A horoscope looms over a month like an arch, providing a shelter of prophecy and suggestion. Months further in the future, free from the shade of projection, are blindingly bright, uncomfortably open to improvisation. Kyra, who was once ordained by the stars to move seven states west, dressed every moment in divine advice. We met working at American Apparel, a sterile, blue-lit building where we clocked in to sell hot pants, invent new names for nail polish like Cinnamon Rust, and talk about celestial system rulings. When seeking consolation from constellations, Kyra never fails to find her fate written in the opaque light of the stars: a likely promotion, difficulties with self-expression, expected periods of creative genius. As long as the results soothed uncertainties, the complex mechanisms underlying these astrological omens could remain obscure. Weekly she receives Rob Brenzy’s astrology newsletter, an eclectic compendium of seize-control-of-your-destiny horoscopes complete with spiritual memes and extra offers (a life-affirming $7 audio reading: uncover secrets you’ve been concealing from yourself.) She forwards me the Sagittarius horoscopes, encouraging forecasts featuring dragons, the Catholic saint Margaret of Antioch who was swallowed whole by Satan, Prometheus, and humpback whales. I always respond enthusiastically, leading her to believe that astrology mentors me too. She once recommended I see her new psychic astrologer, a woman in a velvet headscarf, working from a touristy trapeze show spaghetti restaurant, who predicted one summer that I would fall madly in love before the end of a spectacular month. A dull July passed with no new love. I renewed my license. My dog died.
Adorno, on a return visit to LA in the 1950s, scrutinized the Los Angeles Times horoscope column, critiquing it as an irrational social phenomenon aimed at making an individual function better according to rules of conformity. In ‘Stars Down to Earth’ he calls astrology a pseudo-rational ‘pre-digested dream’ with a soothing overtone that creates an atmosphere of social contentment. In Adorno’s gloomy view, institutionalized astrology exists as a symptom of modern living which he has diagnosed as sick with unrelenting bureaucratic management.
Astrology is a sticky system with remote and impersonal sources, making it distinct from theology, though it can often be treated as a religion. Questions and speculation filter through such systems, resulting in solutions thick with eschatological hope and planetary optimism that require individuals to find fault with themselves rather than given social conditions. Third house moon hurdles, not capitalist precarity. Through spiritual faith and celestial fixations, one is granted the power to direct one’s own life and improve its path, as long as the route moves within the confines of inevitability.
Stellar adjustment leads to enlightenment for those open to oracles. Others prefer wandering through the wilderness without a route, even if a lifted glimpse might allow them to navigate from accident towards alignment. Favors can be found in eternity which are often hidden by conclusion. Alarm bells shake the air with their ringing, waking worries that are funneled through an imperative to improve. Fear of endings matches this desire for improvement. One can escape the ubiquity of enhancement in daily life only by living like a rabbit in a hole. In such a context, is astrology a form of regulation, liberation, or both?
Kyra tells me to relax and trust that I’m being guided. With that trust, I will slowly become more sensitive to synchronicities. She offers me a piece of Jungian thought: everything belongs. Don’t be so addicted to control that you’re left in the back seat of a window-tinted van, waiting for some arrival. I should roll down the window and watch the landscape pass as we endlessly ride west. One passenger reads an orphic hymn to the stars (incense-aromatic herbs), and everyone in the van (six strangers) swallows four drops of burdock tincture prepared on Jupiter Thursday. Kyra is squeezing my hand now. An interior-facing sticker on the van’s front windshield quotes Hermes Trismegistus: as above, so below; as below, so above. Time is a circle. “Capricorn Woman” is playing on the cracking stereo: I get into moods. We turn left on every fourth fork, a puppet van gently pulled along by strings attached to the stars. Kyra sits across from me with wild hair, ruby earrings, and a soft, petroleum jelly smile, her gaze fixed out the window at an ominous gray cloud slowly rising on the horizon, sending smoke signals to infinity.
