Women's Lifestyle November 11, 2026 0 Comments

Is Astrology Guiding Your Fitness Journey or Leading You Astray? Discover the Truth Now!

So, picture this: back in the late ‘80s, whispers started swirling around Nancy Reagan relying on an astrologer to steer some of President Reagan’s most crucial decisions. Sounds like a wild plot twist from a political drama, right? But the truth is way more tangled—and way more revealing about how astrology and politics have always been this curious, fiery mix. Fast forward to today, and astrology isn’t just about star signs or reading your daily horoscope anymore; it’s become a full-on political mascot, woven into the fabric of cultural identity. Guess what? Astrology wears a two-faced mask—seen as a left-leaning badge to outsiders but quietly harboring conservative currents within its very own circles. Intrigued? You’re not alone. Whether you’re drawn to it for meaning or wary of its politics, astrology’s role in our polarized world raises a big question: can the stars actually influence the political game, or are we just reading too much into the cosmic noise? Dive into the complexities and controversies swirling through the stars like never before. LEARN MORE

In 1988, a former aide to President Reagan alleged that Nancy Reagan relied heavily on the astrologer Joan Quigley to guide key moments in her husband’s presidency. The Reagans denied that characterization, but the image of an easily swayed Nancy Reagan using some irrational force to push through Reagan’s policy decisions entered general pop culture, fueled in part by the misogyny of the political press toward most women in politics, left or right, in the 1980s.

The story of Joan Quigley and Nancy Reagan is part of a larger history of people turning to the stars to help explain, and potentially influence, political events. This is an impulse that doesn’t belong to any particular political ideology. But in current pop culture, astrology is often used as shorthand for liberal or leftist worldviews. Leading up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, some online astrologers confidently celebrated a potential Harris win. Their despair over the actual outcome was reported in numerous outlets. It seemed to confirm the stereotype of who follows astrology: millennials who are deeply disturbed by the current state of the world.

Today, astrology, like weight lifting, holistic medicine, and organic farming, has become less a hobby and more a political signifier. So many practices that used to be read as lifestyle choices—tracking your macros, for instance, or taking up ceramics—have, in our hyperpolarized culture, become stand-ins for a person’s political leanings. But what’s curious about astrology is that it reads as liberal-coded to those outside the field and potentially conservative to those inside it.

In a 2022 piece titled “Astrology and the Search for Meaning” in The American Conservative, Bradford Tuckfield attributed the rise in astrology to the fact that cultural discourse had “damage[d] or destroy[ed] the …positive myths that used to animate people,” adding, “The patriotic idea of America as a great nation has been undermined by many efforts for decades, the most notable recent example being the ‘1619 Project.’ ” For conservatives like Tuckfield, astrology is an attempt to fill a vacuum left in the American psyche. The absence of religion and the demand that citizens grapple with uncomfortable historic truths supposedly left young people ideologically lost. “The myth of social justice seems to have absorbed much of the energy” of young people, Tuckfield claimed. And astrology is just like that “myth.” For conservatives, then, astrology is just one of many cultural challenges to a homogeneous culture built on the myth of the hero. Astrology, in their reading, leads to challenges to the status quo, which is, by definition, the antithesis of conservatism.

But that’s how outsiders view the field. Astrology also has its own organizational bodies that strive to define the discipline and often are administered by older, more politically and culturally conservative practitioners. But those groups’ influence over astrology has waned as it has become more accessible through the internet. Once-esoteric knowledge is now widely distilled through TikToks and live streams, and this has led to a political divide for many astrologers.

Practices that used to be read as lifestyle choices—tracking your macros, for instance, or taking up ceramics—have, in our hyper-polarized culture, become stand-ins for a person’s political leanings.

“To be able to study astrology historically has been a very privileged thing to do. And so it’s been dominated by white folks,” explains the astrologer Chani Nicholas. Nicholas is a popular astrologer who trained with those unaffiliated with traditional astrology organizations. “There’s very explicit reasons why I’ve not invested a tremendous amount of time in general astrology communities, even though I am massively indebted to the community and I have a deep appreciation for it,” she says.

