I thank Wout Heukelom for his critique of my paper ‘Understanding Astrology: A Question of Belief’ (Phillipson, 2023, referring to Dean et al, 2022). An exchange such as this can be frustrating: we are each sincerely trying to understand and explain astrology, in ways that seem clear to us, yet remain opaque to the other. Nonetheless, I will try to clarify my perspective.

From my side, Heukelom’s response seems more significant for what it does not discuss, than for what it does. My focus was to pursue the thought-experiment of ‘astrology world’, and in my conclusion I suggested that the recent output of Geoffrey Dean and his co-authors show signs of a belief-based approach. I feel that neither point is really addressed. Heukelom does not address the issues raised by ‘astrology world’, instead assembling a collection of somewhat-related ideas that might, on a quick scan, give the impression of a substantial rejoinder.

Heukelom describes the thought-experiment as ‘dated’ but without saying how its age is relevant, nor what has happened in the interim to affect its significance. The age of an idea seems no longer to be a problem when, in the same paragraph, he rewords a quotation from David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) to refer to astrologers rather than believers in resurrection.

Heukelom states that ‘astrology world’ is not featured in Dean et al. 2022, as if I had claimed it was (I did not). He provides some interesting background on the history of the idea behind ‘astrology world’, which however has no bearing on the idea itself, nor its implications for astrology. What Heukelom does not discuss, then, is what implications the ‘astrology world’ model might have for our understanding of astrology, and how – if thought through – it could affect the approach taken by both astrologers, and critics of the subject.

On a factual point: Heukelom twice suggests that I object to tests of astrology. This is not my position, as is signalled by my first paragraph where I say that I will focus on philosophical issues and leave it for others to evaluate statistical issues. For the record: what I take issue with is only the idea that astrology in its entirety could be evaluated through statistical tests.

In what he seems to regard as a crucial point, Heukelom argues that my approach is redundant because ‘Dean et al. 2022 is a review of studies, not a review of astrology… it is easy to find views that you might love (or hate). But for the authors’ own views you have to listen to what they actually say…’ At this point I should acknowledge that, as an index of texts concerned with astrology, Understanding Astrology is indeed a useful resource. That said, in order to use it one has to constantly set to one side the intrusion of the authors’ opinions to an extent that undermines the suggestion that the book is simply a ‘review of studies’.

To give an example: there are seven references in Understanding Astrology to Nick Campion’s text Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West (2012) before the book is reviewed at p. 915 where it’s introduced as ‘a well-documented sociological overview’. By the fourth line however the review morphs into polemic: ‘He [Campion] condemns academics for being ignorant about what they quickly dismiss, which in effect misdirects our attention from the underlying reality, which is that people desperate for meaning can always find faces in clouds…’ So Campion’s book does not receive the substantial review it merits but rather is used as a leaping-off point for the authors to insist once more on the ‘underlying reality’ in which they believe.

Heukelom quotes Dean et al. (2002) p.918, ‘It is not for us to say whether you should prefer meaning or truth. Or whether you should test ideas before accepting them’ and asks, ‘How does this preclude both astrologers and their clients, or impose beliefs that undermines the value of the authors’ contribution?’ This claim of neutrality is undermined by the recurrent assertion (repeated at least forty times in the book) that belief in astrology equates to seeing faces in the clouds.

As to Heukelom’s question, how this undermines the authors’ contribution: I believe that around here is the location of the divergence of philosophical position that tends to thwart dialogue between astrologers and critics. On the critics’ side we frequently run into an assertion such as Heukelom’s: ‘rejecting tests leaves us at the mercy of speculation’. This reflects the assumption of a simple choice between facing facts and being silly and is (I suggest) unsupportable for several reasons. One that is close to home is that Geoffrey Dean and two of his frequent co-authors, Arthur Mather and Rudolf Smit, started out as practising astrologers, whose experience was that astrology worked. Speculation – or we might prefer to say, philosophical enquiry – must then have been involved in their subsequent reflection and decisions to evaluate the evidence of experience and to question the nature of astrology. Recourse to tests, and the formulation of those tests, therefore rested upon ‘speculation’ from the outset and a stark either/or choice between the two cannot then be supported.

I think that the insistence upon a hard dichotomy between what they think of as subjective and objective, frequently represented in their works by the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ respectively, is responsible for the failure of Dean et al. to discuss the nature of astrology in a way that connects with the experience, and views, of many astrologers. Of course, it is not impossible in principle that all astrologers are simply wrong. The point at issue here is that the approach of Dean et al. does not equip them to arrive at a properly argued conclusion, because it presupposes a world that can be carved into subjective or objective with nothing in between, and this is belief rather than fact. Thus for example when William Lilly argued that ‘a foolish Querent may cause a wise [astrologer] Respondent to err…’ (Lilly 1676, p.1) by asking a question without being earnest about it, this only makes sense if the subjective state of the querent can have an impact on the astrological judgement – thereby straddling the subjective and objective. A more congenial context for understanding this side of astrology might be panpsychism or a framework that is similar in at least not assuming an absolute disjunction between the subjective and the objective. I should be clear that I do not think this sets up a scientifically acceptable proof of astrology; only that it throws into question the basis upon which Dean et al. would effectively relegate astrology to the purely subjective. There is not the space here to do more than point to this as a general area of enquiry, but I have written more extensively about it elsewhere. (Phillipson 2020 (particularly chapters 5 & 6) and 2022)

It would be wrong in a discussion such as this not to acknowledge that the early work of Dean et al. was really useful in helping astrologers to reassess their ideas about the astrology-science relationship. As the thought-experiment of ‘astrology world’ showed, any model of astrology as an always-on and reliable information system was always going to be problematic. But one avenue of possibility leading away from that point is a different account of astrology, one in which the astrologer and their client have an active role, rather than being passive recipients of information.

My paper was brief and no doubt has its flaws – it really is asking for trouble to attempt to discuss the nature of the cosmos in a few hundred words – but as will be evident I do not feel that Heukelom has invalidated the questions I raised.

References
Campion, Nicholas (2012). Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West. Ashgate.
Dean, Geoffrey; Mather, Arthur; Nias, David; Smit, Rudolf (2022). Understanding Astrology: A Critical Review of a Thousand Empirical Studies 1900 – 2020. AinO.
Hume, David (1748/1999). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford.
Lilly, William (1676). The Astrologer’s Guide: Anima Astrologiae. B. Harris, London.
Phillipson, Garry (2020). Astrology and Truth: A Context in Contemporary Epistemology. https://cosmocritic.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/phillipson_garry_astrology_and_truth.pdf
Phillipson, Garry (2022). ‘Panpsychism and Astrology’ in: Clynes, Frances (ed.), Skylights: Essays in the History and Contemporary Culture of Astrology, pp. 165 – 186. Sophia Centre Press.
Phillipson, Garry (2023). ‘Understanding Astrology: A Question of Belief’. Correlation 36(1).