How the Zodiac Became Your Horoscope

What's your sign?

In 1972, Harry Nilsson sang the words They say you never made it with a Gemini. This speaks to the ubiquity of astrology in 70s dating culture, as exemplified by that song's title, What's Your Sign? This, along with the Frank Zappa line, Love Your Nails, you must be a Libra, is what I often think of when I'm asked about my astrology opinions. And usually I leave it at that. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I just don't use astrology in my own practice all that often.

But people keep asking me for my astrology opinions, and so here we go. This is the astrology episode. We'll be going over what the zodiac is, what astrology's contributions to the divination arts are, and some ways that we can consider using them, or possibly even not using them. And I'm going to advocate for some ways to use them responsibly.

So sit back, relax, and join us as we explore the art of divination.

Why I resisted this episode

Welcome to The Art of Divination Podcast, presented by Artisan Tarot. I am your host, Z. Mann Zilla. On this episode, we'll be discussing astrology and the zodiac.

Now, part of the reason I've been resisting doing an episode about this for a while is because honestly, I think it would be pointless to try to sell you on astrology. The signs of the zodiac are such a ubiquitous part of the divination arts that just showing them is shorthand for what it is we do. I would even argue that astrology signs are a more ubiquitous shorthand for the divination arts than even tarot cards.

But as I mentioned during the intro, it's not something that I typically dip into with my own practice. Now, this isn't out of any sort of base disagreement with it or anything like that. It really just comes down to the fact that I haven't really found it necessary. I'm a secular reader, I prefer to stick to methods that I fully understand and that adhere to my understanding of the divination process.

The thing is, I also recognize that the divination arts aren't all about me. I also grew up in an era where astrology was considered by some to be the new hot religion, considered so important and influential that it became a near-inseparable part of the 70s and 80s dating scene, and you can still see evidence of this today. You go to dating sites, and there's many that give you the option of putting your astrological sign in your profile.

So it is clear that a lot of people have a very deep-seated belief of what astrology is, what it reveals, what it's all about, and how it applies to the ways we interact with one another. So, right off the bat, I want to make sure that I'm making it completely clear that this is not going to be an episode about trying to discourage people from including astrology in their divination practices.

But what this episode also isn't going to be is a comprehensive how-to. I do want to include information for people who are not quite as familiar with what makes astrology astrology. I want to offer some perspective on the functional parts of astrology from the lens of a secular reader, and ultimately I would like to introduce some arguments to the topic that, if nothing else, can get people to approach astrology with a more open mind.

The zodiac is a calendar

Because there are many arguments both for and against astrology that are actually ahistorical, and to understand what I mean about that, it's time to go into some history. And I'm not going to cover all of the ones that have existed throughout history. In fact, I'm mostly going to be focusing on the model that arose in the Europe and Asia areas, what we call the Western or Hellenistic model.

But what's important to understand about astrology is that all of it is derived from a very simple process of studying celestial bodies. There are carvings in cave walls over 25,000 years old that represent the charting of lunar cycles. Now, of course, these etchings don't include any sort of indication that they were used for mystical purposes.

It is more likely that this was for agriculture or architecture, knowing when best to build something or plant your crops. Forms of what we call electional astrology, which is a word meaning that's used to determine the best time to do important things. You can do everything from figure out when to plant your crops to when to plan a very important battle. And the reason why it worked for these applications is because at its heart, the zodiac is just a calendar. Nowadays, we're certainly clear on the science of why a particular constellation appears in the night sky in the same place at the same time every solar year.

But regardless of what you understand or know about how a particular constellation got there, the fact of the matter remains that every time, at the same time every year, this constellation shows up here, and when we see that, we know it is time to start the harvest.

