[This is probably the most interesting defense of astrology I’ve ever encountered. -egg]
“Whence has fantasy acquired its bad reputation?” Carl Jung once wrote. In a world in which irrationality is seen as a correctable flaw rather than a fixture of human life, fantasy has no place. But this is not our world, and Jung, whose dabbling in the occult did taint his reputation as Freud warned it would, was right when he said that astrology’s “value is obvious enough to the psychologist, since astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.” The archetypes one finds in the zodiac belong to the collective unconscious, and the importance of such symbols is that they figure into our thoughts whether they ought to or not. A common concept in therapy is projection: the tendency of a patient to imbue impersonal symbols with personal meaning in the process of interpretation, be they dreams, inkblots, or slips of the tongue. Whether the source material is in itself “true” doesn’t make what comes out of it—the reading of one’s self through that material—false. One might say the same of astrology.
The painter may look at the Scorpio and see Scorpio traits, another instance of confirmation bias. But the color-filter overlay of any deterministic language, be it astrology or psychoanalysis or anything else, can shed some light from time to time. Taken alone, the filter is reductive: dialing up the contrast, blasting shades of gray into patches of black and white. But as a supplement to other points of view—what’s visible on first impression, say, or what you know of someone from experience—it adds another dimension, pulling some features into the foreground and pushing others to the back, reminding you of a person’s complexity. As skeptics have long argued, part of what makes astrology appealing (and so easily proven “true”) is that each sign of the zodiac has a cluster of traits assigned to it that may be found in nearly any person. Astrology could thus be seen as a humanizing corrective to other, worse stereotypes. To consider that the shy person is sometimes wild, the considerate person sometimes duplicitous, is to practice something rather like empathy.