a reflection that is mysteriously meaningful, we can get each other. We’re family. Not in a hillbilly/Manson/Lannister sense, but family nonetheless.
Mಠ_ಠbs.
Patrick, Thought provoking as usual. I will be re-reading this again. A lot of insights in your blog.
Thanks!