The astrology revival

What it is

The resurgence of astrology since roughly 2015 — in apps, on social platforms, in mainstream publishing and in ordinary conversation — and the specific ways the revived version differs from the newspaper astrology it replaced.

The scale is real. Co-Star, The Pattern, Sanctuary and their competitors have tens of millions of users. Astrology accounts have audiences in the millions. Surveys in the US, UK and Australia put belief in astrology at somewhere between a fifth and a third of adults, higher among people under thirty-five, and highest among young women.

Where it came from

Astrology never went away, but its popular Western form had narrowed almost to nothing. The twentieth century's version was the sun-sign column — twelve paragraphs, invented for a newspaper in 1930, using one variable out of a system that has dozens.

Three things changed after 2010.

Computation became free. Casting a chart used to require an ephemeris, a table of houses, and an hour of arithmetic that most people would not do. Now a phone does it instantly from a birth time and place. That single technical fact is the largest cause of the revival, and it means the material being consumed is genuinely more complex than what preceded it.

The traditional astrology revival supplied the content. Since the 1990s, Project Hindsight and scholars including Robert Schmidt, Robert Hand and Chris Brennan translated Hellenistic and medieval sources that had been unavailable in English, restoring techniques — sect, annual profections, zodiacal releasing, traditional rulerships — that twentieth-century astrology had lost. A generation of practitioners learned these and brought them online.

The platforms supplied the distribution, with the incentives described under spirituality online.

The cultural timing is also usually noted: the revival tracks a period of economic precarity, institutional distrust and — sharply — the pandemic, and previous astrology booms have followed a similar pattern. That correlation is real; the causal story around it is speculative.

How it is used

Less as prediction than as vocabulary. The characteristic modern use is descriptive and social — a shared language for talking about personality, compatibility and timing, held at a variable and often deliberately ambiguous distance from literal belief.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the evidence has not changed, and it is set out under the evidence on astrology. Controlled tests of astrological claims have not supported them; Shawn Carlson's 1985 double-blind study in Nature remains the standard reference; and the Gauquelin work is the one anomaly, with its own long history of dispute. Nothing about the revival bears on the question of whether astrology works, and the increased technical sophistication does not constitute evidence.

We can say the modern version is a genuinely different object from the newspaper column, and critics who treat them as the same thing are attacking something nobody defends. A full natal chart with houses, aspects, sect and timing techniques is complex enough that its interpretation is effectively unfalsifiable, which is a different problem — but it is not the twelve-paragraph problem.

We can say the practitioners' framing has shifted, and honestly so. A substantial share of working astrologers now describe what they do as archetypal, symbolic or reflective rather than causal — the chart as a language for self-examination, not a mechanism by which planets do things. Under that framing the empirical objection partly misses, because no physical claim is being made. Under that framing something else is being claimed instead, and this site's position is simply that the two framings should not be swapped mid-conversation.

We can say the psychological findings still apply. The Barnum effect — that people rate generic personality descriptions as highly accurate about themselves — was demonstrated by Bertram Forer in 1949 and has never stopped replicating. Confirmation bias does the rest. Neither finding is defeated by the chart being more detailed; a longer description offers more surface for recognition.

We can say the app format introduces something new and worth naming. Push notifications delivering unsolicited interpretations of the current sky, in the language of certainty, to a user who did not ask a question at that moment, is not a form anything in astrology's history prepared it for. Practitioners have raised this themselves — Co-Star's notifications in particular have been criticised within the astrology community for a tone that a working astrologer sitting with a client would never use.

And we can say the "I don't really believe it but" position is the modal one and deserves better than mockery. Large numbers of people use astrology as an idiom — for self-description, for starting a conversation, for permission to talk about their own patterns — while holding no view on the mechanism. Whether that constitutes belief is a genuinely interesting question and surveys handle it badly.

We cannot say why this returned when it did. What we can say is that the technical content is richer, the audience is larger, the evidence is unchanged, and that the most useful thing anyone can know about the app on their phone is that a real Hellenistic technique and a push notification are not the same kind of thing.

Further reading

• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune (2017).
• Nicholas Campion, Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West (2012).
• Bertram Forer's 1949 paper, for the effect that underlies all of it.