Claire Comstock-Gay - Madame Clairevoyants Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves

S OME YEARS AGO YOU WERE BORN SOMEWHERE ON PLANET EARTH . You took your first breath and became a person with a body of your ownno longer existing inside your parent, no longer existing only in the future, but a full and distinct being, with your own needs, your own hunger, your own heart pumping your own blood through you. And this moment of brand-new personhood was the moment, astrologically speaking, that formed you: the broad outlines of your personality, the landscape of your heart, the challenges and desires and unthinkably miraculous gifts that would be yours as you move through the days and years of your life.

Though the possible uses for astrology are vast and variedfrom planning a garden to predicting political unrest; from diagnosing illness to scheduling weddingsit shines brightest in our modern world not as a tool for deciphering omens and curses or foretelling our predestined lives and deaths, but as a mirror to our inner world. In a world with advanced satellite technology and cutting-edge medicine, astrology still offers something science cannot (although it may try): a sharp, wise, nuanced system for understanding ourselves and our messy lives and our mysterious, tangled-up feelings.

This is what many of us arrive at astrology in search of: a way to understand why were like this. Why are we so loud and so frustrating, or so hard to satisfy, or so desperate for reassurance or attention or praise? Why cant we seem to just act normal, get our lives together, sand down the spikier parts of our personalities? Why cant we manage to just force ourselves to be simple, to make our lives and our personalities small and clear and just like everybody elses?

Astrologys skeptics and detractors like to make a fuss about how foolish it is to imagine that, simply by looking to the stars, we can know what the future will bring. But to argue this is to completely misunderstand one of modern astrologys central purposesnot to find our destinies, but to find our actually existing, living human selves.

AND STILL, FOR MANY YEARS, I dismissed astrology, too, not out of reasoned intellectual conviction but simply because it showed me nothing about myself I could recognize. I was about eleven when I learned that my sign was Sagittarius, the archer, sign of intellect and adventure and, as the books would have it, athleticism. To my preteen self, this was laughable in its wrongness. I was an awkward moper, a quiet dreamer, a comically bad athlete. My greatest athletic achievement was when I pitched a winning softball game because nobody on the other team could process that my pitches were really that slow. I was entirely too confused by the world to be, as the list of my apparent traits told me I was, spontaneous. Quietness, loneliness, strangenessthese were the qualities that felt foundational to who I was. The cheery, carefree Sagittarius the astrology books described was another person entirely.

So I shrugged off my supposedly identity-defining sun sign, andbecause I had no idea that there was anything more to itastrology in general. It took nearly a decade for me to reconsider. During that time, I looked for myself in literature and sad indie rock and unfulfilled teenage horniness. I looked for myself in the poetry shelves of the library and in queer punk shows and feminist zine fests, in friendships and relationships and sessions with an exceedingly gentle therapist who didnt understand me at all. I kept learning so much about the world, but none of it could explain to me why I was like this: so quiet but so restless, so full of hunger but so afraid of expressing my desires.

When I graduated from college and moved to New York, I was surprised when I found myself surrounded by people as critical and curious and distrustful of authority as I was and who nonetheless talked about astrology like it was interesting and useful. At a party in a Brooklyn backyard, I joked to a woman who brought up astrology that it couldnt be real, for I was really no kind of Sagittarius at all. Ohhh, she said, smiling, but whats your rising sign? This was the first Id ever heard of rising signs. Before that moment I had a vague idea that there existed such a thing as an astrological chart, but it had still never quite occurred to me that astrology was, for practical purposes, anything more than horoscopes in the newspaper or cheesy books for teens at the local chain bookstore. It hadnt occurred to me until then that my own astrological chart was something I could access and that it might show me a picture of myself that was much clearer, truer, and more interesting than the unrealistic Sagittarius descriptions I had read before.

After the party that night, I opened my laptop and typed my date, time, and place of birth into an online birth chart calculator, and it told me my rising sign was Cancer. Cancer rising, I read on the website, can be sensitive, vulnerable, generous, and dreamy, but also moody, avoidant, secretive, and lazy. The sharp, specific correctness of it hurt my feelings. But more than that, it filled me with relief that someone finally saw me clearlythat someone was finally telling me the truth about myself.

This moment of bracing recognition was enough to change my entire relationship to astrology. What I saw there became my gateway, my door, my Rosetta stone: the key that let me interpret the rest of my chart. With this one piece of information locked into place, suddenly the rest of astrologys potential snapped into focus, too. I could return to Sagittarius with new eyes and see in myself the Sagittarian elements Id missed before: expansive curiosity, generous idealism, a lack of attention to detail, a need for freedom. And although I didnt know what else it all meant yet, I could see that I had an entire chart full of planets, full of placements, full of secrets and mysteries about myself that I could now learn to unlock.

It was only at this point that I could begin to access what astrology really had to offer me. In my own life, I didnt need it as a predictor of the future, or as a guide to practical matters, or even as a quick way to determine potential compatibility with a crush. What I did need, and hadnt found anywhere elsenot from my good and loving parents, not from my rich and fulfilling friendships, not from therapy or literature or exercise or long hours spent trying to figure out my own brainwas an affirmation that the way I was wired was fundamentally okay.

After so much time spent imagining that there was, ultimately, a single best way to be a personone that we all, to greater or lesser degrees, continually fail to attainastrology invited me to radically re-envision the world. It showed me a world where people can act and feel and desire in different and sometimes diametrically opposed ways, but none of these ways are fundamentally bad. None, for that matter, are fundamentally good, either, but all are equally valid ways of being a person, and equally necessary in our broad, rich universe.

Astrology gave me the understanding that all the troublesome Cancer rising traits that I couldnt for the life of me get rid of werent signs of some kind of damage to be repaired but, rather, natural if sometimes inconvenient features of my inner landscape. The problem wasnt that I had a defective personality, only that I kept trying to twist my personality into something other than what it was. I had been trying to rebuild my whole self in a new shape when all I really needed to do was learn how to use what Id been given, how to live as me.

I had once thought of astrology as a system for shoving our wild, unmanageable selves into broad and simplistic categoriesa system for circumventing the difficulties of the full, complex, contradictory realities of living a human life. But what I saw then, at that moment, was that astrology offered just the opposite: a space to explore complexity, to explain contradiction, to see the beauty and sense of being exactly the people we are.