The Crisis of Knowing

Real Review trades in big ideas. Each issue it takes the cultural temperature and presents a series of long essays and reviews that define the “current mood”. It’s a deliberately open structure that allows for brilliantly distinctive writing, like this partisan review of astrology. If you look to your stars for guidance, you’ll love this one. And if you think tracking star signs is a load of old nonsense, read on to see why you’re missing out on an alternative way of understanding the world.

Check your phone. Somewhere in your Instagram feed, someone is citing their rising sign as a reason for their emotional fragility, their ambition, their unread messages. On TikTok, a tarot spread explains why Mercury in Pisces is making you text your ex. In a VC-funded strategy meeting, an investor is talking about the correlation of Bitcoin spikes and the lunar cycle. Everyone is talking about astrology.

What was once the preserve of niche publications and woo-adjacent corners of Tumblr has become cultural infrastructure, a mainstream framework for making sense of time, relationships, identity and the self. Astrology is having a moment. But the question isn’t whether it’s ”real.” The more revealing question is: why now? What is astrology answering that other systems of knowledge (science, psychology, politics, or even organised religion) no longer seem equipped to?

Astrology is not simply trending, it is symptomatic. It’s a symbolic intelligence reemerging in an era marked by the collapse of epistemological authority. Its ability to resonate with a new generational cohort isn’t because it offers truth, but because it offers a different coherence model. It gives people a way to orient the self in an age of complexity, fragmentation and accelerating chaos. This return is not random, it is timed with larger cycles of meaning breakdown and spiritual decentralisation. If the Protestant Reformation was the moment we stopped needing priests to access God, this is the moment we stopped needing scientists to access the cosmos. The sky, once a closed book reserved for the credentialed few, is open again.

Often dismissed as a fad of the wellness-industrial complex, astrology’s resurgence signals something deeper. It points towards the return of symbolic reasoning in a culture exhausted by data, flattened by algorithms and disenchanted with its own “rational” frameworks. If the rational can’t resolve geopolitical conflict, social inequality, or climate doom, then maybe it’s time for something else. In this sense, astrology is not an alternative science, but a counter-epistemology – one that privileges intuition, pattern and narrative over experiment, control and proof.

We’re also living through the failure of dominant knowledge systems to account for felt experience. Science cannot solve the climate crisis it helped quantify. Data analytics cannot explain love, grief, or loneliness.

The techno-rationalist promise of control (think: model better, predict harder, optimise further) has reached its asymptote. What rises in its place is not chaos, but myth and astrology – as an ancient symbolic system comes to the rescue, not by promising “prediction” but rather through poetic correlation. It doesn’t explain your relationship crisis, it simply provides a framework. It allows people to say, “this is what this moment feels like.”

To understand astrology’s current omnipresence, we can trace it historically – particularly Pluto’s last journey through Aquarius in the late 18th century. That era marked the Age of Enlightenment, when reason, science, and individual liberty became the dominant coordinates of Western thought. Astrology, once a respected tool of kings, scholars, and mathematicians, was increasingly dismissed as pseudoscience – an irrational relic of a superstitious past. This was the birth of the modern epistemological regime: empirical, materialist, human-centred; where knowledge became what was observable and verifiable. The cosmos, no longer enchanted, became a machine.

Pluto, with its 248-year sidereal orbit and symbolic ties to death, rebirth and transformation is associated with eras of upheaval and reinvention. In mundane astrology, the branch concerned with world affairs, economics and power, Pluto represents the unseen tectonics of geopolitics, ideology, and technological evolution. Its 2008 ingress into Capricorn coincided with a global financial collapse. And in November 2024 Pluto returned to Aquarius, ushering in another cycle of decentralisation – this time through AI, automation, machine ethics and neural interfaces. These are godlike technologies (like electricity and mechanisation once were) capable of rewriting human identity, labour and moral frameworks.

Yet Pluto’s return may also signal a countercurrent, not a rejection of science, but an acknowledgment of its limits. The very infrastructures built by Enlightenment rationalism now fracture under climate collapse, algorithmic governance and existential fatigue. Astrology’s resurgence reflects a longing to re-enchant the cosmos, to restore symbolic and relational intelligence in a world grown unlivable through pure data and mechanistic abstraction.

Collectively, we are witnessing a decentralisation – not of religion, but of spiritual epistemology. Astrology, in reaching the masses, has become democratised.

Astrology today is user-generated, app-distributed and remixable; it flows from countless voices, some AI-regurgitated, some commodified, some deeply sincere. For many, it serves as symbolic scaffolding for a generation that feels increasingly untethered. This symbolic turn arrives alongside the fall of discernment. As we drift in a sea of manufactured meaning, from AI-written essays, churned-out annual trend predictions and New Age language optimised for shareability, astrology doesn’t function as truth, but as resonance. It offers pattern instead of proof.

