Take Weber’s idea to its conclusion and Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could be conceived of as the spiritual heirs to Martin Luther. Which raises the question: if Luther begat capitalism, what kind of faith does capitalism itself beget?

It might look something like Human Design: an arcane New Age belief system invented by a Canadian music promoter named Alan Robert Krakower after an eight-day visitation from a “Voice” in Ibiza in 1987. Krakower then created a gospel of self-knowledge — a deliberately arcane blend of life coaching and woo-infused mysticism — that spread far beyond him. Though Krakower renamed himself Ra Uru Hu in 2011, his gospel is currently being preached not only on social media, where some of its preachers, such as the popular Amanda Horvath, have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, but on TV. In July, a Human Design coach, appearing in the show Love is Blind, explained that his mantra in life, as per his training, was to “trust your spleen”. Most interestingly, Human Design has penetrated business retreats, leadership conferences, and that most corporate of temples: LinkedIn.

One apostle, Joshua B. Lee, a forty-something Texan online marketer who styles himself the “Dopamine Dealer of LinkedIn”, recently posted about how Human Design led him to achieve millions of “organic views” on the platform. Not for him the grind of search-engine analytics, audience study or content scheduling. Human Design allowed him instead to tap into a higher power: his “true self”.

Lee’s post, written in August, has attracted glowing responses from many CEOs and founders. “Sometimes the real growth strategy is trusting yourself over the trends” writes one. “When you’re misaligned, every opportunity feels like a struggle to fit in,” adds another.

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Thanks to apostles such as Lee, Human Design is acquiring growing influence on the business networking platform. Once consigned to the fringes of New Age spirituality, it has marched into the language of C-suite executives and start-up hustlers, fusing with more conventional life and career coaching. Though it might be tempting to write it off with an eye roll — Astrology in a suit! — its popularity among business leaders suggests something more telling: that the cult of optimization is now open to almost any framework, no matter how baroque.

Synthesizing several ancient and modern elements into a way of analyzing the self, Human Design combines elements of mysticism, life coaching and the sort of quasi-culty, pseudo-scientific theorizing that any one of us might come up with after eight days in Ibiza with the help of some hallucinogens. “I often ponder the great neutrino ocean because the neutrino ocean is the consciousness field,” writes Ra in one of his foundational texts. It borrows freely from astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah and the Hindu chakra system, then wraps it in the language of quantum physics and genetics.

But at its heart is the BodyGraph, a chart said to be as individual as a fingerprint, generated from the date, time and place of your birth. In this respect it is akin to astrology. Unlike astrology, however, Human Design is based not only on your birth moment — even a few minutes’ difference can alter the chart — but also on the precise timing of another moment, roughly 88 days earlier, which is said to capture your unconscious “design”. These two data points are then mapped onto a hybrid cosmology that fuses astrology with the I Ching, a few other belief systems and a dash of quantum physics.

One of the main reasons it has caught on is that the charts are easy to generate. Simply plug your birth details into any Human Design website and you’ll receive a diagram of a body that features nine “centers,” 64 “gates” and 36 “channels,” colored in or left blank depending on which planetary influences were active when you arrived on earth.

I tried it myself and was duly told which “Type” I am: a “Manifesting generator”, since you ask. According to the horoscopic patois of Human Design, that means I’m “efficient, multi-passionate, and thrive on a variety of projects”. The chart then offered me a baffling tangle of triangles, squares and numbers, inscrutable without an interpreter.

The promise of hidden knowledge was there, but locked away in the chart. The chart itself was part wiring diagram, part horoscope, requiring a guide to decode. As in the Catholic church that Martin Luther rebelled against, the reliance on experts is, of course, part of the business model.

In many ways, Human Design is simply the latest iteration of a much longer Western obsession: classifying the self. In the post-God, post-feminism, post-race era of the 1990s, when globalization — with all the religious and cultural flattening it implied — seemed inevitable, a generation of Western teens and pre-teens were being primed to receive the message that there is no higher calling than the project of the self. Self-love, self-care, self-improvement. To understand and optimize the self was the ultimate goal.

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I grew up in that era. Even as a pre-teen, I found myself filling out sex quizzes in Mizz magazine: answer some multiple-choice questions and you find out which of four or so categories you fall into. This habit developed into affinity for astrology, which offered both entertainment and a sense of identity in the absence of formal belief systems. Astrology, in keeping with the times, has expanded from newspaper horoscopes to broader psychological profiling: you are an Aquarius, and this is why you’re so free; she’s a Gemini, no wonder she’s messed up, and so on. We all love reading about ourselves.

Human Design, however, is rather more dogmatic in its conclusions. It claims to supersede anything as silly and fallible as personal choice. One Master Coach, with a book and a podcast to prove it, tells me that personality profiling tools like the Myers Briggs test are unreliable because they are based on questionnaires; and questionnaires are unreliable because, when we fill them out, we carry our own preconceptions and biases. “With Human Design, it’s our energetic profile… an energetic blueprint that we’re born with. Our Human Design will influence our personality, it’ll influence our behavior, it’s ground zero.”

In other words, a personality test can only ever be provisional: it might wobble depending on our mood or level of honesty. But Human Design, in this view, represents the fundamental truth: so fundamental that it is inscribed even at the subatomic level of physics. According to Human Design lore, neutrinos — near-massless particles that are produced by stars and pass through humans and other matter constantly — carry imprinted information that conditions us at birth. To believers, neutrinos are the medium through which the cosmos stamps its data into the chart. To skeptics, the neutrino theory is an audacious borrowing of scientific language; a way of making astrology charts sound like they’re written by CERN scientists.

As I found, interpreting the BodyGraph is formidably complex. At the entry level you can buy ebooks or online courses, the kind that promise to help you decode your own chart, for a few hundred pounds. But to become an accredited reader or analyst is far more expensive. Certification runs into the thousands, with full professional training typically costing $3,000–$5,000, and advanced mentoring packages stretching well into five figures. It is a kind of multi-level marketing scheme where every new believer is a potential customer and every customer is encouraged to become a seller. To its critics, it looks an awful lot like a pyramid scheme.

