The Five-and-Dime Charms of Astrology

By LANCE MORROW

Astrology has something frowsy about it. It comes to the door in hair curlers. It looks through the screen with squint-shrewd eyes. The caller who rang the doorbell stares in at crackpot mystery in the half-light, and senses + there a kind of disreputable plausibility. The dogs on the porch get restless and slink away. A universe of surreal connections unfolds.

What next? A little magic. Astrology, a radiance in pink housecoat and mules, looking eerily like Shirley MacLaine, dances from the shadows, out the door, and floats into a previous life. That's entertainment.

Astrology was once a statelier business. It was a transaction that occurred between emperors and the absolute. The pageants of the zodiac projected themselves upon the lives of kings. The earth was at the center of the universe. Berosus, the high priest of Babylon, would climb the spiral ramp of the great ziggurat at night and ask the stars if the time was ripe to move against the Assyrians. Frederick II would not sleep with his wife, or Lorenzo de' Medici build his country house, until their astrologers prescribed the days and times for doing so.

Astrology had a sheer mythy size, a consequence that could make Caesar or Lear look up to the heavens. The skies were full of promises and dangers. In February of 1524, Europeans lived in terror that a conjunction of all the planets in the watery sign of Pisces would bring a deluge.

Astrology was the machinery of the universe. All the details of the world were wired to the vibrations of the heavens. The membranes of history thrummed to astral music. How cozy that stars and planets should intervene so intimately on earth.

But in its modern incarnation, astrology has become both charming and ridiculous. Somehow the old portentous shrinks down toward the bathos of the fortune cookie and the UFO. The earth is not the center of the universe. Democracy has a hard time sustaining the cosmic drama -- the stars must busy themselves with the fates of hairdressers as well as rulers. Astrology degenerates to advice that runs on the feature page slightly to the left of Garfield and the Wizard of Id.

The Reagans' enthusiasm for astrology comes as a small, slightly goofy revelation, an old Hollywood side of them that has turned up in Washington, a detail endearing and unbidden and embarrassing. Ronald Reagan has always been a lucky man. Perhaps he and his wife find that the zodiac is a means to codify, organize and predict his luck. Movie stars are suckers for astrology, partly because their business is even less rational than the rest of American life. Great egos need great horoscopes.

The pedigree of astrology in ancient times had a certain splendor. But astrology has been intellectually weightless since Isaac Newton. Yet it accomplished a miraculous revival around the turn of the century. King Edward VII (Scorpio) and Enrico Caruso (Pisces) consulted astrologers. The '60s, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, brought in the great age of astral tourism.

Astrology retains its odd seductive powers, like the light from a dead star. Human nature loves the inside track. The American character alternates between Ahab and Starbuck -- the grandiose obsessive and the commonsense skeptic. Astrology plays to the Ahab. It offers a seeing of the unseen, and hears pitches of significance that the ear cannot detect. An elaborate counterworld whispers its order into the human mess.

Today the crystals of the New Age glisten. Alien life-forms taxi in upon the mystic Nazca landing strips of the Andes. The stones at Stonehenge are the cuff links of the gods. Ronald Reagan is an Aquarian, and by the astrological rules, we are in for 2,000 more years of that age.

Saul Bellow once wrote that everyone needs memories. They keep "the wolf of insignificance from the door." Sometimes astrology is better than memory at defeating the wolves of the meaningless. The zodiac rains down portents. The fillings of astrology's teeth pick up radio stations from Mars, with their Gypsy music.

It is hard to tune in to the odd little frequency in the Reagans that beams in the astrological. Or difficult to know how to respond to it -- if it requires response. Astrology is harmless, it is an entertainment. Whatever its former glories, it seems now a five-and-dime glimpse of the cosmos. Still, astrology has a certain sidelong, irrational prestige. Life is more interesting when the horoscope arouses the mind for a moment with a promise or a warning, when it seems that a universal order is at work and that one can manipulate fate by reading the signs. Of course, as the astronomer Carl Sagan points out, in a reduction to absurdity, the gravitational pull of the obstetrician would have far greater influence at a child's birth than the tug of a distant planet. Still, one hungers for the mystic connection, the enveloping weave of synchronicities.

The Christian, who believes in divine providence, is bound to reject the idea that the motions of stars and planets govern human affairs. The Fundamentalist wonders what such a muscular Christian as Reagan is up to when he entertains the false gods of ancient Babylon.

But perhaps Reagan's astrology is merely the metaphysical equivalent of his jelly beans.