A Babylonian dream

The thing is it's really difficult to have this discussion without acknowledging that the mystifications have been conflated into the process quite a bit. And of course, this goes back to the very beginning. Some of the earliest recorded evidence of humans using electional astrology comes from a Babylonian scroll dated to 1700 BC. In it, the author outlines a dream that they had, showing them the constellations to look for to determine the best time to build a temple. And this is a perfect example of that conflation I'm talking about, because regardless of where you believe the inspiration came from, they were still inspired. However, it is important to note that the Babylonian belief in astrology did not attribute the stars to causing the events. The astrology was just there to give a sign of when an event would best take place, and those signs corresponded to specific parts of the year. Again, like a calendar.

The Chinese zodiac

On that note, let's go ahead and jump over to China for a moment, around 1100 BC with the rise of the Zhou dynasty. And we talked about this being the period of time when they started using the I Ching. You might remember that from the I Ching episode, and along the same time they were coming up with their own system using the zodiac that fit in with many of their other religious philosophies. The Chinese zodiac was very granular and could chart things right down to a specific hour of day and could be charted across a 60-year period.

But like the Babylonians, they were not explicitly saying that, oh, the stars are what's affecting people during this 60-year period. They were using astrology as a way to chart the correlations. A lot of Taoist belief understands the universe as a complex chain of cause and effect, with those causes and effects coming from a number of sources, and regardless of what you believe those sources are, charting the effects does have some value because then you can start looking for patterns.

So the Chinese zodiac was about studying these trends and patterns and giving themselves a precise way to compute when about those would come up again.

The first newspaper horoscope

Of course, where most people probably know astrology from is from newspaper horoscopes. And this is where popular fascination with the zodiac starts to take a far hard mystic turn. The first newspaper horoscope was published in 1930 in a newspaper in the UK called The Sunday Express. And the format was sort of invented by accident. The editor, John Gordon, was looking for a way to make a story about a fourth royal birth a little more interesting, and the angle he landed on was to have somebody read the baby's horoscope and try to give a prediction of what their life would be like. The editor had an assistant named Richard Harold Naylor, who, it also turns out, was an astrologer on the side. Naylor goes ahead, and he draws up the birth chart for the new princess, determines that she will lead an eventful life, and then, to fill space, he gives general forecasts for people based on their astrological signs.

And this article also goes on to explain sort of what a horoscope is and what astrology is. And like we discussed with advice columns during the giving advice episode, there's just something about audience participation that gets people really interested in what's going on in the newspaper. So the format took off, and we've been seeing a horoscope section in just about every newspaper ever since.

Believers and hecklers

Now, you'll remember that when I was first talking about, you know, the Babylonians, the Chinese, etc., when I was talking about their beliefs, I was very specific about what they believed the relationship between celestial bodies and their own fates was, and that by and large, ancient adopters of the zodiac did not believe that the stars were the influence, merely the measuring stick. Newspaper horoscopes didn't exactly have that front-loading in them.

In fact, for many, this was their very first exposure to this kind of mystic thinking. And so, as the ubiquity and popularity of newspaper horoscopes started to rise, so too did people's belief in it, and that belief was not being based on the same things that historical uses of astrology were there for.

So now you have a populace that's becoming a very big fan of something that they've only just learned about that hasn't been comprehensively explained to them, and with every type of popularity, you're also going to have naysayers who only hate it because the people that like it are very annoying about it. And so with the haters, the only thing they know to hate about it is what they see from the people that really like it. And this gives rise to the two loudest voices of discourse in the modern astrology debate. The true believers who believe their fate is written in the stars, and the hecklers who believe it is ridiculous to think that your fate is written in the stars.

Cicero and the skeptics

And I'm just gonna segue into some editorialism on that particular topic, so indulge me. Here we go. So I tried to make clear at least the general beliefs throughout history of what people believed the relationship between the stars and their fates was. And I confess these were broad generalizations based on the writings of the time and things like that.