In practice, most people outsource their self-analysis to a coach who translates the circuitry into digestible personality shorthand. Each person is placed into one of five overarching Types — Manifestor, Generator, Manifesting Generator (that’s me), Projector or Reflector — but how that plays out is colored by a dense layering of “profiles,” “authorities,” “centers,” “gates” and “channels.” You might discover that your “undefined centers” make you more likely to be affected by the moods of others, or that your “strategy” is to wait for the right invitation before acting.

Behind the jargon lies the simple creed that your individuality, and its allocated blueprint, supersede any other authority. On Reddit, I found accounts of people freezing out well-meaning parents because of incompatible Human Designs, or dumping their friends in response to Human Design encouragement to “guard” their energies. Another Reddit user reported having followed the dictum by eating whatever they wanted — then gained more than a stone. When I reached out to the Reddit user in the hope of asking them some questions, they explained that they would “follow up with you in a few days as it is my sacral [basically ‘the gut’] that makes my decisions.” I didn’t hear from them again.

The Master Coach I spoke to told me they were preparing to run a retreat in Ohio for 16 American startup founders, focusing on how they can scale their businesses based on their Human Designs. “I think the reason why it’s taking off so quickly now,” they say, “is because people are finally getting their answers. [Human Design] is finally giving them permission to be themselves.”
Modern CEOs and founders are faced with a thicket of impossible variables. There’s market volatility; there’s an unpredictable geopolitical landscape; and algorithms that can change overnight with no warning. No one can quite explain why TikTok suddenly throttled their views, or why Meta’s ad targeting stopped working for them. In this context, Human Design promises a roadmap to smarter, more “authentic” decisions — decisions that are intrinsically right because you made them.

At its core, Human Design is a gospel of individualism. Your chart is yours alone; your “authority”, to use the jargon, overrides every external signal. The system does not ask for compromise or collective responsibility; it insists that flourishing comes from understanding yourself. In that sense it is less a shared cosmology than a cult of the self:  a message that naturally resonates with some of the capitalists of LinkedIn, where instinct, vision and “authentic leadership” are already treated as sacrosanct virtues.

The potential for narcissistic misuse, abuse, exploitation, financial or otherwise, is only heightened by the system’s plasticity. Some former devotees warn of Human Design’s cult-like tendencies. One of them writes that Ra’s charisma ensured that his word, even after death, was treated as law by disciples who became absolutists. Those who leave Human Design are shamed, warned the whistleblower.

On the surface, Human Design insists that you are utterly unique, that no one can tell you how to live but your inner Authority. Yet in practice, the community can feel strangely uniform: everyone reciting the same jargon, revering the same founder, and buying into the same training structures. It even has its own doomsday prophecy: in Human Design lore, 2027 is the year the world tips over, when governments and families will unravel, a new wave of telepathic “Rave children” will appear, and only those living their “design” will thrive.

In the end, Human Design may be less about cosmic circuitry than about the hunger for certainty in a world of impossible variables. As one of the coaches told me: “Humans are storytellers and we want to make meaning of everything. If you look at the past 100 years, there’s been constant upheaval. And many people have come out of that thinking, who am I? What am I doing? What’s my role on the planet?”

And in that sense, Joshua B. Lee’s LinkedIn feed tells us everything we need to know: even the stars can be harnessed as a decision-making framework, as long as they promise growth.

It wasn’t that I believed in astrology. In fact, I’d have taken pains to tell you that I didn’t. But I was of the age when your identity is up for the taking, and that central question — who am I? — needs probing from any angle you can find. Zodiac signs struck me as part and parcel of that mania for self-analysis. Knowing my sun sign was no more or less edifying than knowing my Myers-Briggs type or Harry Potter house. I knew these constructs were probably nonsense, but as an endlessly confused 20 year old, they helped me feel seen.

Fast forward to today, and all things zodiac-related are having a moment. In a Pew Research study from 2018, 29% of American adults said they believed in astrology, including 26% of Christians and 47% of those who believed in “nothing in particular”. If you were to ask people if they read their horoscopes, or know their sun signs, the figure would surely be higher still. The engagement is surely casual for some. But for rising millions, astrology offers a connection with the divine — even if its empirical claims are far harder to prove.

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Astrology has been popular for a while. As far back as 2017, forecasting agency WGSN declared “new spirituality is the new norm”. That coincides with a steady fall in traditional religion in most parts of the world. In the UK’s 2021 census, less than half of British adults described themselves as Christian, with over a third of respondents (“nones”) stating they had no religion whatsoever.

Of course, a shift away from religion doesn’t necessarily mean a shift towards non-belief. In fact, many new spiritual fixations are being forged in the crucible of online spaces. The “nones” haven’t signed up to living a life devoid of purpose: what they want is to define that purpose in their own terms.

That’s where practices like astrology and tarot come in. Many of these practices are billed less as “spiritual” and more as “therapeutic” — sitting somewhere at the intersection of meaning-making and self-care. Introspection is the name of the game here: even if you don’t believe there’s anything inherently special about the cards you pull, or the planetary placements on your birth chart, you might see them as a storyboarding tool. Think of them like a kind of Rorschach test: “What does a Nine of Cups or Moon in Taurus mean to me today?”

But for other astrology enthusiasts, there is something far grander at stake here. If a Pisces really is absent-minded by default, and a Taurus self-righteous, then that says something big and startling about the nature of reality. It suggests that the various bodies in our solar system somehow imprint on a baby’s psyche at the moment of their birth. And it means that those lumps of rock and balls of gas, millions of miles away, have a bearing on our day-to-day psychodramas. If that’s true, the paradigm most of us are operating under is bust wide open.

“Astrology does raise philosophical or cosmological questions about the world and about what we’re doing here and what this means,” says Chris Brennan, host of The Astrology Podcast. “You know — does fate exist, or destiny?”

For Brennan, and others like him, astrology has both empirical pretensions and clear philosophical or religious components too. Know your history, and this isn’t so surprising. Until the 1700s, astrology was considered a respectable scholarly discipline, with just as much validity as astronomy. It was commonly accepted in political and cultural circles, and some of its concepts were used in other fields, notably meteorology and medicine.

