Episode 1: But astrology isn’t real…or is it?

EPISODE RECAP

It’s our first episode! To be honest, we have no idea what we’re doing, but we’re having a hell of a lot of fun doing it. This was a lot of fun to build and plan and we’re so happy to be unleashing our monstrous little experiment on the world. On that note, in this episode we’ll be laying a foundation for the rest of the podcast by introducing ourselves and explaining exactly what science is and isn’t as we explore whether or not astrology is real – and scientific.

In this episode of But Astrology Isn’t Real, We’ll also be discussing:

• How existing scientific studies on astrology are doing it wrong mainly because they don’t actually understand astrology, and how you’d need to set up a study to do it right
• Astrology as a soft science
• The history of the sun sign horoscope and why your general monthly forecast isn’t really helpful if you’re trying to understand how astrological transits are going to affect you
• Whether or not the CIA has actually confirmed that the whole sign house system is real
• Some modern fields of science that study the effects of the sun and the moon, known as the luminaries in astrology, on the human body
• Busting common astrology myths about how “vague” it is
• How the internet has made astrology mainstream
• How to spot astrological bullshit
• Future episodes

MIX TAPE

Check out the sound track for this episode on our Spotify:

Track 1:

Gloria – Laura Branigan

Track 2:

Lucky Star – Madonna

Track 3:

Kickstart My Heart – Motley Crue

Track 4:

Livin’ on the Edge – Aerosmith

Track 5:

Oh Sherrie – Steve Perry

TRANSCRIPT

Kelly Sue: Hi everyone,  welcome to…But astrology isn’t real,  a podcast where really, we’re talking about all of the reasons that it is real, featuring myself, Kelly Sue Milano, and my esteemed astrological colleague Ashley Riley. I like this. I like an informal welcome, and I like an informal conversation in the form of a podcast, personally.

Ash: Yeah, totally agree. And I kind of want this to be like you’re just hanging out listening to us on our own little radio show here.

Kelly Sue: It’s true. It’s kind of like a spoken word version of our DMs. Maybe just a little less snarky.

Ash: Very, very good description. We are not professional here. We are highly unprofessional.

Kelly Sue: I think it’s important that that be said. So because this is the 1st episode, we should probably talk a little bit about who we are, and I’ll let you go first.

Ash: Sure. So my name is Ashley – Ash for short, everybody calls me Ash. I have been studying astrology, not that long, honestly. I think I got into it around 2018. I have to preface this, though. As a kid I grew up in the Bible belt during the Satanic panic, okay? And my parents were hardcore church people. So all of this sort of esoteric stuff -– astrology, tarot cards, all that was totally outlawed. I grew up in a very rural community, and you know, we got the Internet in 1995 as well as our first personal computer. So, as a tween/teenager, I spent a lot of time on the Internet at night when my parents were not awake, and a lot of that was spent studying astrology.

As a kid, you didn’t know anything about it, so sun signs were all I knew, and and I was very interested in horoscopes so I would read all about them as a teenager. Then I later, of course, I learned, “Oh, there’s there’s more than this. There’s a whole chart!” So 2018 was really, when I started to kind of like dive into that stuff. And I’m a self-taught astrologer. I’m self-taught a lot of things, probably likely due to my intense neurodivergence. I taught myself HTML, by breaking down web pages and blogger templates and looking at the scripts on the back end, and figuring out how to to reverse engineer all of the designs. So I kind of have done astrology in a similar way. I’ve learned it mostly through Google, and by talking to my other friends who are also studying astrology and kind of learning about it. I’d already learned Tarot prior to that. So I think understanding archetypes is really helpful when you’re learning astrology, and I was a mythology nerd as a kid, too. So you know, there are a lot of things that I studied in my childhood that have kind of like led me here and helped me pick up astrology really, quickly, honestly.

In my opinion astrology is so big, you could study this for the rest of your life and still not learn everything about it. So I consider myself sort of intermediate-ish, but I know I know there are people out there who are way more knowledgeable than me. But you have an actual astrology teacher.

Kelly Sue: I do, I do, and I think that is also another thing that’s important to be said as as as two people who’ve studied astrology avidly: there are astrologers who have been doing this for 30 years, who are the authority on these things. So if at any point, when we’re sort of going back and forth on this podcast, and somebody hears something, and they’re like, “That’s not that.” Please share that we want to learn, too, as we go.

But I got into astrology in…I guess it would have been 2014 when I was, like most people, going through a challenging time and was referred to an astrologer. It was the very first time I’d ever had my chart read and I had always been into it in a superficial sense. I knew I was a Taurus, and I loved reading those sun sign horoscopes that I now talk about despising. And I was really blown away by my reading, so I started to study my own chart.

