In this episode of the Religious Studies Project podcast, Dr. Nick Campion discusses the history of western astrology. There is lots of fun and interesting stuff in there, but two bits stuck out to me.
Firstly, so many enlightenment scientists and modernist intellectuals were into astrology, theosophy, and the occult! The brief mentions of the shift from astrologies of fate and predestination to astrologies of spiritual development and personal evolution in enlightenment Europe make me want to read Campion’s history of astrology. I’m interested in what all kinds of people use divination for and how they understand it to work, and I am especially intrigued to know how it was conceived of by rationalist, materialist, reductionist natural philosophers.
Secondly, I was stunned by the direct lineage from Greek astrology, through Jung, into the personality type category systems that are so common in contemporary business culture. Recently at my hilarious yet rewarding corporate job (long story) I have been doing a bunch of Myers-Briggs and similar self-assessments and discussing them with other people as part of a training. The comparison we make most often is to astrology (i.e., you can find relevant descriptions of yourself in most of the categories, everyone has traits of various types in different ways), so I am both surprised and not to learn of this heritage.
Campion’s idea that astrology fills a need for personalized psychology and meaning in an increasingly impersonal world seems astute, and corporate workers are surely faced with depersonalizing forces. (I am regularly referred to as “a resource” instead of a person, to my face.) Perhaps the endless personality quizzes do some work to make people feel human and individual again; perhaps they are just compelling under the circumstances.