This video made a lot more sense on the topic than anything I’ve seen so far. It’s 20 minutes long, but you’ll be able to get through this post in much less time.
Her parents are both scientists. She was brought up atheist/agnostic, and now she’s getting a PhD in planetary science. She should hate astrology, right?
A summary of her argument (with my embellishments)
A lot of smart people have disdain for astrology. How could Jupiter’s gravitational pull have any effect on anything on earth? But that’s not the way to look at it.
Astrology gives you a few things. First, if you’re trying to resolve a problem or think something through, astrology helps you loosen your grip on a problem. If you’re ruminating and stuck in a thought loop, astrology and tarot cards will help you break out of that.
They’ll let you see the problem from a different angle. It provides emotional distance. And many people experience a cathartic magic of feeling understood when they see what’s bottled up inside laid out in front of them.
Carl Jung would say that astrology sums up all the psychological knowledge of antiquity. You should look at astrology/tarot as a study of archetypes, symbols, and synchronicities rather than as a scientific model of the physical universe.
Instead of dismissing important negative events as coincidences, they can instead be examined through a system that gives you structure by embedding events into a narrative involving the movements of stars and planets. It’s not that this narrative is true in the way that Newton’s laws are true. Instead, the results of this practice provide a psychological inner peace, and can help you empathize with others.
Is it convincing?
I can better understand the rationale now, but my curiosity for astrology still hovers around zero. Most people believe in Tylenol without understanding the mechanism. The same goes for tarot readings. If the readings provide insight, they’re can help you get un stuck. Like Tylenol, it has potential side-effects. And one failure mode I anticipate is cope: temporary psychological relief that comes at the expense of lasting healing.
Related:
I’ll have to watch the video linked, but I think you’re hitting on something that I’ve been coming to myself. There’s a book by Richard Halloway, The Stories We Tell Ourselves (I’ve not read it, only heard a summary), where he talks leaving his position as a bishop in the Episcopal church when he became agnostic, only to return to Christianity 20 years later — not because he believed in God in a traditional way or that the Bible was the Word of God, etc. etc., but because of a similar reason you describe.
The stories, the traditions, the symbols, the rituals, communally shared, spanning thousands of years, constitutes a framework by which to understand the multitude of disconnected experiences through. It’s the groundwork laid, the foundation. It is arguably inevitable that one we need this framework and come to a framework, but starting from scratch means making all the old mistakes again.
There’s also another tarot video by someone on Youtube that you might be interested in. An old guy with a cigarette smoker voice who avoids overly esoteric stuff and talks more about something called “conceptual blending”, and the tarot gives the means of practicing conceptual blending. Pitski is his name I think.