This this is before getting into transits or anything like that. And then in about 2016 I discovered the the North Node placement and it totally blew my mind, so much so that I started to then be interested in looking at my friends charts because I wanted to see what’s theirs? And is it going to resonate with them as much as it resonates with me? And it did. And that’s how I really dove into reading charts and wanting to actually learn about it from my astrology teacher, Dr. Michael Lennox. Another one of these astrologers who’s been doing this for like 25 years and is a clinical psychologist, and it was in his astrology 101 that I really got to learn the nuts and bolts of all of it, and how practical it is.

And that’s his focus, which is really like, yes, there are these beautiful sort of “out there” ways of working with astrology, but, he said, “I’m more interested in what does this mean for me on a Tuesday, you know? How can I really apply it to my life?” And so that was how I got really into it and stayed super into it. And then, as you and I have talked about so often, you read your own chart. Then you start looking at your friends charts, and then you start seeing the astrological influences out in the collective and you’re like, Oh, wow!

Ash: I guess we should also tell people how we decided to do this podcast? it was really a spur-of-the-moment thing. We’re like, Hey, maybe we should do a podcast.

Kelly Sue: Well, and what’s actually interesting is Ashley and I’ve never met in real life. We became friends on the Internet, talking about astrology.

Ash: I did a reading for you.

Kelly Sue: Yes, you did a reading for me, and then I did a reading for you, and then we go back and forth talking about these astrological things all the time and I think it was your idea.

Ash: Randomly, I was like, I need to do a podcast where it’s just like me, sharing my random thoughts about anything and everything. And I was joking.

Kelly Sue: Totally. And I was like, I’ll be there. And then the branding came online, and that was when it was like, “Oh, man!” Because if you don’t follow our Instagram, which you don’t because this is the very first episode that we’ve done, but go, follow the Instagram. Ash is the meme master. All of this beautiful branding is her brain child. I love it.

Ash: I’m having so much fun with this.

Kelly Sue: I’m so glad. As a single mom of a 5-year-old autistic child, I don’t have any time so actually sharing with me all these amazing memes and logos and everything. I’m just like, “God bless you!”

Ash: Yeah. I mean, how did I end up doing the the branding? My day job is marketing. Okay? My background is marketing, advertising. I worked for a couple of ad agencies, my degrees in journalism. So now I work in higher education as a marketing director. Specifically, at a stem research university. So a big chunk of my work life is translating scientific research into a way that normal people, laymen, can understand it. But yeah, that’s how I ended up doing all the branding and stuff because it’s a hobby, and experience from previous lives.

Kelly Sue: Well, and such a great perspective, too, to break down the soft science that is astrology, as we’ve talked about so many times.

Ash: So I remember that was like one of the first questions that you shot me via DM. “What do you think about astrology as a science?” And that’s kind of where we started this conversation. First of all, I think we have to back up and we gotta give everybody a foundation in science. Because most people don’t actually really understand science that well, right.

Okay, the scientific process. What is the scientific process? It’s more than just one scientist studying something, publishing a paper, and then that’s the facts. This is about a body of knowledge that’s constantly growing and evolving as multiple people across the globe – thousands of people – are studying these subjects, and contributing and advancing that knowledge, right?

Even scientific language is very different than what we would normally use in the general public. So when somebody in the public says, “I have a theory,” that’s not the same as a scientific theory. When people in general say, “I have a theory about this,” what they really mean is, “I have a hypothesis about this.” If we were putting that in a scientific context, right? So a hypothesis is what you think a thing is. You still have to test it, right? In order for something to become a scientific theory, it has to be tested over and over and over and over and over again over a period of years and the body of evidence from those tests are then peer reviewed, meaning other scientists review the data and try to replicate it, and if they can’t replicate it, then they know there was a problem with the experiment. Right? So then you go back to the drawing board. Once you have enough scientists who have been able to replicate the data, then we can kind of like progress to toward a theory.

So evolution is a theory. Specifically, when we talk about evolution, we think about Darwin’s theory of evolution, but Darwin’s theory of evolution is actually the mechanism by which evolution occurs, which is natural selection. So Darwin himself didn’t necessarily theorize evolution. He theorized the the mechanism by which evolution occurs. So the the thing is, we can’t test evolution necessarily as an experiment, because it happens over millennia. The reason why it’s been elevated to a theory is because there’s so much evidence that supports it, and there’s not a lot of evidence that refutes it. So the mountain of evidence for evolution is what is what elevates that as a theory.

Then, when you have something that can be tested – physics, for example, we set up actual physics experiments and you can directly one on one, test something and and find a causal relationship. Then then it can become a law. The laws of thermodynamics are things that have been tested over and over, repeated. And we know that this is how this thing works right?

Kelly Sue: When I first reached out to you about this, I didn’t know that.  I’ve had similar conversations in comments, sections on posts where someone is like, well, this isn’t a science and I had gotten into it with someone and was like, well, it isn’t an empirical science where you can see the physical results of something.

Ash: Yeah, like you, you can see how the behaviors play out.

