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Astrology Critics Don’t Even Know What They’re Criticizing
The urge to cry ‘pseudoscience!’ may be about something else entirely
At a recent party, my friend and I were discussing astrology — what else? — when a stranger sidled up to us. Our new friend confessed that he didn’t know much about astrology — and wasn’t compelled to — because, as he put it, “Everyone hates my sign.” Since I’ve been on the internet in 2019, I knew this disclosure meant he was either a Scorpio or a Gemini.
It was the latter.
“I don’t hate your sign,” I told him, which is true. I don’t hate any sign (although I occasionally dislike what happens when a sign is poorly expressed through an individual personality). My view of astrology, and there are many, is that the signs and planets are shorthand for universal archetypes. Meaning, they’re inherited psychological structures, or energy patterns that are native to the human experience. (In other words, j’suis Gemini.) These archetypes are part of what pioneer of analytic psychology Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious.” Distinct from the contents of the individual unconscious mind — say, a repressed childhood memory that informs one’s conscious dislike of dogs — the patterns of the collective unconscious are ancestral, timeless, belonging to all of humankind. Mother, child…
