The Press: Profundities, Not Facts

• Share

Never before in man's history has he stood nearer his celestial neighbors. Powerful radio telescopes collect emissions from the very lip of infinity. Inquisitive hardware, sent up from earth, skims past the moon, Venus, Mars, the sun. The space sciences, in their long climb from superstition, have developed an impressive and reliable exactitude. Yet for more than 20 million U.S. newspaper readers, the true word from space is handed down daily by a group of occultists turned journalists, who practice a black art older than Babylon.

These are the syndicated astrologers of the press. Despite the fresh revelations of the space age, they are enjoying an unprecedented vogue. Before the war, only 185 dailies carried astrology columns. Today, more than 1,000 papers pass the word, as plotted from the positions of the planets and the stars by at least ten syndicated stargazers. Some of them boast sizable flocks. Carroll Righter, a former Philadelphia pressagent who moved to Hollywood and dusted off his zodiac, claims 150 dailies. Sidney Omarr has 197. King Features' Individual Horoscope appears in 151.

Heed Advice. Worldly observers are at a loss to explain the popularity of these Johnny-come-lately journalists. Astrology itself still rests firmly on the reassuring premise that the earth is the center of the universe, and contemporary astrologers, like their ancient predecessors, take refuge in generalities so broad as to be totally unedifying. "Good lunar aspect today encourages romance, change, travel, salesmanship on highest level," read a recent and all encompassing bulletin from Sidney Omarr who does not apologize for such ambiguities. Says he: "Astrology deals not with facts, but with profundities."

The claim is indisputable, but often the profundities can be confusing. On the same day, while Omarr urged his readers to "act on convictions, " a competitive occultist, Clay R. Pollan, told his readers to "heed good advice." Before the 1956 presidential campaign, Constella—the nom de plume for a sometime poet named Shirley Spencer — rashly predicted that Eisenhower would not be a candidate for re-election and that the election would go to a Democrat, and then named him: Averell Harriman.

End of the World. Once established on a paper, the astrological column characteristically tends to become a tenacious habit, like Skeezix or Smilin' Jack. The editor would often like to kick the habit, but his star-struck readers, 80% of them wom en, usually won't let him. Some years ago, the Chicago Daily News inadvertently dropped its canned horoscope. "The reaction was the most tremendous I've ever seen," said Feature Editor John Carey, who hastily reinstated the stars.