Kelly Sue: And that was when you were like, well, it’s a soft science like psychology. So you know, it’s not like Jupiter is going to come to conjunct Uranus, and at the moment of exactitude, something physical is going to happen that we’re all going to see and experience in the same way. But when you brought up applying actual scientific research principles to astrology, or like the data sets that you have to have are very specific in order to test it. And now I want us to open up our own research lab in addition to this podcast.

Ash: If this ever comes in contact with anybody in scientific community who wants to study astrology, and you want to do it right, we will help you. We’re gonna talk about this in a bit – how all y’all have been doing this wrong.

Kelly Sue: Yes, we will. And this podcast, is basically just a giant grant proposal. Please give us money to study astrological data sets. Oh, my God, what a bunch of nerds, anyway! Back to what you were saying! I kind of interjected your thought about this being a science versus it not being a science, right.

Ash: Yeah, so when you look at psychology or sociology, those fields are not considered hard science, because you can’t set up experiments and test variables and isolate variables in the same way that you can with hard science. So sociology and psychology are often based on self-reported data and observations of patterns of behavior. And that’s exactly how we need to approach studying astrology, and that’s how astrologers have been studying astrology for ages.

Kelly Sue: Well, and that’s also something that’s interesting to me, too, because it has existed and has been studied and has been utilized for thousands of years, going all the way back to the birth of modern astronomy.

Ash: Yeah, they were not separate at that time. Astronomy and astrology were basically considered the same thing for a very, very, very long time, until they merged early on… shortly after the birth of Christ.

Kelly Sue: Shortly after. That was a kind of a big moment. Birth of Christ is a big moment.

So I read this book that’s one of my favorite books of all time. It’s called The Science of Shakespeare by Dan Falk and it talks about how Shakespeare’s plays were sort of – maybe not the first,  but were the most significant in terms of our modern relationship to literature. The most significant examples of a human being really connecting with and trying to live in alignment with the celestial bodies, basically, like all of the references, and, like what he does throughout the book, is, he takes these references that Shakespeare makes to planetary movement, and the stars and the sun and the moon, and draws direct parallels to astronomical findings that were happening in real time. The book is fascinating, and I’m not even going to try to paraphrase any of it, because I can’t but what struck me about it, especially in connection with astrology is that at that time, before there was the modern use of really anything, the sky really was a way that everybody could experience being connected to each other, before there was any real connectivity. So it’s like, that’s also a basis for astrology. I mean, every time you do a reading for somebody they’re wanting to know about their connection to another person, to an experience, like it’s really a connective sort of art. So when I think about it, going all the way back, it’s sort of like, how could we deny that this is a really significant part of all of our lives, even if you don’t believe in it?

Ash: And and humans have had that connection since cave man times. You can look at cave paintings and there’s references to astrological phenomena there. This connection to the stars has been a part of our evolution for a long, long time, like from the almost from the moment we evolved to a point where we could have our own form of spirituality and belief systems.

You know the modern horoscope is a different story. Totally.I was doing a little bit of research on astrology as we know it today, and I was reading that it actually came out of the Middle East. Astrology itself developed independently kind of across different cultures, right? So like, there’s Chinese astrology, there’s Vedic astrology. At that time it was really still more of an astronomical thing. There wasn’t an actual horoscope attached to it. But through the the silk road and and trading the concept of a a horoscope is was actually spread to other places from the Middle East.

So I thought was really interesting because I’ve I’ve had people pose the question to me before about whether or not I think astrology is colonial, and for something to be considered colonial it has to have come out of Europe during the period between like 1600-1800s and Astrology is obviously way older than that.

Kelly Sue: Yeah, absolutely.

Ash: And it definitely was not part of the Colonial game plan which was to force everyone to convert to Christianity and assimilate. Astrology would have been a no, no.

Kelly Sue: and I think that it’s a you know. I think anything in the hands of the wrong person can become colonial. It really depends on how it’s being used and who’s using it, and the and the narratives around it.

Ash: I would love. I would love us to do an episode on that, by the way, about how, like certain interpretations of an astrology chart, definitely have colonial vibes, definitely have patriarchal vibes.

Kelly Sue: I was just gonna say that.

Ash: So yeah, we might do a future episode.

Kelly Sue: Absolutely, but any like anything else. If you draw it all the way back to an indigenous root, whether it’s Chinese astrology, which is very significant even still today, there’s also native American versions of this, Vedic astrology, which is very different from the astrology that we’re reading on the Chani app, for example.

I think the challenge is that the modern astrology, the Hellenistic that we’re going to talk about primarily – I think that trying to weigh them against each other with the knowledge that you would have of Western astrology would probably be a mistake that a lot of people make thinking that they can relate with these things in the same way they’re relating with this sort of Western experience of astrology, and that’s probably something that is true across a lot of different things.  But yeah, it’s definitely worth greater research into those forms of astrology. I don’t know a ton. I mean, I know that I know my own sign in other, you know, astrological modalities, but outside of that I don’t know anything about indigenous practices of astrology, but that would also be interesting, too, to dive into that.

