Nancy knew from the beginning that she would have to take the blame for the President’s most embarrassing secret. She was always careful, tediously crafting the perfect excuse for each funny little idiosyncrasy that plagued the Presidential planner. A flight at 2:11 am to combat jet lag, a presser that would begin at 12:33 pm for optimal digestion after lunch. After six years of near total control of the President’s day-to-day activities, outlasting two chiefs of staff,  the “Mommy” to Ronald’s “Daddy,” would finally have to answer for who exactly was painting the calendar with little stoplights in the Oval. For the first time in 1988, and quite possibly the only time in American history, conservatives would actually practice what they preached from the pulpit, as they indulged the First Lady’s deference to Astrologer Joan Quigly on all things presidential. Nancy would be free from persecution for indulging a religious superstition — to a point. She became the butt of every joke in the press, Johnny Carson even making special mention of her on his late night special. However, there would be no torch and pitchfork riot to drive the witch from the Whitehouse — instead the public engaged in mere mockery for a woman who loved her husband so dearly that she would turn to Occult practices to save his life. 

At least, that was the official story. Nancy, stricken with terror and grief after her husband’s near-death at the hands of John Hinckley Jr., would receive a call from the Reagan’s friend, Merv Griffin, informing her of Joan Quigley’s prediction of the dangers Reagan would face on the ill-fated March day. Nancy would immediately call the astrologist up, and from that day forward each moment of the president’s schedule would be selected by the most auspicious planetary alignments. Travel days would be labeled green, yellow, and red to signal which were the safest. Every little detail, from the time of the State of the Union to his debates against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, would be chosen by the wandering stars. As with all Official Reports, this didn’t tell the whole story.  

By Quigley’s own account, she would join the president’s campaign in 1980 because she drew up his chart and found it to be one of the most eminent in American, nay, World History at large. She would tell the Washington Post in ‘88, “His sun is in the mid heaven (sic), which is the part of the United States horoscope that rules the president. His stars are very lucky for a country. And he has three planets in the sign of the exultation (sic), which you almost never see.” Funny enough, this statement isn’t entirely true — he does have Mars, Venus, and the Moon in the signs of their exaltation, his sun sits in his third house in the sign of its detriment — Aquarius. She may have meant that he shares the same house structure as the most widely accepted astrological chart of the United States that has Sagittarius as the rising sign, and his Part of Fortune lies directly on the US’ midheaven in Libra. Her relative skill in astrology aside — we can almost assuredly say Ms. Quigley was more deeply involved in day-to-day White House affairs than the Reagans wanted us to think. Nancy even asked her once to draw up and compare the charts of her Husband and that of Mikhail Gorbachev — to which the astrologer proclaimed by the account of former aid William Henkel, “‘these two have, by the stars, some good vibes.’” Oh to be a fly on that ovular wall.

Nearly 40 years later, one has to wonder what kind of reaction Mrs. Reagan would have faced today, with Astrology now returning to the public vernacular in a meteoric, so to speak, revival and the evangelical movement to deconstruct the frail wall between church and state reaching a fever pitch. Would her obsession have endeared her to the youth who have taken to astrology as so many worker bees to the nectar of the Gods — would they have rallied around a Queen of the stars? The Reagans were not the first evil dynasty to turn to astrology to help run their empire — in fact, the stars and their machinations have been the focus of many imperialist administrations of the past. 

Astrology as the west knows it today was born out of Alexander the Macedonian’s own bloody campaigns. Roman Emperors would use it to find their successors — and then murder them before they could take the throne. The first Muslim caliphates would use it to found cities and choose generals. Nazi leaders Himmler, Goebels, and Hess all had astrologers on retainer. Astrology has been, from its very inception, employed by the forces of imperialism and capitalism to take advantage of the masses — its history is steeped in blood. In the western world it has always been an art of attrition, of gaining advantage over rivals, of winning a game of Fate and Fortune. Today’s astrologers, myself included, must face this ugly reality as we reframe astrology’s use for the creation of healthy, cooperative communities, and a world that is run by the workers, instead of robber-barons and despots. 

Being a natural Scorpio skeptic, I have to imagine that the Greeks, who crossed the Persian desserts and found the Chaldeans and their star charts, must have had the same thought as I did when I first laid eyes on my own natal promise: Why the Fuck does this Work So Well? In Babylon, astrology was a state-based art that acted as a divinatory tool almost exclusively accessible to kings. Coincidentally, one of the first major mundane predictions in the Greek world would be that of Alexander’s own death in Babylon — one that proved to be correct. 

There are no first person records of who exactly proliferated the practice once the Greecian conquests ended.  The only accounts that exist are secondhand: they quote the original texts attributed to mythic priests such as Hermes Trismegistus, Petosiris, and Abraham. Yes, that same Biblical Abraham, father to many nations. What we can be sure of is that it was the upper class of the Ptolemaic dynasties established in Persia and Egypt after the death of Alexander that codified the system through the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E that we are now most familiar with in the West. (Brennan, 70-72.)