Brennan himself discovered astrology, alongside many other New Age practices, in his early teens. While the crystals and tarot cards fell by the wayside, his interest in astrology persisted, thanks to its having aspects he could “validate” through repeated observations. Today, he remains convinced by the basic premise: there’s a persistent correlation between celestial movements and events on Earth. For instance, the last time Uranus popped up in Gemini coincided with the Second World War, and the time before that was the American Civil War. Many astrologers believe the planet’s forthcoming appearance in this sign — which begins this summer, and will last until 2032 — will presage another turning point in US history.

Not that everyone in the astrological community takes their discipline so literally. For the British astrologer Chris Odle, factual truth just isn’t part of the deal. He pointed me to a trove of empirical data that, in his view, sounds the death knell for astrology as a science. Consider the case of two psychologists working in the Eighties. They arranged for volunteers to visit top astrologers for a reading. The twist? They used the birth data of notorious child serial killer John Gacy. Even so, astrologers failed to discern anything untoward, with all five agreeing that the client should go into youth work.

Of course, many people do find their birth chart readings to be uncannily accurate. But that might just be because they’re vague, couched in archetypes that would resonate with just about anybody. Psychologists call this the “Barnum effect” — named for the notorious showman P.T. Barnum, it describes our tendency to take generalized personality descriptions and believe they apply to us specifically.

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Skepticism aside, I wonder whether checkmates ultimately miss the point. As I myself discovered as a student, most astrology-curious people aren’t really interested in what the data says; they care much more about what star signs and the rest can say about how to live their lives. After all, spiritual practices don’t need to be empirically verifiable to be personally significant or subjectively true.

Odle concurs. He notes that some astrologers are paranoid about being bracketed together with fortune tellers, and as such, cling to the idea that astrology is a data-driven discipline. But, in his view, a lot of what astrologers do is simple storytelling: far closer to the realm of religion than science. Perhaps that is what needs to change if astrology wants to broaden its appeal even further. Rather than making an intellectual case for its convictions, perhaps practitioners should encourage a leap of faith. “There’s something ineffable at the heart of it,” says Odle. “And that’s OK, because the heart of life is ineffable. We can’t approach it with our minds.” The absent-minded Pisces in me would be inclined to agree.

Adapted from The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age (September Publishing)

I’d also discovered, on the past occasions when I’d kept a notebook by my bed and recorded my dreams, that the books on dream interpretation I’d found made zero sense out of them. Maybe I’m just weird — unsurprisingly that suggestion has been made tolerably often — but my dreams didn’t seem to fit into any of the usual patterns. I read Freud, of course, and Jung, and also some of the literature on dreams that came into fashion in the late 20th century. But I ended up wondering whether I was dreaming in Martian or something. So, I temporarily filed the whole thing away.

Recently, though, since the passing of my wife Sara, I’ve had more time to fill than usual. After a series of vivid dreams, I decided to give dreamwork another try. So I put a notepad and a pen on the nightstand, and started collecting my dreams. But they were just as odd as before, and the dream books just as unhelpful. Then — ah, then! — came a dream I could actually interpret.

No, it wasn’t one of those big life-changing dreams that Jungian theorists like to write about. I was sitting at a table with three women, two of them older and one young. They were talking about craft projects. One of the older women explained to the younger one that, if she wanted her project to succeed, she would have to be ready to give presentations to audiences on the ninth day of each month. The young woman replied that this meant she would have to start collecting information right away. The older woman smiled and said, yes, exactly.

That was the dream. The context was that, the day before, I’d agreed to give a presentation towards the end of June about Masonic history to a local group of Freemasons, who, one must add, like to refer to their organisation as “the Craft”. I realised as I reflected on the dream that it was offering specific advice about my project: I needed to have my presentation finished by the ninth of June, and that I’d better get busy collecting information for it.

That is to say, it was making a prediction. That was when doors started swinging open, because until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right.

Yet in late 19th-century Europe, among the educated classes, opinion on dream interpretation started swinging away from those familiar positions and towards new theories of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud’s the most important figure here, though there were influential writers before him who laid the foundations for his work, and plenty of others after him that took his basic insight and ran with it, as often as not in directions that horrified him. Freud’s central claim was that dreams offered privileged access to the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts and feelings, and thus to the psyche with all its quirks and foibles. Most dreamwork has gone in that direction since: it’s about personality, not prediction.

Let’s change tracks here for a moment. It so happens that one of the other things I’ve been doing with my unwanted supply of spare time brought me face to face with a parallel shift, this time in the field of astrology. While I have a second career as a political astrologer, reading ingress and eclipse charts for entire nations, I’m also interested in natal astrology, the astrology of individual horoscopes. And one of the things I’ve been doing lately is studying the seven hefty volumes of astrological instruction written by Alan Leo, a pen name which referenced the author’s astrological sun sign at a time when astrology was still illegal in Britain. Leo’s series of books, with their focus on personality rather than prediction, can be taken as the starting point for most of modern astrology. The long history of astrology underlines how drastic this shift was. The entire science of astrology, born in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, had prediction at the very heart of its whole enterprise — but it sought to answer political, not individual, questions.

What happened on earth the last time something happened in the skies? That was the empirical question that intrigued those early astrologers. Over several millennia of careful recordkeeping, tentative hypotheses, failures, and successes, astrology as we know it came into being out of that research project. Personal horoscopes were only a side effect of that programme — the discovery that a king’s birth chart might offer some guidance about his behaviour and his impact on his kingdom helped to birth what we call natal astrology, but it was only until Alan Leo that a discernible shift can be observed.

While Leo set the movement in motion, his successors, Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones, went even further, redefining astrology as a study of personality and downplaying the entire tradition of astrological prediction. This attitude spread into other methods of divination. I’m old enough that I can recall the angry denunciations of “fortune telling” flung by tarot readers who focused on personality at the older generation of readers who focused on prediction. I also recall well, and profited from, the first ebbing of that particular tide. Early in my writing career, I used to go to various Neopagan events to make presentations and try to interest readers in my books; I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, and so I helped pay my way by doing geomancy readings for other attendees.

