“[Not] in Our Stars, Dear Brutus…”

Now I am aware of no people, however refined and learned or however savage and ignorant, which does not think that signs are given of future events, and that certain persons can recognize those signs and foretell events before they occur.

Cicero, De Divinatione (Tr. W.A. Falconer)

My husband and I were married on a chilly, rainy day in mid-April, two weeks before his Ph.D. qualifying exams. We had initially planned the event for June, when warmer weather would have allowed for cocktails and crudités in the beautiful flower garden of the Penn Museum (yes, we two classicists were married in an archaeology museum), but we were warned that the stars were decidedly not aligned for a June wedding. Some kind of bad vibes were set to interact poorly with the house that governed children and marriage. By moving the wedding up we ensured that the vibes fell instead to the house that rules over finances.

Not the most rational decision I’ve ever made, although I tried to rationalize it. Even though neither of us really bought into the horoscope, there was still a little doubt, a hesitation. What if? If (when) in the future anything horrible happened in the family sphere, I didn’t want to feel like we had deliberately chosen that negative path. On the other hand, I was fine with the feeling that we were potentially choosing financial instability. Since we were both in academia, delayed economic gratification wasn’t exactly an unpredictable result.

Astrology is not rational. But neither is grief. When disaster strikes we look for reasons. Things we could have done to avert the terrible thing. We look back, and we blame ourselves. When we look forward to the future, fear of the unknown and a desire to effect a favorable outcome would seem to demand a similarly individualized, even narcissistic, outlook. Recycle. Think Positive. Don’t open an umbrella inside.

Despite the popularity of weekly horoscopes, pretty much everyone today thinks astrology is hokum. In Ancient Rome, however, astrology was a bona fide science. While there were some skeptics (Cicero called divination a superstitio), in the imagined newspapers of antiquity, horoscopes would have been front-page news, not printed next to whatever was the Roman version of sudoku. Emperors consulted astrologers, astrological knowledge was carefully guarded, and the subject even earned its own didactic poem (an honor reserved usually for specialist scientific topics, like beekeeping and farmers’ almanacs).

Astrology wasn’t the only method by which Romans attempted to divine the future. One could consult the mysterious Sybilline Books, take the auspices (literally “bird watching”), examine animal organs (called, depending on the organ, Extipacy, Hepatoscopy, and Haruspicy), or make note of abnormal celestial events (Meteoromancy).

While astrology was first introduced to Rome in the 3rd century BCE, the practice didn’t become popular until a bright comet appeared for a full week during the funeral games of Julius Caesar. The comet marked the end of an era: the haruspex Vulcanius declared that the comet signified the beginning of the 10th age (Servius, Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil 1.287).

Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, was a believer, if not in astrology itself, at least in its ability to influence public opinion. He himself declared in his Memoirs that the “common people” (vulgus, fr. 6 Malcovati) believed the comet represented the deification of his adopted father.

Pliny seems to have picked up on the possibility that Augustus’ faith in the comet was rooted in political advantage rather than true belief. After detailing how Augustus mentioned the event in his memoirs, Pliny adds (NH 2.93–4):

These are the sentiments that he expressed publicly. Privately he took pleasure in the view that it [the comet] had come into being for him and that he was coming into being in it (sibi illum natum seque in eo nasci interpretatus est, tr. Ramsey and Licht)

Augustus certainly believed in astrology when it came to his own star chart, if we are to believe the biographer Suetonius (think: Daily Mail, or even National Enquirer, so take this addito salis grano):

While in retirement [n.b. “on vacation” retirement, not “move to Florida” retirement] at Apollonia, Augustus mounted with Agrippa to the studio of the astrologer Theogenes. Agrippa was the first to try his fortune, and when a great and almost incredible career was predicted for him, Augustus persisted in concealing the time of his birth and in refusing to disclose it, through diffidence and fear that he might be found to be less eminent. When he at last gave it unwillingly and hesitatingly, and only after many requests, Theogenes sprang up and threw himself at his feet. From that time on Augustus had such faith in his destiny, that he made his horoscope public and issued a silver coin stamped with the sign of the constellation Capricornus, under which he was born. (Tr. A.C. Rolfe)

Augustus was born on September 23 (or 22 … or 24; we’re not entirely sure, and of course it makes a huge difference to his horoscope! Lots of very serious scholarly ink has been spilled over this topic, beginning with astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1599 and continuing to the present day).

