What Science Says About Astrology is coming!

My new book, due next spring, looks into the history, psychology, and sociology os the world's oldest surviving superstition

For centuries, long before the conquests of Alexander the Great, priests and scholars from Babylonia watched the skies attentively, taking careful notes of what they saw — from clouds to flights of birds, from stars to planets. This was, quite probably, the longest continuous series of systematic observations of natural phenomena ever attempted by humans — a treasure trove of raw data.

What they did with this data, however, was, unfortunately, sheer bullshit: trying to correlate what they saw in the heavens and relevant events on earth, these scholars created vacuous, vague pronouncements like “if the moon is surrounded by a halo, and Regulus stands in: women will give birth to male children.”

There are a lot of lessons to take from this, from the uselessness of data in the absence of a good theory to the trap of falling for spurious correlations, of uncritically accepting hidden, “obvious” premises, and letting unexamined assumptions pass. The Babylonians were collecting dots but lacked both a valid framework to connect them and the wherewithal to question the framework their mythologies offered. Hence, they invented astrology.

I explore these lessons and others in my book, What Science Says About Astrology, coming next May from Columbia University Press (you can preorder it from Amazon by clicking the link above; a preorder form from Columbia University Press will be up in February, but you can already take a look at the book there). Most scientific examinations of astrology tend to focus on astronomical (the stars aren’t where the astrological charts suggest), physical (there are no forces in nature capable of generating the kind of effects astrology requires), or statistical (astrological predictions, about events or people, consistently fail) pitfalls, and I of course deal with all of that — but I move deeper into the psychological, social and therapeuthic aspects.

There is, for instance, a lot of research on the content of magazine and newspaper horoscopes — what kind of advice they give, what the ideological presuppositions and social prejudices they reinforce. Horoscopes are surprisingly susceptible to stereotypes relating to the intended demographic of the publication they happen to be on: those published in magazines geared toward poor black women, say, tend to be more sexualized, those written for rich white women, more consumeristic.

Of course, your friend, the serious astrologer, will tell you that mass media horoscopes aren’t serious and shouldn’t be taken as representative of the highest levels of the art. The point is well taken. The book also examines the psychology of the professional, “serious” astrological appointment/reading, and some published and unpublished proposals for using “serious” astrology in psychotherapy, going back to Carl Jung’s personal correspondence with an astrologer. It won’t be a spoiler to say that none of it stands up very well to scrutiny.

What Science Says About Astrology is the first volume of a new series by Columbia University Press, “What Science Says”, with the mission of exploring and explaining the scientific consensus on subjects that are rife with misinformation and apparent controversy in public discourse.

And also…

The first months of the new year will see the release of Mistérios! - Crimes de Quarto Fechado in Brazil, a collection of short stories I wrote originally for the English-speaking market — some were originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine — translated into Portuguese. If you are one of my Brazilian or Portuguese-speaking readers and enjoyed the latest entry in the Knives Out movie franchise, you’ll probably like the book a lot.

(If I may say so myself.)

This has been an uncharacteristically self-promoting post, but I have an excuse: it’s my last Substack entry of the year. Idea Smasher returns to its more usual fare on January 8th, 2026. Good holidays, a happy New Year, and see you then!