“The dwarf planets change everything,” said the woman with the smart haircut as she made a mind blown gesture with her fingertips, temples to air.
I am at the United Astrology Conference, the largest professional gathering of astrologers in the world, in downtown Chicago. Around me, vendors are hoping to excite the 1,500 attenders, flogging books, tracts, affiliations, proprietary apps and various software programs that have replaced the laborious chart-drawing of yore.
I admit, I had come expecting a crowd flaunting amulets and sweeping cloaks. But apart from the occasional streak of purple hair and wispy wizard beard, what I encountered was an even weirder normcore of podiatry-sensible footwear and Oxford button-downs. At a glance, it could almost have been a trade convention of insurance adjusters: experts gathered to contemplate the future, assess risk, gauge the impact of events beyond our control.
In that sense, the room reflected astrology’s broader transformation. Astrology is now a $15bn industry. From the marginal, it has crept into the mainstream. A 2025 Pew Research report found that 30% of American adults consult astrology, tarot or a fortune teller at least once a year, and 43% of women under 50 claim to “believe in astrology”.
But its influence on the zeitgeist has hardly made astrology more settled. As I sat down with my interlocutor, her companion Alan Clay, founder of Dwarf Planet University, tells me the mainstays of the solar system can only get you so far. Recent astral discoveries, he said, have enriched the picture, offering a view into the unconscious through bodies drifting in the Kuiper belt, billions of miles beyond the sun.
On the wall behind his booth, the price of a reading has been slashed from $29 to $9.
He pulled my chart, a term that I learn carries tremendous weight, something between destiny and the template of my very being. There is the dwarf planet Makemake in my fifth house (I too, had to look this up), which carries bold implications for creative expression and, less attractively, secret or potentially bruising sexual affairs.
Some of this resonated. And therein lies the problem. Part of astrology’s current appeal is how quickly it can make itself feel personal – and persuasive.
Like any sufficiently established field, modern astrology has developed its own hierarchies, factions and grudges. There are fights over tradition and fears about AI; impatient zoomers butting heads with baffled boomers; older men with reputations for harassment; and quieter epistemic disputes. (Has no one noticed, for instance, that almost all the planets are male?)
Beneath all of it was a more fundamental question: who gets to interpret the stars?
“Astrology is the oldest of the occult sciences,” writes scholar Benson Bobrick in his 2005 history, The Fated Sky. “It is also the origin of science itself.”
For millennia, people have looked to the heavens for guidance and meaning: when to hunt and harvest, how to navigate the seas. The night presents a tapestry of gods and heroes, myths and parables. The stars are indifferent to these projections, of course, but they reveal a great deal about the people making them.
The basic premise of astrology is that the configuration of the sky at the moment of your birth leaves its imprint on your constitution and life trajectory. As above, so below. If in the past, the stars reflected a collective social order, today they are more often treated as a vast personal mirror.
The principle is straightforward. What astrologers make of it is not.
I arrived at the conference, which sold out of its advance weekend passes, with what seemed like a simple question: what does astrology mean to the practitioner in 2026? Moving from room to windowless room, I quickly realized the question was less simple than naive.
“Astrology is really an art form,” said one seasoned practitioner. “There is the technical component, but it’s mostly about understanding human behavior.”
To another, it was a spiritual practice, a means of communing with the ancients. It was unscientific, and also “not not a science”. It was a field of infinite study: “We’ll never get to the bottom of it.” It was moreover a language, composed of symbols and competing dialects, but nonetheless extant. “No one questions whether Spanish is real,” the astrologer Samuel Reynolds told me.
And yet, in one lecture I attended, Mark Jones, an astrologer and psychotherapist, opened with the controversial claim: “Astrology is not real.” At his words, a murmur rolled through the room, before he elaborated: “not in the sense that you are”. By his telling, the planets exert their influence on the psyche through a theory of object relations. He clicked through slides, and spoke with great authority on the spatial impact of Neptune and the role of the moon in the developmental self.
But that notwithstanding, he said: “The single biggest problem astrologers have is that they believe in astrology too much.”
