Tropical Vacation: How Modern Astrology Drifted from the Stars
When people ask if someone “believes in” astrology, generally what they are trying to get at is whether a person actually buys it that the stars and other planets in our solar system have a direct, literal effect on human life on earth.
Modern physics scoffs and says of course not!
Astrology adepts say “Yes it does too and I like it!”
And everyone closes their ears to any further discussion. Thereby, astrology is relegated to the borderlands between pseudo-science and spiritual belief, where its integrity can run easily off the rails on one side, or its practitioners can slide into rigid orthodoxy on the other. And though astrology is usually relegated to the realm of pseudoscience and spiritual belief, it is capable of better on both fronts.
When a discipline is positioned as related to the religious and the faith-based, we make different demands of it and tend to sanction it as exempt from examination and inquiry. Whereas religions are expected to preserve the past and move slowly towards progress, if at all, science constantly discovers, expands, and questions previous assumptions. It is the latter category that astrology should and could reside in (as a “soft,” human science, not a hard, physical science). But it is the former where popular Western astrology continues to stubbornly sit – stuck in a past it inherited from the Middle Ages and resistant to the continual onward motion of both the stars and scientific knowledge.
This might seem like an odd point of view from an astrology website that literally has the word “soul” in its address. But it is our contention here at Soul Figures that astrology can and should be both more grounded in observable cosmological and astronomical data and reach deeper into the alchemical, Hermetic traditions it is deeply rooted in. Too, as I said in another recent post on the major transits of 2026, the foggy, Neptunian pseudoscientific bent of tropical astrology is symptomatic of how astrology has functioned during the Age of Pisces, and I doubt that this vague logic around astrology will persist into the next astrological age.
Getting Our Heads Above Water
As I mention in several other posts related to the tropical vs. sidereal debate, one of the main reasons that astrology has been relegated to the realm of pseudoscience and spiritual belief is that the most popular astrological system in the world, tropical Hellenistic astrology, is entirely symbolic and unrelated to the actual sky. Though contemporary astrologers will insist their system makes sense from a “seasonal” lens, the truth is they’re simply using an outdated zodiac left over from the Age of Aries. A person can bend themselves into all kinds of intellectual pretzels to try to force what is illogical to seem entirely normal and natural, but the matter is quite concrete: tropical astrology is based on the position of the stars from another era entirely. It’s really that simple. (See the rest of this series, Tropical Vacation: How Modern Astrology Drifted from the Stars, for more.)
Most people who “study” and practice astrology in the West either don’t know about this fundamental discrepancy between the sky and the tropical zodiac, or avoid dwelling on it too much due to the cognitive dissonance it produces. And that resistance to new input is the same rigidity that has kept astrology off in a fog of spiritualized folklore for hundreds of years.
Should one dare mention to a tropical astrologer that they are attributing all kinds of cosmic events to something happening in, for example, Taurus, when it is in fact happening in the actual sky in Aries, responses are often…defensive. Some tropical astrologers simply won’t engage and will completely ignore lines of inquiry or discussion that mention the sidereal zodiac at all. Some will delete comments. Others will use insults, shaming, and defensiveness to try to minimize the intellectual rigor of any questions asked, or pearl clutch and weep that their “energetic boundaries” are being violated when the holes in their system are pointed out.
All of this stonewalling keeps a spirit of healthy inquiry locked outside the astrological mainstream. It also grips the ego firmly in control of a discipline that should, if it has any “spiritual” value at all, be a tool for helping surrender the ego to the larger spirit of the Self. But the tropical orthodoxy leans into defenses in such a way that its spiritual value seems suspect. Why must the borders of the territory be policed so intensely, so that no new ideas are let in, and no questions are allowed to be asked? Much in the same way any religion that has been around for centuries often calcifies into rigidity and control.
But again, astrology is not a religion. It does not require that people believe in gods or that people follow certain mores and moral codes for living. Instead, if astrology mentions gods at all, it positions the gods (of the ancient classical and pre-ancient world, variously) as archetypal forces, much closer in relationship to how Jungian psychology conceptualizes them; primordial, fundamental forces that live in the collective unconscious and find expression in each individual in a unique, highly individualized way. (If you would like to learn more about working with your chart as a portal of integration, rather than a prescription of a fixed fate from the stars, book a reading with us.)
By the way, it bears on this discussion that Carl Jung himself observed that the transcendent function is an inevitable, natural human impulse that must find an outlet – but to misdirect that impulse by worshipping the wrong things creates sickness. In other words, when we “worship” what is not meant to be worshipped, it results in the mental, emotional, and spiritual degradation of addiction. Closed-mindedness, inflation, escapism, rigidity, defensiveness, and control patterns are, in fact, symptoms of addiction; symptoms that someone is trying to protect something that is not well-founded on shared communal principles, by relying on vigorous defenses. And all of these defects are often present in the tropical vs. sidereal debate, unfortunately.
Can people be addicted to astrology? Perhaps. Maybe it is not the use of astrology itself that is addictive no matter what, but the manner in which it can encourage users to try to control and premeditate their life experience that opens it up to abuse. Because in control lies compulsion. It’s possible to use astrology to engage deeper with the archetypal forces that shape our experience, but see ourselves as creative agents whose free will allows us to make mistakes and grow regardless of what the stars may do.
A Bridge Between the Self and the universe
Instead of a belief system, a spiritualized divertissement, or a set of personality prescriptions, astrology could be a method of inquiry into human experience. A bridge that guides us along the mystery between what is observable and what is intuited, that connects our collected knowledge of the world’s spiritual and religious traditions and our knowledge of the physical world. A way of logging patterns, noticing connections, and not needing to make prescriptions about them – but appreciating how the stars point us towards a bigger mystery than we can usually comprehend, and ask us to participate more deeply in that mystery. The transcendent function can very much be a part of astrology without astrologers having to resort to the closed-minded isolationism that shuts out all modern astronomical knowledge and forces adepts to contort their belief system around ideas that are out of date and ill-fitting to our modern era. It all depends on how you play with it – openly, in a spirit of inquiry and freedom, or, closed, with a desire to use it to predict and control and draw conclusions about events and people according to narrow prescriptions.
