What's Your Sign?
On-again, off-again with the unknown
“This is the voice of twenty-first century self-identity: subjective, autocratic, superstitious, knowing what it wants before it gets it, specifying even the unknown to which it purports to be abandoning itself.”
— Rachel Cusk, Coventry
“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
The morning of New Year’s Eve, my parents’ street was filled with a fog so thick it seemed almost alive: unguent and rolling, it seemed to shift as you approached it, swirling with some alien motivation, some unreadable design. The night before, our small family of four had driven through the very same fog in the dark — a wall of white that snaked away as you approached it, sometimes thin as a bridal veil, other times thick and obstinate as a curse. Watching it amass in the morning light, I had the eerie feeling of seeing my own life from the outside — the holiday parties and frantic cooking, the old family friends and tongue-pretzeling of a proper Beijing accent — as though I had been living in a snow globe, some quaint village miniature. Inside this miniature, contentment was possible, back-lit by incandescent lights; outside the miniature, I understood that the so-called “real world” awaited, unfeeling and inscrutable as the fog, and I felt a nagging sense that the year to come was to have within it some Black Swan event — some unforeseeable catastrophe that would define it, as COVID-19 so recently had, for future generations.
Like many Chinese folks, I do a small dance of superstition — avoiding the number four, eating longevity noodles on my birthday — but on the whole, I would not describe myself as a very superstitious person. As for this premonition, then, I held it lightly, experiencing it almost as one experiences a piece of fiction or a film. Still, some part of me recognized that if catastrophe were to truly strike, I would likely experience not total shock but an admixture of lesser emotions, perhaps among them a kind of recognition: Ah, so this is the apocalypse I dreamt about! It’s a little different up close.
Even when the prognosis is dark, there is a kind of primal pleasure in seeing into the future. The Mayans come to mind, who abstracted all of time into a recurring system of 13 periods, each aligned with a different cosmic force. (As I write this, it is the day of Grass, in the 13-day Period of the House, in the solar year of the Reed.)1 In the Mayan system of time, one could say with great certainty what energy would prevail on any given day — and use that knowledge to order one’s affairs according to the cosmic weather. The future, then, was not some naturalistic blank — it was pre-tuned to cultural meanings, to things that had happened in the past, to things that would continue to happen. The future, in that sense, belonged to the culture first.
There are of course many traditional calendars that continue to have this function for us today — the Chinese or Islamic lunar calendars, different forms of the zodiac. For many folks in my generation, I would surmise that our preferred calendar is astrological in a New Age sense — charting planets and their relative paths, retrogrades and conjuncts, astral charts and Sun Signs. Where our ancestors may have consulted a soothsayer or fortune-teller as to when to get married, now we turn to our phones to ask: will Mercury be in retrograde? We order the catering a few more weeks in advance, praying to be spared the “general breakdown in communications” that is the purview of Hermes himself.
I don’t believe in astrology. But I also don’t not believe in it. It strikes me that “belief” is the wrong framework to apply to something that is often so social, so comforting, so downright fun.2 Astrology — as it’s practiced by the horde of millennials and Gen Z I will affectionally call my star siblings — is not really a belief system so much as a collective soothing mechanism, a way of coping with a future that grows more and more precarious by the hour. In this way, it fulfills probably one of the most basic functions of any calendar: to inure us to the terror of being alive in the face of the unknown.
(For those curious, my Sun is in Sagittarius, my Rising sign is in Gemini, and my Moon is in Capricorn. Make of that what you will.)
There is another system that does this — buffer us against the unknown — and it does this in a stylish way, hiding its tracks underneath an aura of fuzzy mysticism — and it is the practice of “manifestation.”
The best manifester I know is K, who spent 10 years building a multi-lot urban garden in the middle of Detroit, Michigan. She attended a famous art school North of the city, then promptly began to buy up property on a dead-end street named after a Union General in the Civil War, settling into a small ramshackle house that she lived in alone, picking up carpentry, plumbing, landscaping and seasonal cooking for guests. In a city that — now even still! — brings to mind blight and economic collapse, she cultivated her careful work, bringing artists and alternative medicine practitioners, architects and chefs to leave their gifts in the space. She still lives there today for a good part of the year, and her life bears everywhere the trace of someone whose faith always travels in advance of her plans.
