What’s the Mutter with Astrology?

People with birthdates between November 23 and December 21, according to astrologers, are particularly suited to be theologians—or comedians. Yet despite the religious aspect assigned to Sagittarius, claims Annette Bousquet Jones, who has written Christian meditations on the zodiac, the sign of the Archer fails to hit a Christian bullseye. “The only connection for the average Christian,” she says, “would be through St. Sebastian’s martyrdom,” and she therefore encourages Christians to pray for those facing martyrdom.

“One of the most direct symbols of Christ in the zodiac,” says Miss Jones, writing in a Roman Catholic weekly in Portland, Maine, is Aquarius, the Water Bearer: Christ “is the source (the bearer) of the living water.” That symbolism takes added significance now that, as the rock musical Hair describes it, “the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.” The “Age of Aquarius,” with its “golden living dreams of visions, mind’s true liberation,” has begun after 2,600 years of the Age of Pisces.

Astrologers point to the current interest in their “science” as evidence for its validity. Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, the astrologers’ planet, so it is no surprise to them to see zodiac symbols on glassware, neckties, and jewelry, or to find advertisers using the zodiac to sell carpets—as one did last spring with a four-page ad in a women’s magazine—or books—as Southern Presbyterian John Knox Press is doing (see page 17) with its claim that “even Aquarians read” its books.

Only 550 of the nation’s 1,750 newspapers don’t offer daily astrological advice. Astrologers’ names fill two columns of the New York City yellow pages; the subject requires a full drawer in the Library of Congress card catalogue.

Last year Dell Publishers sold eight million purse-size horoscope books (compared to one million in 1962). And a computer—given $20 and the subject’s birthdate—will prepare a personalized horoscope. Courses in astrology—as well as in other occult arts—are offered at colleges, high schools, and even, in Washington, D.C., at the Young Women’s Christian Assoication.

What some now call the “space age science” originated 5,000 years ago with Babylonian and Chaldean efforts to understand the movements and influences of heavenly objects. Those ancient stargazers ascribed deified personalities and powers to the twelve “houses” into which they divided the universe. While the sun and the planets—the Greek word means “wanderers”—moved through a house in their revolutions around the earth, the power of that sign dominated events on earth and determined the destinies of children born during that time.

In the era before Christ, astronomers were astrologists; under the influence of Christianity, astronomers continued studying the heavens, but as scientists, not as soothsayers. Astrologers practiced throughout the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, Shakespeare incorporated astrological references into many of his plays: Romeo and Juliet, for example, were “star-crossed lovers” and Edmund in King Lear complained that man evaded his evil nature “to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star.” Finally, in the eighteenth century, astrology appeared to die at the hand of Reason.

Its contemporary revival modifies the concept of astral deities; twentieth-century astrology feels an electromagnetic, rather than a divine, pull between the planets as they move around the earth and the events on earth. Astrophysicists counter the astrologists’ claim with one of their own; so far they have found only two such electromagnetic fields—one around Jupiter and one around the earth—and these fields do not guide human behavior. NASA researcher Dr. Richard Head, who has been studying gravitational forces between planets and the sun, thinks there is a possibility—minuscule at best—that the force is electromagnetic rather than gravitational.

Astrology’s popularity—and that of witchcraft and spiritualism—is waxing, while the influence of organized religion apparently wanes. Collegians, often known to campus officials only by a number or an IBM card, claim something refreshingly personal in groups dedicated to such “sacred” cults.

Andrew M. Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest at the University of Chicago, found students returning to the sacred—or the “bizarrely sacred”—because science and Christianity have failed to end war and injustice and to provide personhood and meaning. For some students the return is simply a means to demonstrate anti-organizational feelings; for others, it is a search for a better world.

That search through the occult draws middle-aged members of the middle class as well as young people. Covens (witch clubs) in the United States include an Air Force captain with a physics degree, an editor with a Ph.D. in anthropology from King’s College in London, a writer, a seamstress, a druggist and his wife, and a business executive and his wife.

For the most part, witches—who claim to recognize one another intuitively—carefully shield their identity from outsiders; the prospect of a trial for witchcraft remains viable. In Wierton, West Virginia, early this month, court convened around a weathered tombstone to consider the charge of Frank Daiminger, Jr. He claimed his former neighbors had falsely accused him of being a “warlock and devil’s consort.”

Witchcraft, says one of its British practitioners, is a “wonderful faith” that demands as much love as possible as well as tolerance and patience. It is at least partially the religious element—the search for ultimate reality—that attracts persons to witchcraft, astrology, Eastern mysticism, drugs, and, for that matter, even to rock music. If, as some theologians said a few years back, man has come of age and outgrown his religious stage, he seems now to be regressing into a kind of second childhood.

But this “new-time religion,” as some have dubbed it, is not part of the Judeo-Christian religious heritage. In fact, it stands outside the Christian faith, where ultimate reality, as the New Testament expresses it, is the coming of God himself to man; and it counters the biblical view of the occult, as the prophet Isaiah asked: “And when they say to you, ‘Consult the mediums and the wizards who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people consult their God?”

JANET ROHLER

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