But “full-fledged astrology”-that goes beyond newspaper-style sun-sign horoscopes-“provides a powerful vocabulary to capture not only personality and temperament but also life’s challenges and opportunities. “Let me state first that I consider astrology a cultural or psychological phenomenon,” not a scientific one, Bertram Malle, a social cognitive scientist at Brown University, told me in an email. And that shorthand works well online, where symbols and shorthand are often baked into communication. “The kids these days and their memes are like the perfect context for astrology.”Īstrology expresses complex ideas about personality, life cycles, and relationship patterns through the shorthand of the planets and zodiac symbols. “Astrologers are always trying to boil down these giant concepts into digestible pieces of knowledge,” says Nicholas.
I have to make sense of those conversations that are happening each month for you.” “You might have three people talking together, two may be over in the corner arguing, Venus and Mars may be kissing each other.
“Think of the planets as a cocktail party,” explains Susan Miller, the popular astrologer who founded the Astrology Zone website. What horoscopes are supposed to do is give you information about what the planets are doing right now, and in the future, and how all that affects each sign. But the placement of the moon and each of the other planets at the time and location of your birth adds additional shades to the picture of you painted by your “birth chart.” “The kids these days and their memes are like the perfect context for astrology.” It’s based on where the sun was on your birthday. You likely know your sun sign, the most famous zodiac sign, even if you’re not an astrology buff. Astrology ascribes meaning to the placement of the sun, the moon, and the planets within 12 sections of the sky-the signs of the zodiac. But the system has its own sort of logic. The availability of more in-depth information online has given this cultural wave of astrology a certain erudition-more jokes about Saturn returns, fewer “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” pickup lines.Ī quick primer: Astrology is not a science there’s no evidence that one’s zodiac sign actually correlates to personality. There’s a low barrier to entry, and nearly endless depths to plumb if you feel like falling down a Google-research hole. In some ways, astrology is perfectly suited for the internet age. Walter Thompson’s Intelligence Group, which tracks and predicts cultural trends.Ĭallie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” Stella Bugbee, the president and editor-in-chief of The Cut, says a typical horoscope post on the site got 150 percent more traffic in 2017 than the year before. “Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient,” says Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of J. Many people I spoke to for this piece said they had a sense that the stigma attached to astrology, while it still exists, had receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people. Millennials have taken it and run with it.” “Then there’s something that’s happened in the last five years that’s given it an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go away-you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines-it “went back to being a little bit more in the background,” says Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles. (Some also refer to the New Age as the “Age of Aquarius”-the 2,000-year period after the Earth is said to move into the Aquarius sign.) More recently, the New Age movement of the 1960s and ’70s came with a heaping helping of the zodiac. The practice has been around in various forms for thousands of years.
This isn’t the first moment astrology’s had and it won’t be the last.
#Astrology chart explained full
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