Co-Star’s daily horoscopes appear under categories that are only slightly incomprehensible, such as “Mood Facilitating Responsibility” or “Identity Enhancing Emotional Stability.” The app generates content by pulling and recombining phrases that have been coded to correspond to astronomical phenomena. Currently, the company employs four people to write these “bits” of language—two poets, an editor, and an astrologer. The app sometimes generates nonsense—“You will have a bit of luck relating to your natural sense of self-control,” it told me recently—and can be blunt to the point of rudeness. Users like to screenshot and post Co-Star’s push notifications, activities that help explain why the company doesn’t spend anything on advertising. “Don’t even try to make yourself understood today. It’s not worth it” is a typical example of the tone. Guler relishes it. “It’s not, like, ‘Go sit and journal and write four sentences about the world you wish to see,’ ” she said, leaning across the table. “It’s, like, ‘Go take a fucking cold shower.’ ”
On the day we met, Guler, like everyone in her office, was wearing all black. This happens, she said, “not infrequently.” (Whether it happens more frequently when journalists are visiting, she did not say.) Guler first realized that astrology could be a business when she went to a party for a friend’s newborn with a birth chart as a gift, and everyone at the party wanted one for her baby, too.
When Guler was a child, her mother used to do readings from the grounds in her thick Turkish coffee. It was, Guler said, a way to have conversations about feelings that would otherwise be difficult. “The sludge, for lack of a better word, forms shapes,” she said. “It’s, like, ‘There’s this divot or valley here—what’s going on with you? Something bad?’ ” Today, she said, “anxiety’s up, depression is up, loneliness is up.” But, with astrology, “you can use this language to walk into a room and be, like, ‘I’m going through my Saturn return. I’m reckoning with restrictions and limits and boundaries right now.’ ”
On the one hand, Guler said, today’s problems are bound up with the rise of technology: “We’re really operating from this place that technology is doing something weird to our brains.” On the other hand, she said, technology will be the antidote, by teaching us to speak about ourselves. Co-Star currently allows you to find friends and read their astrological profiles, and its future plans call for more “social” features. Co-Star, like all tech companies, dreams of “bringing people together”—to spend more time, presumably, on the app itself.
In “The Stars Down to Earth,” Theodor Adorno’s 1953 critique of a newspaper’s sun-sign column, he argued that astrology appealed to “persons who do not any longer feel that they are the self-determining subjects of their fate.” The mid-century citizen had been primed to accept magical thinking by systems of fascistic “opaqueness and inscrutability.” It’s easy to name our own opaque and inscrutable systems—surveillance capitalism, a byzantine health-insurance system—but to say that we are no longer the self-determining subjects of our fate is also to recognize the many ways that our lives are governed by circumstances outside our control. We know that our genetic codes predispose us to certain diseases, and that the income bracket we are born into can determine our future. “Fate” is another word for “circumstance.”
On a hot Tuesday night this summer, two dozen students of astrology gathered in a stuffy back room of the Open Center, in midtown Manhattan, to discuss a partial lunar eclipse and the birth chart of Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been arrested on charges of sex trafficking. Anne Ortelee and Mark Wolz, astrologers who have been leading the class in various locations for twelve years, sat up front. Ortelee, talking fast, mixing jargon and dry jokes in a manner not unlike that of a sportscaster calling a game, pointed to the details of the chart. Epstein had his sun in Aquarius and his moon in Aries, so he was used to having his way. Venus, which rules love, money, and pleasure, and Mars, which rules action, desire, and war, were in Pisces, suggesting trouble with boundaries and addictive tendencies. She said that his “Mercury-Uranus-Venus-Mars configuration” represented “sex with young children—Mercury is young children, Mars is sex.”
Some of the students were studying to pass accreditation exams; others were simply interested in deepening their knowledge. A few had been coming to the class for years. A young man in the front row with deep-set eyes and a faint mustache noted that the arrangement of Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus could indicate a sudden and unexpected death. Ortelee, who wore a flowered dress and held a sweating cup of iced coffee, nodded. “This is not a guy who’s going to live long in prison,” she said. A woman in a red dress raised her hand to point out the connection between the July eclipses (there were two) and the astrology of October, 2018, when Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice. “Kavanaugh was also an evil Aquarius,” she said, to general murmurs.
Some teachers use students’ birth charts in classes, but because a chart is personal—“Looking at your chart is kind of like looking at you naked,” the student with the mustache told me—Ortelee prefers to use the charts of notable figures. Astrologers have been doing so for a long time. In 1552, Luca Gaurico, a court adviser to Catherine de Médici, published a book of horoscopes about Popes, cardinals, princes, and other famous men. Similar books followed, featuring analyses of Erasmus, Albrecht Dürer, and Henry VIII. More recently, Ortelee’s class had studied the charts of Tucker Carlson and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who lit up the Internet this spring when a staffer confirmed her birth time (one of the three pieces of data, along with date and location, that are needed to calculate a birth chart). In another class this summer at the Open Center, I listened as the students discussed the birth chart of Boris Johnson. “Does anybody see why he has the hair that he has?” a woman in tortoiseshell glasses asked. In September, the class turned its attention to Capitol Hill. On Instagram, Ortelee pointed out that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump only minutes before “Mercury was sextiling Jupiter, promising information and news that we should all pay attention to.”
It’s a commonplace to say that in uncertain times people crave certainty. But what astrology offers isn’t certainty—it’s distance. Just as a person may find it easier to accept things about herself when she decides she was born that way, astrology makes it possible to see world events from a less reactive position. It posits that history is not a linear story of upward progress but instead moves in cycles, and that historical actors—the ones running amok all around us—are archetypes. Alarming, yes; villainous, perhaps; but familiar, legible.
Ortelee later explained to me that people pop up in the news because the movements of the planets through the sky, known as transits, are activating their charts. This can work on many levels. “When the Titanic happened, there was a big Neptune transit, and when the ‘Titanic’ movie came out, years later, there was a huge Neptune transit,” she said. “You heard Celine Dion everywhere. And now there’s a mini Neptune transit, so there’s a ‘Carpool Karaoke’ with Dion and James Corden singing the ‘Titanic’ song in the fountains in the Bellagio.”
Others see astrology as having the power not just to explain the political situation but also to change it. Chani Nicholas uses astrology as a tool for social justice and radical action. “To be a human is to suffer,” she said when we met. “I don’t think we should fight that. But we also can’t dwell there.” Nicholas’s work includes readings about what a new moon in Scorpio means for the #MeToo movement, and the import of Saturn’s position for the future of DACA. “I’m interested in helping people get to the core of their purpose and then to use that to be of service in the world, as quickly as possible,” she said.