The thing is, though, if there's one thing I really love about astrology, it is the debate over whether or not astrology's claim that the celestial bodies hold influence over us is legit. And I think it's fascinating that we refer to it as the Hellenistic model because at that time not only were they using astrology more and more often for their own predictive models, but there was also a movement during, you know, throughout that same culture that was trying to dispute its legitimacy. And the entire legitimacy debate was based around this idea of whether or not the celestial bodies control people's futures. Around that same 300 BC period, we were also seeing a rise in the skepticism movement.

This is when a lot of very smart people were going around explaining how things actually work, and just couldn't abide by any sort of fanciful labels on it, mysticism was bad, etc. A lot of these folks were very engaged in explaining how astrology could not possibly be true, because a belief in fate would mean that free will cannot exist, and thus neither can morality. Indeed, it was the Roman orator Cicero who argued very strongly that if one believes solely in the influence of stars and planets, then one discounts the influence of a more grounded explanation, such as parenting, health, or weather.

A calendar doesn't cause anything

And this is where I start doing some editorializing, because on its face, I agree with that logic. The thing is, it is a logic that suffers from the same oversimplification that they are accusing true believers of. First of all, astrology does have a practical source. It is a celestial calendar, and the mere existence of a calendar does not presuppose the source of an influence. You're only using it to chart correlations. When we call a day September 29th, it's not because the calendar told us to.

It is because we made a calendar and we designated that day September 29th. That principle continues to hold up even if you refer to that as Virgo season. Secondly, this oversimplification also makes it so that you're not considering influences on the influences. Again, another reason I really like the Chinese model is because it understands the universe as one big chain of cause and effect.

And as I believe I've brought up in the past, when it comes to a system that complicated, you could very well take the time to calculate the movement of every single atom in the universe over a single moment, but it would take you the entire history of the universe to do that for just a single moment.

So at some point, some abstraction and some ballparking is expected. So if we're using astrology to chart and record certain correlations so that we can study the correlations and see patterns, well, that gives us a simpler model we can use to ballpark things. But as they say in the scientific community all the time, correlation does not mean causation. And going back to Cicero's argument of discounting the influences of parents or the weather, well, then you have to ask yourself what influenced the parents? Was it the weather? And for that matter, what influenced the weather? And really, does the what even matter if all you're trying to do is live within that world and get ready for it, like a surfer looking for the next wave.

Perhaps instead of an overconcern on where the influences come from, you're just charting them with some sort of a measuring tool. A calendar, perhaps.

Respecting what people believe

So, yes, I can understand a bit of annoyance when true believers of astrology go on about a planet's influence on us or anything of that nature. I can understand it, but at the same time, I feel that hecklers who are arguing against that rather than recognizing the bits and bobs of astrology that actually are functional and useful.

Well, I just feel like they're not doing themselves any favors here. Believers are going to believe what they believe. They are believers, and a respect for people's beliefs is integral to all of us kind of getting along together. Because on a practical level, people's beliefs give metaphors, they give stories, parables that they use to guide their way forward.

And if the guidance they're receiving is leading them to leading full, productive lives that they are happy with, then why would you want to remove that from them? Why, indeed, if you believe in practical influence, would you want to make your influence upon another life that you are making somebody more miserable?

Capricorns, Christmas, and Geminis

And if I may, I'm gonna go ahead and share a quick hypothesis with you. As I'm sure we know, each of the signs is ascribed certain habits, certain personality traits, that sort of thing. And I submit that it is possible to explain a lot of them by simple seasonal and cultural influences. For example, many Capricorns share the experience of having a birthday near Christmas, and if you know any Capricorns and ask them what that's like, they'll have a pretty unified experience with that.

Also, given the way schooling works, many Geminis are nearly a year younger than their Virgo classmates, a difference which is a lot more significant during early developmental ages. So is it possible, is it just possible that astrology isn't necessarily ascribing these personality traits to the stars and planets, but is instead measuring the ones that are caused by social and annual influences. I'm not saying that's the case; I'm just saying it is an interesting thing to think about. The moon may not directly influence your life in the way that you are claiming mystics say, but it affects the tides, and the tides affect when you are going out sailing and surfing.

