Is Astrology Really Nothing More than "Divination"?

A Response to Geoffrey Cornelius’s 'The Moment of Astrology'

It was sometime during the mid-1990s when I first heard about a new book that hit the shelves, which at least one of my colleagues was calling an instant classic. Naturally, I had to pick up a copy and see for myself. It was called The Moment of Astrology, and written by English author and astrologer Geoffrey Cornelius.

I found it extremely well-written, and was intrigued by the book's central thesis, which could be summed up this way: Cornelius suggested that the efficacy of astrology relies less on the specificity of actual birth times, or on the objective mechanics of the universe, than it does on the "divinational" dynamics or daemon ("genius") of the astrologer working in the moment.

To paraphrase a bit, Cornelius seemed suggest that astrology was more akin to practices like tea leaf reading or crystal ball gazing than to a purely objective system based on hard astronomical calculations. He used two chief examples to illustrate this point.

One of those was the uncanny way astrologers will sometimes be given the wrong birth time for a person, or simply miscalculate the time when preparing the horoscope; yet somehow the reading they do will still turn out to be accurate. How is that possible if astrology truly hinges on the time of birth being the defining factor in decoding someone’s life?

The other example he used involved the practice of horary astrology, where one calculates a chart for the moment someone asks a question about something, rather than a chart for the actual situation being asked about. Suppose you lost your gold watch on a Thursday; you might go to a horary astrologer the following Sunday and say, "What happened to my watch?” By studying the horoscope for the moment that question was uttered, the horary astrologer tries to discern what happened to that watch.

The reason that poses such a striking challenge to conventional astrological theory is how dramatically it differs from most other forms of astrology, with their emphasis on the moment of someone’s—or some thing’s—birth. Throughout much of history, astrologers have tried to explain astrology in terms of the classic doctrine of "origins," which is the idea that the seeds of the unfoldment of something are encoded in its beginning. You want to know what someone's life is really about? Look to the positions of the planets when they were born. You want to know how a new business will work out? Erect a horoscope for the moment it was started. That sort of thing.

When it comes to horary astrology, however, a chart might be erected for a question about something that happened long before the query was posed. For example, one might inquire about that gold watch lost two weeks earlier, in which case the astrologer will use the time that question is put to him or her for erecting the chart, not for the time when the watch was actually lost! This is strikingly different from the notion of "origins," since the horary chart can be seriously displaced in time from when the situation in question happened, and focuses instead on the moment of interaction between the client and the astrologer itself.

The conclusion Cornelius draws from all this is that the participatory involvement of the astrologer is vital to the process. He takes the extra step to suggest that this isn't simply the case with horary astrology but may be for all forms of astrology. The efficacy of astrology likely relies less on the objective workings of the universe, in other words, than the participatory experience of the astrologer. There seems to be an element of inspiration, genius, daemon—call it whatever you like—that involves the astrologer in ways not fully explained by more “mechanistic” theories of astrology. Quoting from the book:

"There is, after all, no music without a musician, no language without a speaker, and no astrology without an astrologer." [1]

A Bridge Too Far?

All right, so there is no astrology without an astrologer. It's a dramatic claim, and Cornelius states it probably better than I've seen it expressed anywhere else. But while there’s clearly some truth to that, I think we make a big mistake by carrying that claim too far, and I’ll use two examples to illustrate why.

Take Cornelius’s example of astrologers somehow coming up with accurate chart readings despite having the wrong information to work with. Many of us working in the field have had that experience, and it's an uncanny one, to be sure. But it can be chalked up to various possibilities and, more concerning, it often doesn’t work out that way.

I'm thinking particularly of an experiment, presently available on YouTube, conducted by arch-skeptic Michael Shermer which enlisted Vedic astrologer Jeffrey Armstrong, in which unwitting test subjects were deliberately given the wrong horoscopes, but without either the test subjects or the astrologer being informed of the switch-up. [2] Clearly, the skeptics conducting the test fully expected the subjects to automatically agree with the vague generalizations provided by the astrologer, and once that was revealed, how they'd been deliberately given the wrong horoscopes, their gullibility would be exposed to the bright light of day, with astrology shown to be nothing but bunk. Very straightforward, very simple—and very wrong.

