Astrology + Scientific Animism

🌝 Full Moon Essay: drawing distinctions

It was urgent! I wanted to get my definition of Scientific Animism out before anyone else!

Already, Ezra Klein had invented the term, and the concepts were swirling through Ideaspace. Once a thought becomes adjacent-enough, it reveals itself to many people at once.

I would have been major sad if the first project to introduce the term to the world had been a wellness MLM scam.

Scientific Animism to sell diluted herbs.

Scientific Animism to align your chakras with the natural world.

Scientific Animism to harmonize your body’s vibrations with your clothing’s vibrations.

Or some other such.

Woulda broken my heart!

And yet here I am, scheduling events & newsletters on New & Full Moons. Calling this a new Earth religion.

I predict higher-than-average interest in Scientific Animism from people who are into:

• astrology / star signs / horoscopes

• tarot

• New Age

• shamanism

• occult stuff

• witchcraft

• paganism

And that’s great! All are welcome. Plenty of space here.

But I want the “scientific” part of "Scientific Animism” to actually mean something. I want this to feel like it could be a spiritual home—or maybe a spiritual framework, or test bed—for people like me with evidence-based worldviews. Skeptics who celebrate aligning our views with evidence, and who are open to the fact that new evidence might require us to change our minds. Who tend to have high levels of suspicion about supernatural claims, and even our own experiences. I want to build up a spirituality that honors that quest, that curiosity, and doesn’t require buying into a supernatural framework. To make spirituality feel possible to this audience.

There’s already so many scammers and regular-confused-people misusing the word “science” as well as various scientific terms (quantum this and uncertainty that!). Is Scientific Animism just another one?

To help clarify what I think this new idea is and what it isn’t, let’s draw some circles. What’s in this one, and what’s merely nearby in the Venn diagram. The other circles are fine, but I want us to come up with a definition of Scientific Animism that keeps it distinct from the other stuff. If the term is too squishy, it loses power; why even introduce it in the first place?

what’s chill

I see people out there using astrology and these other ideas in many ways. Some are perfectly compatible with a scientific worldview.

1. centering

If you wanna have a little tarot card ritual—draw some cards, see what they suggest, sit with it, orient your thoughts, find some intention—great!

You could use your daily horoscope in the same way. Someone wrote some vague words about people born during an arbitrary date range. (A date range that long ago drifted from the fact of which constellation the sun would be in front of, if we could see constellations during the day. Not that the words would have been less vague or arbitrary when the date ranges lined up with the constellations!) Ok. Do those vague words have something to offer you today?

I see this as equivalent to the common Christian practice of a daily devotional. As a kid, I was encouraged to read a little bit of the Bible every morning, or someone else’s words about the Bible, and treat it like some people treat tarot & horoscopes. Sit with it, orient my thoughts, find some intention. Let God speak to me through it, was maybe how it was phrased to me.

Lots of religions have these little centering rituals. Some are word-based, like the devotional. Some are silence-based, like meditation. Some have strict rules and prescribed movements & recitations, like 5x/day salah. Tarot is sort of art-based, I guess? Lots of different tarot decks created by all different artists. Qigong, tai chi, and yoga are movement-based.

Are some of these better than others? Nah. Better for who? I think you should try them all. And make up more. Watch or read some Carl Sagan, say. Or one of those YouTube channels about math or astronomy (so many new astronomical discoveries and questions right now!). Sing. Go for a slow walk. Deeply observe one specific patch of nature. Or whatever lifts you out of your grind, gives you some wonder, helps you introspect, gets you excited, or [enter your desired affect here]. Stick with one practice for a while and see how it feels. Then try out something else. Or go deeper with that one.

Maybe ✨The 🌌 Universe🪐 is literally speaking to you through your tarot deck, maybe the horoscope author had special insight about people with particular birthdays, and maybe God is literally speaking to you through your randomly-chosen scripture, but like… probably not? At least not in a way that’s distinguishable from randomness. That’s an extraordinary claim.

But there’s still power in the ceremony.

Treating these rituals as something to play with, to experiment with, strikes me as fully compatible with an evidence-based worldview. Fully compatible with Scientific Animism.

2. crystals

They’re pretty!

3. moon

Also pretty!

Paying attention to it may loosen the grip of present shock and our relentless productivity culture (the link for “present shock” mentions some neurotransmitter stuff, and I can’t figure out if it’s legit; maybe?).

Sometimes people go in for extraordinary claims about the moon. And there is probably a bunch of stuff about it and its impact that science hasn’t yet measured (like aforementioned neurotransmitter stuff). Maybe the root causes of some purported moon magic have more to do with psychosomatic effects, or just helping us notice things differently. Like, planting your garlic when the moon is in an Earth sign constellation might result in more robust plants not because of anything about the moon’s interaction with your soil and those distant stars, but because you paid closer attention.

Still cool.

And also, and also, Earth’s moon is the best moon.

4. what else…

I’m sure there’s more. Leave comments with your ideas! What are other ways that people use astrology & similar concepts in ways that are positive, beneficial, useful, or at least harmless?

what’s out

There’s other ways of using astrological concepts that strike me as not only unscientific, but actively harmful.

