So, Mr Wizard, you’re claiming supernatural powers now, are you?
I wouldn’t put it like that. What we do is on occasion intercede with Heaven to make a small adjustment. An analogy would be with the Catholic view of miracles. They do happen, but very rarely. Catholic theologians are among the least credulous people on earth. They have no wish to be exposed as charlatans. In the same way, wizards cast spells on rare, highly selective occasions. If Heaven agrees, then the spell is successful. We all have a history with weather spells. The Archwizard of New Zealand has broken droughts, at the request of officialdom. My own experiences have been a little less precise. One wonderful lady asked me for fine weather for her wedding. I agreed. The temperature that day was 44 degrees. On another occasion I found myself abandoned at a railway station in the Blue Mountains en route to a choir festival. No taxis were available until dawn. It was around 1am. I rang the convenor and called for a lift.
‘OK, but you owe me.’
‘What do I owe you exactly, Brick?’
‘No rain for the next fortnight.’
Oh my. In Sydney? But the rain held off until the last morning. The concert was over, I headed back to the airport and the heavens opened. Thank you, Lord 😀
The world does not always conform to rational explanations. There is an excellent science-based book entitled 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense. I commend it to you. But the important thing about News Of The Weird is to keep your head. An excellent starting point is a magazine called The Fortean Times, to which I subscribe every month. Just because weird stuff really does happen is no reason to let your brains dribble out through your ears.
Why Fortean? Charles Fort was an American journalist who was a true sceptic. He collected strange and weird things which had actually happened only to have them ‘explained’ away by uber-rationalist scientists. He was tremendously amused by some of the nonsense perpetrated in the name of science in order to maintain the pretence that everything had a rationalist explanation. It used to be held as a scientific fact that rocks couldn’t possibly fall from the sky; hence anyone who thought they had seen one was obviously deluded. We now know that meteorites are actually a thing. Here’s a brief and not terribly inaccurate summary of his life and work:
https://www.siegfriedhagl.com/en/strange-stories/a-master-of-the-bizarre/
Periwinkles falling from the sky? Why, this Could Not Happen. It must have been a fishmonger who went about by night strewing mountains of periwinkles everywhere. For reasons which utterly confound reason. Now one common tool in The Sceptic’s Handbook is Occam’s Razor, which says that you should not needlessly multiply postulates.
Like many a medieval theologian, William of Ockham was a lucid thinker far in advance of most of our more deluded philosophes. What he brought to philosophy was Nominalism (denying the celestial truth of Platonic forms); Empiricism (forget Plato! What can you see or sense? Knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience) and his famous razor. Which can point in unexpected directions:
Far too many postulates there. Posit a single postulate instead, that periwinkles really did fall from the sky. Sometimes weird stuff really does happen.
In the Fortean Times of July 2022, there is a multiply attested account of fish (shad) falling from the sky in Texarkana, TX. So there you are. For those who refuse to believe in anything unless it’s recent, well here it bloody well is. Is there a bibliography at the end of the article? Giving names, dates, footnotes etc? Yes of course there is. This is the Fortean Times, not USA Today or Fox News.
Other weird stuff? With my lovely companion, I once saw a genuine UFO. (Cornwall, 1979) Six of them. No, they weren’t aeroplanes. They weren’t the planet Venus. It was 4pm on a sunny summer afternoon in Boscastle. Do not insult our intelligence. We know what we saw, and we had witnesses. Back at our hotel we reported this to the maître d’. Oh, arrr, we do get a lot o’ they round here, quoth he. Now that is exactly the right attitude. We are not saying they were alien spacecraft. We are not saying they were anything at all. But it was a manifestation of Weird which did not conform to the laws of physics as we understand them. It was A Thing, and that’s all we are going to say about it.
