Why Astrology Exists When It Shouldn’t

The Wheel of Destiny

Chaldea, a land in southern Babylonia, was an ancient region in Mesopotamia where astrology was known as the Department of the Divine Wisdom. In the Old Testament, Chaldea is associated both with the origin of Abraham, who came from “Ur of the Chaldees,” and with the mighty Babylonian empire that conquered Yerushalayim, leading to the Babylonian Exile. The Tower of Babel, the massive Babylonian ziggurat called Etemenanki, stood in the city of Babylon. They both vanished in a raging fire — the Tower of Babel and the mythical city of Babylon — and yet astrology stayed, untouched by the flames.

Astrology outlived empires and famine alike, wars and the Kardashians, not because the stars rule us, but because humans kept needing a story to believe in. We are unique creatures capable of caring, of loving, of creating art, music and literature. Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, Proust’s search for the lost time, Mozart’s “Requiem”, agnus dei and need of a human to create despite the pain and suffering. A man is capable of remarkable tenderness and love, to laugh and to dream. He rushes into a burning inferno and sacrifices his own life trying to save a fellow human being.

We’re an exceptional species whose very core — I daresay our survival, even if only in spirit — depends on how we tell our story before the last stars dim and the universe collapses into its final supermassive black holes, just before its last memory of itself is forgotten. So, some of us look up toward the stars, some read the daily horoscope as they gobble up donuts in the early morning mist dreading the economy where humans are increasingly treated like the machines. Even more of us seek answers, or solace, in astrology.

Do Rhinos Dream of Jupiter?

But, really, do rhinos or sharks live according to astrology?

Of course not; they are ancient and perfect in what they do — the wisdom of nature that does not go on endlessly upgrading a perfect creature like we do with our numbing gadgets. The flawless core and the purpose of a rhino is in him being a rhino, nothing more, while we, humans, endlessly ‘seek ourselves’ and in that search many humans trust what the stars whisper to them. That alone is the first sure sign we’re not a normal species. And yet, our mythology is wondrous set of intensely enchanting tales: Venus is born from sea-foam and severed flesh. Jupiter is the sky-tyrant, representing the dread of Zeus’s judgment that no mortal ever escaped, a towering force in all astrological readings. We read someone’s Jupiter at 5° Aquarius and we imagine a person whose judgment and sense of what is “right” form through systems rather than personal impulse. A mongoose is perfect in fighting a cobra; he rarely loses. We endlessly fight ourselves and mostly lose. No, we are not a normal species.

Far from it.

We read that Neptune is ascending today, and wonder if we should write to our lost love on Facebook. Does it make any sense? No, not at all, but what does in our feeble lives? While they might be meaningless on a universal scale, they’re not devoid of purpose—the very same purpose that eludes us as we keep seeking that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. If every action equals reaction, as Newton taught us, then if we disobey Neptune and write anyway, it should react. And, somehow, it does not. Without a care it keeps rotating around the Sun at 5.43 km/s on its 165-year trip to finish one Neptunian year. No one cares about us. That’s the horror and the beauty, a true liberation of our lives.

Even our magnificent planet Earth is, in all its beauty, just a “speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Carl Sagan beautifully said when Voyager 1 took the famous Pale Blue Dot image from 3.7 billion miles away. ^[1]

And that’s a painful thought. Instead of rejoicing over the fact that we — a species so tiny, so feeble, so mortal — have been capable of creating something no rhino, no matter how perfect it is, could, we despair over our mortality, broken hearts, and die fighting for someone else equally indifferent to our savaged limbs, blood, guts, and lives, for their profit.

We behave like something strange, a horde of diverse creatures (?), a civilization (?), an evolutionary error (?) wedged between Neanderthals and an alien live demo prototype: a living being built for myth and now flirting with a suicidal longing to merge with the very machines it created, the new talk of the town, AI, hoping it would beat its own insignificance.

