THE TRAGEDY OF TRAGEDY ASTROLOGERS
Confronting Kassandra’s Curse
I began practicing astrology seriously in middle school. My “Astrology for Dummies” book out on the lunch tables, scribbling my friend’s charts as best I could on the back of the day’s homework was where I started putting the skies to work. Like most 12 year olds, I was mostly interested in bolstering my ego by exposing emotional vulnerabilities and scaring my more religious classmates with proof of witchcraft. 18-some years later, I would slap Little Cooper’s wrist for that. I had learned of a divine art and turned it into a petty tool for capitalizing on other people’s suffering when I could have done much more.
“Instead of being their wise man, I was merely an agent of fate mocking them for mortality.”
Unfortunately, Little Cooper’s childish approach is overwhelmingly popular among social media astrologers today, far older than that hormonal mess forecasting divorces and injury. When those parents split or the friend was gone for a day, no one congratulated me on my accurate delinations. No one thought it was amazing that I could tell them what awful things were coming their way. All I had done was prolong dread. Instead of advising them, I relished in my “I told you so!” satisfaction. Instead of giving them direction, I made them feel powerless. Instead of being their wise man, I was merely an agent of fate mocking them for mortality.
Apollo demands more of those who would learn his arts. With knowledge of the future comes an obligation to act on it.
Think back on the great soothsayers of lore, the Oracles and Kassandras of the world over. In Virgil’s “Aeneid”, Kassandra was a priestess to Apollo. Her powers vary by author, but she is a prophet cursed to never be believed. As the decade-long war showed little sign of ending soon, Odysseues was granted a genius idea by Athena and constructed the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Princess foresaw the Greek’s horse was a trap and rushed to warn her city. Even knowing of her prowess and the curse Apollo inflicted, the Trojans ignored the priestess. If you don’t know how the story ends, Kassandra was right and Troy fell overnight. Kassandra was abducted by Agememnon and then murdered by his furious wife Cleymestra back in Greece. The horrors had come as she had warned.
We could understand this story to mean that you won’t be believed (as Kassandra was cursed) or that visions of the future are worthless in changing what’s to come, but I think we are to understand a greater metaphor here. Kassandra’s curse is that of every seer the world over: the proof for our prophecies lies in faith and the unknown. We require belief from a weary world. People will believe you when you tell them what they want to hear; they will deny you when it’s unpleasant; they will doubt you when it’s unfamiliar. The Trojans were tired after a long war, they wanted to believe the peace offering was legitimate. The priestess told them to take up arms, to fight when the illusion of an armistice was before them. Even if she were not cursed, Kassandra failed to save Troy because she could only speak to the future, having lost sight of the present before her.
As her successors, we modern soothsayer carries Kassandra’s curse forward. We see a future, but lose the power to see the present moment. In our excitement to prove our art’s providence, we lose sight of its purpose. As monkeys desperate for control over the chaos all around us, we cling to imagined powers it lacks. I don’t think the tragedy astrologer is born out of malice: it’s a consequence of failing to teach our worldview with our techniques. Astrology cannot be divorced from its origins: it is not a modern way of making truth and trying to make it one has resulted in bloodthirsty seers.
“Who but the ego does hindsight help?”
We live in an era of skepticism, material mastery, and the inductive mind. Astrologers’ insights draw on an understanding of perspective, deduced by disregarding the objective material reality. The modern world demands physical evidence cast in the scientific, truths which we can control, experiment, and reliably reproduce results. Astrology works within an entirely different paradigm. You could certainly apply a scientific lens to astrology (testing crop planting times vs. un-elected planting times for yield) but the logic underpinning it is entirely different from that which built a global civilization. Unfortunately, we are always a part of our era and the modern astrologer has put in a great deal of effort to “prove” astrology by means that don’t mean anything to the art.
