On Fear-Mongering Astrology and the Eclipse

Why Nuance Always Matters

While it’s thrilling that astrology is more accessible than ever, I worry that the topical nature of what is popular these days does more harm than good. Something like an eclipse makes that particularly clear, as interpretations fly about massively shifting paradigms and portals and finding a soul’s purpose, and panic spreads within the population like a mounting wave. These terms are so nebulous, offering no concrete advice other than to start studying portents and signs like some Mesopotamian priest. As someone obsessed with the ancient world, with literature, with mythology and metaphor, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, but I view an astrologer’s job as one of a translator, being able to bring these interpretations to real lives in their current context.

When Hellenistic astrology—the precursor to the modern tropical style most Westerners are familiar with today—was practiced in the ancient world, it was most often used to tell people about actual events and circumstances in their lives—what some might call “fortune telling,” “divination,” or potentially even “telling the future.” It worked because it relied on the logic of stoicism, or determinism, which posited that everything is preordained. Modern astrology has taken it to a different extreme, focused entirely on the individual and their personality or characteristics, though of course there is always a spectrum of the schools of thought people choose to follow. I would consider myself in the blended camp, certainly interested in the emotional and metaphorical possibilities of Jungian interpretation (I am constantly talking about my personal signs’ influence on my chart) but I’ve always craved a deeper understanding of why and how these energies truly manifest in the course of the every day.

The thing about astrology is that it’s always happening—it’s simply a map for tracking cycles and patterns in the universe. Many modern practitioners use it as a personality test or some other such vague soul journey, to which, like I said, I am certainly not immune and is totally part of my practice. But the key is that we track circumstances—actual fortune—the people, places, events, and things in our lives that make us who we are, that transform one era into another. It’s the connections between these things that are significant, the interplay of each different pulse of a life. Astrology is time made tangible, the object of centuries of observation and debate on the human condition. It provides a rich treasure trove if you know how to use it; unfortunately, most people do not.

Modern astrology as I have come to know it provides the end goals, prescribing nothing about the process. Just vague, New-Agey terms that make people think history will be made or ended every time we have an eclipse. I’m here to tell you—we have them four times a year, every year. Two solar eclipses and two lunar, alternating because they’re caused by orbits and planetary shadows and light and dark.

What they are in astrology are points of tension around which circumstances turn. They amplify people’s restlessness in the same way full moons do just about every month—by drawing attention to the sky. Humans will never stop wondering what it means that we can see out into space, no matter how much we know about science. The astrological truth is that eclipses affect everyone differently, because the organization of fortunes vary so greatly. Someone may be triumphantly born on an eclipse with benefic influence in their chart and spend their lives having positive experiences around certain eclipse cycles. Another person may be born into difficulty, malefic planets challenging them every step of the way, culminating in cycles of loss and grief around these same times. Yet another person might have no trouble or benefit from the eclipse at all.

The outer planets—Neptune, Pluto, and Uranus—also factor into the modern hype around astrology as a grandiose method of fortune-telling on a more societal level. I do feel it’s important to update our collective knowledge as history continues, and that there is no doubt we are more aware of these larger trends than ever before. Like writing, astrology is a human technology that provides techniques for which to control one’s position or reaction to an environment. Thus, a technology improves, becomes more efficient and far-seeing—globalized, even. The slower moving cycles of these planets allow humans to see much farther and wider than we had need to before. Because those planets hadn’t been discovered yet, they were not technically relevant to ancient astrologers, though there is some evidence (I think I heard this on The Astrology Podcast) to suggest certain longer cycles were still tracked, despite not knowing the physical planets were out there to represent them. But like social media showing us more faces and lives than our humanity was wired to absorb, I wonder at the implications of this knowledge, about what it does for the collective, which will always be transforming and shifting and changing, just as it has for all of its existence.

There are people who utilize the outer planets effectively, Chris Brennan being one of them (host of The Astrology Podcast), and others who have put a significant amount of work into actually fact-checking and testing repeating cycles throughout history. I listen to these interpretations with interest, but do not bring them into my own practice; at the moment there’s more enough nuance and complication for me to explore on a more individual-to-individual level (which is also exactly how I feel about not reading reversals in tarot).

I just see so often in online and physical spaces the promotion of anxieties people don’t even understand because the vocabulary is so unspecific, confusing, and doomsaying. Most of all it might not even be relevant to their unique astrological signature. The study of fate is not a trend, but a lifestyle, a sinking in to the currents of lived experience. A lifetime study, really. That’s not to say one can’t get into astrology casually (I myself love to make and share astrological memes, colloquial jokes, etc., that may be interpreted as light hearted or surface-level, especially given their tendency toward metaphor) I just caution against taking these intangible, filler interpretations that say hardly anything too much to heart. This is an era of hysteria, and I would like to remind you that humans have been thinking it was the end times since they saw the very first eclipse (Listen, this is not to say I don’t feel like it’s the end times what with the state of the world. And there are contemporary populations for which it quite literally is the end times. I certainly don’t deny that. But mass panic isn’t really helpful).

There’s a primal need to seek some kind of understanding, but we shouldn’t settle for incoherent nonsense. Instead, I urge you to only take seriously the interpretations that ground themselves in context, giving you a how and why, even offering nuance and flexibility based on their audience. I do my best to take my own advice very seriously—I don’t read outer planets, but yeah, this is an ad. You can go to my Instagram @ponderfoxobscura for more info or directly book my services at here !! Thanks so much for reading and I would love to hear your thoughts if you have any <3