Gnōthi Seauton

Our relentless, rather agonizing need for meaning is our doom and our destiny. Astrology exists because it perfectly serves that fundamental, abnormal human need that a rational world denies us. Nothing in this world, no quantum mechanics nor AI slop, can answer any fundamental question. The meaning of life might be in the greatest meme of all time – 42 – something that literary jester par excellence, Douglas Adams, wrote in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but that is not the answer. It’s rather a genius joke. It provides an ‘answer’ while keeping the agony of not knowing alive. The answers are within but, as Jung wrote, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul," ignoring what had (should have) been known to humans since the Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

On our merry way to self-destruction—be it total annihilation by nuclear war, a slow demise from political disasters that tear society apart, or the factual obliteration of our humanity by collectively going mad—we might find an unexpected ally. As we risk degenerating into a mass savagery of death and destruction, astrology and its ancient symbols can serve, if for nothing else, at least as a mighty dam between our past and our increasingly corroded present. Astrology exists as a myth and as a tool, no matter how feeble for some, malarkey for others, and a clutch for still others, to "Know thyself," the most famous ancient maxim, which was inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in ancient Greece. It works because humans are wired as pattern-seekers: we project inner states onto the sky, then read meaning back from those projections. It is a perfect symbolic system refined over millennia. The planets don’t cause our lives, but the symbolic language they’ve accumulated across time reliably maps the psychological and narrative structures humans already live by. In that sense, astrology is a mirror. Dorian Gray looked at one all the time. As I wrote elsewhere, “It's not astrology predicting your life. It's you recognizing your life inside astrology.”

Black Mirror?

But the mirror of what? Virgo women are “neat” and “unapproachable” while Sagittarius are, how one shall put it, a tad detached from reality they believe they understand so well. A male Capricorn is the most trusted. Why would anyone pay any attention to such statements? I guess—and this essay represents my own search, not answers—perhaps because those traits aren’t “caused” by stars; they’re cultural pattern-bundles people repeat until they feel true. Virgo and Sagittarius archetypes are stories, not forces: once a label exists, people fit themselves into it, notice only confirming behavior, and ignore the rest. Let’s do a mental test: Red Riding Hood. Everyone has the image of her. The very title of the famous fairytale activates a "structured myth" instantly in the reader's mind (the red cloak, the basket, the innocent naiveté, the rapacious wolf). This is how powerfully and immediately these "labels" work.

The mechanism is always the same: in my own mind, if I myself saw a Taurus woman, I’d run away to the different part of the planet because, as Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund told Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine: “You let one woman hurt you and you take it out on the whole world!”, one woman was my wrong choice. Nope, I am not lamenting over the long-lost love; no, I still vividly remember what a friend, a pro astrologer, told me once I provided her with the Taurus’s birth data. Only: “Run! Run! Run!”

A Structured Myth

The moral complexity and spiritual depth of human existence are becoming shallower every day. Vast swaths of humanity are buried under Bullshit Jobs ^[2] suffocating and suffering in a search for meaning eluding them during a workday's drudgery. And it gets worse. The folktales that dealt with good and evil, suffering, and redemption, are going away, as the one-way street of atrocious media lies and mayfly attention span profiteers—these nauseating “influencers”—are reshaping the world as we see it. In January 2025, some obscure British OnlyFans woman claimed to have had sexually ‘serviced’ 1,057 men in just 12 hours as a publicity stunt to generate “viral content” and boost her online presence. It’s grotesque and obscene—not that woman’s ‘achievement’ but a big part of humanity’s fixation on that denigration of everything a woman, or a man, stands for.

