Stars Above!: Astrology is ascending, which is bad news - some seek to include astrology in school curriculum

Those of us who were around in the 1970s often felt we might not make it through that strange decade with our sanity intact if just one more person came up to us at a party and said: "What sign are you?" That particular form of silliness has not so much sunk without a trace as risen without a trace: Astrology can now be studied, for a bachelor's or master's degree, at the Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences in Seattle. Nothing very deplorable about that, you might think. The New Age movement has thrown up all sorts of odd manifestations. Kepler College, however, is authorized by the Higher Education Coordinating Board of Washington State.

As Kepler College prepares to take in its second freshman class, from Paris comes the story of Mme. Elizabeth Teissier, who has just received a passing grade from the Sorbonne sociology department for a 900-page Ph.D. dissertation on astrology, in which she makes it plain that she takes this "science" very seriously. Mme. Teissier is, in fact, a professional astrologer, and served in that capacity to the late French president Francois Mitterrand. The gist of her dissertation, according to one sociologist who has read it, is: "that astrology is the victim of domination. That science, which is renamed 'official science' or 'monolithic thought,' oppresses astrology." The acceptance of Mme. Teissier's thesis by the Sorbonne has created a great fuss in France, especially among professional sociologists, who apparently are not much taken with Mme. Teissier's having described Max Weber, one of the revered founders of their discipline, as "a pragmatic Taurus." After firing off a single letter of self-justification to the French newspaper Le Monde (the valediction read: "Astrally yours"), Mme. Teissier is not speaking to the press.

Further afield, India's large and prestigious scientific community is up in arms about a decision by that country's education authorities to create astrology departments in 24 public universities in the next academic year. At a time when India is building a reputation as a rising power in information technology, the official sanctioning of astrology would, says world-renowned astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar, take India "backwards to medieval times."

It hardly needs saying that astrology is twaddle. An astrologer can tell you nothing useful, though one with a good bedside manner can, of course, cheer you up a bit. The scientific emptiness of astrology has been demonstrated countless times-and the application of it has not fared much better.

This was demonstrated rather dramatically on June 1 this year when Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal murdered most of that country's royal family. In common with many other leaders in Third World countries, the Nepali royals had relied heavily on court astrologers to steer them through life's vicissitudes. One of these seers, interviewed after the event by a London newspaper, was clearly embarrassed by his inability to predict the massacre. "Heavenly planets control the situation on the ground and sometimes we are unable to explain them adequately," confessed Mangal Raj Joshi, who also teaches astrology at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University (Nepal's scientific community being apparently less fastidious than India's). Mr. Joshi still has the day job, though: "His first task for the new monarch was to determine the most auspicious time for his crowning on Monday morning." I can't help thinking that if I were the new monarch, I'd be looking for a new astrologer.

Astrology anyway gives itself away by the company it keeps. Considered in isolation, astrology may be harmless piffle, but it travels with all the most poisonous and antisocial trends in contemporary thinking. The odor that arises from current astrology propaganda is that of the postmodern "deconstruction of knowledge": the conceit that, hey, we can't really know anything, so one set of beliefs is as good as another. This agrees very nicely with the current fads about race and "multiculturalism" that are so busily eating away at our social cohesion. If all beliefs are as good as one another, then the bushmen of the Kalahari are, and the necromancers of old Babylon were, as wise as the Harvard faculty-probably wiser, in fact, since their beliefs owe nothing to "official science."

Consider, for example, Valerie Vaughan, one of the cult's most vocal defenders here in the U.S.A. Ms. Vaughan, a professional astrologer, is also director of a science-education library in Amherst, Mass. Her latest crusade is to get astrology into the public school curriculum under the cover of "multicultural studies": "Since every culture in the world has developed a form of astrology, it is inherently diverse." (I confess that, in spite of my disapproval of the things Ms. Vaughan believes and does, I find her one of the most engaging and quotable of astrology propagandists. Sample: "Scientist debunkers have discovered they can expand their power to the realm of public school education-but what else would you expect with Pluto currently in Sagittarius?")