I’ve recently been reading a great pulp horror series called Daomu Biji or The Graverobber’s Chronicles by Xulei. In this series, there’s this really great part in the second book where a group of graverobbers are on a boat with a fancy anthropologist with a fancy degree. They encounter a magical object from the ocean and the anthropologist is afraid, telling everyone that they have to sacrifice a pig to appease the bureaucratic spirits. The graverobbers shrug. They throw the thing away. They don’t sacrifice a pig.

Nothing bad happens to them. They rob the tomb of a government official from long ago. They all get out alive. One of them takes a fisheye pearl that they sell for 4 million RMB.

The moment was shocking because, in western horror, the big and bad things usually happen when there is a lack of reverence shown to magical objects. Western horror stories are often stories about respecting power, about paying our dues, and about worship. Western horror stories are often about God.

We are taught to obey God and to obey God-like things. God becomes a monolith of himself. There is no conversing with God. There is only sacrifice, only pig’s blood, and only appeasement. We are taught that there is no negotiation with power. We can only hope to get away and that getting away means becoming invisible.

There are as many different types of astrology as there are places. I practice traditional astrology because I learned from traditional astrologers. However, I use modern planets. I’ve learned from evolutionary astrology and uranian. I use midpoints and I use the lunar nodes. I don’t take any of this too seriously because I practice western astrology as a Chinese person.

Chinese cosmology is not serious. It would not survive as a serious thing because it is so bureaucratic and has so much to do with China as an imperial and colonial thing. I know that there are people who practice Chinese astrology seriously. But, I also know that there is a lot of wisdom in Chinese astrology that survives through humor, through satire masquerading as worship, and through deviance that looks like studiousness.

One of the biggest misconceptions about astrology is the misconception that astrologers are a group of people who take themselves too seriously but make the mistake of working with a very silly subject. It’s this misconception that astrologers are busy taking a subject that has been disproven too seriously because we are a bunch of deluded nerds who take ourselves too seriously (and have bad fashion sense to boot). But this isn’t true. Astrologers are humorists, we are poets, we believe in silliness and we are a group of very silly people. We understand the gravity of the field in which we work, which is a field that has to do with identity formation, self creation, and the grief that it takes to form the entirety of you. We work on very serious things with people but we understand ourselves, as practitioners, to be very silly people.

It is very important to practice astrology in a way that makes room for magical practice that is not astrology centric, to practice astrology with tarot, with spellwork, with magic, and with politics. Astrology is the practice of looking at the sky but, while the sky is infinite, any perspective on the sky is always very, very small. It is important to make room for irreverence and also reverence. I want to be able to work with people who believe in spirits, people who believe in God, people who believe in serendipity, and people who don’t believe in any of that. I want to work with people who believe in angels and also with people who laugh at them.

If we’re going to use western astrology to talk about time, we have to understand that we are practicing western astrology as non-western peoples. It’s a little like Christianity. Christianity is colonial but the practice of Christianity has also to do with survival. I grew up in an Asian church. My mother researches the links between the I Ching and Jesus, between Chinese language and the Bible, and uncovers knowledge that was taken by modernity that she would never have had access to in the first place as a woman. Christianity is not just a religion or an ideology. It is also a practice and, with it, a community. In a way, there is a Christianity for Christians but there are also several Christianities for people who don’t believe in Christianity.

So, there is room in astrology for the worshippers, for the satirists, for the painters, for the psychologists, for the ritual makers, and for the deconstructionists. There is room in astrology for God—but, I question whether there is room in astrology for God fearing. There is room in astrology for traditional astrologers, for evolutionary astrologers, for uranian astrologers, for sidereal astrologers, and for those who make up their own language using a language that has to do with making yourself up. There is room in astrology for astrologers.