This is the 4th and final1 part of the Astrology is Real series. Check out Part 1, Part 2, the interlude, and Part 3.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
I was recently at a birthday party for my cousin’s 1-year-old daughter. I observed the children playing, they were probably between the ages of 2 to 9. It’s so interesting watching children play. Each little soul has its own unique disposition, their way of Being-in-the-World.
There was one boy running around doing things impulsively. He picked up a toy and threw it into the baby pool. He picked up an abandoned juice-box and slurped from it. He ate disgustingly moist crackers off of the ground.
It felt like he was acting impulsively, with the naïveté and innocence often associated with Aries (which is also associated with movement and physical activity).
Was he born under the sign of Aries? Is his ascendant in Aries? Did he have lots of Aries in his chart?
My sister sent a video of her newborn baby staring at an illustration of a spotted Dalmatian in his cardboard baby book. Aha, he is so discerning and detailed as he observes the spots of the Dalmatian. Classic Virgo behavior.
Something about this feels so very wrong, approaching child abuse. These young beings are pure bundles of experience, with their own unique souls that will develop in the world.
What if that young boy didn’t have any Aries in his chart?
What if I’m just looking for patterns to make sense of the chaos?
Imagine a spreadsheet of every Kindergartner, with their birth charts. Some kind of astrological social engineering.
This feels even more like child abuse.
ASTROLOGY IS CHILD ABUSE
It would be so much fun to watch a die-hard Astrological Dogmatist squirm as she squints at a spreadsheet of natal charts, searching for a meaning amongst the tea leaves. It’s like the language of astrology provides the subject with a pinball machine of phraseology, allowing the pinball of their mind to bounce around, lighting up with delightful sparks, sounds and lights of confirmation bias.
I trust my sense-making instincts because I was raised on the scientific method. I have a good sense for when I’m fooling myself. I know all the fancy concepts like confirmation bias.
It’s almost as if this Astrological Sense-making was a gift for me to discover later in life, when my body, mind, and soul were fully cultivated and ready to receive it.
But something about foisting this schema of psychological understanding onto young children just feels so wrong. It matters what words we use.
ARCHETYPES
But hey, is Astrology really the worst thing possible?
Bonnitta Roy defines Archetypes as Psychological structures adopted in early childhood and reified by culture.2
I’m going to list FIVE Archetypes that teachers, parents, and other adults use to describe people that are just as abusive as Astrology (and perhaps moreso).
HARRY POTTER HOUSES
TEEN MOVIES
Who do you sit with at the lunch table?
Are you a jock? A nerd? An emo? A theatre kid?
Stop living in an 80s movie and live your own life, dammit.
GENDER
The impulse of the outsider who doesn’t conform with gender norms thinks “All the boys like sports, all the girls like makeup. I’m different. Why should I be placed in such-and-such box.” All the outsiders congregate online, and what started as a legitimate instinct to avoid categories becomes the new ideal in itself, sucking in anyone who feels that same instinct. Any young girl who feels icky and uncomfortably growing into her new body becomes subsumed by a new label like trans or non-binary.
the DSM
The most devious of them all, the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by school psychologists all over the US to figure out which medication to put children on.
I once had a potential therapist tell me after one meeting, that I was bi-polar. He also told me “every case of bi-polar is different, like a snowflake.” Wow, sick metaphor bro. Did you think that one up all your self? When I mailed him a check for his services, I included a letter that said something like “you should keep this check, some day my signature will be worth way more than $100.” Ya know, lean in to the mania and delusions of grandeur.
Most importantly, I watched as a 6th grade girl named Ella wrote in a little home-made journal her therapist recommended she make. She opened it and and read aloud the first page: “Is it depression? Is it ADHD? Is it bipolar? Stay tuned to find out!”
While this process of journaling and self-reflection is useful, it feels disheartening that the only destinations available are those that are treated with a daily pill regimen.
The world needs less Coachella and more Coach Ella.
LANGUAGE ITSELF
Here is the part of the post where I would pretend to understand Lacan and Wittgenstein, were I not satisficing this article.
The more you gain literacy with these archetypes of memes, the more you can play these memes and identities against one another. Find the shadows they don’t cover. When you’ve absorbed the memes and drawn reality filters around enough people, you can reach escape velocity and achieve pure VIBE CONSCIOUSNESS.3
Schools are now full of students with IEP or Individualized Education Plans, designed specially for their unique needs. Everyone’s got accommodations for their special types of learners. Oh that kid is autistic? And he gets an aid to help him with his math quiz? Just because he went to a school-approved psychologist and got a little slip of paper? Okay fine, I’m going to help the jocks with their math quiz.
My child needs to go outside and move around. Your attempts to make him sit down or medicate him with industrial-powered METH are discriminating against him as an Aries.
The Rong Kite story in Part 3 was good enough to win first prize. Did the teacher notice the symbolism? Am I correct in my interpretation?
I published that post on my district’s first day of school. I must thank Mrs. Schumaker for nurturing my young talent, how blessed I feel.
My parents told me that at a parent-teacher conference, this teacher said I was unlike the other kids. The only other kid she’d had that displayed my level of talent was a kid a few years older than me. He used to babysit for us. Two years ago, he killed himself.
It wasn’t the school system that killed him4, but still, things feel totally fucked.
There have always been problems, but I fear things are getting worse. Students have all sorts of crazy dreams - about setting teachers on fire, about being stuck in the basement of the school, or of wandering alone through the empty halls of the school with only the principal as the only other person in the halls.
We need more philosophical levity.
THE NATURE OF GOD
Is God an Astrologer, or a Computer Programmer? Or Both?
What does it mean to have a soul that is “hand-crafted”.
Back in Part 1 I provided an illustration of the celestial bodies and said oh if you don’t relate to astrology then“God loves me more than you”.
Maybe He got tired of crafting the particularities of each soul. Maybe God is a Manager with a deadline to meet, and he delegated an army of Angel Engineers to put Soul-Rays in the realm of these constellations and the celestial bodies?
If this is indeed the case, is it it More or Less Beautiful to be part of this Astrological machine? Perhaps the day you were born, the machine was broken, sabotaged.
Is this Astrological Machine a reality for the eternities of time? Or is it merely a ladder for us to climb so we can reach escape velocity and achieve pure VIBE CONSCIOUSNESS
haha Cosmic Soul-Imprinting Device go brrrrr
For now… at least until I feel compelled to write about the interesting placement of my Mercury, the party happening with my Venus and Mars (will Saturn catch them?), and the battle between my Jupiter and my Lot of Fortune.
Peter Limberg & Bonnitta Roy. Less Foolish. Phenomenological Cartography
Peter Limberg. Less Foolish. Meme to Vibe: A Philosophical Report.
… something else