If You Hate Astrology, You’re a Misogynist and I Can’t Stand That About You, Babe
JK but it’s actually patriarchal capitalistic programming, and it’s very problematic.
“Don’t tell me you actually believe in that stuff,” a man sitting next to me at the bar groaned. He was interrupting my conversation with a friend about astrology. I guess hearing that Uranus was moving into Gemini upset him?
“Yeah, I’m a full-blown believer!” I was rolling my eyes, “I actually have an altar at home to all of the planets and I worship them,” I said. I got off on saying outrageous things in these kinds of interactions. Interactions with men who thought I was stupid.
Before he could reply, a different man who had been trying to get in my pants, chatting my friend and me up earlier, interjected, “I see no problem with believing in astrology if it helps your mental health.” Ah, my defender, thank you for bringing up my mental health. He kind of likes crazy girls, is what I was picking up there.
“It’s all just made-up crap. It has no scientific backing at all. I literally cannot believe you actually think this star stuff is real,” the first guy said.
“So, are you a Gemini and some Tinder date told you she hated Gemini men?” I replied, choosing to completely ignore his previous statement.
“I am not going to tell you my sign!”
I eventually got it out of him. He was a Capricorn.
If you are a woman who likes astrology, or has spiritual interests in general, you have probably experienced a man denigrating your beliefs. Because I’m a moderately “woo” person and I don’t try to hide it, men often want to debate me. On first dates, at bars from random men, new male friends, my friend’s boyfriends and husbands, etc. “You know that’s a scam, right?” or an uncomfortable look that says: this woman is less intelligent than I am.
Some men will be more straightforward, like the Capricorn in the bar, and tell me that astrology is dumb and they don't like women who believe in it. Other men, usually the softer liberal types, will say they have no problem with astrology because they know it is something that people – mentally weaker people – need in order to cope with harsh reality. They, on the other hand, don’t need it because they’re of sound mind. In fact, they’re so smart that their big ol’ brains can’t even conceive of how one could ever believe in something so illogical.
So, they think I’m either stupid or psychologically fragile. Great. But what is really striking is that it’s often a knee-jerk reaction: as if they have to immediately display that they don’t believe in astrology(!!). Obviously, it’s because they’re logical and intellectually superior to me. I’m emotional–possibly a bit touched in the head–to believe in unseen forces at work in the world.
An important caveat: Not all women are into astrology, but none have so far given me strong objections. They’re all chill about it and just say, I’m not really into that stuff, it's not my thing. End of conversation.
Why is that? Why do so many men need to immediately push back, debate, and disprove my spiritual beliefs? Why do they start using science to debate me, as if they’re authorities on it, when they're a bartender, a finance bro, etc.?
The reason why so many men – particularly Western men – are so bothered by astrology has roots deeply planted in the last 500 years of Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and the pervasive, often violent, restructuring of society.
This idea that modern science is the ultimate determiner of Truth and Knowledge is a social script – copied from the Catholic Church – deliberately created to justify colonialism, capitalism and Western global domination.
Early European conquerors justified their global domination over the people they encountered because they were “savages”, or “Devil worshippers” who didn’t know Christ or civilization. Indigenous belief systems were oppressed, the “superior” religion was forced on people, their religious leaders killed, sacred items burned and looted. Not just religion – entire knowledge systems wiped out in what has be called an epistemicide. With the Age of Enlightenment came the philosophical and scientific justifications for moral and practical superiority and right to rule over the mentally and spiritually inferior.
Within Europe, the same kinds of actions were taken against its own peasants, and culminated with the Witch Hunts of the 16th to 18th centuries. The most modest estimates are that 60,000 women, and some men, were killed–while other historians argue numbers are closer to hundreds of thousands.
But–why witches?
Witches are the symbol of female disobedience, wisdom and power all in one. Whether it is true or not, people quite literally believed these women had supernatural powers. Yet often they were elderly, widowed, and poor. Other times they were healers, midwives. Many supported peasant uprisings, or were just mouthy in general. Whoever they were, they did not fit in with the machine that society needed to become to create endless capital to enrich the upper classes. And when molding a class of men and women to become good servants, and not empowered citizens, what better tactic than to divide and conquer?
In ‘Caliban and the Witch’, Silvia Federici argues that “‘if we consider the historical context in which the witch hunt occurred, the gender and class of the accused, and the effects of persecution,’ then the inevitable conclusion is that it was an attack (premeditated or not) on ‘women's resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal.’”
Women, Spirituality & Rebellion
Once upon a time, before Italians ever saw a tomato, rural peasants in Europe were mostly pagan, superstitious, and passively – sometimes not so passively – resistant to the efforts to destroy their belief systems. From destroying sacred sites to inflicting corporal punishment, authorities did what they could to stamp out the old gods. Christianization of rural Europe took centuries, with some scholars believing peasant beliefs did not fully become Christian until the 16th century. So, country folk held on to their local, pagan beliefs – much to the ire of the Church and ruling class. It wasn’t flagrant, but it was there – hidden, sometimes tolerated, sometimes violently cracked down upon. But it was there.
There were also heretical religious movements: the Bogomils, Waldensians, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Cathars, to name a few. Some were an early version of Protestants. Some were Gnostic. In the eyes of the Church, they were heretics to be eradicated. Many of these sects believed in egalitarianism. The Cathars, mostly in southern France and northern Italy in the 12th and 13th centuries, were pacifist vegetarians who believed in equality between men and women and rejected Papal authority. Women were spiritual leaders in Catharism. They were exterminated by the Church in a 20 year crusade against them where up to one million people were killed.
