Why I Believe in Astrology
How "astrophysiognomy" proves we're made of starstuff
I’ve heard it said that “men love to mock astrology because it’s the one thing they can’t mansplain to women.”
And I think there’s truth to this — but I would nix the gendered language. Ideologues love to mock things they can't explain.
Ideologues tend to perceive themselves as most knowledgeable on the things they least understand. It has little to do with gender, and more to do with ideological insecurity.
When an ideologue is presented with new information — which, to understand, would require them to put time and effort into learning new stuff (which inevitably leads to finding out they were wrong about old stuff) — it’s much easier to simply dismiss it (loudly) … so they can reassure themselves that their reality isn’t going to collapse.
Some say the most common fear is public speaking, but I would argue that the most common fear is being wrong.
So this, I think, is why people perceive astrology as a stupid, ill-informed pseudoscience — and not as the serious, scientific study of light that it has been since antiquity.
But astrology endures for good reason.
In order to make the case that we are, indeed, cosmically intertwined with the planets and stars, I’ll tell you about the 5 key events that led to me taking astrology seriously. Maybe you’ll find yourself convinced. Who knows? 🙃
After that, I’ll explain what astrology is.
“This gift is for you, Pisces.”
I never really thought about astrology until becoming a radical feminist. The radfem community has a large overlap with the lesbian community, which is known for its obsession with astrology.
Being surrounded by so many women constantly asking what my sign was, I decided to read about the signs, to see which description I resonated with the most.
If I resonated with my Sun sign, I would conclude that it was legit.
If I resonated with multiple others, I’d chalk it up to the Barnum Effect.
I read through the first 11 signs and felt “ehh” about all of them. But when I got to the end and read the description of Pisces,
it resonated.
I read it over and over. Not even the description of my Sun Sign, Cancer, felt as resonant as this.
I sighed aloud, “How am I not a Pisces?”
Well, wouldn’t you know it:
Not long after, I learned that everyone has a natal chart — which is a snapshot of where all of the heavenly bodies were at the moment of your birth. More than just a Sun Sign, we also have a Moon Sign, Ascendant, Venus Sign… etc.
So I looked up my chart and, yeah: My Moon is in Pisces.
Unlike Sun Signs, which change once a month and therefore create categories too broad to deduce someone’s personality with, the Moon changes nakshatras* everyday, making its placement far more specific to the person. And Ascendant nakshatras are most specific of all, changing more than once per hour.
It’s for this reason that knowledgeable astrologers would sooner looked at a person’s Ascendant or Moon Sign, than at their Sun Sign.
But most people are only taught about their Sun Sign (thanks, bullshit newspaper horoscopes!!), so they never find that out!
Astrology requires — and deserves — a much deeper look.
* To make a long story short, nakshatras [also called “the lunar mansions”] are like 27 subdivisons of the 12 zodiac signs. Here’s a Vedic astrology wheel, so you can see how much more specific the nakshatras are than the signs:
Something in the Eyes
The revelation of astrology continued when I joined a dating app that listed a person’s Zodiac sign on their profile.
I kid you not, every time I thought, “Wow that woman is attractive,” I scrolled down to see her Zodiac sign, and… yep, she was a Scorpio.
EVERY 👏🏽 DAMN 👏🏽 TIME 👏🏽.
And when I reviewed all the photos of Scorpio women I matched with, I noticed a spooky similarity in their faces: their sleek jaws and pouty lips… their hooded eyes… their thick, slanted eyebrows…
It dawned on me that there was no way I couldn’t known all these women were Scorpios based on their photos alone,
unless
astrology affects appearance.
Enter Astrophysiognomy.
Curiously, I looked up “Can astrology affect appearance?”
not knowing that my life would never be the same.
I discovered that yes, astrology does affect appearance. The study of this phenomenon is called astrophysiognomy.
There are people committed to revealing these stellar patterns, like @patternsinthestars on Instagram:
When I discovered that my Moon is in Shatabhisha nakshatra and saw a collage of celebrities with the same Moon as mine, my life was changed forever.
Looking at those Pisces Moon celebrities was like looking at myself!
But how could it be?! These were white women! 😵💫 We didn’t have even remotely similar genetics!
And yet,
our shared astrological placement gave us similar facial features, like some sort of shared cosmic DNA.
It’s so clear in all these collages that the heavenly bodies permeate our earthly bodies; that the movement of the stars reflects the movement of our physical vessels. The asterisms seem to be like sparks of life at the core of our bodies that our cells shape themselves around, giving “star siblings” more physical commonality than having the same parents does.
In fact, SpiritVehicle calls the nakshatras “the 27 star races.”
