“There are so many misconceptions about astrology, it boggles me.” Susan Miller, arguably the most broadly influential astrologer practicing in America right now, is sitting across from me at a white-tablecloth restaurant on New York's Upper East Side wearing a dark blue sheath dress, black tights, black knee-high boots, and Hitchcock-red lips. “The biggest is that it’s for women. I have 45% male readers. People just assume that it’s all women. It’s not.”

She is petite and precisely assembled, but not in a grim, bloodless, Park Avenue way. There is something openhearted about her, a vulnerability that borders on guilelessness. I find her instantly kind. We will sit here together for over four hours.

Miller founded a website called Astrology Zone on Dec. 14, 1995; the site presently attracts 6.5 million unique readers and 20 million page views each month. She released a new version of her smartphone app (“Susan Miller’s AstrologyZone Daily Horoscope FREE!”) late last year; her old app was downloaded 3 million times. Miller is hip to the way astrology functions online, having embraced the web from the very start of her career. She is active across most social media platforms, and fluent in the quick rhythm of virtual interaction, often acting as a kind of kooky, round-the-clock therapist. Offline, she employs 30 people in one way or another, has written nine books, and is aggressively feted by the fashion industry, a community in which she functions as an omniscient, beloved oracle.

Miller was born in New York, still lives in the city, and doesn’t have a whiff of bohemian mysticism about her. Instead, she presents as intelligent and detail-oriented, with none of the candles-and-crystals whimsy endemic to New Age bookstores. (A minor concession: Her iPhone, which beckons her often, is set to the “Sci-Fi” ringtone.) She appears legitimately compelled to help people, and offers an extravagant amount of free services to her followers. Of course, “free services” can be a potentially devious vehicle for other, less altruistic pursuits — and Miller does sell her books and calendars on her website, and frequently pushes a premier version of her app featuring longer horoscopes — but it is very, very easy to read and follow Astrology Zone without ever making an explicit financial investment in it. (Miller insists she makes “pennies” from the non-pop-up advertisements on the site.) I believe her when she says she considers her readers friends.

It had started to feel like a colossal waste of energy, fretting over whether or not astrology is “real” — whether or not there are accurate indications of our collective or individual futures contained in the cosmos, whether or not those indications can be massaged into utility by trained interpreters — because the fact is, even beyond our present disinterest in objective truth, reasonable people believe in all sorts of unreasonable things. True love, the afterlife, karma, a soul. Even high-level cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, hinges in part on tenuous scientific presumptions. When I considered astrology objectively — the notion that celestial movements might affect activity on Earth, and that people born around the same time of year share might certain characteristics based, in part, on a comparable environmental experience in utero — it didn’t seem nearly as dumb as, say, waving one’s hands around a crystal ball. Or calling someone your soulmate.

Still, astrology is often (rightly) equated with charlatanism: hucksters peddling snake oil, burglarizing the naïve. As with any unregulated business, there are practitioners who aren’t properly trained, who haven’t done the work and don’t know the math; they will snatch your $5 and spit back some vague platitude about the stars. It makes sense, then, that astrology is so routinely conflated with fortune-telling, mysticism. “People think it’s predestination. It has nothing to do with predestination,” Miller says, forking the salmon on her chopped salad. She is careful, always, to emphasize free will in her readings — when properly employed, astrology doesn’t dictate or predict our choices, it merely allows us to make better, more informed ones. As the astrologer Evangeline Adams wrote in 1929, “The horoscope does not pronounce sentence … it gives warning.” It’s the same idea — in theory, at least — as a body undergoing genetic testing to unmask certain proclivities or susceptibilities: to find out what it’s capable of, to preemptively protect the places where it is softest, most at risk.

