Does Astrology Just Tell Us What We Already Know?

In this excerpt from the essay “Zoltar Speaks, And So Do The Stars” from her book Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking, writer Marianne Eloise contemplates the relationship between OCD, magical thinking, and spiritual practices like astrology.

In recent years, astrology has seen a rise in popularity, as more people cling to it to seek comfort and order in an ever-chaotic world. They want to understand themselves, to know what’s next. In my more secure moments, when I don’t quite empathize, I roll my eyes. At a party in 2017, when astrology’s resurgence was reaching a peak with the definitely-middle-class-but-faking-otherwise communities of South London, a tall girl with a can of Red Stripe in her hand insisted on guessing my star sign. I really, truly, couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t know her, only knew that she owned a house her parents bought for her but that she pretended to be poor, which irritated me. We had nothing in common.

With no known traits of mine to associate with their according sun sign, she got it wrong several times in a row. I gave in and told her I was a Pisces, to which she said I must be just so scatty and dreamy and creative. Not so — my then-boyfriend chipped in to say that I was organized and careful. Keen not to be proven wrong, she pushed further, trying to find something more fitting in my chart. “It’s your Virgo rising that makes you organized!” she offered. “It’s actually being raised by irresponsible parents,” I responded, and she looked uncomfortable, which is basically what I wanted. I felt resentful that someone would meet me for five minutes, and think they could see into my soul because of the time I was born. People, their infinite traumas and nuances and complexities, aren’t quite as easy to define as that, and I’m skeptical of anyone who claims they are.

But the truth is more complicated, and I’m as guilty of craving confirmation bias as anyone. I don’t believe in horoscopes until I realize how many of my favorite people are Pisces, too, like my closest friends and Tyler, the Creator. I am skeptical of anyone who claims to be psychic, but sometimes it suits me. Towards the start of our flirtation, my not-yet-boyfriend (also a Pisces!) and I were sitting in a pub, when a drunk woman with the energy of Baba Yaga came stumbling over. She told him that he was madly in love with me, and he should tell me now, and I believed her. I sat in the bright light of that sticky, grimy pub with a lukewarm cider in my hand and I thought, yeah, sure Grandma Death, maybe you do have a gift!

I would believe in anything that offered guidance or knowledge or some deeper understanding of who I was.

Growing up, I didn’t have security. I lived in an unstable household that I didn’t have the tools or the language to either define or fix. My parents divorced when I was a toddler after spending the first years of my life screaming at each other, and they dragged one another through a painful court case, fighting for custody of a child neither of them seemed to want. Soon after, my mom met a man that I called Dad. Even after they broke up, I had a room at his house, and it felt like a home, until I was sixteen and he cut off contact with me to date and marry a seventeen year old. I had no reason to trust that anything, anybody, was permanent. I had no outlets for my own feelings, which were quickly metastasizing into something much uglier and deeper than adolescent angst. I was lost.

When I was very young, my neuroses were apparent to any keen observers, and my nana, keen to assuage them, gave me a bag of worry dolls. Every single night, I clutched the small, wpaganooden dolls wrapped in cotton, and whispered what I wanted to them: what I was scared of, what I wanted them to “bring me.” I tucked them into their pink bag and slipped them under my pillow, believing steadfastly in their power. Next, she gave me a Spanish Indalo, a good-luck charm that she hoped would protect me. I quickly used it as a tool for my developing disorder, promising it good behavior in return for stability and happiness. When it told me what to do, I listened.

Hearing that ‘God’ granted his followers all they could desire, I turned to religion. I had never been baptized, wasn’t raised to be religious at all, but as soon as I heard of the concept of Christianity, I was hooked. I read the Bible cover to cover, getting down on my knees every night to pray for whatever I wanted: for someone to sit next to me on a school trip, for a boy to like me, for my nightmares to disappear. When it happened, it was confirmation of his existence. I clutched a beaded rosary and I promised God to be good, to believe in him, to do his bidding, so long as he would give me everything I wanted and keep my family safe.

It soon became clear that I wasn’t religious, but mentally ill. I was fickle! I had no conviction behind my faith that I wouldn’t pour into something else if it promised me more. In my early teens, I got into Wicca and astrology. My New-Age inclined mother encouraged anything slightly wishy-washy that stopped me from asking questions. She bought me tarot cards, books on numerology, and crystals. I built an altar and worshiped at it, learning all I could about Wicca. I started to believe, truly, that I could change the course of my fate through a few well-timed spells. I believed I could predict what might happen tomorrow by turning to the stars, even though my mother’s moods weren’t predictable minute to minute. I was just praying at the altar of a security that I wasn’t responsible for.

I would believe in anything that offered guidance or knowledge or some deeper understanding of who I was. More shallow than that, I believed in anything that would bring me things that I wanted, like my close friends the tooth fairies.

These quirks in children are often dismissed. Children believe, however strongly, in anything they want to. They believe in fairies and superheroes; they ask Santa for gifts and kneel for God without asking any questions. It’s endearing when you’re young, before it causes you or those around you distress. In cultures across the world, from the UK to Japan, parents use superstition and folklore to keep children in line. Those concepts work. Perfectly sane, competent adults warn their children not to step on cracks, or put new shoes on the table, or walk under ladders, due to their own superstitious beliefs.

Encouraged by adults, I followed those superstitions to the letter, but nobody around me noticed those quirks turning into a fully-fledged mental illness. Walking home, every day, I avoided the cracks in the road. At my corner, I would take it one step further, not letting myself go home until I thought of a word that had fifteen letters. When I read that, in Japanese culture, sleeping with your head facing north is bad luck, I changed my entire room’s configuration around in the night. I became obsessed with feng shui, with magic, with any culture’s version of foresight and order.

All human beings seek order, guidance and knowledge, and that yearning manifests in different ways. We want to believe that if we do the right things, however arbitrary, we can keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. We can get the outcome we want and come to a greater understanding of who we are, simply by enacting the correct rituals or saying the phrase enough times, whether it’s through prayer or magic.

Not everyone with an interest in superstition or religion or astrology has obsessive compulsive disorder, and most won’t take their interest to an unhealthy degree. Not every Christian or amateur astrologer is mentally ill, they’re just human, but our ways of understanding the world share some similarities.

My OCD always relied on a simplified version of a Karmic system — do good, be good, else things be bad for you. But, while I only ever really worshiped at the altar of obsession and compulsion, most of us share a reliance on magical thinking to organize the chaos of the world. Maybe I still do.

My own relationship with spirituality and folklore is, at best, complicated. As a child it was a symptom of a disorder I couldn’t name, yet another way of seeking a handle on my reality that would never come. As I attempted recovery, I had to let go of my own rituals. With time, I’ve learned to let my interests coexist with my slightly healthier mind. Occasionally reading my horoscope or turning to the wisdom of the great Zoltar won’t set me back so long as I understand their function in my life: to confirm what I already know.

Excerpted from Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking by Marianne Eloise. Copyright © 2022 by Marianne Eloise. Reprinted by permission of Icon Books.