Ashley: I mean, according to horoscope.com there’s over 80 branches of astrology, and that doesn’t surprise me. Just within Hellenistic astrology alone, how many different charts do we to break down? People have this really black and white way of thinking about this stuff, too, and it’s like, well, which one’s right? Why can’t it be all of them? I always look at astrology as sort of a layered thing.

For example, when a new planet gets discovered and an archetype gets assigned to that planet, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that invalidates any of the previous way that we’ve done or interpreted astrology. It’s just another layer of information. So I look at the all the different fields of astrology, so to speak, the same way in that you can use all of them. Why not?

Kelly Sue: And I think that once you start, that’s the best thing about studying astrology through your natal chart, because you can, you know, start with the astro generated Placidus – although nowadays with apps like the pattern, and again Chani, or Sanctuary, or any of these astrology apps, they’re reading whole sign houses which it makes sense to do it that way if you’re reading horoscopes en masse right? Because you would never be able to create app content for that many unique charts, that would be impossible.

Ash: Well you probably could if you have if you have all of the the aspects loaded up into your database, and all the person has to do is input their chart.

Kelly Sue: You could. So hopefully, that becomes something that happens because I would I would love that.

The teacher that I learned from poo-poos whole sign houses. And then there’s another one where every house is the same size, so like, if your rising sign is at 20 degrees of Leo, like mine, every subsequent house will begin at 20 degrees of the sign. Yeah, I can’t remember what it’s called, but–

Ash: I know people who swear by whole sign.

Kelly Sue: Totally. And there are times where I’m like…there are aspects of whole sign that really do resonate for me a little more than Placidus, but not on the whole, I find. But there’s still so much value in those different ways of breaking down and generating the chart. Yeah. Same kind of goes for synastry versus composite, which we will obviously talk about at a later time.

Ash: Yeah. So let’s let’s jump back to to science real quick. And how people have been studying astrology over the years. I’ve seen a very small handful of actual scientific papers published on astrology. But every time I see one, when I go and I look at the methodology, they’re testing something like sun sign compatibility in married couples. And they’re like, “We found no correlation,” and I’m like, well, no shit, Sherlock.So it’s like, you know, if you want to find a correlation – and and science doesn’t necessarily study something because it wants to find a correlation, but like, if you want to study astrology correctly you’re gonna have to look at something that’s not just sun signs. And I think the reason why this happens so frequently is because it’s people who don’t actually know astrology who are trying to design experiments around astrology and that just doesn’t work.

And so, you know, and for most of those people they’re they’re only reference point for astrology is a sun sign horoscope.

Kelly Sue: Yeah. And for good reason, as I sent to you today, this invention of the sun sign horoscope as we know it now was really a marketing tactic that came out of the 1930s when Princess Margaret was born. It was a British publication that wanted something to sensationalize the news and they found a celebrity astrologer, whatever that meant at the time, to talk about Margaret’s birth placements. And so many people responded to it, and were asking for more predictions and more astrological weather. So that’s how it got started. And then it turned into these weekly or monthly or bi-monthly breakdowns of just a sun sign horoscope that was now built into, you know, women’s magazines in the back of newspapers next to the funnies, it became something that was sort of like entertainment. But over time it’s become what people think astrology is when in reality that is a facet of astrology that was used to sell newspapers and magazines.

Ash: If you wanted to really study astrology from a scientific perspective, number one, you have to realize that astrology can’t be isolated down to a single cause and effect, variable. Again, when you talk about skepticism towards astrology, people are like, “There’s no causal relationship between the stars. How do the stars physically impact a person,” right? And that’s a whole other discussion – we would have to turn our whole thoughts about consciousness kind of on its head in order to do that. But that’s that’s also kind of part of the the colonial aspect of science, too, we always think about these things through a very Western lens. So that’s that’s one aspect of that conversation.

But really like, if you did want to study astrology through that modern scientific lens, you’d have to study it the same way that you would study psychology or sociology. But you would want access to a large data set. You’re going to have to use data science principles to study astrology is what I’m saying. We need to see thousands of charts and we need to see every possible expression of a particular aspect. And you know, astrologers know what what those expressions of those aspects are. We can pick them out. And it’s it’s different combinations of multiple variables that can produce the same expression, depending on what it is. It may just have a slightly different flavor. So you have to study these things in clusters of aspects, not just like one planet at a time, and one really vague sun sign, because, as you know, anybody who actually does study astrology knows, houses have a huge effect and the aspects have a huge effect. It’s not just about which sign is this planet in. And I think that’s where a lot of these really fall short is, they’re not even looking at the aspects between planets, which is going to be way bigger and more important in relational astrology than just your sign compatibility.

