Peddling Fear

Originally this post was a bad-tempered rant, but it sat in draft form for 24 hours, giving me time to reconsider a few hard words I'd written about a well-known astrologer and his predictions for next year. I've toned it down.

In my view, astrologers ought be above scaring the s..t out of their readers. How on earth can it be useful, or ethical, to present doomy predictions based on what is, after all, an imperfect tool: astrology. Astrology is imperfect, especially for the purposes of prediction. If a passing reader can name any exact predictions of world or national events from the past which proved accurate, I'll be happy to eat my words.

The best that astrologers can honestly aim for is a vague forecast of what the general atmosphere of any given period of time might be, based on cycles; based on the passage of time, marked by the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets. Their movements track time in the way the hands on a clock track time. I'm beginning to suspect that the planets themselves, like the hands on a clock, are not "it". Time and its unknown properties, waves and cycles are "it", with the movement of the planets being our only available reference points.

Perhaps the next few years will bring us to an important point in time cycles, to the crest or trough of a "wave" of sorts, when events will prove, with hindsight, to have been highly significant. Details beyond that, presented by astrologers or anyone else, are guesses at best, and to my mind ought to be labelled as such. Assumptions as to whether events will prove negative or positive in effect cannot possibly known with any certainty. Comparing what happened "the last time" such and such a planetary formation occurred seems to me to be unhelpful. We are now part of a different cycle on the spiral of time. Things are different in every conceivable way from how they were "then" - whichever "then" is chosen.

I believe that astrology needs to be kept alive, pending a time when science, physics, and human knowledge catch up, and help to clarify the shadowy traditions bequeathed to us by astrologers of centuries past. I have a feeling this will happen. One day an unsuspecting physicist will utter those words..."That's funny!"

Astrology needs to be kept alive, but not by fear and pessimism - by love. Fear is a virus, it spreads and mutates, and unhealthily infects the collective mindset. Astrologers ought to keep this in mind.