Astrologers of the past, the masters of the mundane astrological texts from which we draw, were employed to predict the future. Personal growth was rarely on the minds of monarchs. The texts are quite explicit in how to make these delineations but are surprisingly sparse with examples. Where we do see them in instructional texts, it’s largely natal charts from which conclusions about placements are drawn rather than events. Conversely, you’d never see a contemporary astrological how-to that isn’t centered on charts from past events to demonstrate the application of the theories and validate (or challenge) the delinations of earlier authors.
The shift here is subtle but with profound implications: astrologers are learning the rationale of astrology backwards. Instead of learning astrology on its own terms, we are introduced to astrology in the context of our current culture, rooted in a society that despises the mystical and continues to distrust the faithful. Simply explaining what each planet means, what the aspects are, and how to make sense of the signs fails to meet the expected evidentiary threshold. To break through our preconceptions, these authors look back for evidence they don’t need in the first place. By seeing our teachers prove themselves in the past, we learn to forecast through hindsight.
Kassandra’s curse rears itself once again: we must speak to the present, even in the context of forecasting the future. With social media bringing a depth of astrology to hundreds of thousands of people in a way we haven’t seen in centuries, we must stem the growing tide of tragedy astrologers. The ones who hunger for horror in the public, dissecting yesterday’s trauma to capitalize on today’s headlines. This is not simply a personality flaw to be “canceled” – these are students of the scientific era, taught to make truth of the past and provable alone. There’s great power in natural science and anyone who tells you to disregard it for magic alone makes the same mistake the Enlightened of Europe did. Apollo did not give us the third eye for us to not use the other two: we must learn to see the future and present simultaneously, to understand our role as transmitters of what might be rather than servants uncovering the cycles of what will be. We must ask ourselves why we practice astrology and if our answer is not to better the world, then we must begin again.
“If all you want is to be right, you’re in the wrong.”
If the astrologers defending their takes on tragedy were actually concerned with helping people, they would have been delineating before the crisis, not after. If they were interested in understanding astrology better, they would look at many events across many times and places, not deep dive into the minute-by-minute violence of today’s hot topic. If they were aiming to advance the art, they would be using it to identify relief scammers, find trapped victims, or otherwise apply it. If we are to say our art demands respect, then shouldn’t we be carrying it out with respect in return? Who but the ego does hindsight help? It isn’t enough for us to say we can: we need to justify our work in why we should.
I do not believe in a deterministic perspective. The future is in flux, a set of probability equations betting against the unpredictable chaos at the core of everything. There is nothing in this world which must occur except those things which already have. Astrology is the study of circumstance, interpreting a stellar dance to understand the deeper song playing in the background. We will move regardless and the normal person will dance in tune with that song, like turtles heading to their breeding grounds. The astrologer – or soothsayer of any tradition – has the ability to choose their movements. You know the song will be sad, so you prepare a requiem. You see a tempo shift ahead and so you switch styles. You hear the audience will boo, so you improv a new routine. Knowledge of what’s to come does not give us mastery over it, but it does allow us to change what we will do in light of what occurs.
There is no use for astrologers who would appreciate 12-year-old Cooper’s approach. Astrologers should make predictions and those predictions will be grim at times. Just as awful as the tragedy astrologers are the positivity astrologers, desperate to make something good out of everything. Be wary of both breeds: neither will do much but convince you of their greatness and your inferiority. Whether it’s through beating their chest as mourners clutch theirs or telling you to close your eyes to avoid the coming tsunami, they both fail to uphold our art’s purpose: giving mortals a light of hope in the face of the existential horror that is reality. “Hope” is a complicated thing: hope for a better future comes from knowledge of the rewards of hard work ahead; hope for true love comes from knowing its absence; hope for life after death comes from fear of a boundary with no return. We cannot punish astrologers for discussing dark matters nor can we count on them to always have a positive message in the face of horror. Instead, we must look at the present with knowledge of the future and do what we can to change it for the better.
Everything else is unworthy of our predecessors. If all you want is to be right, you’re in the wrong.
