Seeing Stars
Astrology is popular in 20th-Century Southern California, but it never would have been invented here. You can’t see the stars at night. Our distant ancestors could, though, and over the millennia learned to track them through the heavens and map their changing courses.
Living in fear and trembling of all things natural, the early peoples struggled toward understanding through myth and superstition all mixed up with mathematics and early science. The attribution to the stars of influences both benign and baleful was a precursor of scientific astronomy.
To this day astrology and its kin linger in many cultures besides the Southern Californian. In the Chinese, to mention just one great civilization, learned people by custom make no serious decisions of any sort without consulting a feng shui expert, who studies the forces of nature.
But astrology continues in Southern California with a zest and vigor that is distinctly American. There being much money to be made in the trade, there is much drawing of charts and plotting of lines for eager customers. This newspaper has been publishing a popular astrology column, by the acknowledged dean of American astrology writers, Carroll Righter, who died Sunday at 88. The column has been nestled appropriately with the funny papers, where it has dispensed gentle and usually useful advice: “Be more aware of the needs of your mate, and improve the situation at home considerably. Budget your money more carefully tonight.”
Astrology can, though, be a bit of a problem when taken too seriously. A perfectly healthy 7-year-old we once knew refused to go to school for two days because the astrology column told him to stay close to home. The American commanders in Vietnam, seeking to impose Western rationalism on that Confucian country, would gnash their teeth and tear their hair (and threaten worse things) because President Nguyen Van Thieu would not make decisions without consulting his astrologer.
So now there is an uproar when it is revealed that the astrologer’s divining arts are not unknown in the White House. Nothing serious, you understand, no questions of policy are governed by them, just matters of scheduling, and perhaps the timing of the signing of a treaty. Not to worry. Larger illusions have been let loose in the land than the signs of the zodiac.