So that's why I don't think we can throw astrology out completely. I just think some baseline education would help people understand why astrology exists in the first place and what it really does.

What a zodiac actually is

And I'm looking up at my timeline and realizing I've only given myself about 10 minutes to discuss that, so let's just switch over to that real quick. So I spent far too long talking about what astrology isn't, so I'm gonna really quickly try to tell you what astrology is. And we're gonna start with what a zodiac is. A zodiac is the belt of stars along the ecliptic path. That is the path that the sun looks like it's taking through the sky throughout the course of a year.

This belt of stars forms a 360-degree circle, and we cut that into 36 10-degree sections called decans. The Hellenistic model groups three decans into a single symbol, forming the 12 symbols of the zodiac that we recognize. So, for example, we recognize Taurus as representing April 20th through May 20th, and that's divided into three decans. The first one's April 20th to April 29th, the second is April 30th to May 10th, and the third one is May 11th to May 20th.

Reading a birth chart

Now this forms the basic grid, for lack of a better term, that you use to chart the movement of visible planets and celestial bodies, particularly the moon. What a birth chart is showing you is the position of the planets and the moon at the time that you were born. Now, if, and that's a very big if, you are using this information to chart patterns throughout human history or correlations based on those patterns, then this is a good piece of information to have.

The thing is, especially in a lot of modern thinking, there's, you know, a lot of mysticism that's been applied to the system, and there are a lot of theories about where certain celestial positions are and what those positions mean, how they can be interpreted in the divination sense, in the same way that a tarot card has certain interpretations, and that's a good comparison because keep in mind that tarot card interpretations can also vary from reader to reader.

But all of that is to say that getting into the nuts and bolts of these mechanics is something you're gonna want to do some research on and figure out what belief systems best align with your own. Indeed, just as it would be disrespectful for me to enforce my interpretation of The Devil on you, I'm also not gonna enforce an interpretation of what a Leo is or a Sagittarius. What my goal here is to show you what piece of information astrologers are going for when they do their interpretations for you.

Astrology in tarot

Now, this information isn't just used in straight astrology to determine your horoscope and things of that nature. It's also used in tarot; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn mapped certain celestial bodies and signs of the zodiac to certain tarot cards. Each of the Major Arcana cards has a corresponding sign of the zodiac or a planet or even an element that's important to astrology assigned to it, and they are considered sort of the ultimate ruling avatar of that element. While 36 of the pip cards are also assigned to specific decans, which in your readings can be very useful for giving yourself a very specific 10-day time frame. Very useful if you are, for example, trying to find a narrative answer to the question when can I expect this to happen?

And it can also be used to justify certain pip cards as significators. But again, you have to know the date of birth of the folks you're talking about in order for that information to be useful to you or to make sense.

What astrology has going for it

Now, as I said before, I'm not the right person to try to sell you on all of this. You're either a believer in astrology, or you're not. You're either willing to invest the time to learn about astrology and incorporate it into your practice, or you're not. And the reasons for that are going to be very personal. What I will say is that I do see the advantages of this system being applied to your divination art. For one thing, the very act of studying celestial bodies to determine these patterns is again over 25,000 years old. And even its codification is extremely old, older even than many of the systems I've gone on about, like I Ching.

So it's a terrific source of inspiration if you're looking for something that has a tremendous amount of provenance, even, you know, whether you're talking about provenance on paper or provenance in what they represent. But there are also some pitfalls to incorporating this thinking into your practice if you haven't already, and I'd like to take a moment to go ahead and go over some of those.

Never give out your birthday

So you will remember how I talked about in the process of creating a star chart, somebody's gonna need to know your birthday. Indeed, there's lots of free services online that will do a star chart for you, and all they need from you is your birthday. This presents one of the biggest problems with astrology, one of the biggest, most practical reasons I won't use it in my practice, which is that it leaves you open to certain scams. Back when I used to do Sesamerot for TikTok, part of my content was also that I would do tarot reviews and do readings of regular tarot decks for folks. And an experience that I shared with a lot of my fellow readers online is that people would sometimes get contacted by folks pretending to be us and offering them a reading, saying, Oh, we've got an important message for you from the stars.

