So let me begin with what you are right about. The planets do not push on us. No mechanism has been found by which the positions of distant bodies at the moment of a birth could shape a temperament, and careful tests have not found the correlations that prediction would need. The vagueness of most horoscopes is exactly why they seem to fit everyone. Signs sorted by birthday do not sort people. If the question is whether astrology works as prediction, the honest answer is that there is no evidence, and I would rather you heard it from me.
Here is what I am not willing to give up.
I hold my chart the way I hold a poem I love. I know it is a made thing.
The sky itself. Whatever else astrology was, it was the reason most of the human race looked up for most of history. The calendar, the reading of stars for direction, the cycle of eclipses, even precession, discovered because someone noticed that Spica was not where an older record said it should be: the road to modern astronomy runs straight through the observatories of the astrologers. I cannot say the people who watched Spica were mistaken to care about it.
The language. Astrology gave us a vocabulary for time and temperament that is astonishingly rich. We call someone jovial or mercurial or saturnine, we say a plan was ill-starred, we speak of a person’s ascendancy, and mostly we do not know we are quoting. A little of the oldest poetry we have lives in those words.
The ritual. Most of what happens in a reading, I think, is a conversation held on purpose. A person arrives with a hard question. Somebody takes it seriously, for an hour, at a table, with a candle and a pile of symbols that give both of them something to look at besides each other. That is not nothing. People pay therapists for less and pay priests for more, and the structure is not so different.
The pleasure. The sheer geometry delights me: twelve signs, twenty-seven lodgings, nine lights, a hundred and twenty years. That a human mind with no instrument but patience built so elaborate a frame, and kept it in order for two thousand years, is a wonder whether or not the frame holds up a single true prediction.
So I do not believe in my chart the way you believe in your bank statement. I hold it the way I hold a poem I love. I know it is a made thing. I know the poet could not see my life. It still says something to me about what I might notice.
I ask one small thing of you, as a sceptic should. Do not take my word for any of this. Take the evidence, and keep the rest for pleasure. And if you want to see what I mean, go outside after dark, find the Moon, and ask which of the lodgings it is visiting tonight. Then tell me it is nothing.
Yours in doubt.