Making Sense Out of Celestial Bodies

If you thought “So what’s your sign” went the way of fern bars, corkies and tie-dye bell-bottoms, think again . . . long and hard. Yep, exactly. “Everything old is new again . . . “ at least with a slouching-toward-the-millennium spin to it.

So why shouldn’t astrology be ready for its post-make-over close-up? Authors and stargazers Kelli Fox and Elaine Sosa don’t see why not. But you may want to update your source.

Fox and Sosa have just released “Stars of the Stars: A Fresh Look at Astrology With Our Favorite Celebrities” (Astrology.net Books), a spinoff of Fox’s popular Web site, https://www.astrology.net.

But in this interactive age, the book uses a more hands-on, do-it-yourself approach than the fortune-telling, profile-sketch styles of the past. Using information on birth date, place and time, the book teaches not only how to read your own chart but also create it and those of other people. The book “. . . offers a collection of charts as a way for us to better grasp the concepts of astrology . . . Us[ing] celebrities as our subjects makes the learning process that much more fun,” they write.

All of it started a year ago, says Sosa, a San Francisco writer who had been working with Fox on Astrozine.com, which can be found on Fox’s Astrology.net.

Sosa says, “We were doing celebrity astrological profiles . . . Stud of the Week, Babe of the Week, Is This Match Made in Heaven? (Y’know, Pamela and Tommy? Bill and Monica?) Bad Boy of the Month--Slobodan Milosevic.”

From the number of requests they’d received for information, charts and background, it was soon apparent that they’d hit a nerve.

“Astrology.net is the largest astrology site on the Web. We get 10 million [hits] a month. A majority of them are female. We realized that we were on to something. The whole thing took off--newsmakers, celebs and astrology were popular with the readership. We figured with a book, we could do it more in depth.”

To be sure, says Sosa, much of it is just good fun.

“The one thing,” she stresses, “that is really important is that we want people to know that astrology isn’t just about your horoscope, but where’s your Venus [your love planet]? Where’s your Mars [your passion planet]? The book will show them that astrology is a sum of many parts.”

Before you move to the nitty gritty--the who, what, when--be sure to take in the introduction, which breaks down the many layers that oftentimes get skimmed over--from ascendants and aspects to conjunctions and trines. Then you can dip in and find out just what makes Leos like Robert De Niro and Antonio Banderas tick--what you’ll love about them or what you’ll grow to hate if you don’t watch out. Aquarians can figure out how to marshal their energy, channel their focus and get some of that “Oprah money.”

In the future, Sosa says, “We’ll be doing a lot of Hillary Clinton if she decides to run. But I’m telling you, this Milosevic-Clinton thing is interesting. I think they both have Mars in Aries! The super sign of the warrior! Those two are going mano a mano, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I think we need to do Madeline Albright’s chart and see if there is any hope to neutralize it.”

“Stars of the Stars”: https://astrology.net/starsofthestars.

Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at lynell.george@latimes.com.