Essay: The Five-and-Dime Charms of Astrology

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Astrology has something frowsy about it. It comes to the door in hair curlers. It looks through the screen with squint-shrewd eyes. The caller who rang the doorbell stares in at crackpot mystery in the half-light, and senses + there a kind of disreputable plausibility. The dogs on the porch get restless and slink away. A universe of surreal connections unfolds.

What next? A little magic. Astrology, a radiance in pink housecoat and mules, looking eerily like Shirley MacLaine, dances from the shadows, out the door, and floats into a previous life. That's entertainment.

Astrology was once a statelier business. It was a transaction that occurred between emperors and the absolute. The pageants of the zodiac projected themselves upon the lives of kings. The earth was at the center of the universe. Berosus, the high priest of Babylon, would climb the spiral ramp of the great ziggurat at night and ask the stars if the time was ripe to move against the Assyrians. Frederick II would not sleep with his wife, or Lorenzo de' Medici build his country house, until their astrologers prescribed the days and times for doing so.

Astrology had a sheer mythy size, a consequence that could make Caesar or Lear look up to the heavens. The skies were full of promises and dangers. In February of 1524, Europeans lived in terror that a conjunction of all the planets in the watery sign of Pisces would bring a deluge.

Astrology was the machinery of the universe. All the details of the world were wired to the vibrations of the heavens. The membranes of history thrummed to astral music. How cozy that stars and planets should intervene so intimately on earth.

But in its modern incarnation, astrology has become both charming and ridiculous. Somehow the old portentous shrinks down toward the bathos of the fortune cookie and the UFO. The earth is not the center of the universe. Democracy has a hard time sustaining the cosmic drama -- the stars must busy themselves with the fates of hairdressers as well as rulers. Astrology degenerates to advice that runs on the feature page slightly to the left of Garfield and the Wizard of Id.

The Reagans' enthusiasm for astrology comes as a small, slightly goofy revelation, an old Hollywood side of them that has turned up in Washington, a detail endearing and unbidden and embarrassing. Ronald Reagan has always been a lucky man. Perhaps he and his wife find that the zodiac is a means to codify, organize and predict his luck. Movie stars are suckers for astrology, partly because their business is even less rational than the rest of American life. Great egos need great horoscopes.

The pedigree of astrology in ancient times had a certain splendor. But astrology has been intellectually weightless since Isaac Newton. Yet it accomplished a miraculous revival around the turn of the century. King Edward VII (Scorpio) and Enrico Caruso (Pisces) consulted astrologers. The '60s, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, brought in the great age of astral tourism.