If you’ve read your Linda Goodman, you know that this September birthdate means that Augustus was a Virgo (or a Libra, depending on that iffy birthdate …), not a Capricorn! So, why did he issue the coin with Capricorn as his special symbol? Because the Romans thought that the greatest indication of one’s personality was the location of the moon relative to your mother’s Mount Pleasant at the time of your descent, rather than whether or not the sun shone on it (what we moderns care about). Augustus may have been a true believer or a skeptic, but what we know for sure is that he didn’t hesitate to embrace his good fortune and use it to his political advantage.

Whether Augustus truly feared a negative horoscope, or whether he, like most of us, considered astrology to be inexplicable — yet inexplicably compelling — bullshit, he certainly seemed to think his subjects believed. Perhaps, as Cicero said of divination in general, Augustus was “… influenced more by actual results than convinced by reason.” In any case, Augustus’ trust in the people’s belief in astrology was so strong that he banned the practice:

… the seers were forbidden to prophesy to any person alone or to prophesy regarding death even if others should be present. Yet so far was Augustus from caring about such matters in his own case that he set forth to all in an edict the aspect of the stars at the time of his own birth. Nevertheless, he forbade this practice. (Tr. Earnest Cary)

Again, we see the same interpretive issue as before: does Augustus believe the bullshit? Or does he only trust that the people will believe it? He bans astrology, yet he doesn’t personally care about releasing his own information (his long-form Birth Certificate, if you will).

The behavior of later emperors may indicate a more straightforward belief. Suetonius says that Tiberius was “addicted” to astrology (but also had the habit of banishing astrologers). Nero, on the other hand, decided to cherry pick for favorable horoscopes. Some emperors are recorded as having murdered enemies with politically-favorable horoscopes. True believers, right?

Maybe not. Classicist Pauline Ripat situates this paranoia, and the expulsions of astrologers, not as evidence of a belief in astrology, but as proof that astrology functioned as ancient media with the ability to influence public opinion, and therefore the Romans considered (rightly) this information equal parts useful and dangerous.

The United States is no stranger to the effects of media on politics, but surely we have evolved beyond astrology …

… or perhaps we’ve regressed back to augury?

Or entomomancy?

On a more serious note, certain famous presidential Americans did assign astrology, and other pseudo-sciences, some credibility. Independence Day, Election Day, and Inauguration Day initially divided the year into thirds (called a “Grand Trine” in astrology). Expediency won out over superstition, however, after FDR’s lengthy president-elect period delayed his economic reform measures and the 20th amendment relocated the day to its current January sedes. Also, FDR consulted noted astrologer Jeane Dixon and MI5 sent an astrologer-turned-operative to the US in the summer of 1941 to convince him to enter WWII. Coincidence?!?

In times of uncertainty, we look for signs: Caesar’s comet and #berniebird are not very different, after all. Caesar may or may not be a god, but Bernie definitely did not win the nomination, with all due respect to that bird. Astrology is a pseudo-science, but to the layperson — myself included — FiveThirtyEight is just a colorful map with numbers that either scare or soothe.

What’s more, the current election is unprecedented in so many ways — in unquantifiable ways, perhaps. Nate Silver’s comments in an article about the implosion of the Republican party don’t help: “There aren’t any good empirical precedents for something like Trump. So we’re extrapolating from cases we do know out to an empty part of the graph.”

FiveThirtyEight’s Now-cast, Polls-Plus cast, and Polls-only cast might be grounded in the science of statistics, but the guts of those different computer models are as impenetrable to me as the Liver of Piacenza. So, for the sake of giving a fair and balanced take on the situation — and just in case — let’s also take a look at what the stars have to say.

No, not George Clooney. The other stars.

Pluto is a very slow moving planet (not a planet! Yes a planet! In any case, Pluto = Death = Rebirth). At the precise moment the United States was born (4:50pm LMT, 4 July 1776, Philadelphia, PA, according to eyewitness accounts), the planet Pluto was in Capricorn. It wasn’t until 2008 that Pluto reentered Capricorn; it will reside there until 2025. Liz Greene, professional astrologer, claims that this “Pluto Return” signifies that

… a time has arrived when there is a great new opportunity to affirm the values and ideals of the original founding of the nation, applicable not only to government and to foreign relations, but also to the land itself and the resources inherent in it.