Miller has written extensively about the debilitating, unnamable ailment she suffered as a child (“I had sudden, inexplicable attacks that felt like thick syrup was falling into my knee,” she wrote in her 2001 book, Planets and Possibilities), and over lunch, she tells me she was bedridden for weeks-long stretches, and endured bouts of extraordinary, life-halting pain. She describes the problem as a birth defect, but her doctors were mystified by her condition, and routinely accused her of total hysteria. Around her 14th birthday, Miller’s parents finally found a physician willing to further investigate her case, and she spent 11 months in the hospital that year, undergoing and recovering from various vascular operations.

“The other doctors were like, ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you? You don’t want to go to school, and you’ve hoodwinked all of us,'” she recalls. “And you know, my mother and father were on my side. But they were the only ones. I could feel how a prisoner would feel when unjustly accused. It was the most horrible thing. To be in so much pain and to be screamed at!”

To date, Miller has received more than 40 blood transfusions. Although she no longer endures attacks, if she were injured again in her left leg — in a way that suddenly exposed her veins — she could easily bleed to death. As of 2001, there were only 47 other documented cases of her particular affliction on record.

The pain kept her out of high school, but Miller studied from bed, passed the New York State Regents exams, and graduated at 16. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in New York University, where she studied business. The whole arc is remarkable: a narrative of redemption. I can’t tell whether I find it incongruous or inevitable that a kid who was constantly told her pain was not real grew up to adopt a profession that gets ridiculed, nearly incessantly, for being its own kind of con. It speaks to Miller’s self-possession that she is charitable, always, to her skeptics.

“No astrologer believes in astrology before she starts studying it,” she says. “What I have a problem with are people who pontificate against astrology who’ve never studied it, never looked at a book, had no contact with it. And they criticize it without opening the lid and looking inside.” She pauses. “But I’m not an evangelist.”

Miller is famously available to her readers, particularly on Twitter. The medium suits her: Her dispatches are sympathetic, personable, chatty. Aggressively educated young women, especially, share them in a half-winking, half-sincere way, indulging in astrology’s prescribed femininity and wielding it in a manner that feels almost confrontational. It reminds me, sometimes, of the way women talk to each other about nail polish: as if it were a political act to not be embarrassed by it.

Miller, for her part, spends loads of time answering questions from her more than 177,000 followers, like, “I need to have oral surgery. when should I schedule? Aries w/Virgo rising.” (“Every Aries I know is having oral surgery,” Miller wrote back. “My daughter had it too. Go ahead and have it — think of it as repair work. Good time!”).

Advice like this would be troubling if Miller was not always exceedingly mindful of her influence (she says she would never tell someone not to have surgery or not to get married on a specific day), and it is, in fact, troubling regardless; her readers take her work seriously. She is pestered with inane questions like some sort of human Magic 8 Ball. If there is any delay in the appearance of an Astrology Zone forecast — they are posted, en masse, on the first of the month — people get agitated. The tweets accumulate, and range in timbre from bummed to slightly desperate: “Waking up the first day of the month to find that Susan won’t post for another 24 hours is the worst,” “It won’t officially be spring until Susan Miller posts her March horoscopes,” “This wait on @astrologyzone is killing me,” “Why is @astrologyzone always late? Every other astrology website posts on time but the best.”

Eventually, the forecasts always appear. Miller stays up very late — until 2 or 3 in the morning, most nights — and wakes up at 7 to exercise, screen several news broadcasts (she likes to compare them, to see how certain stories are prioritized), run errands, and, eventually, around 11 a.m., start writing. She generates at least 40,000 words every month for Astrology Zone, and produces detailed horoscopes for Elle, Neiman Marcus, and a slew of international publications, including Vogue Japan.

Anyone who’s ever interviewed Miller has observed that she’s a circuitous, digressive storyteller, and her monthly forecasts are far longer — they’re essays, really — than a typical newspaper or magazine horoscope, which usually contains just a sentence or two of fuzzy wisdom. Miller can be specific in her advice (“I suggest you do not accept a job now, not unless the offer emanates from a VIP from your past. In that case, you would be simply continuing your relationship, not starting a new relationship, and you therefore would be on safer ground during a Mercury retrograde phase,” she cautioned in February), and she calls her work “practical astrology,” which differs, she said, from “psychological astrology.” She wants to be service-oriented. She wants to give people information they can use.