Just what to believe in and what methods to follow are open and contentious questions. “There are as many branches of astrology as there are astrologers,” one attender told me, before rattling off a list. There’s horary astrology, an oracle for a single moment – is the person I made eyes with on the subway someone special? – and electional astrology, dealing with the timing of events (one woman told me that, much to the chagrin of her friends and family, her chart dictated a 7.30am wedding.)
There’s also evolutionary astrology, which maps the soul over lifetimes; mundane astrology, concerning politics and society; and medical astrology. It goes on: relational, predictive, Jungian (the Jungian vibes are strong).
Above all, it was presented to me as a kind of security blanket: a system for understanding the inexplicable, a way to make sense of a shitty day, a means to grasp the contours of current upheavals and find solace in their eventual end. During Covid, one astrologer explained: “People were really looking for answers. They were like, ‘Sky, tell me what’s going on.’”
The 185 experts who presented were doing what people at conferences do: establishing hierarchies and professionalizing a crowded, competitive field. A conference, after all, is an occasion for conferring legitimacy and codifying the rules of the trade.
In astrology, this raises some obvious complications. If you are claiming to see something about a person’s future, what are you responsible for telling them?
Some clients, I was told, “just want the good stuff”. Other practitioners prefer to rip off the Band-Aid – if dark days lie ahead, it’s better to make an ominous prognostication so the afflicted can prepare or hunker down as necessary.
But what happens when you get it wrong?
“There is no wrong,” Clay told me. “There are different interpretations. Right or wrong is a Saturnian construct, it’s useful but doesn’t help us understand these new energies.”
That is not, however, the abiding consensus. One of the conference seminars was devoted to learning from readings that went awry.
“When people are giving predictions, there is at least a five or 10% chance that it’s not right, and the stakes are huge,” said Kay Taylor, president of the UAC and the Organization for Professional Astrology.
Another astrologer illustrated the stakes with a story from her own practice. Based on her reading of a client’s chart, she concluded that both of the client’s parents would die within the year. She felt obliged to convey this information, whereupon the client quit their job and moved across the country to be with their parents for the end.
“But they didn’t die!” She exclaimed with surprising pride.
That was years ago. Mom and dad are still alive and well. Yet the astrologer assured me that even though the prediction was off, the message remained sound. Her client got to enjoy some bonus time with her parents.
Gaffes like this are what make training critical, I was told. No fewer than six professional organizations were sponsoring this year’s gathering – the National Council for Geocosmic Research is the only one without “astrology” in its name – and they offered various routes to affiliated credentialing and curricula, ranging from astrological markers of ADHD to advanced training in asteroids.
Celeste Nash-Weninger, from the American Federation of Astrologers, told me: “Every person is a complicated mathematical formula.” She used to be intimidated by the graphs and numbers, but after taking recommended courses – “and they’re tough: eight hours of math and delineation” – she has confidence in “how the heavens move”.
Whether advanced math is required for mastery is open to debate. But there is one thing nearly everyone here agrees on: technology has made astrology more accessible – but also, some practitioners worry, diluted its expertise.
“Before, people had to do it all by hand,” said Leslie Benson, an astrologer who works for AstroGraph, maker of the popular TimePassages app. “You had to have an ephemeris, where you looked up every placement. You had to draw it all. Now it’s instant.”
Most have eagerly embraced the new tools; after all, if software can do the calculations, practitioners have more time for the interpretive work. But they also remove one of the barriers by which skill was once recognized.
Artificial intelligence is where most everyone here draws the line. Of course, AI was inevitable: Pluto is in Aquarius and Uranus is in Gemini – yikes – but the contemporary astrologer, at least according to one seminar, must safeguard the personal and spiritual component of the work. “Embracing Uranus,” it advised, referring to the dark trickster of the cosmos, “without losing your soul.”
Co-Star, the astrology app that has brought personalized charts and algorithmic readings to millions of users, is notably absent from the conference, and attenders clucked in disapproval over news of its recent acquisition by the AI startup Midjourney. The technology that made astrology accessible to anyone with a phone is also the technology that threatens to make the astrologer – the human interpreter, the trained practitioner, the person who knows what all those symbols mean – obsolete.