I was wondering what her sign is. A Taurus born on May 14, 1999 whose “celestial chart weaves a complex narrative, a cosmic drama played out upon the stage of the heavens.” Even more so, the “Moon squares Saturn, suggesting a tale of emotional challenges and the need for resilience.” Further astrological inquiry into that woman’s planetary aspects tells us how her “Mars's opposition to Saturn adds a layer of tension between impulsive desires and societal expectations or personal limits” and also, how “Venus opposing Mars suggests a compelling drive toward intense experiences and a strong desire for validation through relationships or encounters. This aspect can manifest as a pursuit of excitement and stimulation that sometimes leads to impulsive or extreme actions in the realms of love and desire.” ^[3]

I am sure DSM experts would have a different take than the stars and, had she not been a huge commercial success in a brutally competitive OnlyFans arena (according to data previously displayed on OnlyFans’ internal creator dashboards, creators in the top 0.1% collect 15x as much as the average creator in the top 1%, and 100x that of those in the top 10% ^[4]), would have lobotomized her, given her role in porn’s race to the bottom and its devastating social consequences. Some believe that online porn addiction is the number one public health challenge facing the West today, so to punish her would be welcomed in holier-than-thou caves of the Internet.

Suddenly, be it innocent fun or a serious study of the spider’s web of our human experience, astrology does not feel vile or dangerous in comparison to the daily sludge smothering us. On the contrary; perhaps that’s why it survived for so long. After all, “The Sun's opposition to Neptune can sometimes create a veil between reality and illusion, leading to confusion or a sense of disconnection from one's true self,” is the further reading of our OnlyFans superstar. It almost feels like a real profile of the woman—I can’t know, but I fear—that’s going to face a lifetime of inner misery.

World Without Heroes

I dare to claim: Astrology is not stupid even if it feels quite off in today’s world devoid of myth and heroes. Smart people take structured myth seriously. I wonder, would all of these giants of human thoughts really waste their time on malarkey?

• Mircea Eliade — The Myth of the Eternal Return (myth as the organizing grammar of reality before science; cosmic cycles as meaning-making structures). ^[5]
• Carl G. Jung — Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious + Synchronicity (astrology as symbolic language of archetypes, not causal physics). ^[6]
• James Hillman — The Soul’s Code and Archetypal Psychology (planets as enduring psychological images; psyche speaks in mythic structures). ^[7]
• Franz Cumont — Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans (historical proof that astrology functioned as a systematized mythos binding culture, fate, identity). ^[8]
• Geoffrey Cornelius — The Moment of Astrology (astrology as divinatory symbolism, not astronomical causality). ^[9]

For most of human history, we did not have ‘influencers’ to further stupefy us and finish what mass media did not yet, nor did we have algorithms to create our own info bubbles, further isolating us in an increasingly atomized society. During those times, astrology wasn’t a voodoo type of “woo” — it was the primary framework for organizing fate, temperament, politics, and the psyche. We always strived to understand ourselves. Aristotle, Jung, the medieval physicians, the Arab polymaths — they used astrology not as astronomy-causes-personality, but as symbolic systems for the human condition when no other existed. It lasted for a long time, but with the breakneck speed of scientific ‘developments,’ it became an orphan, one even real astronomers are ashamed of.

Slowly, astrology was pushed to the cuckoo margins as the sciences advanced. On that glory path, we had lobotomy, which received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1949, now seen as barbaric and cruel treatment. I daresay someone’s belief that Libra, ruled by Venus, the planet of love and beauty, is the most attractive astrological sign, has been historically less harmful to our mental health than removing the connections between the prefrontal cortex and frontal lobes of the brain. Sir Wylie McKissock, that dreadful Scorpio (3 Scorpio 22), alone performed an estimated 3,000 lobotomies during his career.

What does ‘modern’ psychiatry do since it disavowed lobotomy? It structures our ‘mental illnesses,’ not by the harmless astrological myths, open for interpretation, spats, mockery, or an honest dialogue, but rather by the holy bible, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a vile publication by the American Psychiatric Association used by healthcare professionals to diagnose mental illnesses. I say ‘vile’ because DSM-2 classified homosexuality as mental illness (‘sexual deviation’). Today, I guess, having kids changing their own sexuality as they are five years old is normal. That is taking us astray.