That’s because when the subjects were finally asked whether the personality and life-descriptions provided by the astrologers felt accurate to them, they said no—at which point they were given the "right" horoscopes by the skeptics, which struck them as being far more accurate. Instead of disproving astrology, in other words, the test actually wound up being supportive of it. So while it is true that in some cases a wrongly calculated chart can lead to accurate insights, that isn't always the case. It could well be in those cases where that does happens, the astrologer genuinely had insight into the lives and personalities of the subjects, in a truly divinational sense; or it could just be the result of pure coincidence, or that the comments by the astrologer were so vague that the readings only seemed accurate. Whatever the answer, there are other possibilities than the one suggested by Cornelius.

The point here is that if his astrology-as-divination theory were rigidly true, Jeffrey Armstrong would have come up with accurate (or at least reasonably accurate) readings for the two test individuals even though he was working with wrong birth times, when in fact the readings fell flat in those mismatched cases.

But there's another example which points up the shortcomings of the astrology-as-divination argument even more critically, and this one draws from the field of mundane (socio-political) astrology. Consider the fact that we can use our computers now to calculate major configurations involving the outer planets going back through time for many millennia. As a result, we can chronicle the conjunctions, oppositions, and squares of distant Uranus, Neptune and Pluto which accompanied major events throughout history. A particularly dramatic example of that involved the great triple conjunction of these outer planets in the 6th century BCE. It was a period that writers like Richard Tarnas have called one of the most important in recorded history, due to the occurrence of so many important religious and political developments that began or flowered then. [3]

Why is this so relevant to evaluating Cornelius's thesis? Because the outer planets weren't even known about at the time: Uranus was discovered in the year 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930. That means that whatever cultural changes occurred in association with those planets prior to those discovery dates took place entirely without the conscious participation of any astrologers living then. Because of that, one can't possibly credit the divinatory or participatory involvement of astrologers for the huge impact of those planetary configurations at that time. If there is indeed "no astrology without astrologers," as Cornelius claims, how did the planets affect people on Earth so profoundly back in the 6th Century BCE?

Another dramatic example would be the French Revolution of 1793, which by virtually all astrologers’ accounts corresponded to the powerhouse opposition between Uranus and Pluto unfolding at the time. Although Uranus was known at that point, having been discovered the previous decade by William Hershel, Pluto wouldn’t be discovered for another 137 years. As a result, we can’t very well attribute the bourgeois uprising that occurred in France to any conscious knowledge on the part of astrologers regarding that planetary opposition.

In short, as important as the intuitive and participatory component may be for some facets of astrology—a point I’ve argued for many times myself [4]—it isn't absolutely necessary in every instance. Astrology clearly incorporates daemonic elements, especially in systems like horary astrology, but it does so to a lesser degree than we find in divinatory systems like crystal ball gazing or tea leaf reading, let alone mediumship or trance channeling.

In the end, astrological "influence" seems to involve a combination of objective and subjective (or divinatory) factors in varying proportions, and it would be a mistake to tip the balance too far in either of those directions. As the historical record makes clear, the influence of the celestial bodies on our lives seems to operate quite effectively even without us astrologers being involved at all, thank you very much.

Notes

1. Geoffrey Cornelius, The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination. The Wessex Astrologer, 2003 (Revised edition), p. 305.

2. https://www dot youtube dot com/watch?v=C6k7xa1NrCc

3. Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Viking Books, 2006, p. 409.

4. In both The Waking Dream (chapter 4) and Under a Sacred Sky (chapters 1 and 16), I myself suggested that astrology was indeed a form of "divination," but more in the sense that it involved a symbolic reading of the universe and its phenomenon, and less so in the strongly participatory “daemonic” sense implied by Cornelius. While that daemonic side is certainly involved in many instances of astrology, it isn’t the sole determining factor. For that reason, I suggested the usefulness of positing a spectrum of divinatory processes ranging from "low-information/high-subjectivity" systems like crystal ball gazing and tea leaf reading, where one has little outside data to work form, to comparatively "high-information/low-subjectivity" methods like astrology, where one has an enormous amount of objective data to draw from. In his book, Cornelius seems to suggest that astrology is basically a "low-information/high-subjectivity" system, whereas I would say that astrology is more of a “high-information/low-subjectivity” discipline.

Ray Grasse was associate editor of The Mountain Astrologer for over 20 years, and is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods. This essay has been excerpted from his 2023 book When the Stars Align. His website is www.raygrasse.com.