Through the five boroughs of New York City last week prowled a dozen inspectors of the Department of Markets, their eyes peeled as usual for butchers with a thumb on the scales or too much fat in the hamburger. But they were snooping—perhaps uneasily—for a different kind of quarry: the soothsayers, crystal-gazers, palmists and tea-leaf readers who gull money by the barrelful for telling people what the future will bring, and thereby are liable to prosecution as "disorderly persons." More surprising than the seedy collection of fakers and phonies, love potions and hex-chasers that the inspectors are turning up is the source of the current campaign: New York's astrologers, who complained that the racketeers and pseudo astrologers were giving them a bad name.
But astrology has not always had a good name to lose—and for good measure the investigators decided to investigate the astrologers as well.
Delicate Operation. In the U.S. today, there are some 5,000 fulltime astrologers and about 100,000 part-timers who collect an estimated $100 million a year from among the more than 10 million true believers (80% of them female). Nearly 1,000 U.S. newspapers, with a daily circulation of some 40 million, carry astrological columns with such thumbnail profundities as: "Leo (July 22 to August 21) : Avoid investing unwisely or trying to outdo the experts when you have not had sufficient practice or knowledge. Listen intently instead. Stand up under pressure admirably."
To prehistoric men, who observed the influence of the sun on the seasons and the moon on the tides, it was not illogical to believe that the five visible planets of the solar system had their own varied and subtle influences on man. Over the millennia, a system was evolved, assigning certain characteristics to the cosmic forces (Venus, love; Mars, will, etc.) and charting their position in twelve divisions of the year called Signs and Houses. The relation of these elements at the instant of birth (what Sign was rising, which planets were in which Signs and Houses, etc.), astrologers believe, predisposes the individual in certain directions, which in turn will be played upon by the movements of the planets throughout the rest of his life.
Thus, though the "casting" of a horoscope is comparatively easy, the interpretation of the vastly complicated charts and symbols is a delicate psychological operation.
Big-Name Believers. The ancients accepted astrology as a matter of course.
Hippocrates once said that "a physician without a knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician," and the Magi of St. Matthew's Gospel who followed the star to Bethlehem were astrologers. The Roman Catholic Church today condemns serious belief in astrology as a grave sin; but as a man of his time, the great St. Thomas Aquinas held that "the celestial bodies are the cause of all that takes place in the sublunar world." Among modern believers, the worst advertisement is Adolf Hitler, who had five astrologers charting a course for him. Perhaps the most surprising was J. P. Morgan: he regularly consulted Astrologer Evangeline Adams, who, when haled into court, did so accurate a horoscope of the judge's son that the judge dismissed the case.