Resistance to the Church and the ruling classes was rampant. There were sects, cults, and peasant uprisings. These were all efforts by lower class people to gain more freedom, and women were central to these movements. They wanted freedom of belief, less taxations, and more ownership of their time and labor. And while women were persecuted as witches in Europe, around the same time colonized people were being persecuted and their belief systems were being eradicated. The taming of women in Europe and colonized people had similar goals: to terrify and tame people into submission. Submission to Western ideals that justified the dehumanization and exploitation of people in order to support the ruling class.
The precursors to the Witch Trials were a broader persecution of independent, rebellious, spiritual movements that often supported more egalitarian, pacifist values. Most of all they sought to take back power from the ruling class. The Catholic Church and State worked together to keep their power through maintaining a monopoly on Truth.
The Script
There is a script running that the anti-woo men are working off of. Code in the programming that says people who believe in what the authorities deem True are smarter and more worthy of holding power and respect. When religion reigned supreme, being a good Christian meant you were a worthy, moral person. Now that Western science has the crown, in this epoch where brainpower is more important than an immortal soul, being an intelligent and productive person is what gives you points in a Capitalistic meritocracy.
The monopoly on knowledge and who determines Truth is central to the script that has been running this anti-spiritual girl conspiracy for centuries. At one point in time it was what the Catholic Church determined to be true. They would base their authority in God and use the Bible as a written source to back up their interpretations. If you made other interpretations of that same source material, you would get you cooked alive.
Now, the monopoly on truth is not based merely in science; it’s based in scientism. Scientism is the belief that if something cannot be empirically proven through the scientific method it is meaningless. Any other form of knowledge – traditional knowledge, personal experience, etc.– if not replicated and explained through hard science, it is not true, and therefore not real. So while the scientific method can reliably measure and define the physical world, the metaphysical and spiritual realm is essentially unscientific and therefore nonexistent and a lie.
This is where astrology, and all spiritual paradigms, are brushed away as the delusions of softer, weaker minds. Anything that the scientist cannot explain away is not real, a relic of a savage past. Astrology? That’s just star racism for gullible girls. Your lifechanging, near-death experience where you saw God? That’s just DMT working on your brain, you dummy.
When the Body Lost its Mind
This epistemological hierarchy — no, hegemony – of Western scientism serves the current powers that be. Corporate billionaires and technocrats like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have replaced the Catholic Church. Science is the ultimate harbinger of truth and alternative viewpoints are wrong, almost immoral in their stupidity. This switch to valuing brain power over soul began around the Age of Enlightenment and the change from feudalism to capitalism. The idea that the body is a machine subservient to the mind began to arise. This is exemplified in Cartesian Dualism, the French philosopher René Descartes’ idea that the mind and body are fundamentally opposites, with the mind being superior to the body. The mind is civilization, progress, discipline, consciousness. The body is of nature, filled with regressive animal instincts that must be tamed and overcome by the mind. Instead of being united as equals, the mind must dominate and tame the body. Just as civilization must dominate and tame nature. As the West must tame the savage, and as man must tame woman. Men were of higher faculties – of the mind. Women were of the lower faculties, the body. This echoes the witch trial dichotomy of men being more of God (high) and women being more of the Devil (low). Even a shallow understanding of Adam and Eve is enough to see how Christian doctrine is foundational to that idea.
Through the Age of Enlightenment, witch trials grew out of fashion. Magic was sterilized of all power and even religion lost its hold on the world. The explicit mind-body divide of Cartesian Dualism is a philosophical relic now, but its influence is clear across Western culture. We’re still running off a script that says men are more logical, stoic, science-oriented (overrepresentation in STEM jobs, which tend to pay more), while women are more emotional, spiritual, illogical and uninterested in science as shown through their underrepresentation in STEM (meanwhile typically female jobs being paid less…but don’t get me started).
I had a conversation with a guy friend who is resolutely atheist and believes that we are living in a simulation. He told me that he based this belief on some articles about how scientists theorize that all of reality is an artificial simulation created by some kind of higher intelligence on mathematical equations. When I observed that the idea that reality being the creation of a higher intelligence is the basis of most major religions, he rejected the comparison. “Yeah, but religion isn’t scientific. The simulation theory is.”
Well, you can’t argue with the logic of a true believer.
A Call to Witches: Stand Your Ground
Being into astrology does not make me a rebel against the overlords of the 21st century. Nor am I at risk of being burned at the stake for doing my date’s birth chart or pulling tarot cards for my friends. I am, however, going to have my intelligence and sanity questioned by certain types of men. My personal interests and beliefs are going to trigger in them that old script that men are more logical, more intelligent, than women.
If you have ever felt like you have to defend or hide your love of astrology – or spirituality in general – because men have made you feel stupid, I call on you to stop.
Stop defending your spiritual beliefs by appealing to science. Stop hiding your beliefs because some men think it’s stupid. Do you really want to allow a man to make you feel intellectually inferior when his attitude is historically rooted in misogyny and racism?
The next time a man tells you he hates astrology, or rolls his eyes at you when you mention the full moon is in Aries, just remember that they are the ones who have fallen for the grift. It’s the grift that keeps us divided – men and women, civilization and nature, science and spirit, even our minds and bodies – so that we can fit into a system that benefits those at the top. And that’s not very intelligent, is it?
It’s time to take your power back and let your witch flag fly.