Geomancy, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is more or less a Western equivalent of the I Ching, using randomly generated four-digit binary numbers where the I Ching uses six-digits. What sets geomancy apart from most other ways of divination is precisely that it’s a method of prediction. You ask it a question and it gives you the answer, and by and large it’s right.

So I would settle at a table in the divination room and do readings. My rule was that I’d cast and interpret the readings and then the clients would pay me whatever they thought it was worth. I cautioned everyone who sat down for a reading that they shouldn’t ask a question if they didn’t want to know the answer, because geomancy doesn’t provide wiggle room; if you ask it “Will I achieve my fondest dream?” it’s perfectly capable of answering “No”. Of course there were people who didn’t believe me, asked questions like that, tried to get me to take back a negative answer, and ended up flinging a handful of loose change in my face and stalking away in a rage.

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While I remember such encounters, they weren’t the ones I found interesting. I was drawn to the people who wanted a straight answer even if it was negative. One woman in particular comes to mind. She sat down at the table, listened to my spiel, and asked about a grandiose and not very marketable business project. I cast the chart and it was a very strongly negative one. The woman burst into tears and thanked me, because she’d had a bad feeling about it all along, but she couldn’t get anyone — not her friends, her advisers, nor the other diviners she’d asked — to give her any response other than some mindless cheerleading. She then opened her purse, got out some bills with noticeably large numbers on them, and handed them to me, before getting up and letting the next person sit down for a reading.

My political astrology these days follows the same principle. I’m in the business of offering the most accurate predictions I can. While I’m certainly not infallible, my predictions are reliably better than, say, those of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. (Admittedly this is shooting fish in a barrel; if an economist tells you the sky is blue, go look.) As a result, I make a decent share of my income from the subscriptions I ask for in return.

My point here, however, is not to preen myself on my far from unmixed success as a prophet. It’s to point out that there’s a market niche for something that most astrologers aren’t providing: predictions, as accurate as possible, instead of personality-obsessed navel-gazing. The flight from prediction that gripped dream interpretation and astrology alike in the late 19th century has deprived a great many people of a resource they want.

That, I’ve come to think, points at the heart of the flight from prediction. The years that Leo was turning away from astrological prediction, and Freud was redefining dreams as a means of psychological introspection rather than advice about the future, were also the years when Jules Verne was inventing science fiction, and technological change was first becoming a steady process rather than a matter of occasional fits and starts. Furthermore, it was also the zenith of Europe’s rise to global empire.

It was during these years that the modern mythology of progress was invented. Victorian futuristic novels such as Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889) took it for granted that Western civilisation would suffer the usual fate. By contrast, Leo was among the early adopters of a very different view: the notion that the world stood poised on the brink of a new golden age in which all the miseries of the past would be laid to rest forever.

While that belief had been in circulation in its original religious form for a very long time, what distinguished the myth of progress was how it decked out the Christian belief of the Second Coming in secular drag, proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Millennium without any supernatural justification. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world over the long 20th century was shaped by the transformation of this secondhand mythology from a belief of fringe groups to the cultural mainstream Much of the intellectual history of the Western world since 1990, in turn, has been shaped by the gradual unravelling of the failed progressivist faith.

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What gives all this a bitter irony is that the world of the late 19th century was not on the doorstep of Utopia. Rather, it stood poised on the brink of utter horror. Imagine for a moment that Leo had been interested in prediction rather than personality, and that he’d been able to get a good clear look at the next century or so of world history. He would have had the chance to preview two horrific world wars, waves of genocide sweeping across much of Eurasia from Armenia in 1915-1920 to Cambodia in 1976-1978, the total collapse of European empires in a chaos of insurgencies and failed wars, the rise and fall of the Communist and Fascist movements, and much, much more of the same kind, with poison gas, aerial bombardment, and a couple of mushroom clouds in there just to add a little additional piquance.

As it happens, there were people who foresaw some of the horror in advance. One of the occultists of that era I find most appealing, the colourful Joséphin Péladan, proclaimed to a bemused Paris in 1891 that European civilisation had passed its peak. A leading figure of the Decadent movement which was also home to the now more famous Joris-Karl Huysmans, he predicted that eventually Chinese troops would conquer France and parade down the Champs Elysées —a prediction that seems far more likely right now than it must have done in his day. More generally, the entire point of the Decadent movement was the recognition that the West was in decline.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that this awareness was behind the flight from prediction. Too many people saw or sensed what was coming and so fled into a fantasy of a shining future. It’s understandable that they did so: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot noted in his interwar poem Burnt Norton. Yet there comes a point at which fleeing from the facts becomes too dangerous.

We’re arguably well past that point now. That’s why I could pay most of my travel expenses back in the day by doing geomancy readings that gave people the bad news nobody else would tell them. Outside of the airtight bubbles where our political classes spend their time many people have come to grips with the fact that the future is going to be more difficult than the past — the mirage of Utopia projected by our corporate pseudoculture will never be more than a slickly packaged daydream.

I’m not sure how long it will be before that realisation starts to affect the practice of astrology, or for that matter the interpretation of dreams. Nonetheless I’d encourage people to consider their predictive possibilities of either of these. As the long road down to the deindustrial dark ages stretches out before us, we can use all the guidance we can get.

I scroll — and a groovy Gandalf type pops up on my feed. “If you stay in on Friday night, you’re outta ya mind.” I sit up. “Venus is trine — 120 degrees apart — to the North Node. The North Node is associated with our destiny. If you’re single and you’re sat at home with the roundest, most ginormous pizza you’ve ever seen, you’ve got it harribly wrong.” He goes on to tell me that tonight, I’m bound to find my soulmate. In the event, I do not (this is Kennington, not Camelot).

