The Debate Over Decolonizing Astrology

Sky, Stars, and Sovereignty

In the wake of the Forrest Fire, I have seen a number of people online arguing for the need to decolonize astrology. In response, others are saying that astrology doesn’t need to be decolonialized, and that using the word colonialism in the context of astrology is incorrect. I have written about the Steven Forrest situation in two places, Shadow Work: A Record on my own site and Forrest and the Fallen here, if the background is useful.

I decided to do some digging into this, and jumped onto the internet. I found a number of articles and posts about the subject or related subjects. They were helping me to see that I had quite a large gap in my understanding of the historical context and philosophies of astrology as it relates to the concepts of colonialism.

I was suprised by that, because I have not uncovered this information in the astrology books that I have been reading for years. Many of those books are by authors who are in positions that give them the opportunity and the platform to discuss these issues, either in their books or in their online communities and publications.

So I spent several hours reading and gathered the information. I went over to Google Gemini, because I have a subscription for it, and asked it to formulate a series of deep research prompts that I could use to aggregate the information into coherant reports that could be easily digested. I then executed those prompts, and the result is six reports that discuss the subject of colonialism in modern Western astrology and detail that through its historical roots.

Now, AI reports like this can be prone to mistakes, they can misconstrue or mischaracterize the information of the primary sources in their synthesis. I want to say that one should not simply read these reports and take them as verbatim truth or fact. However, in my cursory review of the sources that are listed, I feel that there is enough accuracy in the gist of the reports that they form a very good starting place for someone who wishes to research in this area.

I don’t feel that it is my work to further this right now, with the workload of the things that I’m trying to acomplish. However, if there is someone who feels this work is important and wants to take up this banner for those in the astrology community, please feel free to use these reports as a starting point for presentations or classes around this information.

You will find the links to the documents below.

The Political Economy of Esoteric Publishing

The first document goes after the money. It follows the business side of esoteric publishing from the 1960s onward, and the case it builds is that Western Tropical astrology became the global default less by argument than by what was cheap to print and easy to sell. Carl Llewellyn Weschcke bought Llewellyn in 1960 and moved the operation to Minnesota. The report puts that near the middle of its account, along with the certification bodies and their fee structures. The argument then carries forward into software, where the report reads Astrodienst’s Swiss Ephemeris and the apps built on top of it as quietly hard-coding Tropical placements and Placidus houses for users everywhere, including places with long-standing systems of thier own.

Modern Astrology and Eurocentrism

The second takes up the twentieth-century turn from prediction to psychology, and its argument is that the turn carried more freight than the people making it seem to have noticed. It sets out a line running from Alan Leo through Dane Rudhyar to Liz Greene, whose Centre for Psychological Astrology in London gave the approach a teaching home, and it holds that the Jungian material absorbed along the way brought Jung’s own ranking of European and non-European minds with it. On the institutional side, the document points to the Faculty of Astrological Studies, founded in 1948, and to Margaret Hone’s Modern Textbook of Astrology of 1951 as the pedagogy that everything after it grew from.

The Historiography of Astrological Transmission

The third document is about historiography. It documents how European scholarship from the Enlightenment onward wrote the history of astrology so that Greece came out as the place where superstition turned into science, and it names names: Auguste Bouché-Leclercq’s L’astrologie grecque of 1899, which the report reads as the anchor text for that framing, and Franz Boll’s Sphaera of 1903, which filed non-Greek star lore away as barbarica. From there the argument moves to the twelfth-century Latin translations and the Latinizing of Arabic authors, borrowing George Saliba’s phrase, the Classical Narrative, for the story in which Islamic scholars merely kept Greek learning warm until Europe wanted it back.

The Genealogies of Psychological Astrology

The fourth report assembles a pipeline. Its claim is that shadow work in psychological astrology arrives carrying nineteenth century racial theory, and it lays the stages out in order: Victorian evolutionary anthropology, Blavatsky’s root-race scheme in The Secret Doctrine of 1888, Jung’s borrowing of Lévy-Bruhl’s participation mystique, and then Alan Leo sorting sign expressions into evolved and unevolved ones. Farhad Dalal’s 1988 essay on Jung does much of the load-bearing work in the argument.

Methodologies of Decolonial Re-Alignment

The fifth turns to what people are building now, and it is organized as a survey of method. It gathers the technical moves first: Alice Sparkly Kat rereading the essential dignities against Roman citizenship law, so that a planet in exile reads as a structural shortage rather than a personal defect, and her re-description of exalted planets as hungry ones, sitting in signs ruled out of sect. Sam Reynolds appears here for what the document calls in-house skepticism. The organizational half covers the Fresh Voices in Astrology summit, directed by Kirah Tabourn, and NFLUX Magazine, which the report presents as infrastructure built to route around the older conferences rather than to petition them.

Astral Hierarchies and Epistemic Colorism

The last of the six is comparative. It sets four traditions beside one another on the question of light and dark. The report reads Ptolemy’s climate theory in Book II of the Tetrabiblos as the Western root of it, and takes from the classical Jyotish treatises the material on Saturn as neelanjana, dark-complexioned and governing the Shudra varna. Against those it puts Chinese Wuxing, where black belongs to Water and signifies depth rather than defect, and Aztec cosmology, where the argument runs that Sahagún’s Florentine Codex is the point at which Tezcatlipoca, lord of the night sky, gets translated into the Devil.

I encourage people from either side of this perspective to review the information. It is eye-opening, to say the least. And remember, the reports are generated, not written by me.