The last time I saw K was in 2021, at the end of my road-trip from California.3 J, A and I ended our long itinerary with a visit to K that never ended, because the house we ended up staying in actually belonged to her. Its backyard was her sprawling ornament of an edible garden -- with a mulberry tree that I'd sometimes hover by, eating its berries idly while waving away mosquitoes -- and past that was the house she had lived in for a decade. Some mornings, I'd amble through the half-fence that separated our lots and knock on her door, and she'd appear, hair a wilderness of curls, with a smile so big it seemed plucked from some other dimension. Barefoot, always, a tea kettle on the gas stove. Chocolates on little quilted squares.
One particular visit, I explained to K that I had written a bevy of songs on my journey, and was considering recording an album of original music. That’s amazing, she effused, what are you missing? I explained I needed a producer — someone who could handle and teach me the practical, logistical aspects, but with enough artistic sensitivity to partner with me on the art-making — and that I was hoping, knowing her ability to manifest things, that she could manifest one on my behalf. K thought to herself, pouring out the tea into two mismatched mugs. What about Johnny?
Johnny became my producer later that week. We met in the garden between our houses, because as it turned out, we were essentially neighbours. I still remember holding my cellphone to his ear the very afternoon we met, as it played a tinny rendition of a demo I had recorded on K’s piano, everything half a cent flat, the sound of dishes being washed in the back. Johnny did not know me. He said yes. We still work together now.
Despite sometimes employing the manifestation talents of my friends, I am not a manifester myself. I think something about it has always turned me off despite the fact that I recognize its power, even its solidity, in the lives of those who are particularly skilled. If I were to try to identify my discomfort, it may be with manifestation’s relationship with certainty and control — a relationship that is not immediately obvious.
A classic, pre-millennial text on manifestation is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. This 2006 best-seller, at one time featured on Oprah (!) popularized the idea of the “law of attraction,” which is at the heart of the practice of manifestation. The law of attraction states that “people attract what they focus on.” Thus, in order to get rich, one thinks of money, in lurid and stunning detail — in fact, one thinks of money so compellingly as to believe that one is already rich, and trust that in fact, it has already happened. The one who is able to do this will then, apparently, get rich in real life.
Of course, Byrne’s work is a load of profit-making hogwash. However, there is a kernel of truth to the wash, so to speak, and it’s this: in order to make something happen that has never happened to you before, the first step — and a step that people all too often skip — is to visualize in great detail exactly what you want, and how it will take shape in your actual life. This practice, which is just one step in the art of manifestation, strikes me as excellent practice advice on its own: to make new things happen in your life, first you have to know, really know what you are asking of the world. It’s also the step that I struggle with the most.
The deeper one dives into the art of manifestation, the more one realizes that it is really just a form of spiritual planning. Faith is not its bedrock, but a kind of certainty — a kind of fixing in advance of what one wants to happen.4 Its central implication is that you know what you want, and that if you were to receive all that you want, this would actually be good for you and the world. There are some people (like K), whose desires and manifestations really do seem like gifts to the world. Then there are others (like myself, at least until now) who have found themselves stopped at the beginning, unwilling to make an order to the universe because they have so far preferred the chef’s own menu, unpredictable and motley as it has been.
There is a similar paradox in the world of horoscopes, a place where the mystical touches the predictable.
On the personal astrology app The Pattern, there exists a feature called “Time Travel” that allows you to input any future date in relation to your own astral chart, predicting what prevailing themes will be relevant for you then — even if that date is hundreds of years into the future. These themes range from general love advice to gnomic pronouncements like “Letting Go of Identity.” (From a recent theme shown to me: “This cycle marks both an ending and a new beginning for your life as a woman.”) To “Time Travel,” one can choose any date at any time, regardless of the timeline of one’s actual life.
The first time I tried to “Time Travel,” I found myself in an uncomfortable quandary. I wanted to anticipate all of the major shifts in my life — the years that they’d happen, and perhaps even their thematic content. To do this, however, I’d have to make a prediction of when I’d likely die — and choose to ignore the transformative phases that would have apparently happened were I to live forever. I didn’t know when to stop looking — how many years to give myself. I started to feel sad, thinking of the astral periods I’d likely miss on account of being actually mortal. And then I started to feel silly — thinking of a “personal astrological system” that was so automated, so lifeless, so as to miss the departure of its sole devotee. I imagined The Pattern app churning on my data forever, spitting out platitudes and vague life advice until the last server went dark.
