First of all, it’s just Twitter, babes. Twitter, the place where you perform a little communism to get your 37 likes on your slave-made electronic device before toddling off to your social media job to help a cereal brand give more children diabetes. So relax.

Second, it’s Twitter during a spicy retrograde. Had to be said.

For those of you with better things to do -and I would include me in that as I’m on my first proper vacation in five years- there was a now-deleted/protected Twitter thread that made the mistake of assuming historical materialism is reality (rather than a deeply naive theory that the sole force of all epochal historical change is class struggle) and went off on a signalling thread about how essentialising astrological traits as fixed human categories can lead to fascism. Ie it ‘elevates’ certain traits people are born with over others, that sort of thing.

I’m not going to link to the account because it’s now protected so we may make the good assumption that what began as reasoned disagreement quickly descended into name-calling, sexism and probably the odd death threat. Anyway, it’s super dumb but -of more interest to us- not entirely wrong. Mostly wrong, and definitely super dumb, but not entirely wrong.

Firstly, astrology comes down to us from cultures that were definitionally totalitarian -that were run by priesthoods and monarchs claiming to be actual descendants of stars/planets/gods and so on. So don’t think for a second it isn’t in the DNA. Why would it be different to any other form of western occultism in that regard? Ignoring it just makes it way more likely you’ll fall for it. Ask literally any branch of neopaganism how that works out.

Austin and I went to great lengths at As Above (video in the members area) to explore the urgent metaphysical work astrology needs to do to capitalise on its moment in the sun -a moment that leads to the sort of grumbling, jealous, hot takes such as the tweet that sparked this post. I have a whole chapter about it in Pieces of Eight, too: If you haven’t taken the time to grapple with and then build your own metaphysics then you have inherited one like you inherited baldness or alcoholism.

Trying to win the approval of the Chapo Twitter crowd by accusing astrology of fascism is the dumber version of the ‘fate vs free will’ argument within astrology which -again- I went off on a rant about at As Above. The tl;dr is that ‘free will’ as commonly understood by Americans in particular is permanently entangled in the country’s own Enlightenment origins and the rise of purely rational agents within theories of capitalism and markets. You see what I mean about doing your own metaphysics, right? The discussion presupposes that something called ‘free will’ is baked into the universe and that we all already agree what that is, instead of talking about it emerging out of a cosmology required to make capitalism work.

Most naive versions of Marxism also require humans to be rational, atomistic agents of self-interest to work, or else you won’t get your proletariat uprising. (And when they don’t happen, you have to invent even shittier metaphysics like Adorno’s false consciousness to account for it.) The erasure of the more-than-human in order to make the socialist-revolution-as-Christian-Rapture work in their heads has and always will be my chief complaint about this diffuse thing we call/often dismiss as ‘The Left’.

Both ‘fate vs free will’ and ‘astrology leads to fascism’ are too far downstream from the actual metaphysical wrangling that needs to happen.

One of the ways you can tell astrology is juuuuuust past the peak of its popularity wave is that there are simply more opinions about today than there used to be. It’s not that there aren’t good opinions and actually there technically are more good opinions than there were a few years ago, there are just… more opinions. And some of them are crap.

Some of them are basically even-more-superstitious versions of phrenology, combined with a whole range of anxiety disorders about leaving the house on certain days or interacting in the workplace and so on. Just terrible stuff. It’s the same with witchcraft, which is mercifully a bit further past its peak of wider cultural popularity. You can’t judge the whole movement based on its stupidest takes. Some days that’s easier said than done, of course.

And I’m willing to bet actual money that the offending tweet was inspired by a particularly egregious violation of this foundational belief in what the tweeter believes a human is, from a Twitter Marxist perspective. It would have been along the lines of “I’m a Cancer so that’s why I…” (I guess my other criticism of the performative left is its often complete lack of a sense of humour. Most of the astro-essentialism that passes through my feed is done for the lulz and rightly so. It’s usually hilarious.)

But you know what? If your metaphysics of astrology is that it’s some sort of cosmic Human Resources personality test then you kinda are a little bit fascist. As well as being a moron.

Now, this is Rune Soup so I’m about to use the a-word. You don’t need some sort of muddled, Neoplatonic essentialism to get the glorious language of difference that astrology offers to sing for you. You need a kinship model. You need animism. You needs stars and planets as persons, as kin.

You need a kinship model as a subset of a wider language for understanding time and cycles and culture and hope and loss and risk. As I said on a solo show that came out a year ago this month, astrology is actually 100% accurate because it’s a language. One that contains an above-chance predictive mechanism (that -chaos magic alert- improves in predictive accuracy when blended with other cycle models of which it is the Ur and exemplar).

Done correctly, astrology’s glorious language of difference performs the opposite function of fixing people into classes and fixing those classes to a prescribed destiny. Done correctly, it opens up our understanding of place and connection and aspiration and context and otherness. Done correctly, it kills fascists. With awesome space weapons.