Astrology is indeed a set of codified myths: a fixed set of symbols, roles, and cycles that people use to interpret behavior and events. Its power isn’t in celestial causation but in giving humans a stable, repeatable narrative framework. That’s why it survives—not as science, but as a search for meaning. Men as distinct as Aleister Crowley and Albert Einstein apocryphally said, "science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness" (Crowley), and, “If you don’t believe in any kind of magic, or mystery, basically, (you’re) as good as dead” (Einstein). Why’s that? For Carl Jung, a life fully lived is one of "individuation," where one integrates all parts of yourself—conscious and unconscious—to become your authentic and whole self. Such a journey denies lazy selfies and requires confronting your own "shadow" as you find meaning in both your inner world and outer life. I did not want to hijack the focus, but we've traded a poetic system for a pathological one when we look at the human experience—a vile one that is taking away that same humanity from us and replacing it with a mechanical worldview in which we’re just a blob of atoms and neurons, running on electricity, binary creatures without agency.

Dismissing Astrology is Easy: Is it also Sinister?

Ponder what has been done to us, deliberately and systematically over the ages. The suppression of traditional knowledge is the most direct parallel to astrology. The dismissal of millennia-old systems as "unscientific" in favor of a centralized, industrialized, and profitable model has been going on for decades. The Flexner Report (1910) ^[10] is the "smoking gun" for the corporatization of medicine in the U.S. This report, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, led to the shuttering of nearly half of all American medical schools. It systematically discredited and eliminated schools that taught eclectic medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy, and midwifery, standardizing a "one-size-fits-all" model that favored pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. It wasn't a glorious "scientific" advancement; it was a corporate consolidation of medicine. The result?

• Biopiracy: The modern, sinister form of suppression. Corporations "discover" and then patent traditional remedies, effectively stealing them from the public and indigenous domains. A famous case involved a U.S. patent on the healing properties of turmeric, a remedy used in Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. India had to fight a legal battle to have the patent revoked. ^[11]
• WHO Acknowledgment: The World Health Organization (WHO) notes that in many wealthy nations, Traditional & Complementary Medicine (T&CM) is dismissed and marginalized, despite being the primary source of care for at least 80% of all countries. ^[12]

The pattern—ancient systems → delegitimized → centralized biomedical monopoly—is alive and well. Ancient & traditional medicine have been suppressed. To mention only a few:

1. Ayurveda, which we mentioned: 3,000+ years; repeatedly restricted, dismissed, or pushed into “wellness niche” not worthy of “serious” medicine, the one that gave us $126+ B (billions) in pharmaceutical-industry malpractice penalties. ^[13]
2. Traditional Chinese Medicine – only tolerated as cultural export; inside China itself, western clinical model dominates hospitals. Indigenous Amazonian medicine – shamans arrested, psychoactive plants criminalized.
3. African herbal systems – banned under colonial rule; many remain unrecognized today.
4. Unani medicine – once central from Persia to India; now reduced to boutique clinics.
5. Homeopathy – removed from universities, licensing, reimbursement systems.
6. Herbalism – regulated as “supplements,” stripped of any medical authority.

We are being stripped of agency and humanity alike on every imaginable level. What’s going on, undetected by the mass media or public discourse, is also the great linguistic & biological extinction; the literal erasure of unique ways of seeing the world. If each language is a "structured myth" (as we've called it), its death is the death of a unique human world. According to UNESCO, at least 43% of the world's 7,000+ languages are endangered. ^[14]

It is estimated that one language dies every two weeks. When a language dies, a unique worldview, a library of unwritten stories, and an entire "symbolic operating system" die with it. This is the intellectual equivalent of clear-logging a rainforest. What is left is James Patterson and his nauseating slop in 200 books; the guy publishes 12–20 books a year via ghostwriters, and for that garbage, he’s worth $800 million. Speaking of an industrial scale manufacturing of literary garbage. Rhonda Byrne sold her The Secret poppycock in 35M+ copies, but her pseudoscientific self-help candy created a global multi-billion dollar “manifestation” industry.