Despite the campy fun of listing my signs to friends in the know, or dissing bad dates in the language of elemental incompatibilities (A Cancer? That’s fire and water, girl!), it’s features like this that most clearly reveal to me the artifice of astrological timekeeping. As much as astrology purports to fit itself into life, it is in fact a separate system entirely, run on its own logic — less connective tissue than existential buffer, less sensitive reading than playful and random romp. I still have my dead friend Anthony as a friend on Co—Star, and every once in a while the app exhorts me to call him or make plans, because the stars are apparently aligned.
Part of what makes both astrology and manifestation particularly interesting at this moment in history is that we seem to be living at a particular inflection point between calendars — without a proper organizing metaphor to speak about the future. Divested of the crude 20th Century notion of endless industrial progress, we are caught now between the AI techno-salvationists and the climate doomsday prophets. Are we on the cusp of a revolution in technology that will change the world as we know it — for the better? Or are we at the curtain call of our species, about to pay the long hibernal price for our collective greed? As conflicted as they are, both groups agree: the old world is coming to an end. Perhaps now, when the terror of the infinite nothingness ahead is most acute, we are turning more and more to personal systems of temporal organization as a coping mechanism. Will life be as it is now, more or less, in 100 years? Or will we be living in a nuclear winter, struggling with unending climate migration and a primitive resource war? Who knows — all we know is that Mars will be in Gemini. And yes, it’s probably the right time to call your crush.
But even if my intuition is correct — even if we are holding onto astrology, say, as drowning sailors hold onto flotsam in a wreck — it oughtn’t be a shameful thing to do. There is nothing wrong with wanting to know the future. It seems plausible to me that the instinct to organize the temporally unknowable is basic to human survival, likely held in common among most if not all historical cultures. But even David Hume, the father of empiricism, admitted that we cannot say for certain that the sun will come up tomorrow — only that so far, it has. And it is here: the place where we cannot know, no matter the perfection or subtlety of our predictive systems, where all the trouble — and all of the grace — begins.
There is a different side to my spiritual life, one that I do not write about often, but with which my closest friends are well acquainted. It is my belief in God — a kind of Meister Eckhart-style, medieval Christianity-type God that actively keeps the world spinning, that breathes our every breath with us, that feels the fall of every leaf and animal.5 My religion is disorganized but real — something that accompanies me in every moment and has no root in any church. (In this sense, I am New Age to the bone!) There is a metaphor that recurs for me, in attempting to describe God — it is a metaphor somewhat borrowed from Saint Augustine, who once described the present moment as so quick to be eternally fleeting, so brief as to be impossible to catch:
If we can conceive of some point of time that which cannot be divided even into the minutest parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that is has no extent of duration at all… the present has no length.
— (Confessions)
Said in a different way, we only exist at this infinitesimal point — at this impossible fulcrum between the known and the unknown. If we imagined an extremely thin piece of paper, then, stretching out at all four corners to infinity, existing between the past and the future, I believe it is precisely there that God touches us — so close that we can press our cheek to the divine at any time, like pressing one’s ear up to a rice paper door. On this side: all of history, up until the present moment. On the other side: forever, and everything we cannot know. The closer we are able to get to the door, the more intimate we become with the divine. It is because I believe this — and because I have experienced this in my own life — that I am anxious not to cover up too much the fundamental vulnerability of our position in time, whether with astrology or some other means.
The truth is, we do not know the future — and the moguls and bureaucrats whose entire careers are built upon trading, betting and buying up the future know this better than anyone. But I fear that in an age so characterized by technologically-mediated certainty, we have forgotten how to not know in peace — and how, when it is appropriate, to resolve our lack of knowledge into faith. It is not merely God that I speak of, but just the literal feeling of peace — the abiding by the world in its contradictions, a world that cannot be fixed or tamed, a world that cannot even be understood or properly perceived. If we say, like Borges did, that non-human animals live in an eternal present, perhaps what we really mean is that the future doesn’t bother them very much — it is, perhaps, as ordinary as the sky.
If you liked this essay, you might enjoy reading this essay on being close to trees, and this one about collaborating without a fixed relationship with the future. As always, the full archive is here.
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Discussion Questions
The discussion group has come to a close — for now. Enormous thank you to Michael for being a fantastic ringleader, and those who joined over the months!
For these questions, free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.
What’s your sign? (No, really!) And what does it mean to you?