 The Wonderful World of Astrology
In any debate between astrologers and physicists the latter will generally get the worst of it. It could hardly be otherwise, since astrologers understand physics and those trained in mechanistic science are unlikely to understand astrology. Eventually they bring out what they imagine is their trump card, slam it on the table and say Right! Tell us about the forces exerted by these celestial objects on actual humans! What are they, and how do they work? And astrologers will smile and say no, there aren’t any. Of course there aren’t. By the inverse-square law, a child born at a moment when a truck was passing the hospital would be far more a child of whatever make of truck it happened to be.
No, there really is no mechanism. Life forms patterns. Get over it. Hey, when and where were you born? We can tell you a great deal about yourself. Want to hear about it? Naturally no mechanist will want to look into that telescope, because they might see something which would upset them. But. Let us now admit that astrology is absolutely bollocks at telling the future. Yes, really. Every time some famous astrologer talks about what will happen this year they finish up with their shorts wrapped around their head. It is an undeniable fact of life. Yes, astrologers can do 20/20 hindsight. (A bit like economists, really. You might consider listening to both.) All very well; but if you want a reputation for prescience you need to put your shirt on the horse before the race. Not after it. This being the case, what’s the use of it?
Yes, we can tell you all about yourself. All that you’re good at. All that you really struggle with. The sorts of things that will happen to you. Reading the present is a very useful skill. I am a competent astrologer. I will, if you ask nicely, interpret your birth chart for you; although thanks to the miracle of the internet machines can do this for you as well. But be warned. Machines can only go so far. So many charts contain things like oh yes Mars sextiles Uranus therefore blah blah blah. Unless either planet is seriously energized in your chart it doesn’t much matter either way. Humans are still better than machines. And yes, I can progress your chart for you; but I’d much rather not. And why? Because too much navel-gazing and self-obsession are vices which should be shunned. For most purposes, look at your birth chart once a year; make a few notes; and then leave it alone.
Does it actually help? That’s a good question. Here are four brief case studies, with all identifiers stripped out of them:
A’s chart was dominated by a double grand trine. Early in life things came easily to him. He had great gifts. But grand trines do produce downhill skiers in life: those who come to expect that things will continue to fall into your lap without working for them.
B’s chart was that of a massive over-achiever: intelligent, capable, diligent, and astoundingly beautiful. But five planets in Libra were a Warning! Danger! Red Alert! for substance abuse and general escapism.
C’s chart was filled with conjunctions and sextiles. Considerable charm and intelligence was indicated, but also a tendency to escapism, coasting and vegetating.
D’s chart was dominated by a massive double T-square. T-squares are built from oppositions and squares, and bring considerable life tension, stress and burnout. But in a T-square they can bring achievement through sustained effort. His Saturn squared both the Moon and Venus, meaning that despite being very popular with girls he always managed to sabotage any incipient romances through misplaced idealism and fear of exploiting the vulnerable.
What happened to them? A and B ignored the warnings, and their lives fell in a heap. They eventually came through; but only after a lot of stress, turmoil and formation underachievement. C heeded the warnings and became a highly successful person. And D finally realized that he was needlessly refusing love and romance when they came knocking; and that sometimes it really is all right to say yes.
Now you may if you wish continue to protest that it’s all nonsense. I don’t care either way. I have nothing much vested in the truth or otherwise of astrology. But it is an extremely useful tool whether you believe in it or not. And, thanks to Gunther Sachs (no, not Manuel) there is a statistical proof that astrology works. The data sets are filled with results well beyond three standard deviations from the mean. Over and over, each Sun sign predicts outcomes which cannot possibly be random. And this is only with a twelve-way sort. Astrology has far sharper tools than that. Belief is not necessary.
Finally, consider this. Most of the world’s cultures have developed astrological prediction. Are they all deluded? For those who think they have made a point about the precession of the equinoxes and the fact that the stars are no longer where they used to be, consider this. The Chinese system (Tzu Wei) is based on thirty-seven stars, most of which can no longer be seen. Yet it still works. And it tells you different things from Western paradigms. Don’t be scared to look down Galileo’s telescope. Just don’t lose your head and refuse to get out of bed until you’ve consulted the stars. Because that is just bonkers.