Astrologer Bob Marks states, “Before one can discuss whether or not astrology “works,” one has to know how the subject is practiced. Before one asks for evidence, one has to be able to evaluate that evidence.” Another astrologer, Mike Harding, speaks of astronomer, Heather Couper in his Prejudice in Astrological Research. Mr. Harding explains that Ms. Couper’s view (that of a skeptical scientist) would have more importance if she had simply studied the subject before she said in an interview that “Astrology is absolute rubbish. If you study it and see what they claim, it completely falls apart.”  After spending a good two-thirds of my life studying and practicing astrology I can comfortably state that astrology is bunk. Ms. Couper, brilliant astronomer that she is, had it right on the mark. I had barely been studying astrology two years when I discovered the first problems. I had carefully learned all the calculations. I had a desk strewn with ephemerides, Tables of Houses, time change books, atlases and gazetteers (which are for finding a cities longitude and latitude.) I could calculate the acceleration on the interval and adjust for longitude equivalent in my head. “There is nothing supernatural about casting a horoscope, most of it is done according to precise astronomical and mathematical principles,” astrology books and practitioners say.  

Well, if that’s the case, precession of the equinoxes alone should’ve blown astrology out of the water. The precession of the equinoxes refers to the precession of Earth's axis of rotation with respect to inertial space. The vernal equinox point precesses westwards at a rate of about 50".29 per year or 1 degree every 71.6 years (the rate has been accelerating.) The process is slow, but it adds up. A complete precession cycle covers a period of approximately 25,765 years, the so called Great Platonic year, during which time the equinox regresses over a full 360°. The current difference between the zodiac most astrologers use and the actual vernal equinox is about 24 degrees. A sign is only 30 degrees, this means that almost everyone who is classified as one sign is in fact the preceding sign. Some authors do not even address this issue. Sylvia Brown does not in her astrology book. Rea Orion explains it away by saying that the constellations are only signposts and “have nothing to do with your sign.” A. T. Mann says, “It must be carefully noted that the signs of the zodiac refer to the 30 degree divisions of the elliptic in both astronomy and astrology and not to the series of constellations which carry the same names.” Well, that’s good considering there are 14 signs, 12 signs, 24 signs, the choices go on depending on the system. Precession leaves us with another big problem, though. Precession means that thousands of years ago when the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans who established the characteristics of each sign were setting them up the planets were in different signs than they are now, yet we still use the characteristics as though they should fit. How can this be when any named sign is by now really in the previous signs area?

There are also major differences in house systems. Regiomontanus, Campanus, Placidus, Koch, each is different. If your Jupiter in the third house is supposed to mean something different than if it is in the fourth house then house system matters and there seems no right and wrong. Even interpretation of the houses is not consistent. One author says the third house is “bad luck,” another says the third is “The Goddess” and yet another says the third is the house of siblings and immediate environment.

Then there was the question of what all does one include in which kinds of charts. There is so little standardization. Does every asteroid, fixed star, and comet count? What about Pluto, does it count or not? I wondered which of the older planets’ characteristics counted, as the moon, for example was female to the Greeks but male to the Babylonians.  How exactly are the characteristics of each new planet decided upon? As Bob Marks explains, “The procedure astrologers used to figure out the planet’s influence was to first calculate the position of Uranus in the horoscopes and look for charts in which it was strongly placed.” Uranus, for example was found to correlate with traits such as rebelliousness and increased originality. The same process was used for all the recent discoveries. This is at best correlation, not causal.  Correlation between two things is not a sufficient condition for the belief that one causes the other. Even a statistically significant correlation isn’t sufficient for a causal connection.

The more I studied to answer my questions the more questions I discovered. Why is the time of birth used, not the time of conception? Why is the birth time the client gives me acceptable? Surely mistakes in recording the time happen, and what time is recorded anyway? What time should we value, the time the water breaks? The time of the crowning of the baby’s head, the time the cord is cut, the time of the first breath? Birth is a long process covering many hours, yet a new degree of a rising sign comes over the horizon every four minutes. How do we know what time to use, and doesn’t a difference in this decision change the interpretation? How come it is the birth information that is important at all? As Robert Carroll points out, “If you want to know what tomorrows low tide will be you do not need to know where the moon was when the first ocean or river was formed.” Aren’t present conditions more important than initial conditions? Why are heliocentric charts not used, wouldn’t the earth’s influence matter more than other planets’? What about the occasional client born in the arctic or Antarctic circle?

