White girl astrology is postmodern because white girls are postmodern. Adorno hated white girl astrology not because he thought that white girls were irrational but because he thought that they were irrational and conservative.
Was Alice Bailey a white girl astrologer? It’s not likely. She founded her organization, Lucis Trust, with the intention of shaping international events. She also said that a man in a turban gave her astrological wisdom and her ideas on neopaganism and the Aryan race railed against immigrants. It’s possible that Alice Bailey was a white girl astrologer.
White girl astrology has been around for a while now. Madame Blavatsky was celebrated by her followers even as she was also called a scammer and plagiarist by others. White girls are often accused of either being fake or plagiarism. When white boys take ideas, they are called anthropologists and when white girls do the same they are called charlatans.
White girl astrology is a misogynist name. Let’s make that clear.
White girls have always been around in modern astrology. For a while, it was the age of white male teachers and white female students. This was a very gross situation, of course. The white girls started printing their own magazine columns even if they were not invited to speak at the astrological conferences. They compromised their technical interests by writing Sun sign horoscopes, acted the sage big sister by talking Sun sign synastry, and gave style tips by rising sign.
The white girl astrologers got published. They are more commercially successful than most “serious” astrologers, who are almost always white men who look a little strange.
There are a few unspoken standards that one must adhere to if one wants to become a white girl astrologer. First, you must be sex positive. This brand of astrology began to thrive during third wave feminism, after all. You must talk about sex as a thing that empowers your reader and you must allude to the necessity of having your own life and and self before you get into any relationship even as the majority of your content is hyperfocused on relationships. You must nod to the Virtues, which include but are not limited to Compassion, Love, Selflessness, Humility, and Faith. You must talk about these virtues with vagueness but urgency as if you have personally witnessed how they may transform someone’s life the moment they figure out what, exactly, these things are.
You must never talk about politics. You must assume that your readers are white girls and that they, at least at one point in their life, desired the validation of men. You don’t have to be a white girl to do white girl astrology.
White girl astrology is a funny intersection of postmodern witchcraft, the rom com, and magazine culture. Magazine or zine culture originated in queer communities and eventually became commercialized. Witchcraft was originally civil disobedience and grassroot organizing that, also, became commercialized.
Romantic comedies are instruction manuals about love and adulthood. Romantic comedies show us who is worthy of love and who is capable of love. In romantic comedies, white girls are worthy of being loved and white boys are capable of loving them. The romantic comedy is an instruction manual because it relies on conservative humor norms through which viewers are taught who they are supposed to laugh at and who they are supposed to emphasize with.
White girl astrology is not exactly marginal because it is so mainstream. It is not exactly institutional because it is so scattered. It is not exactly commercial because, often, it doesn’t sell you anything. It’s twitter accounts run by teenagers collaging early aughts fashion choices for the signs, it’s instagram memes imagining the signs are girlfriends, it’s the meme carousel of the Bratz girls as Moon signs. It’s your favorite ISAR-certified astrologer making a romantic advice post on their social media. It’s Hellenistic astrologers writing horoscopes. It’s people debating the merits of a composite chart over a synastry chart at a conference.
We’re all white girl astrologers now, even or especially, those of us who are not white girls. We are all white girl astrologers for the same reason why we are all sometimes white girls—because we strive to be loved sometimes just like the white girls must be.
