Astrology in the Age of Uncertainty
Astrology in the Age of Uncertainty
I met Nicholas, who is in her forties, in July, when she was visiting Brooklyn from Los Angeles. She had arranged for a private tour of the exhibition “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art Fifty Years After Stonewall,” at the Brooklyn Museum, with her friend Tourmaline, who had short films in the show, and two of the exhibit’s curators. While the curators talked, footage of the transgender activist Sylvia Rivera flashed on a video screen. Nicholas pulled up Rivera’s chart. At the moment of Rivera’s birth, the sun—which, Nicholas said, represents the essential self—was at the same degree as Uranus, the planet of disruption, which, she said, will “tear this whole thing down.” But all this, Nicholas went on, was happening in the sign of Cancer, which signifies home and nurturing. “How do we care for people radically?” she asked, explaining how the chart was relevant.“It’s such a nice day. Just let him walk the bases.”Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian BoothbyNicholas has a million online readers. She now rarely books private chart readings, because the demand was overwhelming. Her business is based on selling downloadable workshops, and she curates free monthly Spotify playlists for each sign. In January, she will publish her first book, “You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance.” Back in 2012, Nicholas was one of the organizers of the first Queer Astrology Conference. “When you queer something, you try to see it outside cultural norms,” she said. She uses astrology to talk not just about sexuality and gender but also about race, class, and climate.Nicholas believes that astrology appeals because it gives “context” to people and to world events. Like religion, it says that there is something beyond material existence, but it doesn’t teach dogma, or prescribe action. Many astrologers I interviewed expressed concern that astrology can be misused to generate fear or to extort, but mostly, Nicholas said, it’s a way of “framing the thing we’re in.” As humans, she said, “we need rhythm. We need ritual. We need timing.”“I absolutely love astrology,” Alex Dimitrov said. “But it’s a gateway drug to the real magic, which is poetry.”On a Friday night in July, I had dinner at the Odeon, in Tribeca, with Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky, who run the Twitter account Astro Poets, which they launched in November of 2016, just after Trump’s election. Ten weeks later, they got some negative feedback because of a joke about yoga, and Lasky called Dimitrov at three in the morning and said that she wanted to delete the account. “I was, like, ‘Excuse me?’ ” Dimitrov remembered. He took a sip of rosé. Dimitrov, who is dark and compact, was wearing fitted jeans and a Def Leppard shirt. “That was Aries behavior,” he said. The feed now has five hundred thousand followers.Dimitrov and Lasky think of the signs formally, as “poetic constraints,” and imagine them interacting like characters in a novel. On their Twitter feed, in addition to the horoscopes, lists, and pop-culture references that populate all astrology social media, they quote poets they admire. The night before, someone had texted Dimitrov a line by Eileen Myles—“It is summer, I love you, I am surrounded by snow”—and he had tweeted it. “Honestly, it’s the Sagittarius mantra,” he said. (Dimitrov, like Myles, is a Sagittarius.)The Astro Poets’ horoscopes employ exquisite images, turning sharply from low to high, from humor to pain or grief. Here’s the horoscope they tweeted about Pisces for the week of August 4th: “A wind is a little reminder. Reminder of what, you ask. The rain. The rain!” Don’t ask them what it means. Lasky, resplendent in sparkling eye makeup and a crocheted necklace, said that the whole point of a poem “is it’s supposed to be your friend, and you’re supposed to commingle with it.” On the first episode of the Astro Poets podcast, which débuted in August, she explained that astrology is also a friend—something that can witness your life and help make sense of it.Still, those who turn to astrology for clarity will be bemused by the Astro Poets. Some of their most passionate readers long for plainer speaking, or at least for someone to put their poetry into prose. “We have these translators,” Lasky said. “There was one translator who was an Aquarius, Mimi—as soon as I would write a tweet, Mimi had an alert and would translate it for people. But Mimi, after a few years, has retired, and everyone is really sad.”A few weeks later, I met the Astro Poets at Enchantments, a store in the East Village, where the poet Alice Notley used to shop. Dimitrov, Lasky, and I picked out herbs and figurines and candles. Then we went to Canal Street to have our aura photographs taken. (Lasky’s and Dimitrov’s auras seemed to match, like two halves of a blue-and-purple rainbow.) The plan was for us to do a “very positive” spell on the Brooklyn Bridge. But it was more than ninety degrees, and we wandered for a long time looking for the pedestrian walkway, and eventually settled on a bench in the shade under the bridge. Lasky lit the candles, and we all silently meditated on our intentions for this article. A pigeon hopped tentatively nearer.One way to cope with uncertainty is to demand certainty. Another is to learn to dwell in uncertainty, to find solace and even beauty in what is, and must be, unknown. Dimitrov and Lasky’s new book is called “Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac,” but for a long time they toyed with putting the word “mystery” or “magic” in the title. “Those ideas are so important to us,” Dimitrov said. As Samuel Reynolds, who began researching astrology in the nineteen-eighties in order to disprove it and is now on the board of the International Society for Astrological Research, told me, “To talk about the planets literally having some measure of effect on you brings up all kinds of questions that I don’t think astrology is prepared to answer.” Instead, Reynolds said, astrology is “symbolic and spiritual”—a literary language whose truth can neither be validated nor invalidated by empirical science.For some people, the complex system itself is a source of pleasure: there’s math involved, rules to master, vocabulary to memorize. For others, it permits a play of interpretation. As the planets transit, they move into different signs, picking up different meanings. In one context, Uranus indicates sudden death; in another, revolutionary energy. There are myriad combinations for storytelling. At the Odeon, Lasky said that when poetry transits—when it moves from meaning to meaning—it doesn’t let go of what came before. She started to explain the Greek root of the word “metaphor” (“to carry across”), when Dimitrov broke in.“It’s about negative capability,” he said. “To endure doubt is ultimately the only thing you can do in life—to not strive for meaning or answers, and to endure the state you’re in.” ♦An earlier version of this piece misstated the title of the Astro Poets’ new book.