“I can’t believe I’m saying this to someone who writes for the FT,” a wizard-like man with a bald head, black-rimmed glasses and a bushy white beard is telling me. “But I’m looking at your chart and – well, if you could just lean into your yin energy a little more… you probably would find something of the Goddess within you.”
The man is Michael Geary, a 70-year-old vedic astrologer and “spiritual mentor” from Massachusetts now based in the Cotswolds, who was recommended to me by a friend who has been going to see him once a year for the past decade. Geary has read the birth charts of Hollywood actors, Glastonbury-headlining rock stars and Silicon Valley tycoons, and seems to inspire devotion: he’s just spent four days working with an architect who’d flown in from Los Angeles.
He needn’t have felt so bashful – I’m more than happy to be informed that I have a Goddess within. And while I’ve always been sceptical about the kind of generic, unfalsifiable horoscopes you get in newspapers and magazines, I’m curious about astrology more broadly. I’ve found that people’s characteristics often align with their star signs, and have noticed that I appear to be more compatible – both platonically and romantically speaking – with certain signs of the zodiac (Libras can do no wrong by me; Capricorns can do no right).
Some of you might be rolling your eyes already, readying your fingers to complain that astrology has no place in such an august and high-minded institution as the Financial Times. But while the former is your business, on the latter you would be wrong. On any given non-rainy day at FT HQ, there is to be found a smattering of tourists gazing up at the building – not in the hope of spotting their favourite columnist, sadly, but to catch a glimpse of a rather eccentric astronomical clock. The clock features the face of Winston Churchill glaring out from an image of the sun in the centre, the signs of the zodiac surrounding him and the hand pointing at the current zodiac season. It was designed in 1959 by the British sculptor Frank Dobson, in honour of the friendship between FT founder Brendan Bracken and the former prime minister, though the reason for the star signs is unclear: Churchill was not said to be a fan of astrology (unlike the Nazis). Astrology, you see, is in the FT’s very fabric. Ahem.
In fact, it is the British press that can be thanked – or blamed, depending on your perspective – for the birth of mass-market astrology, a now-booming global industry. In August 1930, three days after Princess Margaret was born, an astrologer named RH Naylor wrote a column for the Sunday Express under the headline “What The Stars Foretell For The New Princess”, based on an analysis of her birth chart. It was such a hit that the Express asked Naylor to write a regular column that could be broadly applied to readers, and so he came up with the idea of writing horoscopes based solely on the 12 “sun signs” (the position of the sun in the zodiac when you are born).
This is not at all the kind of astrology, so-called “sun-sign astrology”, that Geary charges clients £265 per 90-min session – or £1,200 per day – for. For a start, the location of the sun in the zodiac at the time of birth is just one of a whole number of variables that include not only the fairly widely known moon and “ascendant” signs, but also the positions of the planets, the “houses” the stars were in, and the placement of all of these things in relation to one other, meaning there are literally billions of possible variations. Professional astrologers consider the entirety of their clients’ birth charts, not just their sun signs.
Secondly, vedic astrology uses an entirely different system – the “sidereal zodiac”, which reflects the actual position of the stars – from the “tropical zodiac” western astrology uses, which incorporates the seasons and equinoxes. And so while, according to the latter, I am a Gemini sun, Leo moon and Sagittarius rising, in vedic astrology – the original system, developed several thousand years ago in India – I am one sign earlier for each: Taurus sun, Cancer moon and Scorpio rising.
And yet when I set up a session with a western astrologer, Lynne Speight, what is striking is not so much the difference between the readings I am given, but the similarities. Speight, a salt-of-the-earth-type 64-year-old with spiky grey-blonde hair and a warm, comforting countenance, tells me from her home in Devon that I am to work on grounding myself and getting out of my head, that there is an inherent duality in my nature, that I am passionate about the truth, highly creative and relish a challenge. These are all things that Geary had told me, too, and they all feel – particularly when we drill down into the details – very “me”.
How to account for the commonalities? Geary uses the analogy of language. “How do you get the same story from a different language? Language is just a symbol system, and astrology is a symbol system,” he explains. “Vedic astrology is like the mother tongue… but the two systems have a common archetypal alphabet.”
Of course, a sceptic might argue that they had both Googled me beforehand, and would suggest that these astrologers pick up on things over the course of a conversation, and tailor what they say accordingly. But what I am slightly surprised to discover is that neither Geary nor Speight take astrology too “seriously”.
“It’s storytelling – I would say that’s what I’m good at,” says Geary. “Looking at a chart and going: ‘I’m gonna tell you what your fairytale is, I’m gonna tell you where the bogey man is, where the monsters are, where the knight in shining armour is.’ What better way of conveying ideas than through a story?”
My colleague Tim Harford wrote earlier this year that “the test of a useful forecast is not whether it turns out to be accurate, but whether it turns out to prompt some sort of useful action”. Perhaps we could take a similar view with astrology. I take away advice from both my sessions that I find helpful, probably more than a regular therapy session (though they both feel a bit like therapy too, which I was surprised by). And both the advice – such as, from Geary, ways I can connect more with my right brain by being more playful and getting rid of my endless rules and to-do lists – and the character analysis are always given in reference to my birth chart, which somehow feels quite affirming and like I’m really being “seen”.
So I also come away from them with a pleasant sense of self-acceptance: it is easier to acknowledge the less good parts of yourself when you’re told they were predetermined by the stars. These days, I’m learning to “lean into my yin” energy more, as I slowly come to accept that I am, in fact, a Goddess.
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