Throughout the conference I asked around why astrology inspires such avid faith, why it appears to “work”. Some practitioners offered explanations involving gravity – the extremely subtle but no less palpable effects of celestial bodies on our own bodies. Or perhaps it is about the moon, whose effects on the tides might somehow produce corresponding swells within us. “We’re 80% water,” one astrologer offered.
On three separate occasions I was told, “the proof is in the pudding”. and so with an equal mix of trepidation and enticement I agreed when Nash-Weninger, of the American Federation of Astrologers, volunteered to give me a cold read. Though she assured me she was a “professional” and could tell me “some things” about myself, I could not imagine how, on the basis of my scant data – birth date, time and location – she could uncover anything about my life. But in the name of research I let her plug my information into an app on her phone.
“Ooh!” she exclaimed. I experienced an instant tingle – was this a good chart? I was born, she pronounced, in a great conjunction year, “just like Jesus Christ … in theory.”
My sun is conjunct with Mercury – “that’s the writer” – and my north node indicates that “if you did something creatively you would probably be known for it later”, she said.
It was hard to resist the ego bath of it all, especially when she said: “I’m going to take a chance and say your career might get really big. You might have opportunities that are huge.”
At the time, I confess, I didn’t preoccupy myself with the caveating “might”, hearing only the allusions to success. The mere fact that I was born in time and place conferred a thrill: the universe had designs for me.
But then she paused and squinted at a corner of my chart.
“One thing I want to say: take good care of your liver and kidneys.” She gave me a pointed look and gravely intoned, Jupiter lords over my house of health issues.
And then, graver still, she said she was “a little concerned about this dark moon” in my house of love.
When I mentioned my recent divorce, she nodded in an of course sort of way.
Maurice Fernandez, a popular evolutionary astrologer, was giving a lecture on Chiron in Taurus. Astronomically, Chiron is an icy body discovered in 1977 that travels in a long ellipse between Saturn and Uranus, taking roughly 50 years to circle the sun.
It was named for the centaur of Greek mythology – and this is where the afternoon’s drama began.
Fernandez assured the audience that Chiron was not an “add on” to the chart but a “central part”. In myth, Chiron was the immortal son of the titan Cronos and the sea nymph Philyra. When a poisoned arrow struck him, he suffered unbearable pain and eventually chose to surrender his perpetuity.
In astrological terms, Fernandez explained, Chiron represents a confrontation with mortality: the “wound of invisibility”, “hubris” and “the freedom to be sovereign”.
As he spoke a logic came into focus, wherein a celestial body receives a name, the name summons a story, and the story reaches through the light years to our fragile, earthbound lives.
Chiron was just leaving Aries, Fernandez said, a transit that explained the #MeToo movement and the rise of the manosphere. George Floyd’s death and Black Lives Matter were also, he said, the stuff of Chiron. He needed to check the numbers, but Chiron in Aries had seen “a greater statistic of political violence”. Myth is a capacious place.
What was coming as Chiron entered Taurus could be glimpsed via the past: sustainability, finances, land, resources. Stalin’s agrarian policies, Fernandez stated, also bore the hallmark of the roving centaur. He drew out the words: “Three to 5 million people died because of a manmade food crisis.” Gasps rippled through the room.
Then the stock market crashed. A decade of poverty. More gasps.
What gripped the audience was not necessarily the work of the stars, but rather the stunning facts of history, which, like myth, is a generous tool in astrology. A pattern is imposed on a bygone moment, and that pattern, once established, lends credibility to the prediction of what comes next.
While figures like Fernandez swam through a field of palpable adoration, some of the greatest gusts of enthusiasm were reserved for the conference’s plenary speaker, Chani Nicholas, whose star is among the most ascendant in the field – at least to some.
Nicholas, who has nearly 700,000 followers on Instagram, has built a devoted following around a blend of astrology and social justice. In an August post announcing Virgo season, she called for readers to “Abolish ICE and data centers and billionaires! … Manifesting a socialist utopia! Life is short! Let Gaza Live! There’s another eclipse coming!”