“I can tell right away if you had a harsh father or a critical mother,” she says. “I might mention it. But I’m not going to delve into your childhood and growing up. I think that’s the work of a psychiatrist.” Instead, Miller finds out how certain astrological phenomena have affected a client in the past, and then, when those events are about to repeat, asks them to recall the state of their life at that prior moment. “When I do a chart the first time, there is so much information there. I have to watch your proclivities.”

Miller pulls out her MacBook and opens a program called Io Sprite. She plugs in my birth information, and a pie chart appears on the screen. It contains several concentric circles; the outermost circle is divided into 12 sections, one for each sign of the zodiac. Individual slices contain glyphs representing the sun, the moon, planets, nodes, trines. It is a snapshot of the sky at the moment of my deliverance, and it is the lynchpin of Western astrology.

Besides the placement of celestial bodies, astrologers also consider what they call “aspects” — the relative angles between planets — and use the natal chart to determine an ascendant or rising sign (the sign and degree that was ascending on the eastern horizon at the time of birth; astrologers think this signifies a person’s “awakening consciousness”). The planet closest to one’s ascendant is that person's rising planet, and is believed to indicate how we approach or deal with other people. Every astrologer will interpret a natal chart slightly differently. Miller compares this to how various broadcasters report the same news, but emphasize or deemphasize certain narratives. She tells me it is important to find an astrologer that I like and trust.

“You have Uranus rising the same way I do,” Miller says, staring closely at my chart. “Your thought patterns are different from everybody else’s. You think they’re the same because you’re living inside of your body, but they’re different. That influences your personality. People will remember you. And at some point in your life you will form a path for people. You will expose something or teach them something that they didn’t know about." I'm not sure how or if I'm supposed to respond, so I chew on the end of my pen and look up at her like a puppy dog. I want her to tell me everything. Maybe I don't believe in astrology, or at least not entirely, but I'm also not immune to the lure of whispered prophecies.

Obviously, the personality attributes commonly associated with most signs (and repeated by astrologers) are positive, and if they’re not immediately complimentary, they’re at least forgivable (“secretive,” “stubborn”). In astrology, no one is “strangely shaped” or “sort of dense.” I am a Capricorn, like Joan of Arc and LeBron James, which means, according to Miller, that I’m rational, reliable, resilient, calm, competitive, trustworthy, determined, cautious, disciplined, and quite persevering. “Your underlings see you as a tower of strength,” she wrote of Capricorns in Planets and Possibilities. “And indeed you are.” Meanwhile, I have Scorpio rising at 19 degrees, which means I have “awesome sexual powers” and a set of “bedroom eyes” that, I’m told, will get me “just about anything I want.” Like many people, I find my astrological profile to be spot-on.

The most noteworthy scientific repudiation of astrology was conducted in the early 1980s by a UC-Berkeley physicist named Shawn Carlson. He tasked 28 astrologers with pairing more than 100 natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Personality Inventory, a 480-question true-false test that determines personality type. The idea was to figure out if a trained astrologer could accurately match a natal chart to a personality profile. “Astrology failed to perform at a level better than chance,” Carlson concluded in Nature in 1985. “We are now in a position to argue a surprisingly strong case against natal astrology as practiced by reputable astrologers.”

It is a surprisingly strong case, in that I’m legitimately surprised that the astrologers fared so poorly, and then further surprised by my own surprise. I wonder, for a moment, if astrology has become so omnipresent and accepted in America — nearly everyone, after all, knows their sign, and has since childhood — that we’re all unconsciously performing our attributes now. That we have assumed them. This seems bonkers.

I recall Wittgenstein: “We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.”