You don’t say.

What might the stars tell us about the candidates? Well, it turns out I’m by no means the first person to have the idea to profile the 2016 candidates. Although the author behind this article thought it wasn’t necessary to profile Trump. Oops. Anyway, what follows are the strengths and weaknesses that subjects of each candidate’s astrological sun sign are said to have, copied and pasted from the Internet (Hey, I used cutting-edge science and technology to achieve these results!):

Trump:

Strengths: Resourceful, brave, passionate, stubborn, a true friend.
Weaknesses: Distrusting, jealous, secretive, violent.

Hillary:

Strengths: Creative, passionate, generous, warm-hearted, cheerful, humorous.
Weaknesses: Arrogant, stubborn, self-centered, lazy, inflexible.

… and moon signs, which the Romans would have considered more significant:

Hillary:

Strengths: Generous, idealistic, great sense of humor.
Weaknesses: Promises more than can deliver, very impatient, will say anything no matter how undiplomatic.

Trump:

Strengths: Compassionate, artistic, intuitive, gentle, wise, musical.
Weaknesses: Fearful, overly trusting, sad, desire to escape reality, can be a victim or a martyr.

Classicist Tamsyn Barton emphasizes that the polyvalency of horoscopes is what made the science so popular among Romans: astrologers were careful, she argues, to be vague enough that subjects could find something they liked in their horoscope. Does this strategy obtain? Think long and hard about how you read the above horoscopes. Did you allow your own political bias to influence how much value you attributed to the purported strengths of the candidate you support?

Guess what?

I switched their information.

Incidentally — and not that we need Hillary to be the genesis of another birther scandal (<COUGH> … I mean … <SNIFF>) — astrologers claim that she has given conflicting birth information (WHERE is her long-form, seriously?). While Trump publicized his own long-form birth certificate in 2011, Clinton’s campaign has refused astrologers’ requests to divulge birth time. On several occasions, Clinton has said that she was born at 8:02 PM (which would make her moon Gemini rising), but her mother is on record as saying that Hillary was born “in time for breakfast” (moon would be Scorpio rising).

The Wall Street Journal investigated this issue at the end of September, but, for some reason, neither campaign deigned to comment. The solution most astrologers have arrived at? Cast both charts and pick the one that seems to conform best with (their assessment of) her personality or prospects. Arlene Nimark, interviewed by the WSJ, thinks that the lack of birth information is itself proof of which chart is accurate:

She may herself not want to give out the exact time of birth … There’s always something a Scorpio is hiding. They play things close to the chest.

But Robert Wilkinson (another internet astrologer) offers this note of caution:

none of [the other astrologers] have any sound reason for making her a Scorpio rising except that she seems like a Scorpio, which of course she would, given she has a Sun, Mercury, Venus, Chiron, and South Node in that sign!

Nothing is perhaps more uncertain than ourselves (cue the Delphic Oracle: know thyself. Not an easy order to follow). Perhaps this is why a great deal of astrology deals not with predicting the future, but analyzing the present: who am I? Why do I do the things I do? Which Stranger Things character am I? (In my case, a Virgo/ISFJ, inertia, Joyce Byers, respectively.)

In these days of Buzzfeed quizzes, Meyers-Briggs personality tests, and enneagrams, it makes sense that, long after the science of astrology has acquired its pseudo- modifier, we can still find astrological charts compelling.

The biography will always be more enticing, more entertaining, than the history. Despite decades of knowing that the best way to “do” history is to consider the broader context of historical structures, rather than isolated events and leaders (what the French call the longue durée) we still find ourselves drawn more to individual narratives. After all, I doubt that a musical entitled “The Socio-economic Context Of The American Revolution: An American Musical” would have made it to Broadway.

The US seems to be standing on a great precipice. It feels like there are only two futures for America. Two parties. Two candidates. Two people. With two birthdays.

Oh look: a bird!

Sarah Scullin is Managing Editor of Eidolon. She received her Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Her moon is in Capricorn (just like Augustus!) and she has Jupiter in the IXth house (which rules over both Higher Education and Publishing, go figure).