1. bad predictions

Ash (fka Ashi) said it better than I can:

i think it's cool how in queer spaces if you say you don't get on with black or disabled or trans people you'll get rightly dragged for days, but if you say you don't fuck with people born March 31 - April 19, folks will nod sagely like yes, fuck those guys.

These are not directly comparable—astrology in the west isn't white supremacy and it isn't patriarchy and it isn't ableism, and it's right to critique folks for supporting any of those powerful institutions.

But maybe let's also interrogate our attraction to a magical system that so easily supports writing stories upon, and withholding energy from, other people—due to, in the most literal sense, the accidental circumstances of their birth.

For more of Ash’s brilliance on magical systems, go read their thread on gender.

To say “I don’t fuck with [star sign]” is to make personality predictions based on when a person was born. “When were you born” is a bad personality test; no one should go in for this. It has no place in science, and no place in Scientific Animism.

A similar way of using astrological concepts to make bad predictions: “Don’t make big decisions if you keep super close track of where the planets are from night to night and you notice that one of them (Mercury, say) seems to move backwards (retrograde) against the background stars and you can only assume that something fishy must be afoot because you live in a time when people hadn’t yet figured out that the sun is the middle, not the earth.”

2. externalizing blame

It wasn’t Mercury bein’ in retrograde.

It wasn’t the devil.

It was you.

3. fatalism

A friend once insisted I have high emotional intelligence because of when I was born. Against my protests. “As a child, I had to be taught to hug back!” I argued. “I wouldn’t look up and acknowledge people when they walked into a room. Every scrap of emotional intelligence I have was hard-earned! Learned. A playbook of scripts to deploy based on queues. Not my innate personality.”

At the time, I still didn’t consider myself particularly adept at this whole Emotions skill. But he did! Because he knew when I was born, and that carried more weight for him than my own self-knowledge. And he insisted that the alignment of the stars at the moment of my birth baked that in, despite my own learning journey indicating otherwise.

4. confusing cause & effect

Words are powerful. Have you tried a boring example of it? One of those I-stopped-saying-I-was-bad-at-remembering-names-and-got-better-at-remembering-names kinda things? Just tell a different story, focus on a different thing, and sometimes you can live into it. Our brains are weird, and sometimes simple affirmations can have powerful effects. “When we speak a story, we summon a story.”

Some people were born during Capricorn dates, but never heard anything about what a Capricorn is “supposed to be” while growing up, and then discover as adults that they are quintessential Capricorns. This is a funny coincidence. (And also part of the art of writing good horoscopes—keep everything vague enough that any person can see some of themself in any of the descriptions.)

Other people are told from the time they’re young that they’re a Capricorn. Maybe their parents even read them their horoscopes. They learn what they’re supposed to be. And consciously or not, some of these people will shape themselves to the expectations.

The horoscope isn’t describing an innate personality. The personality formed to the horoscope.

(And of course other people, for the record even though its obvious, don’t fit their star sign at all, because “when were you born” is a bad personality test. I never fit mine.)

5. limiting oneself

Maybe you’ve got some of your star sign’s associated traits, but you contain multitudes. Let the other stuff grow, too! Give the other parts of your personality some time in the sun, in your attention.

At least treat star signs like the Enneagram, or Meyers-Briggs. Self-fucking-analyze! Which one do you think matches you best?

Or maybe try on different signs. Decide that you’re a Virgo for a while, then switch to Cancer. Read their ‘scopes. See how they sit. Do you feel different, moving through the world as the new sign?

Or write your own horoscopes.

6. replacing “praying for” with “manifesting”, then using it in the same harmful ways

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Maybe to you. It’s not because you didn’t try hard enough, whether your version of “try” is praying or manifesting or staying positive or anything else. No supernatural explanations will ever make it ok. You didn’t do something wrong, you’re not being punished.

Is astrology a shallow religion?

“Astrology” by itself is not a religion, in the traditional way people use the word in the West.

But I do see a lot of people who grew up Christian fall away just to replace the word “God” with “Universe” and “pray” with “manifest” and then keep a lot of the same fatalism & magical thinking that I thought they were trying to leave behind. And sometimes, I might add, they do this with what strikes me as disdain for the tradition they left, as if their new path is more enlightened.

People grab a handful of concepts from my list near the top and self-assemble something that may as well be called a religion. If you didn’t read my “is a hot dog a sandwich” post, it’s got a great summary of Ninian Smart’s Seven Dimensions of Religion. People’s “astrology+x+y” might not add up to seven, but 3? 5? Definitely.

There’s nothing wrong with this! At least, if it’s done humbly. I’m out here championing some sort of new quasi-religion, too.

And yes, these all strike me as a little shallow. Maybe just for now, maybe for always. Could be a feature, not a bug.

By “shallow” I mean that these newer assemblages of concepts lack the thousands of years of history and cultural strata and bloodshed upon which more established religions now rest. A religious tradition feels deeper when a bunch of your ancestors died for it.

The same thing I said I believe about religion applies to these self-assembled ones too, as well as to Scientific Animism:

Religions are good for inspiration, for self-analysis, for community, for framing the world. They are bad for explaining why things are the way they are, for making predictions, and for legislating Can vs Ought. As Robin Wall Kimmerer put it: good for orientation, bad for mapping.