I don't care for woo shit generally but damn if astrology isn't the lamest one. Why aren't there people out there searching for gold with Dowsing rods? Why aren't teens trying to figure out their fates by doing Geomancy and throwing sticks on the ground? I want to see people get into Scapulimancy and Haruspexy where they divine things by burning bones and looking at duck livers.
Bring back that metal shit, fuck this "oooohhhh I looked at some stars and that said what personality I have", fuck that loser, go cut open an Ox and burn it's thigh bone and see the future by huffing geothermal gases!
astrology has a much lower entry cost. There's always a girl in the back of class willing to tell you your sign for free. you can get a cool bracelet for like 3 bucks or a necklace for 5. there's astrology books for like 10 dollars with a decent amount of information in them. The stars are always overhead(although they've gotten harder to see). Plus every single newspaper has horoscopes and there's a million apps. You can pay to get a more complex reading for like 20 bucks. Dowsing require you to go to the middle of nowhere and spin a stick around, geomancy only makes sense if you are a builder really, and any sort of animal-based augury is considered cruel and wasteful in addition to being expensive and well outside most people's skill sets.
On another note, all those other things have been commodified. You buy animals as pets or as food, they aren't divine. the earth is to be bought and sold, it isn't divine. if there is gold it is already owned so what's the point? The stars, at least so far, cannot actually be sold to you. So they still carry their heavenly status, just as they have since time immemorial. Sure you can sell things based upon that divinity, but the stars themselves will still be in God's domain above us mortals.
Remember when they hexed the moon and witches got really super mad about it? Good times, good times.
preach it. i'll be waiting for you under a tree root, hidden by the moss, sleeping in a nest of asps.
Astrology allows people to put themselves and others into boxes.
Im always saying more people should get into demonology.
Do you like memorizing obscure trivia and drawings of fucked up little guys? Demonology has both of those!
Learn about Alloces, a Duke of Hell who gives men wise but deceptive council and appears as a lion man riding a flaming horse. He claims to command 36 legions of demons, but can you trust his word becuase the Dictionnaire Infernal states that he only commands 30 legions!
Also demonology is all about making up a type of guy to be mad at and judging by social media, that's the favourite pass time for a fuck tonne of people.
Gaap is best demon though: he makes men foolish, steals familiars, carries people on his back, and does gynecology. Ba'al ain't gonna be able to tell folks if they've got HPV.
I read about demonology before and it's part of this whole continuum that I have zero context for. Summon demons and they...sit down and teach you? It's less prince of darkness and more VIP tutor. Weird...
Don't you want this weird owl king to teach you about pretty rocks, which plants to eat, and astronomy aka astrology for cool science nerds?
Because that shit is harder to monetize and the people that do monetize woo shit are charging like $400 an hour for energy healing for your pet. (a real flyer I saw recently that looked fairly professionally produced)
It's all grift and it's all crafted to appeal to the people that like astrology and shit.
Well shit I’m gonna try and monetize haruspexy. Pay me money and I’ll teach you to divine reality from the gall bladder of goat.
Will never work. That sounds cruel, and astrology is all about feelings. People will pay to get a good feeling. You have to learn how successful con men work. That's what they do, they make people believe in them by dispensing good feelings.
Why are so many people into astrology
Without doing any research, I would bet all my belongings that the answer is capitalism. By one means or another, astrology won the war in the market.
I wonder if someone without a birth certificate has ever reverse engineered their birthday based on their astrological personality?
Learning about astrology taught me about how propaganda works. I knew people who would defend astrology by saying they knew it wasn't real and it was just for fun, but then would absolutely change their actions or judge a person or situation based on what their sign was. They knew it wasn't real, but it still affected them.
Why aren’t there people out there searching for gold with Dowsing rods?
Well it only takes a couple tries with a dowsing rod before you realize that it's completely bunk and you'll never get rich doing it. With astrology, the belief has a lot of staying power because it exists almost entirely in feelings and interpretation, which means that a true believer is "right" every time no matter what.
Yea, astrology is completely removed from material reality (except as far as our birthday, but everybody has one of those). It gives nothing, but it asks nothing in return.
If you drill down far enough anywhere, you will hit the water table
That's the secret of dowsing
Astrology is easier to get into, and it's less obviously bullshit if you don't talk about it. Dowsing gets you weird looks, bit stargazing (or googling in the modern age) is perfectly respectable.
listen to old episodes of coast to coast, people are into all kinds of shit
This is actually a really fascinating question. I think the turn towards "woo shit" is indicative of a latent (especially feminist) anti-capitalism reemerging, This has always been tied to a particular communion though. "Witches" gathering for black mass, communal living, vagrancy, drugs and herbal medicine, naturalism, all of which was practiced with one's sisters/brothers in the dark arts.
With its latest reemergence, it distinctly lacks its communal nature while having a much wider appeal. The material force driving this is primarily the internet (although market forces are also an important driver, selling woo as an identity). The internet completely isolates us. There is no incantation circle in the woods. It's just a person and their plants at home saying "I am a witch". Astrology can be practiced quite easily by the individual and because it relies heavily on the written word can be transmitted easily over the internet.