Her company, Chani, promises employees a salary floor of $80,000 and comprehensive benefits, including “unlimited menstrual leave for people with uteruses”.
Rather than delivering a conventional keynote, Nicholas sat in conversation with Samuel Reynolds, a former fundamentalist Baptist youth minister who came to astrology as a skeptic and, in the course of trying to debunk it, found himself converted.
“Extremes are extreme-ing,” Nicholas told the room, citing floods in Nepal, rising inequality, and populations straining precious resources. “If Pluto in Aquarius is about a revolution, then the robots are definitely out to get us.”
Nicholas spoke directly to a younger generation that had shown up in Chicago in droves. “We’ve never had so many newcomers,” one of the conference organizers observed, not without ambivalence.
The tensions were already thrumming before Nicholas took the stage. A scheduled speaker had been removed from the program after using the N-word on a podcast over the summer, prompting a small but vocal schism among attenders. For some, the episode represented an overdue reckoning; for others, it was evidence that astrology was being remade according to the dictates of a younger, more censorious culture. An antiracism panel followed.
At Nicholas’s keynote, the divide became harder to miss. When she mentioned white supremacy, a handful of people got up and left. But the overwhelming number applauded when she described astrology as an essential tool for organizing in the fight against fascism – and AI.
It was tempting to see this as a generational culture war imported wholesale into a trade convention. But it was also about something more fundamental: who gets to decide what astrology is for, who gets to speak for it, and what counts as knowledge in the first place.
That question has particular force in a field that has never had much institutional authority to begin with. You don’t need a degree to practice astrology. You don’t need a license to create a chart, or credentials to interpret one. This makes astrology unusually democratic – and unusually susceptible to the creation of new gatekeepers.
In times of uncertainty, the argument goes, people reach for systems that offer, if not certainty, then comfort: faith, mysticism, pop psychology protocols for surviving the collapse of familiar structures.
“Astrology is not therapy, but it is therapeutic,” writes Nicholas. “It’s a relentless reminder that we are the way that we are on purpose.” If the self has become a more demanding and illegible creature, here is another way to make sense of it.
There is something to this. When the world feels chaotic, when our purpose seems opaque, it is appealing to believe that chaos has a pattern, that this crappy stretch will end, that the planets are moving and so, eventually, will you.
But the explanation is also too easy. We are always living in “interesting” times. Astrology has survived wars, plagues, depressions and the scientific method.
Reynolds, the former Baptist minister, offered another possibility. Young people who came of age with Donald Trump and Covid, he said, may have a different relationship to authority. They spent crucial developmental years watching institutions struggle to explain the present, while science was often hauled off to the chopping block. Truth itself became unstable.
Perhaps, he suggested, they are simply more comfortable inhabiting several systems of knowledge at once: data and mysticism, evidence and meaning.
In this sense, astrology is not necessarily an alternative to facticity so much as a parallel language, asking a different set of questions. It does not have to win an argument with physics to be useful to someone trying to understand why their marriage ended.
Before leaving Chicago, I found myself in conversation with the sociologist Ian Anthony Waller, who was there to research the gendered nature of astrological belief. He also described himself as a “solid seven” on his own scale of faith.
I had come to see astrology less as an impossible-to-validate predictive model than a cool caress of reassurance. The stars see you and whatever happens is happening for a reason.
But how, I wondered, as a scholar, did he manage to maneuver between a healthy skepticism and an embrace of a system of elaborately calculated comforts?
“Sometimes astrologers will say things and I’m like, ‘that is madness,’” Waller said. “But then other times, things that I read and then see in the world – there’s something going on that is too accurate for me to dismiss out of hand.”
It was incumbent for him as a scholar to understand why it appears to work. “If anybody ever really figures it,” Waller said, “it’s probably not going to be an astrologer, it’s probably going to be an astrophysicist or a physicist or somebody from Nasa who makes a connection between launch failures and Mercury or something like that.
“And that’s going to be the big eureka moment – or the big Uranian innovation, as we would say in this culture.”