These messages always included some sort of language to the tune of, could you tell me what your sign is or when you were born so I can calculate your star chart? And this is, of course, how scammers get a very important piece of information out of you for the purposes of identity theft.

So while I have personal reasons why I don't incorporate astrology into my practice, one of the main reasons I'm in no hurry to start doing so is because I don't want to normalize the behavior of people giving their birthdays to strangers. You can cancel a credit card, you can change your password, but there's nothing you can really do about changing your birthday. That's always gonna be your birthday.

So I'm gonna stress, particularly if you are an online reader, that you do not ask for people's astrological signs, you do not encourage people to volunteer that information, and if you are the sort of person that consumes tarot content online, I would encourage you to withhold that information. And if you are a true believer that's looking to get your star chart drawn up, make sure you know as much as possible about the astrologer before you volunteer that information.

The opposite of random

The other reason I don't dip too much into astrology is because you know me, I like a craft that has an element that can be shuffled. I've talked a lot in the past about divination techniques that incorporate a random element so that even if you believe in outside intercession, you are giving an opportunity for intercession in your process by having a random element. Astrology is the opposite of random. The planets are gonna continue on the same axis that they always have. The moon is always going to operate in the same phase as it always has. Useful in their own way, but it sort of requires the philosophy that you believe the future's immutable, and as you know about me, I don't believe that. I consider divination to be forecasting a future, not predicting the future, and I believe that there has to be room for free choice.

A shorthand and a common language

But here's the thing, I don't want to discount astrology entirely, not even the mysticized parts of it. For one thing, astrology still provides some nice broad-scope predictors, or, narratively speaking, a foundational leitmotif. That's an overhanging theme that allows swifter explanation of the specifics. Instead of dancing a two-minute-long narrative circle around something, you can just say, oh, it's because you're a Leo. Or this card represents your crush because your crush is a Pisces. And that's related to my other good point, which is, and we brought this up during the runes episode, having little succinct ways of indicating the principles that you're trying to bring up is a very good thing to have in a lot of systems. The symbol for Mercury is just as succinct and conveying of information as the rune for Tiwaz, for example.

So a working knowledge of astrological symbols and signs adds some nice little shorthand to whatever system you're doing. Along those same lines, it's a very ancient art in a lot of ways, and so also carries a lot of that provenance and gravitas that you know I like to see in a divination system. Or in this case, a language to accompany a divination system. Astrology also represents one of the broadest common ground topics for all practitioners of the divination arts, regardless of what system or tools you like to use in your practice.

So as a social element, it is very handy. And finally, underneath all of that mysticism, there is actually a grounded explanation for everything that's happening. Underneath everything, all we're seeing is a calendar, something that measures time.

Closing and where to find us

So, in summary, while I don't use astrology in my own practice, and I recognize some of the dangers of choosing to do so, I do not discourage its inclusion. In a reading, it is no more outlandish to call upon the metaphor of what Taurus represents to you than it is, say, to call upon the metaphor of the Tower of Babel when drawing a Tower card.

So, bottom line, I think it's worth looking into if you haven't really taken a closer look at it. Definitely worth checking out, and when you do, make sure you keep an open mind. Or don't if you think I'm full of beans or something. Which should just be so Virgo of you.

This has been The Art of Divination Podcast, presented by Artisan Tarot, publishers of both historical and modern tarot decks, and your one-stop shop for all things metaphysical. Look for many of the items we discussed today at www.artisantarot.com.

As for myself, I've been Z. Mann Zilla, and you can find more about me at www.Pandangit.com. I wish you all the best of luck on your own divination journeys. Happy reading, and thank you for your time.