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How You Know Mercury Is in Retrograde
I recently filled an online shopping cart with four hundred dollars worth of trading cards, and I don’t have the four hundred dollars to purchase them, so that’s one way. More to the point, astrology has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past decade or so, and I’m far from the first person to tell you. Daily horoscopes, in particular, seem to crop up everywhere, as do zodiac sign assignments to all manner of subjects, no matter how niche. Want to know what Neopet you are based on your sign? It’s out there. At some point, things like Mercury retrograde became part of today’s zeitgeist, and whether you intended to or not, you’ve heard about it.
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The question in this article is what role popular media has played in that resurgence. Have movies and television, in particular, quickened, or dampened, the astrology hype?
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Oversimplified as Far Back as the Forties
In general, astrology is looked down upon in popular media. A quintessential example of this is Alexander Hall’s 1944 rom-com ‘The Heavenly Body.’ In it, an astronomer’s wife (Hedy Lamarr) tries out a visit to an astrologer, who foretells that she has yet to meet her true love. William Powell plays the astronomer, and the husband and wife banter about astrology’s legitimacy, and the astrologer’s prediction turns out to be the fateful thing that intrudes on their lives.
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Like the queer coding of Disney villains, astrology is assigned a villainous, chaotic role in the film. This same general view of astrology as harmful pseudoscience persists alongside fervid enthusiasm by those who believe in its value. Take as opposing examples Stephen Fry and the counterculture creatives behind the ’60s musical ‘Hair’, famously adapted into a movie in 1979. While Stephen Fry is quoted as having said of astrology that “it is a senseless delusion that does not even have the benefit of being harmless fun,” Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt McDermot introduce their musical with the now-iconic “Age of Aquarius,” a song that embraces the significance of astrological signs wholeheartedly.
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Whether supporting or opposing, most people who interact with astrology do so with an elementary understanding at best. Astrology, as represented in Instagram graphics or even in NASA’s highly personalized Co-Star App, is typically a simplified version of Natal astrology, one of four major categories of horoscopic astrology. In the same way that yoga has been watered down for a broader audience reception, in-depth astrology rarely sees the big screens.
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A Quick Rundown on the Four Kinds of Astrology
As mentioned before, things having to do with your astrological chart are in the category of Natal astrology. At the exact time of your birth, the planets and the constellations corresponding to each zodiac sign are arranged in some way or another, and Natal astrology proposes to find the meaning in that. This category covers daily horoscopes.
Mundane astrology is a category of astrology involving world events. Practitioners of mundane astrology seek the significance of certain celestial alignments as they relate to the world at large. Richard Tarnas, author of ‘Cosmos and Psyche’, is a modern example of a mundane astrologer.
Electional astrology uses the stars to determine the best time to begin something, trying to discern the most ideal moment for a significant undertaking.
And lastly, horary astrology is the practice of answering a question based specifically on when the question is asked. When someone asks a horary astrologer a question, the astrologer determines which astrological house the question most closely adheres to, and then gets more specific from there.
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Astrology in the Entertainment World
Most references to astrology in movies and television are cursory one-liners. Lines like the moment in ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ when Mrs. Paxton (Keira Knightley) calls Jess (Parminder Nagra) a lesbian at Jess’s sister’s wedding, and a confused guest says, “Lesbian? Her birthday is in March. I thought she was a Pisces.”
Movies and shows that have astrology as a central theme are few and far between, but they exist. As recently as last year, the Italian rom-com series ‘An Astrological Guide for Broken Hearts’ came to Netflix. It follows the story of a heartbroken woman who consults with an astrology guru as she sets out to find someone with a perfectly compatible star chart to her own. The episodes and characters are all thematically representative of zodiac signs.
‘An Astrological Guide for Broken Hearts,’ as gimmicky as it is, best represents the way astrology exists in our collective consciousness. It’s a show much better described as trendy than subversive, and in that way resembles the pop astrology that most people are familiar with, and content to be only acquaintances with.
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The Core Themes of Astrology
Perhaps a more nuanced approach to the way that astrology overlaps with movies is to examine how themes of fate and destiny are examined in them. In episode 314 of The Astrology Podcast, astrologers Chris Brennan and Leisa Schaim discuss the ways that movies like ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ take on the idea of fate. They do a far better job than I could in this format, and it’s an interesting listen.
My biggest takeaway from their discussion is that what fascinates astrologers is the same search for significance in the world around us that guides filmmakers and audiences. At its core, astrology and the consumption of it are outward expressions of an inward search for meaning. Ali Roff Farrar offers a nice summation of the likely psychological causes behind astrology’s recent boom in popularity in her article for Pan Macmillan, “Why Is Astrology Making a Twenty-first-century Comeback?.”
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When Blanche (Vivien Leigh) says to Stanley (Marlon Brando), “I bet you were born under Aries” in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ his actual sign, Capricorn, is meant to reveal something about his underlying personality. In the case of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece, astrology represents a dowsing rod for truth underneath the tense relationships between Stanley, Blanche, and Stella. I think a lot of people seek small truths to hold onto in a confusing world, and the permanence of star alignments offers, at the very least, the appearance of truth.
Whether astrology compels you or rings hollow to you, its prevalence seems to come from that inward search more than anything else. And though it’s taken on a trendy form and has long been a subtopic in visual media, astrology seems to influence movies and shows more than the other way around.
By Kevin Hauger
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