I do not believe in astrology, in the same way that I do not believe in Hell or Taylor Swift. To me these are kooky, backwards quirks for people willing to surrender control over their own destinies, who look to grand narratives instead of embracing bleak, atheistic sophistication. But I know many people who do — exclusively, by the way, women or the occasional ironic gay man. Some of my friends religiously check their Co Star horoscope app first thing every morning, or return from exceptional Hinge dates only to sigh “BUT, he’s a Capricorn…”

Modern astrology is seen as a niche fixation, but its roots are colossal and ancient, beginning in Mesopotamia and hurtling through the Greek, Islamic and Chinese traditions. The Hellenistic style, which forms the basis of much modern Western astrology, holds that 12 Zodiac constellations divide the heavens — the positions of planets and bright stars at your birth determine your destiny. According to an online quiz, I am a Virgo; my “moon sign” is Cancer and my “rising sign” is Scorpio. I was born in the Lincoln County Hospital at 12.34pm; my twin, two minutes earlier. I doubt two people were ever less alike — but our astrological diagnosis is the same. Even more damningly, we were delivered early, as twins often are, and plucked out by a surgeon. Were our destinies really determined by Lincoln County Hospital’s appointment-booking system?

The feminine vibe of astrology has much to do with the way newspaper horoscopes are written. A staple feature since the Thirties, they target the ruminations of young ladies: constant references to relationships, “soulmates” and fateful encounters hint at Mills & Boon-style titillation, while hijacking trendy notions of “self-care” and “manifestation” has propelled mystics to mainstream success. A 2016 YouGov poll showed that a staggering 42% of women believed that there was “definitely or maybe” truth in astrology or star signs, versus just 19% of men.

Why the disparity? We know that women tend to be more religious than men, and that in an increasingly secular culture, nebulously “spiritual” beliefs have taken hold, free of the oppressive flavour of old-school creeds. Sixties and Seventies New Age mysticism, a product of a bloated, over-educated and drug-addled middle class groping for rebellion, has evolved into a strange and paranoid fatalism among anxious young women. For many modern women poring over horoscopes, the trappings of spirituality — singular magpies, palm readings, lay lines — often represent monitions rather than heavenly guidance.

Then, there is the other side of trendy feminine mysticism. I know of a few insufferable “witches” — inevitably girls with tarot tattoos and ketamine habits — who appropriate a chic new brand of paganism (for approximately three years, before their first job in corporate law). For them, spirituality is ironic and sexy: baleful strumming of guitars, quirked-up rituals involving wax, moonlight skinny-dipping with other girls’ boyfriends. It is all about a non-specific radical unearthliness targeted both at and for men — no green slop in cauldrons, no eye of newt, just weed-honking hedonism. I hope that the particular university culprits I remember frolicking about in Port Meadow occasionally wince, from their glassy Kirkland & Ellis offices, at the embarrassing things they did in the name of Vashti Bunyan. We remember.

As an antidote to Gen Z’s performative mysticism, there are the middle-aged innocents — who I find to be quite charming. My twin and I once went to see a psychic called Brian, who operated out of his conservatory in Skellingthorpe. We sat there patiently on a settee surrounded by Native American knick-knacks as he rummaged through a list of initials of dead people we knew, waiting for our eyes to light up in recognition. He summoned an uncle we barely remember, and our long-gone grandmother who, he gleefully reported, was “laughing”. I do not remember her being much of a joker.

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My then boyfriend was sat outside in the car — he was a very serious Christian so could not be associated with Brian’s dark arts. “This isn’t your first, is it,” Brian tells me. Perceptive of you. “The last one treated you badly, didn’t he?” Now I was listening. “Yep…” I said. (Not a bad guess, given we were no longer together.) “This one, he’s the one,” said Brian with a sage nod. “He’s got his head screwed on.”

Needless to say, a month later this boyfriend cheated on me with a girl from Christian camp. Perhaps it was in defiance of Brian’s heathen second sight? Perhaps the One True God had intervened to smite me for my heresy? I fear only a Sound of Music-style audience with a singing abbess will provide the answer. What is certain, though, is that we women should not be putting our faith in bogus guesswork, surrendering personal agency to the whims of horoscope writers, nor Skellingthorpe psychics.

And this is just one route into starry-eyed delusion. Think of the legions of middle-aged women who sit at home ringing up psychic hotlines — a big money-spinning element of horoscope writing — paying £5/minute to hear whether a tall dark stranger will court or kill them. Or the stampedes of clairvoyant animals wheeled out on live TV — Paul the Octopus being the most beloved. He died in 2010, aged two and a half, having correctly predicted the winner of eight World Cup matches. Then there are the mediums who ghoulishly gather intel on audience members before “summoning” loved ones during live shows — earpiece intact.

For astrology to retain its allure, it has to have the occasional hit. In 2020, a Twitter astrologer called Starheal declared that Kamala Harris would run for president this year “since this coincides with her Saturn return”; she also correctly predicted, on 11 July, that Biden would step down on the 21st — because “it will be at the Capricorn Full Moon”. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

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With America in retrograde, astrology offers reassurance and a sense of control. Times of uncertainty have always been perfect petri dishes for all sorts of wacky interests: it was a century ago that the cultural upheavals of the Twenties spat out magick-making charlatans such as Aleister Crowley, or intellectuals such as W.B. Yeats flirting with the capital-W weird clubs including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It should not surprise us that each of these eras has its requisite bunkum — but this time round, it’s earnest young women rather than kohl-wearing sex pests like Crowley keeping the show on the road.

I wonder if my snobbery about astrology is connected to this fact. How often do we hear from straight men, sneering at women who are “into star signs” as shorthand for some broader, despicable feminine credulousness? For vapidity, stupidity? Is this entirely fair? Is my snobbery (read: rationality) just a subconscious way of slithering into the good books of men?

For many young women, tutting from men is part of the appeal: one friend tells me she brings star signs up on dates as a litmus test of whether potential partners are predisposed to that knee-jerk, borderline angry hatred of female fripperies. In this sense, star signs are simply a metonym for playful femininity, to be enjoyed with ironic detachment — and a good indicator of intolerance among bad-tempered men. But to give it any more credence than this is, I feel, a mistake. It’s time we women stopped wishing away control over our lives and dragged ourselves out of the dark ages. After all, why should men alone be the captains of their fate?