Another disagreement is whether astrology is based on synchronicity or forces. Almost all astrologers want to cite the moon as an example of gravitational planetary forces. They want to say that planets have measurable magnetic and gravitational influence, yet almost all of them also want to say there is only a synchronicity to events and no causal relationship between heavenly bodies and earthly events. Astrology in its traditional form is a type of divination, yet now it is popular to claim that it is a psychological tool used for self-analysis. As Dean and Kelly say in their paper, astrologers work in a world of “complex symbolism based on analogy, mythology, numerology, sympathy,” and “image schemas.” Some astrologers even like to claim that astrology cannot be tested by science. Thousands of years and none of this has been standardized.

As time went on I did hundreds and hundreds of charts and eventually began to practice professionally because people were so pleased with the charts. My paying customers were as happy as my research subjects had been and I was convinced I could find answers to my questions. I continued to do tarot and numerology for people as well, as these seemed only extensions of the symbol system used in astrology. These too, have their problems and are no more real than astrology. It was in these moments of personal readings, though, I found that I did better. People were very pleased with their readings and as the decade passed I gained even more business by word of mouth. At some point I was asked to do a workshop. It was not until I began to try to put lessons together to teach what I had so long ago began to learn did I realize, I was relying a lot on feedback from the client. I had not been doing astrology or tarot, at all. Rather, I had been doing what is called cold reading. Even very subtle cues, such as changes in expressions or body language could tell me if a particular line of inquiry was effective or not.  

The term hidden persuaders is used by Geoffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly to describe affective, perceptual, and cognitive biases or illusions that lead to erroneous beliefs. Dean and Kelly say that, “Technically these hidden persuaders can be described as statistical artifacts and inferential biases,” and that they explain why many astrologers continue to believe in the validity of astrology despite overwhelming evidence that it is bunk. Carroll goes on to explain that the hidden persuaders are “quite useful adaptations.” “Seeing patterns,” he says, “especially causal patterns is quite beneficial to our species. Drawing inferences quickly may mean the difference between life and death.” There are many hidden persuaders in astrology.  

I didn’t even know there was a name for it but one of the techniques is shotgunning. I have since noticed that it is used by both John Edwards and Sylvia Brown. It is when there is a huge variety of general information offered quickly. I did it as an ice breaker but it is also a way of eliciting the cooperation of the subject. This cooperation is critical to the cold reading. An eager subject is willing to make connections or reinterpret vague statements. I have also seen Barnum statements be used. These are open ended statements with wiggle room. They may seem personal yet they can apply to many people. Like, “You had an accident involving water at a young age.” The Forer effect allows people to think these statements are highly applicable and personal when they are not. One that is rampant in astrology is the Rainbow Ruse. This is a statement that simultaneously awards the subject with a specific personality trait and the opposite of that trait. In astrology this is done in different ways, the various parts of the chart, the ascendant, the sun sign, the moon sign are used to make these statements. You can easily end up with statements like “Most of the time you are cheerful and positive but on occasion you get depressed.” The idea that people born on a cusp are said to have characteristics of both signs and the idea of “dual” signs like Gemini are also examples of astrological rainbow ruses.

I am not the only one who has discovered this. Former new age practitioner Karla McLaren says, “I didn’t understand that I had long used a form of cold reading in my own work! I was never taught cold reading and I never intended to defraud anyone; I simply picked up the technique through cultural osmosis.” Readers aren’t even the only ones helping in this charade. There is a great bit of communal reinforcement. Communal reinforcement is a social phenomenon where a concept is repeatedly asserted in a community regardless of whether there is empirical evidence to support it. We continue to print horoscopes in newspapers each day. There are now colleges teaching astrology. All this reinforces the false belief of the over ten thousand practicing astrologers and the millions of believers. As Robert Carroll, a professor of philosophy notes a colleague of his, “a history teacher with a PH.D. in history from the University of California at Davis, practices astrology.” Carroll admits the colleague, “is aware of all the arguments against astrology and even admits that logically it shouldn’t work. But it does, he believes.” And what does “work” mean anyway? Doesn’t “work” just mean my customers are satisfied? It doesn’t mean astrology or tarot or whatever has predicted something to a significant degree, as the main argument for “works” is anecdotes and testimonials, as Carroll notes. There are many satisfied customers who believe that the chart I did for them accurately describes them and that I gave them good advice. This really does nothing to prove astrology or my skill at it, so much as it shows the effects of confirmation bias and my skill at cold reading.

