Why do horoscopes work

Jung, who created the psychological categories of introversion and extroversion and formed the basis for the popular Myers-Briggs personality test, placed astrology on par with mythology in explaining the workings of the human psyche. As far as he was concerned, it was all just in our minds. People who claim that astrology as practiced in its current form is based on thousands of years of tradition are wrong. Originally, astrology flourished in the Hellenistic period alongside various sciences like mathematics, medicine, and engineering.

When the Roman empire fell in the 5th century, Hellenistic texts of all kinds were scattered and fragmented over the millennium as their standing with Christian and secular European society fell in and out of favor. Ancient astrology looked to be delegated to dusty Greek attics. In the late 19th century, a group of German linguists stumbled upon previously unpublished fragments of Hellenistic astrological texts. The discovery set in motion a year task of collecting as many of the overlooked texts as they could find in libraries across Europe.

In the early s, a group of astrologers decided to translate this and other classical works in the hopes that they would recover something worthwhile. They called the effort Project Hindsight and styled themselves after Renaissance intellectuals reviving the lost art of ancient algebra. After a decade and a half of translation work, Project Hindsight claims to have revived the old astrological methods.

No longer a folksy way to look at our individual personality and character, astrology as we know it is getting pushed aside and being replaced by older techniques of looking at why real-world events happen. Traditional Hellenistic astrology brings a rigor and harmony to astrology that modern methods washed over. The modern system flattened the houses, which describe worldly matters like money, love, and career, into the zodiac signs of the star constellations.

The ancient texts never conflated the two. Prying these important pieces of astrology back apart clarifies how the ancients related movements of the heavens with events on earth.

Compare this to new-age psychological astrology, which over accentuates internal matters of the mind and spirit, opening up far too much room for confirmation bias. Modern astrology also hastily assigned outsized influence to the newly discovered planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto without the centuries of observational data that the Hellenistic astrologers were working with. One of the greatest sticking points where traditional and modern astrology diverge is destiny.

Hellenistic astrology describes a causal relationship between the movement of planets and stars and the material world on earth.

The ancients also believed in the notion of fate. Fatedness runs counter to our modern notion of free will, and therefore many find traditional astrology unpalatable. However, we do not need to believe in a fatalistic view of planetary movements to revive some insights in the work of the ancient astrologers who espoused them.

Now, modern psychology can enrich those parts of the astrological tradition. Even horoscope writers admit that some of their success rests in not saying too much.

You develop the art of being vague. French, the Goldsmith psychologist, notes that people who read horoscopes are often invested in making their horoscope right for them.

On the one hand, the straightforward answer is that, according to a host of scientific studies, astrology does not work. That observation tallies with what other psychologists say: Margaret Hamilton, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who found that people are more likely to believe favorable horoscopes , noted that people who are believers in astrology also tend to be more anxious or neurotic. Newspaper horoscopes, she said, offer a bit of comfort, a sort of seeing through the veil on a casual level.

Philosophically, there is something about reading horoscopes that does imply a placing of oneself. We have a very, very strong predisposition to notice regularities in nature and the world, to the extent that we see more than there are. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, in short a false positive is less risky than failure to observe a truth.

Horoscopes walk a fine line, and, for many people, an appealing one. Astrologers might agree. But really, at the end of the day, are horoscopes doing more harm than good, or more good than harm? It all depends on whom you ask and, of course, on the appropriateness of the advice being given.

It is also an insult to the science of psychology and the richness of human personality. I should have said that this new age drivel is undermining the very fabric of our civilization. At their heart, horoscopes are a way to offset the uncertainty of daily life. And people hate doing nothing. She covers the weird stuff for Smithsonian. They wish for more anonymity online. Except, perhaps the questions of who you really are, and what life has in store for you.

Ruby Warrington is a lifestyle writer whose New Age guidebook Material Girl, Mystical World came out in May —just ahead of the wave of astrology-book sales this summer. It seems we may be at a similar turning point.

Bugbee, the editor-in-chief of The Cut , noticed this shift a couple years ago. They may like to read their horoscope, but not change their behavior based on what it says. There is more nuance than this statistic allows for. Many mainstream examinations of astrology as a trend are deeply concerned with debunking. The people I spoke to for this piece often referred to astrology as a tool, or a kind of language—one that, for many, is more metaphorical than literal.

Michael Stevens, a year-old who lives in Brooklyn, was in the quarter-life crisis season of life around the time of the total solar eclipse in August this year.

And then shit started to happen in life. She was annoyed, he says, that he called her at the end of the month, which is when she writes her famously lengthy horoscopes. But then she asked him for his sign—Sagittarius.

It sounds totally like me. Still, he says the conversation made him feel better; it spurred him to take action. In the months between his call with Miller and our conversation in October, Stevens left his advertising job and found a new one in staffing.

Shortly before we spoke, he and his girlfriend broke up. Beusman, who hired Gat at Broadly, shares her philosophy. And of course they were. That was the point after all. Digital natives are narcissistic, some suggested, and astrology is a navel-gazing obsession.

It feels simultaneously cosmic and personal; spiritual and logical; ineffable and concrete; real and unreal. It can be a relief, in a time of division, not to have to choose.