Seeing the physical evidence that the heavens do affect us, sealed the deal for me. Astrophysiognomy was my gateway into the serious study of astrology, and I’ve been happily pondering the stars ever since.
I’ve gotten fairly good at guessing people’s astrological placements just from looking at their face (because “the face is the chart”), and I’ve even contributed my own research to Vedic astrophysiognomy, in this video about how Jyeshtha and Anuradha (Sagittarius) natives embody their yoni animal, the rabbit.
Speaking of yoni animals:
In Vedic astrology, there’s a matchmaking system called Yoni Kuta. Yoni Kuta posits that, of the 27 nakshatras, there are 13 pairs of “yoni consorts.” The idea is that these pairs have the same “yoni animal” (or sexual nature), therefore making them the ideal sexual partners for each other — which is crucial for a happy, long-lasting marriage. So historically, the Yoni Kuta system was relied upon to put couples together and ensure their happiness. (I must say, my Indian ancestors really got it right with this one 😂.)
Personally, I have never seen an astrological system of understanding romantic or sexual attraction that’s nearly as accurate as the Yoni Kuta system. The problem is, it’s so obscure that a lot of people are intuitively attracted to their yoni consort
but don’t know THAT’S WHY THEY’RE ATTRACTED.
Here’s how that played out in my life:
Just as I have a “type” with women (Scorpios), I have a “type” with men too.
From my first crush ever in grade school, to countless celebrities, there’s a very specific look that my dream guy has — an equine face, playful mannerisms, a whinny laugh. I’ve been fanatically and disturbingly attracted to this “type” all my life.
So when I learned that in Yoni Kuta, my yoni consort is Ashwini
— the exact physical type I’ve always sought out
— the floor just about fell out from under me.
This answered e v e r y t h i n g.
And the craziest part?! I confess: When I was maybe 10, I had a crush on a cartoon character. Not just any cartoon character, but a really dorky, dweeby one who was designed to be the opposite of attractive. For reasons unbeknownst even to me, I felt myself swooning whenever he spoke.
In adulthood, when I learned all this astrology stuff, I had the bright idea to look up the natal chart of the voice actor who plays that character.
…
You fucking guessed it.
The voice actor is an Ashwini.
It was like my soul recognized the “wild horse” in his soul, and even the veneer of a dweeby cartoon character couldn’t obscure such a violently intense magnetism for the person beneath the moving image.
So miss me with that “coincidence” shit. I could not have possibly guessed that a voice actor was my yoni consort based on his voice alone.
When it comes to the relationship between us and the stars,
the currents run much, much deeper than newspaper horoscopes and “woo-woo debunkers” would have you believe.
The way the stars pulse and tesselate
is the throbbing of our own heartbeats
writ large across the night sky.
Oh, and speaking of “throbbing heartbeats”…
^ Here’s a video of a star, zoomed in. Up close, stars move like tesseracts.
A tesseract is a hyperdimensional cube that exceeds our physical perception, and thus appears to fold in on itself while simultaneously, paradoxically, expanding outward.
When dealing with stars, we are dealing with something far more mysterious, far more multidimensional, than just “balls of gas millions of light years away.”
The stars are not far away. They’re within our sky. Indeed, they’re within us.
Outer space is inner space.
I learned this during the most mystical experience of my life, wherein I activated the “stargate” inside myself (that everybody also has!), and, in doing so, was able to travel the cosmos from within my Inner World:
In a future post, I’ll elaborate on what I believe astrology is and what it’s really for (hint: I don’t believe it’s for “predicting the future”).
I’ll also talk about the necessity of Gnosis in the study of Astrology, the lack of which is A MAJOR REASON MAINSTREAM ASTROLOGY FEELS “FAKE” TO MOST PEOPLE!!! (Pardon, I have BIG FEELINGS about this.)
I also heard about this from Mysterious Universe. I've sent your article to my wife who has recently decided to [finally] ditch her chemical birth control. She's transitioned to tracking her body, which immediately made me think of this.
We were talking about astrophysiognomy this morning and had some interesting questions which we're going to test. She and the son of a family friend were born in the same hospital on the same day within hours of each other. (Funny story, actually, my father-in-law brought his friend in to meet his wife while she was in labor...🤦♂️) So we're going to test the thesis and see if they have similar facial characteristics. We've noted as well that all of the boys who were born within a couple weeks of each other in my son's birth group (we used a birth center, and they group pregnancies by expected month for purposes of their process) are all very tall.
Anyway, all very interesting. Thank you so much!
Herd about your substack on Mysterious Universe, really impressed by it