Kelly Sue: Oh, yeah. If you look at the aspects of marriage where most people experience conflict – because if it’s a conflict it’s a compatibility question – you also have to look at the areas where most couples fall into conflict which is like money. Maybe the way to raise children, careers, and taking into account the houses that would influence those areas of each person’s chart, whether there’s a planet there or not.

And that’s another thing, too, that took me a long time to realize, even after studying astrology for so long. Just because there’s not a planet in a specific house, it doesn’t mean that you’re not feeling the influence of the sign that’s in that house, right? We have in a really broad sense, every sign in our chart. It’s all operating within us all the time, which then takes it from the scientific conversation to the more spiritual conversation, which, you know, you can’t talk about astrology without talking about spirituality in a sense.

But for the purposes of this particular episode we’re looking at the science.

Ash: So speaking of this, a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago sent me this reddit post where somebody had posted, “The CIA literally confirmed the whole sign house system is real and nobody seems to care.” And they linked to some kind of FOIA page on the government website. I actually went through and read the whole document. It was just one pidf, one page, but it was a summary of studies from over the last, like, hundred years –some of these stuff is going back to like the 1930s and 1920s. And and so only three of them on there were about astrology. One was about Carl Jung and he wasn’t even actually studying astrology. He was studying archetypes so that one was nothing about it. Then there was another one that also wasn’t directly related to astrology. So really, on this whole thing, there was like one paragraph – one summary of a scientific research paper that was done in like the 30s or 40s I think where this guy in Germany had studied – I think again it was sun signs.

Ash: But he was. He was actually specifically trying to find a direct correlation between astrology and human behavior. It was only like four sentences, and it didn’t even tell you what he did or what he specifically studied at all. It said that he concluded that astrology was not real, but that the stars definitely did have some sort of impact on human behavior.

But basically, like, this person on reddit is just looking at one study that was referenced by the CIA that didn’t even actually say astrology was real, and they’re like “the CIA confirmed astrology is real,” I’m like, no, that’s not how that works…

Kelly Sue: And that goes back to your original point where you’re like, people don’t even actually understand how science works.

Ash: Right, right.

Kelly Sue: And they’re out here being like the CIA just said this is real. You’re like, well, no

Ash: Yeah. So that in order for anyone to confirm the astrology is real, like, we need a body evidence. And we need a group of researchers studying it over time. Which, hey? That’s what astrologers do. But the thing is like the scientific community doesn’t see value in in it. And my thing is like, okay? So if you if you want to do a large scale study like this, typically in order to get the funding to study it, it has to have a practical application, right? And so it’s like, well, even if astrology is real, what are the practical applications? Most people again only think of it, of personal horoscopes. So why would they care?

But anyone who actually studies astrology knows there are applications, like we use astrology for business, you can use astrology for therapy, and by the way government, don’t you have any kind of interest in predicting the potential rise and fall of empires? Because that’s another application of astrology which we will probably also touch on when we talk about Pluto in Aquarius.

Kelly Sue: Yes. That’s a big one.I also think, going back to what you were saying about there not being physical evidence. You made a note in the notes for this episode about how people are like, oh, well, the moon has a very literal effect on the tides, and our bodies are 90% water. And so, because of that, that’s enough evidence to say that yes, these celestial bodies have an effect on our physical bodies. And you explained that. Yes, though that’s true, that’s not a theory necessarily. Can you explain that a little bit more? Because I think a lot of people use that example to be like. Oh, this is why astrology is real.

Ash: Right. Well, I think when we’re talking about astrology, we’re talking about astropsychology, really right? It’s how astrology influences our psyche. Now there are actual fields of science that study how the luminaries affect human evolution and our our cycles. Chronobiology, is a whole ass field where they study things like our sleep cycles, menstrual cycles, etc. including how they are affected by the moon. So like. there are hypothesis out there that humans, prior to modern civilization, all cycled with the moon. And it was because it was an evolutionary thing where, if there was a full moon outside it was very bright, so it was safer for humans to like be out at night, whereas when there was a new moon, it was very dark, and it was more likely that you could be eaten by predators. So they they hypothesize that ancient man evolved to stay indoors at night in a sense for safety, and so they decided to use that time for copulation and reproduction. And so, evolutionarily speaking, that’s how our menstrual cycles evolved. So the question is, why why don’t all women cycle with the moon now? Light pollution. Same reason roosters will crow all night now.

Kelly Sue: I love it. I love the farm references.

Ash: Well, my boyfriend lives in Bermuda and there’s like wild chickens everywhere. So they crow all night long when it’s bright.

Kelly Sue: But interestingly, if you, as a modern woman, track the cycles of the moon, you’re more likely to have your cycle sync up with it. At least that’s something that people talk about, again. That’s not a scientific study. There’s no proof surrounding that. But it’s happened to enough people that I’m like, “Oh, maybe there’s something here.” Because nobody’s getting away from light pollution around here. Certainly not in the city of Manhattan or Los Angeles, where we’re both based respectively.

