Astrology

Your report “Covid Astrology Boom” [ FT394:4] makes dismal reading. The American astrologer Susan Miller not only failed to foresee the pandemic but also predicted a good time for most of us in 2020. Her remark about “a calendar full of international travel” is particularly inept when contrasted with newsreels of dozens of aircraft sitting unused on runways around the world.

Most issues covered by FT – ghosts, UFOs, strange beliefs and religions, anomalous happenings – exist on an uncertainty principle by which they can never be entirely proved or disproved. But astrology is a different matter. It can be satisfactorily debunked because it simply doesn’t work. Even people who check their ‘stars’ in a newspaper every morning mostly claim it’s just a bit of fun and don’t expect realistic guidance in their lives from horoscopes. And of course what guidance there is varies seriously from one horoscope to another: astrologers themselves squabble over how to interpret the signs, and forecasts are notoriously so vague as to be applicable to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

If astrological predictions even turned out to be 50 per cent confirmed, we might agree there’s something in it, even if we can’t understand how bodies millions or even billions of miles away can enable inhabitants of this small planet to meet a new partner or make more money. It is probable that most human beings – even the terminally ill or those planning suicide –- retain a flicker of interest in what’s due to happen to them next. This is what astrology latches onto, and perhaps explains why it’s flourishing during this pandemic. But it should be recognised as merely a creation of human hopes and fears, which lets down its followers in so many ways that it completely lacks credibility.

MG Sherlock

Colwyn Bay, North Wales