These are all classic signs of an avoidant attachment style. According to the Attachment Project, avoidant individuals “do not want to depend on others, have others depend on them, or seek support and approval in social bonds”, which is a pretty good description of my longstanding fear of relying on others.  The question is whether the broad understanding offered by attachment theory can really help me be a better partner, or enable my partner to better help me.

The concept of attachment styles has been rattling around in psychology for at least 70 years, but it has recently become inescapable. Pioneered by the British psychologist John Bowlby in the Fifties, attachment theory suggests that experiences in our childhoods, most significantly the way we were parented, play a large role in our later adult relationships. If our parents made us feel safe, if their attachment to us was stable, we carry that into adulthood and have healthy relationships in turn. But if we were parented in a way that was cold or uncaring or inconsistent, then we will bring echoes of that treatment into our friendships and romantic partnerships, to our detriment.

Attachment theory has gone in and out of fashion over time, but when it’s been hot, it’s been worked into self-help books, discussed to death by unhappy girlfriends, and used to analyse everything from societal trends to episodes of reality TV shows. The 2010 book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love has become something of a bible for adherents to this philosophy, and has kept selling, to the point that the New York Times wrote it up in a trend piece more than a decade after its publication. NPR, which is a good guide to the id of the overeducated American liberal, ran an explainer of attachment theory last year. And right now, topics related to it have hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.

The theory goes that there are four major styles, though there are variations depending on who you’re listening to. A healthy childhood, with loving and committed parenting, usually leads to the secure attachment style: these people tend to be dependable and self-confident, good partners who don’t let their relationships be influenced by fear of abandonment. The avoidant style presents itself as a commitment to extreme independence, which can threaten the mutual bonding of a healthy relationship, and which typically springs from the fear of relying on others and the vulnerability that brings. The anxious style is found in those with an unhealthy degree of need for their partner, and a constant fear that the person they’re attached to will leave them. The disorganised style combines aspects of both the anxious and avoidant styles, alternating between aloofness and deep neediness.

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The internet is a sea of dubious claims that your partner might be a sociopath, or that your relationships fail because of conflicting astrological signs; in this context, a simple explanation about the connection between loving and secure parenting and loving and secure romantic partnership seems sensible. The existence of the secure style does seem a little like a projection of a “normal” ideal that few people actually reach, and as always with this type of thing, there’s a question of how far you can deviate in any direction before you occupy another of the styles. But I’d certainly like to believe that there’s plenty of people out there who enjoyed healthy childhoods and are able to navigate adult relationships with confidence because of that. The assumption of universal childhood trauma that has grown over the years is good for no one.

Still, there’s little doubt that people who have suffered neglect in childhood often struggle, later in life, to feel safe in relationships — because they are either unable or unwilling to allow for true intimacy, or constantly afraid of losing it. But the disorganised attachment style — otherwise known as “fearful-avoidant”, “anxious-avoidant” or “mixed” — strikes me as just the kind of catch-all category that you often see with this sort of schema, into which people squeeze stubbornly complicated cases.

That doesn’t mean it’s a useless concept. What I’m suggesting here is that categories like these are helpful when our experiences conform to their guidelines, potentially unhelpful when they don’t, and dangerous when we begin to see them as science instead of interpretation. If we think of them as useful-but-artificial frames for understanding ourselves, they can be handy and healthy. If we insist on seeing them as a matter of scientific fact, we risk falling into all sorts of bad mental habits. For example, let’s consider me.

As I said, I’m typically avoidant. When I’ve wanted to end a relationship, I’ve simply pulled further and further away, making it clear to the other person that I was no longer invested, without sitting them down for a frank talk. When someone else has ended a relationship with me, I’ve responded by parting as quickly as possible, shutting down the opportunity for a sympathetic conversation, even when I was secretly very upset. In general, my inability to escape the fantasies playing out in my head was convenient to me: they became another world, in which what I was trying to avoid was not present.

This dynamic would only support attachment theory if it stemmed from childhood and my relationship with my parents. Here again my case study seems to support it. Both of my parents died when I was young, and I spent the remainder of my childhood without an adult to securely hold on to. I had a legal guardian, but she and I had an explosively unhappy relationship, and I left home as soon as I was able. I spent so much time in a state of emotional self-defence that I never really confronted what happened to me, and it’s taken decades of turmoil to put it together, with the help of therapy. My embarrassingly predictable response to a childhood where attachment led only to pain has been an adulthood in which I have craved intimacy but have consistently refused to allow myself to feel it. This is about as obvious an expression of the core of attachment theory as you’re likely to find.

And yet I’m also a good object lesson in the limitations of this approach. According to the Attachment Project, “parents who are strict and emotionally distant, do not tolerate the expression of feelings, and expect their child to be independent and tough might raise children with an avoidant attachment style”. But my parents were remarkably libertine, relentlessly loving, and gave us the opportunity to express our feelings. It’s true that we were raised to be independent and make our own choices. But this wasn’t a result of neglect; it was, in fact, a purposeful approach to parenting, and thus a reflection of love. Their belief was that allowing us to make our own choices and accept the bumps and bruises that came along with them was ultimately the only way to prepare us for real life.

There are also ways in which my behaviour, as well as my background, doesn’t fit into attachment theory. Avoidant people supposedly dodge arguments, which is not exactly a trait I’m known for. And they are generally less likely to fall in love, but as a younger man I would fall head over heels in no time at all. Within a given intimate relationship, romantic or not, I’m likely to withdraw, as a defence mechanism — but my heart still desires intense connection. My brain is just unwilling to countenance the risks.

Some would say, well, that means your attachment style is disorganised. But this is precisely my problem with catch-all categories like that one: anytime there’s an apparent internal contradiction, you just throw people into them. The result is a system that’s non-falsifiable, and thus not useful.