Ash: So that’s anecdotal evidence.

Kelly Sue: So I think now might be a good time to talk about – you know we’ve talked a lot about the astrological chart and the luminaries, and the effect of the stars, and all of these things, but I would love to go to busting the common myths. Like astrology can apply to anybody and actually no it can’t because in a single chart there are how many planets? 9.

Ash: Well, do you consider Pluto a planet?

Kelly Sue: I do?

Ash: Science doesn’t. It was and then it wasn’t. It’s upgraded back to dwarf planet, I think. Yeah. So you’ve got 9 planets in in a chart. You’ve got 12 houses. You’ve got 12 zodiac signs. You’ve got 30 degrees per sign, numerous calculated points and innumerable asteroids. Fixed stars. You’ve got galactic center. You’ve got vertex. I mean the the number of elements available to a single chart is – I don’t even know. I mean I think it might be infinite honestly.

I am not a math person. I will openly admit this. I am numerically dyslexic, but some some good soul on Reddit, with, you know, a brain that does math was like, oh, this is easy to calculate. We just use some basic high school algebra. And they came up with…what was it? 540 septillion? Different charts.

Kelly Sue: Wow!

Ash: And that was not factoring in every single chart variable available. That was just like the basic ones.

Kelly Sue: Wow!

Ash: And so to compare that – and I had to Google this, but there are estimates out there. It’s believed that there’s only been 117 billion members of our species ever to have been born onto this planet. So there are more unique astrology charts possible than there are humans who’ve ever been alive on earth. So tell me again how astrology, so vague.

Kelly Sue: Yes. And also there is an entire supportive mode of astrology that breaks down the specific meaning of each one of those 30 degrees within a sign and each of those degrees has an association with a sign specifically to some degree. So the ways that you could equally interpret a chart are endless.

Ash: Well, yeah, and take into account the fact that there’s a positive and negative expression of like every single thing in a chart like. And then that doubles everything that you’re looking at.

Kelly Sue: Yes. It really is  a fascinating thing to study, because the more you study it the more there is to study. It’s an endless rabbit hole of astrological deliciousness. And that’s a scientific term.

Ash: Totally a scientific term. The bottom line, I think, is that you know, the people who think astrology isn’t real are people who don’t know anything about astrology, or, as the meme goes, “Everybody who says astrology isn’t real thinks Aquarius is a water sign.”

Kelly Sue: Everybody thinks it’s a water sign. It’s called the Water Bearer but it is an air sign. In fact, Darwin was an Aquarius.

Ash: See now we’ll go on a whole ass tangent on this, I’m sure, but I I deeply suspect that there are heavy aquarian and or Uranus placements in a lot of people who are in science.

Kelly Sue: Yes, there’d have to be.

Ash: And and trust me, I work with scientists and engineers every day, so I get to see those personalities play out on a regular basis.

Kelly Sue: that would actually be really fascinating.

Ash: It would. That’s all I wanna do. I wanna study astrology charts en mass and look for the common placements, because, you know, they’re there. You just know.

Kelly Sue: Well, and I think about it in terms of my own chart. So just based on like, if we’re taking it from sun sign astrology. If I were to go and pick up an issue of Cosmopolitan, if that even exists anymore? Do people even go buy magazines? I haven’t in years, but if I were to do that, and I were to pick up a magazine and flip to the back to where the horoscopes are, I would look for my birthday, and I would read the horoscope for Taurus. But.

Ash: But that would be the wrong way to do it.

Kelly Sue: But it would be the wrong way to do it, and it also wouldn’t necessarily apply to me. Because if you’re gonna do that kind of horoscope you actually would want to use a rising sign, and that would be more accurate. And you can’t figure out your rising sign based on a period of dates that you were born within. You have to look up the chart to do that, and you have to have your birth time. You have to know. I mean, hopefully. Everybody knows where they were born, and your birthday, and you don’t even get an accurate rising sign unless you have the exact time that you were born, as my astrology teacher says, the moment that you took your first breath – that is where your chart begins – which is beautiful when it’s put that way. But it’s like you have to have such specific information to generate the specific chart. And so that conversation in and of itself, just there before you go into whatever my Venus is, or my Mars, or their relationship to each other, already it’s not what anybody thinks it is just from that. And even then just a rising sign, horoscope isn’t even gonna remotely cover it.

Ash: It, it might hit it at a really sort of vague level, because, you know. Well, this this planet’s in in your second house right now. But until you understand how that plan is going to be interacting with the plans in your Natal chart it’s it’s still a very sort of vague thing.

Kelly Sue: And then there’s Mercury retrogrades that everybody’s just like Mercury’s retrograde. So everything’s fucked.

Ash: Well, I have a natal Mercury retrograde so everything typically is fucked.

