Of Course I Write Romance Novels.

Oh, hi! Been a while.

So anyway, my friend Jan emailed me this morning, asking for help answering a coworker who’d said to her, “How can astrology be valid when a whole constellation — Ophiuchus — has been left out?”

Hey, what's that? It's Ophiuchus!

I think the answer is twofold. First off, asking “How can astrology work when a whole constellation’s been left out” is like asking “How can the moon pull on the tides when Jupiter has over sixty moons?” It’s two separate issues.

Or — and here is the second part of the answer — maybe it’s more like asking “How can current cancer research be valid when it doesn’t incorporate [whatever they're going to learn in the future about treating/curing cancer that we'll wish we'd known a long time ago]?” Astrology, like any science, is ever-evolving. 3,000+ years ago, in ancient Babylonia, they paid attention mainly to the Moon and Venus. They didn’t really care about the sun. After some time they incorporated Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and Mars; and all of it was related to things like crops’ seasonal success here on Earth. So astrology is the cumulative knowledge people have amassed over three millennia. And it can sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, such as when Pluto was recently demoted from planetary status.

I’m sure that in another 1,000 years, astrology will look totally different than it does now, because humans — if we’re still around, that is — will have discovered all kinds of new things about the planets/constellations, and we’ll have discovered new emotional or behavioral patterns that sync up with the movements of those planets and constellations. That’s all astrology is, really: A record of patterns in planetary movement as related to corresponding patterns in human behavior/emotions, geological phenomena like earthquakes, tsunamis, tides, and so on.

There ya go — your astrology lesson for the day.

How are you doing, anyway? I’ve missed you!

Love, Catherine