All that BS is the antithesis of astrology’s millennia-long diversity of aspects. The merciless attacks for profit are seen, not only in endless wars that maim and kill millions all over the world for the profit and the profit alone but The Corporate Monoculture (Homogenization) is the creepy mission creep of the physical erasure of local character. Think Starbucks in Hanoi (Vietnam). A city with a thousand-year-old, unique coffee culture (ca phe sua da, egg coffee) now has a corporate chain’s venti idiocy we bring with us as we embark on seeking (of the unknown), while embracing the familiar.

McDonald's in Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) polluted the capital of a nomadic culture with a distinct food tradition (dairy, mutton) with its Golden Arches nutrition-free bile. McDonald's operates in over 118 countries. Starbucks has over 38,000 locations globally. While it might be cozy not to abandon our homey habits abroad, the atomization is the true human cost. A local café or "pop and mom" store is a community hub. A transaction at Starbucks or Walmart is an isolated, corporate exchange. It atomizes the individual by destroying the local economic and social fabric.

Replacing Sacred with the Branded

These “influencers” go to Peru, to Machu Picchu, in order to witness the ruins of a once-mighty empire and, back in Cusco, they sit together alone in the damn Starbucks, ‘working’ as ‘influencers’ of me, myself, and I on their laptops, showing the pictures of themselves idiotically, boastfully smiling with Huayna Picchu behind them, blissfully uninfluenced by the wealth of the foreign culture. The secret of the Incas' writing (they did not have one; knots are deemed to be their replacement) is not the focus; rather, a single Caramel Crunch Frappuccino made in a venti size with (big breath) a caramel-lined cup, a double shot of espresso, 5 pumps of vanilla syrup, 3 pumps of caramel syrup, 3 pumps of dark caramel syrup, 5 pumps of white mocha sauce, 5 scoops of vanilla bean powder, almond milk, double-blended, light whip, extra caramel drizzle, extra cookie crumble toppings, and extra caramel crunch toppings those inept "Indios" are not able to make as they are used to it in Seattle. Once at home, they go on burning the place down, ‘fighting’ for diversity rights and indigenous culture they so blissfully ignored while taking selfies above the Sacred Valley.

It is a miracle so many of us still function as fully human beings capable of independent thought and true feelings, desires, and curiosity, given Moloch's sacrifices of our souls. Alas, the attacks never stop.

The "Pop & Mom" & Library Extinction

This is the consolidation from hell, a stake thrust into our hearts—the replacement of human wisdom, gathered from the campfire stories passed down over generations before writing was invented and the monomaniacal passion for book collecting and knowledge amassing in small libraries, and local commerce with a single cold, profit-driven, callous, stupid corporate algorithm. The rise of the "One Store" has ended with Amazon controlling nearly 40% of the entire US e-commerce market. The destruction of humanity and beauty never stops. While the beauty might not “save the world” as Dostoyevsky wrote, it nourishes us, it lifts our spirits. The magnificence of Christian cathedrals all over the world is attacked with Soviet-like architectural, uniform, eyesore monstrosities that are, like invasive weeds, taking over our cities and suburbs one after another, while the smaller churches burn all over the place. ^[15]

Numerous studies have shown that when a Walmart “supercenter”—a huge box of cheap stuff—opens, it causes a net closure of nearby small businesses ("pop and mom" stores) as it siphons off all local revenue. The independent bookstore, run by a person, offered curation and a community of local wackos loving a common theme / topic. Amazon offers an algorithm. It's the replacement of a human "symbolic system" with a mechanical, "slop"-generating one. Once you buy James Patterson, you’re done – they never stop offering you more and more of the same industrial garbage. New York City used to have over 200 working comedians until Seinfeld appeared on the corporate TV, made Jerry Seinfeld a billionaire, and rendered them unemployed dreamers.

