The Telescope’s Lure

If I were feeling charitable, I would quietly add astrology to the ever-lengthening list of “Things I Don’t Get”, along with cigars, India, contraflow bus lanes and God and leave it at that. But this being a seasonal time of year (whatever that means), I am spoiling for a fight with this ropey and imbecilic concept.

Way back in 3000 B.B. (before broadband), several people of the notably underemployed variety looked up at the stars and then looked back down at their filth-stained landscape - full of people lancing each other’s boils and murdering cats, dropping their babies off ledges while grasping for the gin bottle and writing words with too many ‘e’s at the end, throwing excrement at the blasphemous in the stocks and generally wallowing in a steaming pit of bilious fluids and eking out an existence straddling the bread line all the while trying to maintain some kind of pious dignity because their creator and tormentor must be appeased or else they’re fucked and will be sent to a place in which worms gnaw at your eye and there ain’t a great deal you can do about it – and they thought, the sky must hold the answers, because they sure as hell aren’t down here. “In the stars, people!”, they said. “Up there your fate is decided, not down here. Even yours you lecherous kerb-suckler” (kerb suckling being an important profession at the time).

So we see the dubious beginnings of the ‘science’ (Kiran quickly swallows down momentary rising of phlegm) of astrology. A while ago, my mum came back from abroad brandishing a piece of paper in which my fate had been decided by an astrologer or snake-oil salesman, based only on the time and date of my birth. I have been here before. I have been told to sign my name doubling my first initial to “KK” as this would rectify an imbalance in the Numbers of Purity or whatever and redeem my sinful life into a new-born existence inextricably linked to the planets. No matter that it left me one ‘K’ short of a vicious sect of yore. Anyway, said bit of paper was interesting as it charted my life and attributes from birth, and therefore gave me over two and a half decades of history. Apart from discerning that I was male (and I think they had to be told that first off) and that I am argumentative, and that I was likely to have a serious disease when I was three years old, it was pretty bollocks. And it also predicted a serious disease at three-year intervals which miraculously failed to transpire. Though luckily this life-map was wrenched from my mother’s hands, when it turned out she had got the year of my birth wrong, negating the whole thing even in her eyes. Well who keeps count anyway. I haven’t since I turned 26 or 40 or so.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually find astrology a physically dangerous belief in the same way that religion or homeopathy are, it’s just that there is something vaguely unsettling about it. All those charts, all that smoke and mirrors, knowing that in tandem with the work of astronomers, that there is also astrology, a parasitical barnacle appended to the astronomer’s arse, mimicking their actions but then running off on a tangent to dupe the weak-willed into subservience. It is about as appetising as a televised circumcision. If astronomy explains the walls and the ceilings that provide your shelter, and the cooker that kills the bacteria in your food, then astrology is a drunken cousin who comes down the chimney and shits in your soup. Or perhaps I’m getting confused with Santa.

Anyway, what is great is that, once again, science dicks on superstition. People are said to be born under a constellation, meaning that the Sun appears to be residing within a certain constellation at the time of birth. The Sun traverses the entire apparent sphere of the sky in a year, and sits in each of the zodiac constellations for about a twelfth of that time. The thing is:

a) The constellations aren’t even approximately the same size, so these zodiac periods all differ wildly in size. The sun is only in Scorpio for one week of the year, not a month.
b) Due to something called ‘precession of the equinoxes’, 86% of people have the wrong star sign (i.e. mostly they are one sign out, though a few are two signs out). The whole map has ‘shifted’ since the Plague Era when people drew up their maps and charts.

On the last point, this is due to the tilt of the Earth and the way in which the squint axis (which causes the seasons) itself rotates very slowly relative to the Sun over a period of 25,765 years changing the star we designate the pole star every few thousand years and realigning the position of the celestial sphere in relation to the ecli… la, la, la, yawn…

Once upon a time there was a little advertising executive called Samantha who was thirty years old and lived on her own in a cottage made of marshmallow imbued with asbestos so that the gentle fire in the hearth did not cause any undue damage and she had an ickle fluffy rabbit that she loved called Monsieur Fluffboots. Of course Samantha lived in a wonderful land of milk and honey called Rainbow Land which is situated in north-eastern France and can only be reached by rubbing your left-shoulder against the Rainbow Tree which can be found thanks to a yellowing treasure map left in a Starbucks in Reims by a group of dispirited pirates way back when.
Samantha loved her ickle fluffy rabbit and she used to talk to it constantly, muzzling her face in its fur and tickling it and giving it anything it so desired, as long as that was talcum powder or brandy.
One day ickle wickle Monsieur Fluffboots got very sick and sneezed great swedges of mucus onto the walls of his hutch and Samantha got very upset so she went and told her therapist who told her to get a fucking grip because it is only a fucking rabbit. This made things alright for a while, the sensitive charm of her therapist allowing her to get through the difficult days ahead. But Monsieur Fluffboots got more and more ill, refusing his brandy and insisting on gin and tonic, which was very expensive as it had to be imported from outside Rainbow Land, and whole lorry loads had to be reversed backwards and forwards so that their left sides rubbed against the Rainbow Tree so they could gain access to the kingdom of the Rainbows.
As the days wore on, Monsieur Fluffboots left eye swelled and turned blue and then at last burst, causing him to kick his ickle fluffy bucket and go up to the fluffy pink clouds and harp-playing rabbits and marsupials of wabbit-heaven. Awwww.
This made Samantha sick with rage at the injustice and she climbed up a nearby tree never to set foot on the hallowed turf of Rainbow Land again. There she would sit for hours, weeping, eating marshmallows, and hugging the steadfast ready-embracing tree that had offered her comfort in her time of woe.
Samantha’s mother was a kindly old woman who was able to bake pies that steamed satisfyingly and brought all the ickle squirrels and robin red-breasts to the ends of tree limbs whistling happy tunes whenever her and her pies were there. Samantha’s favourite was a marmalade pie, but day after day her mother left them on the ground next to the trunk and still the little advertising executive never touched them. One day, several years later, the ten-foot high rotting mass of decaying marmalade and pastry became too much for Samantha and she jumped into the middle of it and smothered herself all over and it all got a little pornographic and this is the point when you always wake up isn’t it…

…Welcome back. As I was saying, this slow movement of the ecliptic (the path along which the Sun appears to move) means that if you think you are an Aquarius, you are probably really a Capricorn. And just to really mess things up, a thirteenth constellation has hijacked part of the zodiac. It is called Ophiuchus, and is slotted awkwardly between Scorpio and Sagittarius like a bald-headed alcoholic miraculously appearing in your tourist snap of the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square. So if you were born in late November, chances are you are actually Ophiuchus (pronounce it “Oh fuck us”, it’s close enough), the Serpent Bearer, which means you are great at handling feathered boas and the like. Unless by ‘bearing’, they mean it in the ‘child-bearing’ sense, in which case, lucky you, you are going to be giving birth to a snake at some point. I imagine that is even more upsetting if you are male.

There then, is my guide to astrology and its merits. “But it’s only just a piece of fun”, I hear you say (I do believe in telepathy), and it’s Christmas, think of the children.
All valid points. Which is why in the next post, you will get your very own real horoscope, courtesy of my alter-ego, El Keranu, who likes incense and tie-dye clothing and acupuncture and alchemy and the good word of the Bible and the mystical flowings of ying and yang and those zen gardens that have a small rake and a tiny sand pit too small to drown even a stunted toddler in. Until then…