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If you dig around into forums devoted to attachment styles, such as the relevant subreddit, or look through the endless Instagram posts dedicated to them, you’ll find that this kind of confusion is very common — people will say something like, “my attachment style describes me so perfectly in this regard, but in this other aspect of myself, it doesn’t describe me at all”. And it seems that the more closely a given attachment style seems to reflect one part of your life, the more it stings when it fails to reflect another. An apparently scientific model that seems to fit us perfectly can feel like validation, like our problems and struggles are not incomprehensible to others. When we then fail to conform to other aspects of that model, it makes our original feeling of alienation — the one that had us Googling “what’s my attachment style” in the first place — all the more acute.

And yet, any broad categorisation of messy human people will, in practice, blur at the edges. People who subscribe to Myers Briggs or the Big Five Personality Test, or the most popular categorisation scheme of all, astrology always find this — it explains everything, until it explains nothing. Horoscopes are written to be vague and broad enough to be non-falsifiable. But as the industry of astrology has grown, so too has its claims to truth — which will inevitably and eventually fail, given that the stars can’t actually predict our destinies. People who are invested in attachment styles hate the comparison to astrology. But if you look at how these systems are discussed and experienced, you can’t help but note the similarities.

So, if they’re doomed to fall apart, why do we keep putting ourselves in categories? We all recognise that taking a Buzzfeed quiz about which Disney princess we are is a frivolous exercise. And yet the enduring popularity of that sort of thing — I remember the copies of Seventeen magazine that my sister collected and the endless personality quizzes therein — speaks to one of the most powerful urges in human life, which has only grown stronger in the digital age. We long to be understandable to others, to represent a type, so that we can be seen — especially in the cacophony of personalities that is the internet.

Of course, anyone who has ever known a teenager knows that this desire to fall into an easily-communicable category often goes hand-in-hand with extreme discomfort with being categorised. But in a culture that has effectively discarded religiosity — which has ironised defining ourselves by our professions and abandoned the communal markers that once created a sense of meaning — we find ourselves desperate to be something. Some people fill this need by overidentifying with their consumer choices — the person who has tried to make owning Beanie Babies a personality, the ones who thinks environmentally-friendly consumption makes an identity. Some people become “stans”, giving their autonomy to a celebrity to feel a sense of belonging. Some people join cults. And some people overinvest in systems like attachment theory.

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As an atheist, and one who feels that spiritual woo-woo is ultimately corrosive to many lives, I’m not a fan of people reading their horoscopes or Googling whether a potential match has a compatible star sign. But I also understand that most people use astrology for fun and perhaps to give them another lens through which to consider their own behaviour. Despite their scientific patina, attachment styles ought to be used in a similar way. They are useful rather than true.

If they are understood to be a metaphor for deeper patterns and pathologies in relationships, they can promote healthy romantic and sexual lives. If they are mistaken for some sort of transcendent categories into which we all fit, and which are existential or comprehensive descriptors, they are more likely to promote misery than healthy relationships.

It’s particularly easy for this sort of system to create self-fulfilling prophecies; someone who encounters attachment styles in popular culture, rather than therapy, might decide that they are simply cursed to be a certain way and act out avoidance or anxiety in response. A therapist who uses attachment theory to counsel couples in how to have better relationships will be well aware of this distinction between what is useful and what is transcendently real. But the internet is a machine for making people place undue faith in limited human concepts. “There are exactly four ways that adults attach to each other” fits comfortably in an Instagram meme, just like “Geminis are capricious and can’t be counted on”. “These concepts are useful descriptors of broad human behaviours, but they are necessarily limited and contextual and should not be relied on for literal or perfect advice” does not. And the latter doesn’t sell self-help books, which become popular by offering exactly the kind of certitude and totalising advice that we shouldn’t invest in them.

Part of the misery of the contemporary conversation about mental health is that the people who are best equipped to navigate its incredible and increasing complexities are precisely those that need it the least. An emotionally healthy person is more likely to accept the limitations of attachment theory, where an emotionally vulnerable person might get overinvested in it. An avoidant person is more likely to use broad concepts they find on the internet to make sense of their lives, because they lack the deep human relationships that would help them understand themselves. An anxious person is more likely to cast about for any reassuring explanation for precisely what they need to change in order to maintain their grasp on someone they love. A fearful-avoidant person might experience both at the same time. Each, in other words, is highly impressionable, and more likely to put too much faith in attachment theory.

The devolution of psychology to a crowdsourced “science”, popularised through memes, has done tremendous damage to our ability to let experts guide our complicated paths toward understanding our own minds. The solution here is for us to return mental healthcare to the status of medicine, not internet fads. There’s nothing wrong with reading about attachment styles — or boundaries, or gaslighting, or narcissism; nothing even wrong with learning about them through Instagram. The trouble is when we start to think of these frameworks for understanding relationships as “real”, as certainties rather than human tools, when in fact, like so much else in the science of human behaviour, they cannot exist outside of our collective effort to define them. We created them, and we would do well to remember it — but of course, that’s hardest for the people who need help the most.

That, after all, was the destiny of perhaps the most famous British astrologer of the 20th century: Mystic Meg, who died last week. Known as Meg Markova, but born Margaret Anne Lake, she became so identified with the power to predict the future that “Mystic Meg” passed into everyday language as a byword for prognostication.

It might be tempting to imagine that the modern age is so secular, scientific and disenchanted there is no modern-day role for a magician other than popular entertainer. How else to describe the “asparamancer”, who foretold the death of the second Queen Elizabeth last year in a pattern of falling asparagus spears?

But if you think there are no sorcerers left, you are looking in the wrong places. In fact, thanks at least partly to John Dee, it’s more accurate to say his inheritors now rule the world.

Whether or not you believe there’s anything paranormal “out there”, a great many studies affirm that most of the time when we notice patterns, we’re not conscious of doing so; what can feel like a “hunch” or “intuition” is really just our own powers of unconscious observation trying to get our attention. In this light, one way of understanding the many traditions of “reading” fortunes — whether in Tarot cards, the flight patterns of birds, tea leaves in a cup or the entrails of animals — is as a means of accessing some of these buried powers of pattern recognition, and allowing less conscious and sometimes more accurate observations to inform our conscious choices.