Subjects often take coincidences as “hits.” In fact, you will often hear someone refer to a reading by mentioning the “uncanny coincidences.” After all certain kinds of predictions are just very probable. “There will be an earthquake in California this year,” for example. Predictions are also made vague enough that an unlimited number of events would count as a “hit.” As an astrologer I was very careful to do this very thing. I did not want to scare the client so I would often water something down to say something like, “Take extra care to not overdo it,” or “There is some danger of having an accident next week.” Some astrologers even think this is the true “strength” of astrology, to inform you about probabilities. Subjects will also count an out and out error as a “hit.” For example Sylvia Brown once told a woman her husband died of a clot when in fact the death was due to a hemorrhage and yet the woman agreed that Brown was right. A lot of times the reader is just feeding back information initially provided by the client or subject. Even maximizing time spent on hits and minimizing the time spent on misses, is natural. According to author, Howard Bloom, from 1972 until 1975 University of Utah psychologist Marigold Linton kept detailed daily records of every aspect of her life. Every so often she reviewed the records to see what she could remember and what had been forgotten. She would try to recall events of the last year and what came to her mind turned out to be the high points. Once she re-examined her notes she was reminded of all the low points her mind had buried. The mind rewrites reality for all of us. Elizabeth Loftus, the pioneering University of Washington memory researcher and author of Memory points out that people recall past salaries as being higher than they were, they recall buying fewer alcoholic drinks than they actually bought, and of course they remember giving  much more to charity than the receipts show. In other words people remember the positives, the triumphs and even exaggerate those positives, while the mind erases things that are not as positive.

Cold reading and astrology always depend on the subject being willing and able to connect the dots to make the most of the reading. Humans are very good at finding meaning where there is none and giving significance to what is actually meaningless. As British astrologer Roy Alexander puts it, “I take it for granted that astrology works, and that we have enough cumulative experience to know that it works, whether the computer studies and the scientists agree with us or not.” As journalist Neil Spencer found in his survey of modern astrology, astrologers carry on despite having no rational reason why it should work. And it doesn’t. Study after study shows it. According to former astrologer Geoffrey Dean and psychologist Ivan Kelly an apparent correlation between signs and extroversion disappears in later studies. Another statistician, Michel Gauquelin did research that is often cited by astrologers. Gauquelin claimed to have found correlations between the planet Mars and sports champions, known as the Mars Effect. Since it was done, it has been the subject of many critical studies that refute it. Dean and Kelly did the analysis of the research on “time twins,” one of the most comprehensive studies ever done, as well. “The strong similarities predicted by astrology were simply not there.” Prompting Roy Gillett, the president of the Astrological Association of Great Britain to accuse Mr. Dean of seeking to “discredit astrology,” Robert Mathews of the London Daily Telegraph reported. You can’t make the evidence say something it doesn’t though, and the time twin study isn’t the only one to disprove astrology, by far. There were also tests done of astrologer accuracy, they showed that there is nothing to suggest that your own chart interpretation fits you better than someone else’s. Meta-analysis of tests of astrologers’ ability to agree on the profile shows that there is no agreement. Even when astrologers received everything they asked for in the testing conditions: certified birth times precise to five minutes or better, professional astrologers picked by their peers for their competence, responses to their own 61 item questionnaire that covered everything from height to family death, and two personality tests, the best of them did no better than the non-astrologer. And there was no agreement between the astrologers.     

I am not hostile as many astrologers claim skeptics are, I am not a scientist. I am not an astronomer with an issue of professional rivalry as some astrologers claim astronomers are. I am a whistle-blower. Whether intentional or not astrology, tarot, and other forms of divination and psychic claims are fraud. People spend unnecessary money on it and it does no one any good. The parents of Shawn Hornbeck went on the Montel Williams show in ’03 and received info from Sylvia Brown that he was dead. He was found four years later in January of ’07. Springdale Borough Police Chief Jack Killian stated that the use of psychics and astrologers and the like slowed rather than aided the investigation, “because it led us down other paths.” In 1964, Dutch born reader, Peter Hurkos claimed to have identified the Boston Strangler. The man he accused was eventually cleared. According to the Shreveport Times, John Catching predicted the body of twelve-year-old Kimberly Norwood, who had been missing for a year in 1990, would be found buried in the driveway of her parents’ home. After many hours of backhoe work and multiple searches with cadaver dogs, there was still no body. Wonder if Catching had a prediction regarding the amount of heartache he caused the child’s already distraught parents. It needs to stop before someone gets hurt. Reader, Greta Alexander directed the search for an elderly man in precisely the wrong direction, according to Joe Nickell, author of Psychic Sleuths. Fortunately the man was still alive.

— Jenni