Kelly Sue: I also have Natal Mercury retrograde, so there’s no hope for us. But there’s still time for you. If you don’t have a retrograde Mercury, and if the transiting Mercury retrograde is not hitting your chart or points in your chart in a specific way, your mistakes are your own. You can’t blame them on the astrological weather, at least not based on the mercury retrograde. But that’s actually another really great example, too, that, like there could be a Mercury retrograde that is hitting the chart in a in a challenging way but if you have larger astrological themes going on that are positive it won’t be felt as negatively. The experience of it is so layered. Which is why it’s so easy to geek out on.

Ash: Well, you can still blame all of your technological woes on mercury retrograde.

Kelly Sue: 100% on that. You can

Ash: Actually I we might we might do a whole episode dedicated to Mercury retrograde.

Kelly Sue: Think we should.

Ash: Just so we can go through the list that I compiled a few years ago of all the times that Facebook and Instagram went down during Mercury retrograde.

Kelly Sue: That is perfect.

Ash: Yes, tell me again that astrology isn’t real, and I’m going to show you every time Facebook has like blanked out globally during retrograde or during retro shade.

Kelly Sue: Oh, my word, and also in the midst – just right now, as we are recording this podcast – a friend of mine texted me to ask what their mid heaven is.

Kelly Sue: cause I have all my friends charts loaded up, because that’s just what I do for people, so I get these questions all day long, and I’m like, Oh, I know it by heart.

And those kinds of things would be really cool, too. I mean with Mercury. It’s a little bit easier, I guess, to sort of research the amount of outages that happen during that period of time, but it would be neat to do for some of the other retrogrades as well, even though they aren’t as, what’s the word Consistent or, yeah.

Ash: Potent.

Kelly Sue: Yeah. There’s so many ways to do it. And it’s so exciting and having a breakdown. I’m so happy to be doing this because this is a breakdown of astrology and the science of astrology, and what it is, and what it isn’t, that I have personally been dying to listen to so I hope it’s really interesting for everybody else listening to it. I can’t wait to like extrapolate on all of these points. And they’re not theories. They’re hypotheses.

Ash: Right.

Kelly Sue: See, even I get to learn something new, because your breakdown of science was something that was like, I guess I could understand it in a way, from a general perspective, but until it’s explained in a way that’s like personal to me, I’m just going to be like, oh, yeah, science numbers and facts.Somebody else deal with it. But you’re like, no, this is actually the way that this works. Similar to astrology. And I think both of us have an eye towards systems. Would you say that’s true for you, too?

Ash: Oh, 100%. Yeah.

Kelly Sue: I think that could it be our specific brands of neurodivergence, possibly.

Ash: I think so. I have Jupiter conjunct Uranus in Sag in my 6th house, sextiling my mercury. So you know, when you put Uranus and Jupiter together it’s big, big, big, big, big picture thinking. That’s how my brain works. I think in big picture. I need to be able to see all of the pieces out on the table, and then I understand how they are connected. And I think with it being in my 6th house with that Virgo flavor to it, it’s like, okay. Now, I need to understand the nuts and bolts and the details of each individual piece, and how it all layers up together. And so that is a perfect placement for somebody who is doing science communication. Because that’s what I do is I break down highly complex technical subjects in a way that’s really digestible for people to understand at a at a high level. And in order to do that you have to be able to see every level of the subject.

And you know, my background is in journalism, and you’re taught how to ask the right questions. And you’re you’re taught to understand your audience in marketing. It’s like, Okay. I need to use a language that my audience understands. And so all of these, like pieces of my professional background, have come in really handy, because I’ve developed these skills over time. But they also just come naturally to me.

Kelly Sue: Yeah, well, and I’m happy that you touched on the marketing background, because, you know, we we touched on how astrology was used in the thirties as a marketing tool, basically. And we’re seeing that kind of happen again. There’s been a rise of popularity in astrology. And now you have brands that are not associated with astrology whatsoever. It’s almost something like Walmart posting an ad on Instagram, saying, Get everything you need this weekend before Mercury retrograde. Yeah, it’s become that much of a cultural trend.

Ash: Oh, we’ve got a meeting loaded up, I don’t know if I posted it to our Instagram channel yet, but it is a screen cap of Mcdonald’s fact-checking somebody about Aquarius being a water sign.

Kelly Sue: Yes, thank you. This is this is exactly what I’m talking about. So it’s really one of these things where it’s happening again and it’s being used to market in a different way. But it’s also like there’s a little bit more integrity behind it, like Mcdonald’s is fact-checking astrological information.

Ash: Right.

Kelly Sue: What even time are we living in right now?

Ash: Pluto. Pluto is going into Aquarius, and things are are gonna get crazy.

Kelly Sue: Totally. And so if it’s become something that’s this meaningful which I understand, because prior to the Internet and I’ve said this a million times. If I were an astrologer in the 80s I wouldn’t be, because the amount of knowledge that you would have to have about drawing an ephemeris from scratch is insane, like.

