Why Are Horoscopes Always Wrong? (And Why This Astrologer Writes Them Anyway)
Every morning, I post an Astro Weather Forecast on Instagram. These forecasts are my answer to horoscopes. I pick out things that are happening in the sky, and I try to help my followers understand what’s happening and how to apply it to their own lives.
In a recent post, I talked about Mercury retrograde as a challenge the collective has been given, and one of my readers asked in the comments what I mean by “the collective.”
It’s a good question.
I started to answer, and I realized that the relationship between astrology forecasts and the collective is more complicated than an Instagram comment will allow.
What Is Astro Weather?
Before we dive into the question of the collective, it’s helpful to be clear about what astro weather is.
Astro weather describes what is happening astrologically in the sky from our perspective on earth at a particular moment in time. The technical term for astro weather is transits.
To understand the significance of transits, it helps to think of the planets the way the Mesopotamians did.
To the Mesopotamians, the planets were gods who went on procession through the zodiac. Each sign of the zodiac belonged to one of the gods, and while the traveling gods were staying in a sign, they had the resources of their host god available to them.
Along the way, the traveling gods came to places in the sky that formed geometrically significant angles with each other from our perspective. These angles are called aspects, and they allowed the gods to interact with each other.
When two gods were in the same sign, they had the same resources and concerns. In Aries, they were asserting their will and engaging in conflict. In Taurus, they were taking a vacation and resting from the conflict of Aries. In Gemini, they got back to work and tackled the mountain of email that was waiting for them.
When two gods were in different signs, they might be in places that allowed them to work easily with each other (easy aspects), or they might have conflicting needs that caused them to have arguments (difficult aspects).
Astrologers believe that what is going on in the sky corresponds with what is happening on earth. (“As above, so below.”)
So, by watching transits, we can understand the times we’re living in and how best to respond—just like knowing the weather helps you figure out what to wear when you go outside.
Mundane Transits Are The Collective Weather, Our Weather
When astrologers talk about the aspects that are formed between planets that are moving through the sky right now, they are talking about mundane transits.
If all the world is a stage, as Shakespeare said, mundane transits describe the important events that are happening in the story of the whole world.
This year, the big astrological story is an argument between Uranus God of Rebels and Saturn God of the Establishment. We are seeing this play out in protests and resistance movements around the world.
These big stories on the world stage are what astrologers are talking about when we talk about the collective.
They aren’t the only stories in town, though.
Personal Transits Are Your Weather
Just because a story is newsworthy, doesn’t mean that it is going to have a personal impact on you.
The insurrection in the United States in January is an example of an event in the Uranus/Saturn storyline, but not everyone in the world was in Washington D.C. during the insurrection. Even those who were in D.C. weren’t all involved in the insurrection, and not everyone who was involved in the insurrection had the insurrection as a major part of their story.
A police officer who was protecting members of the Senate was definitely on the global stage and in the heart of the action, but the focus of her personal story last January might have been on being there for her mother who was dying of cancer over Christmas. She will always remember the insurrection. It will be an important part of her life and a story she’ll tell to her children, but when she thinks back to that time, the thing that will be most personally meaningful to her will be the moments she spent saying goodbye to her mother.
Another person might go through the exact same story and look at it differently. If she is driven and career oriented and doesn’t feel close to her mother, the work she did protecting the Senate might stick out for her as being more relevant to her overall story than what was happening in her family.
Our subjective experience can be read astrologically by looking at aspects between the planets moving through the sky right now and the position of planets our birth charts. These are called personal transits.
Personal transits help us to situate ourselves within the stories that are happening in the world around us. They help us understand what our role in the story is, where the story will play out in our lives, or even if it’s right for us to be involved in those collective stories at all.
Horoscopes Aren’t Always For You
When astrologers write astro weather forecasts, we know that the stories we are telling don’t apply to everyone.
We know that emphasizing the collective story is a little dangerous. It has the potential to lead you to believe you should should participate in stories you don’t belong in. You might believe that things will happen to you personally that are really destined to happen to someone else.
In short, many mundane transits don’t apply to you as an individual. And, yet, astrologers can’t write personal horoscopes for every person on the planet.
(This is why I encourage you to become your own astrologer.)
Additionally, astrologers have to be choosy about the transits we emphasize. Big stories like the Uranus/Saturn square are showy and glamorous and do a lot for astrology’s image. You can set your watch by them and see them on TV.
At the individual level, big transits like that are unlikely to impact you personally, just like a tiny fraction of a percentage of the world’s population was involved in the insurrection in January.
Smaller transits, like the moon’s 2.5 day passage through Aries, are much less likely to make the news. The moon in Aries isn’t glamorous, shocking, or showy because it happens once a month, but you are much more likely to experience that transit in your personal life as road rage or personal arguments.
Even then, these small, regular mundane transits are unlikely to connect with the big stories that are happening to you personally. You might remember that it rained on your wedding day, but the rain wasn’t the point.
This tension between individual and collective transits is one of the reasons horoscopes have such a bad reputation. Even a very good astrologer is going to talk past you sometimes.
How To Tell When Your Horoscope Is Talking About You
The good news is, you don’t have to guess if an astrology forecast has anything to do with you.
Many astrologers offer transit readings that can help you get a sense of the stories you’re in and the collective stories that are likely to pass you by.
I host Astro Talks on Discord once a month where I regularly take questions about transits.
And you can figure things out for yourself. If you have the ability to read your own chart, a good astro weather forecast should give you enough information about the transits the astrologer is referencing that you can look up those transits and see if those transits will be impacting anything in your birth chart.
As an astrologer who writes weather forecasts, I always try to provide tips for how to orient yourself within the story of the collective transits.
It’s important to remember, though, that readings for the collective require discernment. Not everything you hear is a message for you.