How Does Astrology Manage to Resist?

People will accept vague, general, and high-probability statements as uniquely accurate descriptions of their own personality; it is called the Forer Effect (or Barnum Effect, named after P.T. Barnum's "a sucker is born every minute" mentality), a well-documented psychological bias. So, as an Aries, I am a stubborn man unable to quit. It would be easy to dismantle such a statement as nonsense, because if I believe the astrological analysis is tailored just for me, then I am easily fooled by the structure that does not make much sense.

The “sense,” in the sense of meaning again.

This is an era of lost meaning and lost identity. If we’re squashed and shattered by the deliberate attacks on all that is human, we’re lost. That’s why identity politics was so powerful; offer people, even kids, a convincing story about their own (search for) identity and they might find meaning, no matter how deceptive the strategy sold to them might have been. Amidst all the chaos, we have hundreds of millions of people reaching toward astrology as a tool to help them cope. ^[16] It became, paradoxially, a resistance to the slop and ugliness, duplicity and sheer corruption of the institutional world that frames our existence. There’s vanishing hope that the ‘structures’ (they were called “Organs” in the Soviet Union, as they shoveled tens of millions of people in the Gulags or an early death; our misery is less dramatic but likely more traumatic for the survivors) will ever heal and help us out. No one is coming to rescue us. The Batman’s beam was a Hollywood brainwashing technique, alongside Superman and then the puke-provoking throngs of idiot “superheroes” the entrainment machine has been mindlessly producing so it could keep killing the healthy neurons in our collective brain. Jung’s collective unconscious must be a deeply polluted substance fighting back.

If one would go on denigrating “structured myth” thesis I postulated herein, I would say, even the “approved” systems, such as Myers-Briggs (MBTI) corporate and psychological personality test function as "symbolic operating systems" to "Know thyself." It's loosely based on Carl Jung's ideas. It sorts you into one of 16 "types" based on four letters (e.g., INFJ = Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Judging). It's another typology box we accepted. So why not accepted Pisces' unique traits? On the other hand, the purpose of an Enneagram test is to identify our dominant personality type out of nine, based on our core motivations, fears, and desires (e.g., "The Peacemaker," "The Challenger").

But, Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are static. They are reductive. They aim to find the "one true you" and put you in a box. You are an INFJ. You are a Type 4. That's your label. An astrological chart is dynamic. It's an expansive map of a moving system. It doesn't just give you a label ("Virgo"); it shows you a complex set of relationships, cycles, and conflicts (your Sun, Moon, Ascendant, and all the planets in their signs and houses). It's designed to change over time with "transits" and "progressions." It's a moving model of your life, not a static label for your personality. One would be a fool reading astrology as Saturn Ascendant means that the actual planet Saturn (the one that does not care about you at all) really, directly, physically influences you. But, once seen as a symbolic map that thrives on the very core of human nature: our innate contradiction, its value as a tool for self-knowledge becomes undeniable.

It is, again, a wonderful symbolic story, “written by the stars.” Your Sun (your ego) can be in "logical" Virgo, while your Moon (your emotion) is in "chaotic" Aries. The tension between those two is the whole point. It doesn't throw one out; it says the conflict itself is who you are. It's a "structured myth" that's complex enough to map our real, contradictory human nature. Herein lies the beauty of our feeble, insane, inspiring, wild, free nature. We are, after all, made of stardust, so why deny our ancient ancestors, the exploding supernovas, a right to map our life through the wonderful symbolic language astrology offers?

Astrology is truly cosmic. Its entire symbolic power comes from mapping the self onto the cosmos. It links our "search for meaning" to the "Divine Wisdom" of the stars. It's not just a personality system; it's a personal mythology that connects our inner life to the universe.

In Las Vegas, November 15, 2025
Cesare di Monte Calvi

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