Ash: I’ve I’ve thought about this, too, like you would have to flip open so many books and just read to your little hearts, delight. You’d have to be dedicated.

Kelly Sue: No wonder people were like “astrologers are loons” because you would legitimately look like Merlin in the Sword in the Stone. Your house would be a disaster, and you would just have open books floating around you that nobody else knew what any of that meant, you know. So I think, also, because astrology has just become so accessible, anybody anywhere with an Internet connection can look up their chart. And so I think that’s something, too, that’s given rise to integrity and ironically factuality when it comes to astrology.

Ash: To a degree because, you do still have, you know the “I hopped on astrology 4 months ago, but I have 8 million followers on Tiktok” train. I saw something the other day on Tiktok. This guy was explaining South Node, and I was like, “No. Wrong. So wrong.”

Kelly Sue: that is gonna be a really fun episode: how to spot astrological bullshit.

Ash: I mean, in order to spot astrological bullshit you kind of know Astrology.

Kelly Sue: That’s true, I guess, in a way, that’s true. But I remember us sharing. You know, somebody who was talking about “It’s a Cancer new moon. And you’re gonna hear from an ex.” and we were like in what universe?

Ash: You’re saying that every time July comes around I’m going to hear from an ex? That’s insane.

Kelly Sue: So it’s stuff like that. There isn’t really a way to spot it if you don’t know enough about it, because there are aspects of astrology where there are blanket statements like that like, “Hey, now’s the time when you might hear from an ex. Now’s a time where you might have more kind of challenge in communication.” So that would be difficult. But, man, I wish we could create that roadmap for people.

Ash: I mean we could definitely do it on a foundational level, like anybody telling you that, you know, a Pluto transit means you’re gonna die. You know there, there are some people out there who take astrology very, very, very literally. And well, yes, astrology can be predictive in that way, but I don’t think there’s any way that you can say for certain that this is how the transit’s gonna play out for someone. It’s more like a cluster of possibilities.

Kelly Sue: Absolutely. And that’s always the sort of disclaimer that I give when I read anyone’s charts where it’s like, I don’t predict hard and fast events based on astrology. I can take a stab at it, but mostly what is being predicted is the energy of something which is, you know, the energy of anything is inherently neutral. Right? It’s us that gives it the meaning. So it’s like, once you know how to work with an incoming energy. You can be proactive in how you experience the energy which is what I think makes astrology so meaningful to the people that it’s meaningful to. Because there have been conversations where it’s like, well, this just feels like a tool that’s being used to control something you can’t control. And I’m like maybe, but you also can’t control the movements of planets and what it brings about in your life, and you can’t control energy. You can just control the response. You can react to it, which is all that you have control over, anyway. I’ve had so many conversations where I’m like it wants to help you.

Ash: I like what my friend Susan says. She’s like, “Let me give you handlebars.” That’s what she what astrology can do for you, it can give you handlebars.

Kelly Sue: Yeah. so that is what this podcast is gonna do for you. It’s gonna help you find the handlebars.

Ash: We hope.

Kelly Sue: Anyways. So yeah, that’s like an hour of conversation. Just right there.

Ash: That is, I think this a good spot to wrap it up, too.

Kelly Sue: I think so. We’ve covered so much, and in a very organized naturally flowing manner. I appreciate that.

Ash: Yeah, this. This wasn’t awkward at all.

Kelly Sue: No, there was nothing awkward about it. I don’t think so. I felt very just really on top of it the whole time. Oh, my goodness, anyway! I think one of the things, too, that I wanted to implement is having people submit questions about anything that we talk about on this episode, or prior episodes or future. Well, not on future episodes. You don’t know what they are but that would be so cool to answer questions, to research answers to questions. I would love that. So if anybody listening to this has an immediate question send it to the contact for this.

Ash: DM us on Instagram for now @butastrologyisntreal.

Kelly Sue: Oh, and you can also follow us individually on Instagram. That’s probably important to note.

Ash: Not me cause mine’s private, but yours.

Kelly Sue: That’s right. You can’t follow her, but you can follow me  @KellySueSays on Instagram, but nobody is immune to getting blocked, so be respectful.

Ash: So what I’ll do for the future is, I’ll put a like a question submission box on website, and people can drop questions in there.

Kelly Sue: Fantastic. Okay, great. Well, this is an incredible kickoff. I’m feeling really good about it. Awkwardness aside. I would say it’s only going to get easier, but I’m generally pretty awkward just at rest, so.

Ash: Same.

Kelly Sue: Yep, lots of awkward neurodivergence will be had in addition to the astrological breakdowns. Total nerd mode. Awesome. Well, thank you for listening this long. If you enjoy this, podcast please follow us on Instagram and all of the other socials that we may appear on over the course of time. Like, leave a nice comment, and yeah, I think that’s a pretty good sign off.

Ash: I think so too.

Kelly Sue: Catch you next episode.

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