Do you tend to live in the present, the past, or the future? Would you like to change that? If so, to what?
How do you think about the future? In terms of goals, metrics, astrological happenings? Life events, seasons, zodiac signs? Has this changed over your lifetime?
BONUS: Do you believe in manifestation? Have you ever done it, or experienced it? What happened?
BONUS 2: Has anyone ever manifested you?
For a fun and interesting resource on this: the Aztec Calendar website!
For this and for my introduction to this fascinating framework, thank you Johnny!
As an ethnographer, I sometimes wish there were a term to encapsulate this kind of cultural phenomenon — a ideology or practice that becomes widespread not because its practitioners believe its precepts in good faith, but because choosing to believe is far more enjoyable than the alternative. Then again, it’s possible that the vast majority of ideologies — including political ideologies — work this way.
An essay for another time :-)
The process of deciding to leave California was another one entirely.
And in fact, this is the exact criticism of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love that Rachel Cusk (of all people!) makes in an essay in her collection Coventry. Cusk pulls the following quote from Gilbert, outlining the author-celebrity’s pre-planned (!) spiritual journey: “It wasn’t so much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves… this has been done. It was more than I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.”
In response to this passage, Cusk writes cogently: “This is the voice of twenty-first century self-identity: subjective, autocratic, superstitious, knowing what it wants before it gets it, specifying even the unknown to which it purports to be abandoning itself. It is the voice moreover of the consumer, turning other realities into static and purchasable concepts (‘tradition’, ‘the art of pleasure’) that can be incorporated into the sense of the self.”
This is not dissimilar to Leibniz’s God, who he believed orchestrated cause and effect itself — as in, God would move both the putter and the golf ball, and it was only to human eyes that things seemed to affect each other directly. A stunning corollary of this is the idea that we are not, in fact, connected to anything or anyone else — not really. Instead, we are each of us alone in the universe, connected only to God.
I used to find these ideas ridiculous but — as my Oxford tutor predicted — I’ve warmed to them with age. It is a lonely universe, but not in the way that you might think.
"Will life be as it is now, more or less, in 100 years? Or will we be living in a nuclear winter, struggling with unending climate migration and a primitive resource war? Who knows — all we know is that Mars will be in Gemini. And yes, it’s probably the right time to call your crush." - I laughed so hard. Thanks for addressing all my obsessions--God, manifestation, new age claptrap, control, surrender, magical thinking (doom) vs. magical thinking (hope)--with lyricism, humor, and insight.
Famously, I’m a Cancer sun, Aquarius moon, and Aries rising. People who don’t know me well recognize the Aquarius and Aries energy. My partner (an Aquarius sun, Virgo moon, Leo rising), however, understands that my Aquarius moon is the only thing keeping my Cancer sun in check to arguable success (losing right now). I resonate with astrology to a somewhat high degree. I don’t keep up with the forecasts and habits and movements of the “heavenly bodies.” I didn’t blame my meltdown in a CVS parking lot last night to being in Mercury retrograde (which we are in for much of the year, every year). I’ve always wanted people to see me. The dynamic between my signs in my big three and six reflect my contradictions, my conflicts, my facades, my love. It’s superficial and wildly subjective and inaccurate, but I’m friends with a woman who used to be my barista just because she has her Aquarius moon tattooed on her arm.
When I’m in pain, like now, I feel in the past and fear in the future. When I’m not, I’m more in the ether than in company with any of Christmas Carol ghosts.
I’ve always seen time as set. I’ve always believed everything will be okay or it will not. My belief in god is marginal, but I still pray. The future feels here and past. I’m the only thing I’m truly familiar with that will be in my future, so I focus on her.
As I said, I still pray. Some would call this manifestation, as I’m imploring and trusting an invisible force, but I’ve never believed in manifestation. Truly, I think it is the simplest human principle manipulated and wrapped in false control and privilege. Human will has power. It is not aligning with your higher self and “speaking it success into existence.” You got that job because you have a bachelors. You got that house because you worked hard and the buyers had no better offer. You have more friends because you’ve developed on your self-confidence. You met your husband because love is everywhere and you are a serial dater—it’s just odds. What I disliked about religion was the control. Surrendering control to god was still using the language of control. A lot of new age spirituality is the disorganized whims of the disenchanted former religious grasping for control. Not my vibe, but astrology is ha (!)