Nicholas’s brand of astrology makes explicit connections between planetary transits and real-world political events. She directly cites progressive and leftist political goals in the context of astrology. Nicholas traces the political divide in astrology to post-pandemic America and links it to the same divide seen in alternative health spaces and yoga practices, where many practitioners became enthralled with MAGA and MAHA politics while others did not.

Before the pandemic, organized astrology was dominated by “a group of white people that are mostly able-bodied, mostly heterosexual, mostly cisgendered, that have never had to confront their own racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia,” she notes. “In the pandemic, a lot of millennials started taking classes with a lot of establishment teachers, and a lot of the racism started to come out.… Millennials were like, ‘I’m not going to sit here and have you say that. You can’t say that.’ And then the more establishment teachers were like, ‘Why are you coming for me?’ ”

This tension between a more conservative old guard in astrology and a younger group of practitioners came to a head this summer when Stephen Forrest, an older practitioner of astrology, appeared on the Lila Astrology podcast. In the episode, he spoke about a satirical character he had once employed to make fun of racism, using the N-word in doing so. Forrest also brought up white-supremacist beliefs he had previously held on the inferiority of Black people’s intelligence; claimed to be related to Nathan Forrester, the founder of the KKK; and repeated the debunked myth that the KKK originally formed as a charity organization and not a terrorist one.

In response, younger astrology adherents asked that Forrester be removed as a speaker from an upcoming conference. Other older practitioners who were more deeply invested in astrology organizations cautioned against “cancellation.” Chani Nicholas, who was scheduled to appear at a conference that was also planning to host Forrester, pulled out of her appearance.

“The framework by which we talk about humanity is not quite as vast as astrologers like to believe.”

“Astrology attracts all these different types of people. It’s fascinating, but it doesn’t mean that because you’re interested in the human condition that you’re actually interested in interrogating your own biases and your own way of enacting violence on behalf of the system,” Nicholas says.

Astrology organizations, like many institutions currently, are caught between a younger generation, which is asking an older one to abide by the values of fairness and universal acceptance many purport, and older generations that are refusing to see the contradictions and biases in many of their organizations’ stances.

“There was no shared reality about where we had been working,” says Nicholas. “This younger generation of people that were really trying to understand identity and politics and location and power and privilege started to make this robust astrology community [of their own] and really push back against a lot of stuff that had just been existing unchecked for decades.”

Samuel F. Reynolds is an African-American astrologer who, for more than 35 years, has chosen to work within astrological organizations. He originally came to astrology as a skeptic. One of the biases he pushes against is the tendency to ground all interpretations in Western culture. “When Uranus went into Libra, an older Western astrologer might say to you, ‘Oh yeah, that led to a time where there was an acceleration of divorces and where people started to gain more power related to marriage,’” Reynolds explains. “When they say things like that, I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, did that happen in Africa? And did that happen in India? Was that true in most of Asia?’ And the data actually is no, it didn’t happen during that same time frame.… It does bring up a philosophical question of what are we talking about and what are we looking at? Because the framework by which we talk about humanity is not quite as vast as astrologers like to believe when they talk about it. That’s the truth of it. You’re talking about the people who are like you or in some way who are adjacent to you.”

He remembers astrology conferences 20 years ago where “every other talk, someone would bring up the charts of the Beatles, Princess Di.” Astrology is an art of interpretation, which rests on the practitioner’s frame of reference. The limited references at conferences spoke to “the insularity in general of white people,” Reynolds says. He does note, though, that at a conference recently, he saw someone comparing the chart of Toni Morrison with Agatha Christie. “Why? I’m not exactly sure,” he jokes.

“There was no shared reality about where we had been working.”

All of this conflict is happening in the wider context of big cultural and political shifts and the crumbling of any sort of authority or governing bodies. In extreme instability, the desire to understand why everything is changing makes astrology even more attractive. And astrology offers a lens for many to understand themselves. You may not be able to name why you have anxiety or why you tend to have chaotic romantic relationships or why you have trouble forming deep community bonds, but your planetary signature (and those of your friends and lovers) can provide you with something that looks like an answer.

But Nicholas cautions against giving too much sway to the question of transcendence and self-interrogation that astrology can sometimes provide. “I really want to talk about how we can build power and be effective now,” she says. “I don’t want to be out in outer space. I actually really want to be on earth.”