When the Romans swept over Greece and Asia Minor, astrology proliferated to their highest courts. Some of the most notable Roman Historians catalog how astrology became an obsession with Rome’s emperors. Tiberius, the Second Roman emperor, famously consulted with astrologers and then immediately had them murdered, presumably to prevent them from spilling his most closely kept secrets and weaknesses foretold by the stars. One of the most interesting stories comes from Cassius Dio, who reports that before becoming emperor, Tiberius met with the astrologer Thrasyllus and asked him to read his chart. Thrasyllus did so, and upon predicting great things for the future emperor, the superior told him to calculate his own chart for that very day. Thrasyllus reportedly saw that he was in imminent danger, and Tiberius, who knew this to be true, was so impressed he spared the astrologer’s life and made him an advisor. Tacticus takes this story of their relationship a step further and says that Thrassylus was asked to predict what message Tiberius would receive from the approaching ship on the horizon when the two lived on the Island of Rhodes. The astrologer correctly predicted it was a message from Caesar Augustus, calling him back to Rome to assume the position of leader of the unfree world. (Brennan, 80.)

The powers of prediction were not lost on any of the brutal Roman Emperors, who used astrology to not only justify their rule, but also as their earliest warning signs of danger to their reign. Augustus, seeing the danger of having astrologers at all, made a failed attempt to banish the lot of them. His aforementioned successor, Tiberius, would have Thrassylus cast the charts of his political rivals and execute any whose chart suggested they could supersede him. Septimus Severus had his own chart painted upon the ceiling of his court, but left out any detail that could be used to predict his own death. Such was the bloody rule of Caesar, and his gladius was astrology.

When Rome fell, the intellectual center of the Western world moved once again to the Arabian peninsula. The Sassanian Empire started preserving the Greek texts in the middle of the 3rd century CE, a stepping stone to its revival in the Muslim world. The Abbasid Caliphate took a liking to the ancient art, and began translating the surviving Greek to Persian texts into Arabic — it is because of such scholars like Masha’allah that astrology survived at all in the Western world. In the middle of the 8th century CE, a group of astrologers was convened in order to select an auspicious date to move the capital of the empire from Damascus to Baghdad — in 762 it was so, and the center of astrological knowledge moved from Alexandria in Egypt to the newly minted capitol until its fall to the Mongols in 1258. Until then, the rulers of the caliphate had their own methods in using astrology to their advantage.  (Brennan 130-132.) Generals had to have very specific Mercury-Mars aspect in order to lead the armies that would spread the Muslim world across all of Asia Minor, North Africa, and later, Europe.

Astrology, in an example of true irony, made its return to European intellectuals during the Second Crusade.  Christian armies began invading the Moor’s Spanish territories, where many of the texts that were preserved in the 8th and 9th centuries were retranslated back into Latin - coupled with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks which sent Byzantine scholars fleeing west with the remaining Greek astrological texts. Astrology would continue to follow where the Renaissance led, from the Italian city states to English courts. By the 16th century, astrology once again was at the center of the European intelligentsias cosmological conception. From Copernicus to Kepler, the West's construction of the known universe was married to its divine and derived meaning. 

Let’s jump ahead (more than) a few centuries — when a new empire began to spread across Europe. Nazism, officially, condemned astrologers. In the leadership, however, some were impressed by the predictions of one particular Astrologer: Swedish-born Karl Ernst Krafft. He made several predictions about the rise of the Third Reich based on the texts of 16th-century mystic Nostradamus — predicting that for Germany to win the war, they would have to be victorious before the year of 1943. Most famously, he predicted the attempt on Hitler’s life on November 9th, 1939 in the city of Munich. The Nazis knew that total control over the flow of information in Germany would be tantamount to its survival, and this is important to understanding the idiosyncratic policies when it comes to their treatment of diviners. During their rise to power, the Nazis immediately began to seize all commercial astrological publications — particularly, anything that made political predictions about the Reich and its leaders. They would then go on to craft their own compendium of pro-Reich predictions to prop up their narrative of racial superiority. Goebels used Krafft to assemble a team of astrologers to write propaganda based on the Nostradamus texts. Himmler had his own astrologer, Wilhelm Wullf, whose book claims that he was set to the task of locating the ousted Benito Mussolini. Like so many before them, the Nazis became masters at manipulating the cosmic narrative — and turning the stars impartial judgments into endorsements for the shedding of blood. 

Astrology has always been used as a tool for attrition. Even in its most innocent and innocuous form, it is often reduced to being a crude tool to maximize possessions and to gain advantage over adversaries. Astrologers today, in America and otherwise, use prediction to pick the most auspicious dates for beginning business endeavors, making gains on the stock market, and forming partnerships that are in the favor of “the native.” It’s been based in the capitalist fantasy of endless expansion. It has been popularized by its uncanny ability to divide us into Meyers-Briggs-esque social groups — and it is good at doing all of these things. But Astrology has to evolve beyond its history of conquest, it has to be used for more than just individual gain. Imagine the power of astrology in communities, and rather than dividing us, it taught us what we all have in common? As above, so below. As within, so without. The true basis of astrology is that we humans are a reflection of the cosmos. That we fit into this universe for the same reason everything else does. We are part of the fractal puzzle that makes all of nature. We, as people and astrologers, have to start to figure out how we fit into that cosmological pattern, rather than how to leverage it to our advantage. 

* Brennan, Christopher. Hellenistic Astrology, the Study of Fate and Fortune. Amor Fati Publications, Denver, 2017. 

Editor’s note: As astrology enthusiasts no doubt know, this is a wide and complex topic that can't be explored in a single essay. For further reading on investigating power systems and astrology within Western Tradition, we recommend reading Alice Sparkly Kat’s Postcolonial Astrology.