In his essay, The Stars Down to Earth, Adorno has some words to say about Caroll Richter’s horoscope column in the Los Angeles Times. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Adorno. I find his essay on why he hates jazz really problematic and I think that his disdain of the so called “leveling down” of mass culture in a world where Europe was seeming to lose its grip on its colonies to be really western supremacist. Basically, Adorno sees the world as a commodity society that is becoming flattened by neoliberalism. I see the world as struggling against neoliberalism where people try their best to be creative despite and against neoliberalism.

In Adorno’s critique of Richter’s horoscopes, he finds that these horoscopes tend to assume that all conflicts are external, that the person reading the horoscopes is well-intentioned, and that “everything will be fine” at the end of the day. In other words, Adorno writes that Richter’s horoscopes encourage people to harmonize the vested interests around them. Though the horoscopes stage themselves as neutral, they assume certain things about the reader, encourage them to accept their social position instead of jeopardizing it, and borrow from the language of finance (encouraging people to “invest” in their relationships).

Basically, these horoscopes are like a Hallmark card or a Disney ending. They play with the idea of a little tension for the sake of it but tell you that everything will be okay in the end, assuming that you are comfortable in the status quo and do not seek to see social change.

While I find Adorno’s framing of astrology as a fashion to be very heteropatriarchal and disagree with his assertion that esoteric thinking is an evolutionary regression, I think that he has a point about ideology and horoscopes. The thing is, horoscopes are incredibly subjective. Horoscopes are not objective. Horoscopes come from an astrologer—not thin air. Horoscopes written by liberals will support liberalism. Horoscopes written by fascists will be fascist. Horoscopes written by leftists will be leftist.

The thing is, there is not only individual astrologers who write horoscopes but also a horoscope industry where writers of horoscopes are sometimes astrologers and sometimes not. That’s right—not all the horoscopes you see from your favorite magazine or website are written by astrologers. Like other industries, there are certain norms and tropes at play when writing horoscopes. These norms and tropes reinforce the idea that, like Adorno said, horoscopes must be all about nice things in a nice world described with nice words.

For example, I used to write horoscopes for horoscope.com. One month, they found my horoscopes to be “unacceptable” and sent me the following email:



For context, this was for the horoscopes for June of 2020, when we were moving through a global pandemic, BLM protests were happening in all major cities, and our choice for president in the 2020 race is going to be two rapists.

For horoscope.com, horoscopes are not supposed to be “angry messages” and “bad words.” For horoscope.com, horoscopes are not supposed to be disturbed by the status quo and find anger with the way capitalism distributes death unevenly. For horoscope.com, there is no room for a discussion on saviorism in the horoscope industry. For horoscope.com, they believe the readers of horoscopes find comfort in the status quo and only seek nice words and nice feelings from astrology.

In reaction to both Adorno and horoscope.com, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think astrology fans use astrology to reinforce their comfort. I just don’t see that happening in my entire years long practice. I don’t see that from other astrologers and I don’t see that from clients.

I see clients who use astrology to talk to their family about generational traumas, enact transformative justice in their lives, and create connections with people despite the alienation of capital. I see astrologers who remix Venus from fetish object into femme for femme love and use Eris to engage in new vocabulary on sexual assault. I don’t see the astrology community as being about nice words and nice things. I look at the astrology community and see activists, healers, and caretakers who use astrology as a language that can enact discussions of social change.

I see a bunch of people who are trying to steal the stars and the sky back from the colonizers who took them.

Horoscopes are actually so absurd—by writing horoscopes, you get to write a letter to people who you know nothing about, except for their Sun, Moon, or rising sign. You get to leave messages and speak to people all over the world. Unlike other forms of art, which express the artist, people who receive horoscopes apply your messages to themselves.

When I was in school, a teacher told me that the purpose of making any kind of art was to open windows and not close doors. Horoscopes, like poetry or painting or sculpture, are an art form. The purpose of art is to get people to start asking questions. It’s not to give solutions for people who you don’t even know. That’s all horoscopes are—they’re questions that you want to put into the world, based on a certain moment in time and oriented twelve ways. Art is here to open dialogue. Good horoscopes open conversations. They don’t have answers.

There is a faint misogyny in Adorno and in horoscope.com’s ideology of horoscope writing as nice words and reassuring vibes. They assume that horoscope readers are femmes and they assume that femmes are not political. They assume that femmes only seek comfort and do not seek social change. Obviously, this is not true.

Adorno also compares occultism to fascism, writing that both occultists and fascists have “childishly monstrous scientific fantasies” and that they like to feel that they are people who are “in the know” about things that laypeople don’t have access to.

I think that he has a point here. When horoscopes only reinforce comfort, when they discourage people to seek social change, and when they prioritize niceness over discomfort—that’s when horoscopes lend themselves well to fascism. These types of horoscopes are a bit tongue in cheek. They like to make their readers feel that astrology is not a tool for mutual engagement but that astrology is an esoteric thing that will give them an advantage over everyone else. These types of horoscopes assure. They distribute answers because they believe that there are right answers. They see astrology as a top down power dynamic where learned people give answers to unenlightened people. They remember the first part of astrology’s adage (so above, so below) but forgot the second (so below, so above).

Horoscopes, like other forms of art and culture, can be used for fascism. Just like there is a such thing as a fascist song or a fascist play, there is a such thing as a fascist horoscope column.

However—and thank god for this—the astrology community that exists today has very little appetite for facsism. People don’t want horoscopes that are full of nice words and complacency. People are not complacent. People don’t look for answers when reading horoscopes. People who read horoscopes are complex and know they’re complex. They’re not looking for solutions from a horoscope column.

Rather, horoscopes are here for the following reasons: they’re here for you to send to a lover, they’re here to give you wonder and poetry, they’re here to remind you that you have agency, and—above all—they’re here to open windows that you didn’t even know existed.