Horoscopes and Happenstance
“It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
— Voltaire
I’ll be honest, I’ve had one too many vaguely-written horoscopes resonate with me in an eerily precise way. I don’t consider myself religiously affiliated to any real extent, and I’m still very much in the earliest stages of any sort of ‘spiritual’ journey (assuming that the zodiac and one class on ‘mystical traditions’ counts to some extent). I tried to narrow down what it was about the zodiac, mysticism, and spirituality that drew me in, especially given the fact that up until these past few years I had been sitting with a cynical, skeptic attitude towards anything and everything that couldn’t be rationally explained by science. What I grew to appreciate about the nature of horoscopes and other ‘new age’ spiritual practices was its antithetical relationship to science, it had nothing to ‘prove’. I could read about what my week might have in store from an astrological perspective and draw out what resonated with me in that moment.
I had a somewhat religious upbringing. Between full time jobs and trying to raise a family, my parents didn’t always take my sister and I to church on Sunday’s, but always on holidays and the rare weekends free of soccer tournaments. I attended a Christian youth group, and the church leaders around me instilled the tenets of sin and virtue, heaven and hell, and good and bad. I held a very real belief in the consequences of my actions, and the idea that hell was a very real place I would be sent to if I did not lead a virtuous life. As I got older and more preoccupied with typical teenage tropes, my participation in the church fizzled out. I’m at a point now, as a senior in college, where I can identify with the quarter of Americans that think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. But, why horoscopes? Was it just because they were trendy? Was it because all my friends seemingly had some new insight about my life that even I wasn’t aware of? Yes and yes, but I think it goes a little deeper than that.
Like I mentioned earlier, horoscopes and other ‘new age’ spiritual practices don’t have anything to prove. There’s a sort of openness to them, you can choose to draw out what resonates and act on it, or not. There isn’t really a right or wrong way to give meaning to a horoscope, and there’s certainly no reprimand for misinterpretation. This kind of openness is reminiscent of what rhetoricians describe as choric invention, or meaning-making that happens in “the chora” (Plato’s “third kind”). The chora favors chance, which is arguably what makes it so radically open. It’s not an algorithm with a set task or end goal in mind, and it’s not a heuristic that calls on the incorporation of prior knowledge, even though our prior knowledge is seemingly inseparable from the way humans perceive and understand their environments. The chora asks rhetoricians (and everyone, for that matter) to approach networks, assemblages and environments with empty minds and observant senses, to explore what becomes possible by chance, surprise, or accident. In their 2014 article examining the works of Maira Kalman and/as choric invention, Marc Santos and Ella Browning suggested that choric invention cannot be systematized or institutionalized because “its unfolding will be as distinct and idiosyncratic as the minds and bodies it passes through.” There is no one way that invention or discovery happens in the chora, and there is value in the multiplicity of unique experiences.
In a way, traversing the entirely overwhelming realm of new age spiritual practices demands this sort of openness and favoring of chance. From meditation and mystics to psychedelics and sacrament, maybe the best way to start some sort of spiritual journey is to remain open and observant, pursuing what resonates or presents itself by chance.