Astrology fits this moment (the extreme present) not just as a content form but as a way of sensing through noise. In the absence of external validation and in the face of a never-ending, global clusterfuck, people turn inward (or upward) for coherence. In that sense, astrology functions like myth or metaphor, not logically accurate, but emotion- ally precise. To some this might feel regressive, but there’s a new form of intuitive intelligence being acknowledged by young people today – an intelligence that has long been sidelined by Western empiricism. It privileges symbol over fact, narrative over causality, relation over materiality. Consider it a cognitive technology for navigating nonlinear, emotionally complex realities.

It engages the nervous system in pattern recognition, while also giving form to inner states through a model of archetypal language: Pluto as power, Mars as action, Saturn as boundary, Neptune as dream. Its stronghold on younger generations could be underpinned by its ability to become an interface between self and system... whether that system is the cosmos, history, relationships or psyche.

Astrology is cyclical (non-linear), relational (non-extractive) and – most crucially of all – it performs as a temporal decelerant (slowing time down).

Astrology invites reflection through rhythm; and terms like retrogrades, transits, returns. These are signatures of temporal depth that resist the infinite scroll, productivity traps and capitalism’s acceleration loop. Even the language of astrology (“Venus in Aries,” or “Jupiter trine Saturn”) draws attention to a different type of temporality, one that doesn’t operate on clock time (chronos) but on kairos: the right or critical moment.

After centuries in which Western modernity was built on the belief in rationality as a kind of salvation, we now inhabit its afterimage – a world where climate collapse, post-truth politics and generative AI each reveal the limits of logic alone. In the absence of a stable epistemic centre, symbolic systems are resurfacing – not because they offer objective truth, but because they are expansive. These systems hold paradox, invite emotion, and create space for transformation.

In this light, astrology does not seek to replace science, but to complement it: while science maps what is, astrology explores how it feels.

It reintroduces subjectivity into a world that has been abstracted and optimised to the point of alienation.

This may help explain why astrology resonates so deeply with those historically excluded from epistemic authority – women, queer communities and people of colour. It affirms forms of knowledge that are embodied, intuitive and emotional – standing in contrast to the dry, data-driven approaches to futures thinking and strategic foresight which remain embedded within an addiction to rationalist frameworks: risk matrices, projections, predictions. The world does not move in straight lines – it lurches, spirals and improvises.

It shifts through collective emotion, forces that resist quantification, not easily plotted on graphs but rather sensed, storied and felt.

Astrology is far from perfect.

It is generally viewed as complex, personal and deeply open to projection. This is precisely its strength. It offers a reminder that knowledge isn’t always about mastery or control; sometimes, it’s about participation. In times of a perma- and poly-this-and-that, we don’t need another model, we need metaphor. Many are quick to say they don’t “believe” in astrology, as though it were a fixed belief system. But astrology is not doctrine, it’s a practice of relation: between sky and self, past and future, symbol and story. It endures not because it explains the world in empirical terms, but because it gives us a way to live within it.

And then, of course, there are the vibes. Astrology is not only a form of symbolic knowledge but also aestheticised knowledge. With its glyphs, memes, charts, and colour-coded transits, astrology speaks through visuals as much as through metaphysics. Platforms like Co–Star and The Pattern don’t just deliver insight, they curate a mood (much like the Real Review), offering a sensibility as much as a system. They essentially provide / sell the ability to feel “seen”. This aesthetic add-on renders astrology legible to a generation fluent in design-forward identity and the language of Instagram selfhood.

In a secular age, astrology does not function as a replacement for religion, but rather it replaces certainty. It teaches us to trace patterns rather than draw conclusions – and to attune to cycles rather than chase endpoints.

It gives us permission to be poetic in the face of the unknowable. As the philosopher Empedocles once wrote, the cosmos is woven by two forces: Love and Strife. Perhaps astrology returns with such resonance in times like these not to deliver salvation, but to remind us that meaning was never something to be proven, it was always something to be made and engaged.

Real Review is a contemporary culture magazine that investigates, “what it means to live today”.

Sarah Owen is a futurist, strategist, trend forecaster, and sociologist specialising in culture, human values, and systems thinking. With 15 years of experience across future trends, cultural research, and communication strategy, she guides organisations through strategic foresight, scenario planning, and trend analysis. You can see more from her on Instagram.

Rose Theodora is a leading astrologer, advisor, and creative director who translates ancient symbolic intelligence into modern strategic foresight for leadership, innovation, and organisational decision-making. You can see more from her on Instagram.

Lauri Simonin is a French illustrator based in East London. Her work is defined by organic lines, expressive characters and rich textures, inspired by modern culture and the subtle absurdities of everyday life, often with a touch of humour. You can see more of her work on Instagram.