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Dee himself used an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, supported on wax discs inscribed with arcane symbols. He and the alchemist and medium Edward Kelley would gaze into its black, reflective surface, where they reported seeing visions of angels; these were reflected in numerous manuscripts, which form the basis of the Enochian system of magic. Their occult legacy has endured, from the 17th-century politician Elias Ashmole to the 20th-century British occultist and “father of modern Satanism” Aleister Crowley and beyond.

But this is hardly Dee’s only contribution. In the Elizabethan age, “natural science” and “occult science” were seen as intertwined — also seen in the mystical but proto-scientific study of alchemy. Dee epitomised this rich and strange Elizabethan brew of the material and magical, pursuing “thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine” alongside and often blended with mathematics, cartography and natural philosophy (and possibly also espionage, as the original “007”).

Dee stands alongside Francis Bacon as one of the founding figures of modern science — and the modern world in general. For two of his proposals helped lay the foundations for the age that followed: first, creating a national library accessible to anyone, and second, expanding Britain’s holdings into a “British Empire”, a term he’s credited with coining. While he didn’t live to see either come to full fruition, this vision of mass literacy and expansionary, extractive capitalism were key foundations of the Age of Enlightenment.

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This was in full swing two centuries after Dee’s appointment as court magician. But as this world blossomed, in the process (as Dee envisaged) vastly enriching Britain’s wealth and power, so the “natural” aspect of the alchemical sciences came to dominate — even as the “occult” aspect lost status. Thus as Dee’s political vision was realised, his black “spirit mirror” remained in circulation — but as a curiosity, having passed through multiple hands into the collection of Augustan writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole.

Walpole was 56 in 1773, when Dee finally got his wish and the British Library was founded. That same year, too, Walpole denounced the immense inflows of wealth from the East India Company’s colonial depredations in India, deploring the “sink of Indian wealth” that he saw as turning Britain into a “gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principles, genius, character or allies”.

But did Dr Dee really “see” things in his black mirror? Was he a fraud, seeking only to befuddle the gullible? Was Mystic Meg only pretending to entertain the crowds?

It is true that in the flurry of affectionate recent articles commemorating the passing of Mystic Meg, there’s a conspicuous lack of efforts to tally up the hit-rate of her predictions on the National Lottery Show every week. But viewers loved her anyway: the theatrics, the crystal ball, the pendulum and the sometimes extraordinarily specific suggestions such that a woman named Pat or Cathy would win with a ticket bought at 6pm (which did not, in fact, happen).

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Nor have any of the other predictions made last year by “asparamancer” Jemima Packington come true. Boris Johnson hasn’t returned as PM; Princess Anne is not Duchess of Edinburgh; Prince William hasn’t been made Prince Regent. And the jury is still out on whether Ukraine will defeat Russia.

Even so, enough people found enough resonance to sustain Mystic Meg’s legend, such as the lorry driver who recently remembered gratefully sticking his ticket into the cab copy of the Yellow Pages on her advice, and then winning £15 million. And even if such stories have a touch of back-rationalisation about them, those who point to the patchy hit-rate of popular fortune-tellers to dismiss the power of pattern recognition as mumbo-jumbo don’t understand its real power.

The “libraries and colonialism” Age of Enlightenment in turn laid the foundations for the “digital libraries and post-colonialism” Age of Information we now inhabit. And in this world, you would only dress up your intuition (patchy or otherwise) with a breathy voice and the aesthetics of a Victorian medium if your preferred field was weekend telly and the tabloid press. What, though, if you were a figure more like John Dee — political éminence grise, global traveller, possibly spy? In that case, you’d want the kind of authority that gets you taken seriously by people with real power.

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Let’s say you wanted the modern equivalent of a royal charter today, for your powers of pattern recognition, and to offer those powers to guide the modern-day kings and princes in areas of unfathomable complexity, where decisions can make or break fortunes. You wouldn’t use hexagrams or chanting or the power of fear and the uncanny. Such a practice wouldn’t refer to angels, spirits or occult forces, either.

We live in the age that succeeded and built upon the one of science, exploration and British Empire that Dee inaugurated: that is, the American Empire. And in this era, someone who wanted the ear of those with real power would be far more likely to borrow the authority afforded by the exoteric side of Dee’s interests: the field now known just as “science”. Instead of sigils, it would use more mundane symbols to give substance to intuition. Users might call it “data-driven decision-making”.

And nor would such a person bother to learn abstruse tables of Enochian symbols or inscribe wax discs with elaborate symbols, if they wanted to use languages to shape reality. Other arcane languages are now routinely in use, coding the algorithmic trading engines that power the roiling back-and-forth of global finance, and the social media platforms that serve as giant, distorting scrying-mirrors for our collective souls.

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Should such an individual want to intervene more directly in these ebbs and flows of reality-shaping meaning, he might, for example, in the wake of a crucial tech-sector investment bank’s failure, take to Twitter and whip up investor panic or (according to some) try to incite bank runs so as to force a government bailout.

In other words, were John Dee alive today he wouldn’t be Mystic Meg. Her role was more akin to what I do: dabbling in pattern recognition, in service as much to entertainment as anything more solemn. Dee’s real inheritors, meanwhile, eschew overt “mystic” symbolism to hide in plain sight, in metropolitan skyscrapers and first-class business lounges. Nor do they stare at the images conjured on a blank piece of obsidian supported by a disc of wax inscribed with mysterious symbols. Instead they (and in fact most of us) spend much of our time staring at messages conjured on a blank surface powered by a tiny chip of silicone covered with mysterious symbols. Which is completely different.

Is this sorcery? Well, not exactly. I dare say the financiers, coders and economists conjuring in realms of pure meaning would (at least in public) vehemently reject the idea that they’re communing with anything beyond the exoteric world. Others, though, increasingly treat the voice behind the silicone mirror explicitly as an entity (or entities), with agency and unknown intentions.

Mystic Meg epitomised an age, and a culture, in which those with unusual powers of pattern recognition were more often than not perfectly happy not to be taken seriously. But in ways we’re only just beginning to grasp, this more innocent age is succeeded by a much more eerie one. And here, as in the age of Dr Dee, the natural and occult sciences are once again unnervingly intertwined.