When did the astrology boom begin again?

How long has astrology been everywhere again? The answer is more concrete than it might seem. Astrology’s popularity does not grow at a steady rate; it comes in surges — and every surge hung on a new medium that suddenly reached a great many people at once.

The summer of 1930 and a newspaper column

On 21 August 1930 Princess Margaret was born in Scotland, the younger sister of the future Queen Elizabeth II. The Sunday Express, a London Sunday paper, had an idea: the astrologer R. H. Naylor was to write down what stood in the child’s birth chart. The piece went down well, and the editors asked for more.

What turned the column into a fixture was a disaster. In a follow-up piece Naylor had warned of a danger to British aviation; a few weeks later, in early October 1930, the airship R101 crashed in northern France on its way to India. That, at any rate, is how the story is told.

The real novelty came only afterwards. A one-off reading became a recurring feature, and a feature needs a grid that works by itself every week: twelve paragraphs, twelve date ranges, done. Astrological almanacs had existed long before. A column in which anyone could find themselves in seconds, and which was there again the following Sunday, had not.

The second wave: the end of the sixties

Forty years later came the next surge, this time out of paperbacks, record sleeves and musicals. Astrology was part of a wider search that also took an interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation. The talk of an Age of Aquarius moved out of specialist circles into a song lyric, and from there into everyday speech.

At the same time, books about the twelve sun signs became bestsellers. They could do something the newspaper column could not: they gave each sign a whole chapter instead of three lines.

When calculation became cheap

The third surge is the least conspicuous and perhaps the most consequential. Well into the eighties, a birth chart was manual work: looking things up, converting to the time of birth, taking the houses out of a table, drawing the whole thing by hand. One to two hours was normal, and so were arithmetic errors.

Software did the same in seconds, and with that what people talked about shifted. As long as the arithmetic was laborious, most stayed with the sun sign, because it cost nothing. Once the calculation was free, the birth chart with its birth time and place moved to the centre — and with it words like ascendant, houses and transits, which hardly anyone outside the specialist literature had used before.

The wave now under way

The fourth surge has been running since the middle of the 2010s, and it hangs on apps and social networks. What is new about it is not the content: the readings come largely from the same literature as in 1970. What is new is that a complete birth chart is on the phone in ten seconds and can be passed on with two taps.

Out of that a manner of its own has grown. People send each other screenshots of their charts, joke about Mercury retrograde, compare positions as casually as they once compared record collections. That explains the tone of this wave — more self-mockery than reverence, more conversation than oracle.

What the waves show

What stands out is that none of these four waves was set off by a new astrological insight. Each time it was a medium that set them off: the mass-circulation newspaper, the paperback, the computer, the phone. So the booms say something first of all about how far astrology reaches, and nothing about what it holds.

For you this comes down to one thing above all: the step that actually makes a difference has stayed the same across all four waves — the step from the twelve groups to a picture of your own, with date, birth time and place of birth. What comes out of it is set out under Horoscopes, and how it comes about under Astrology.