The Stars Don't Know You: What We're Really Asking When We Read Our Horoscopes

A quarter of the world has believed this for as long as anyone has bothered to ask. Four hundred years of astronomy have not moved the number. Ask someone with a horoscope app whether they believe it and they will laugh at you. Then they will open it again tomorrow morning. Belief in astrology has been flat for thirty-five years. Most participants describe it as entertainment. Roughly one percent rely on it for anything that matters. So the interesting question is not why people believe. Most of them don't. The Stars Don't Know You asks what they are actually doing, and takes the answer seriously enough to follow it all the way down. Inside: Why a generic description of your character will feel uncannily accurate — and why knowing that does not switch the effect off What the controlled trials really found, including the reanalysis that cut the other way and the one serious anomaly the skeptics rarely mention How the sky briefed Babylonian kings about sieges and said nothing whatever about anyone's temperament Why the signs no longer sit over the constellations they are named for, and what the standard defence quietly gives up The case against astrology that has nothing to do with whether it is true, made by a philosopher who despised religion as much as horoscopes What is left standing when the whole apparatus is taken apart, and what might actually answer it This is not a book about how gullible people are. That book has been written many times, it is boring, and it is wrong. The needs that send people to the sky are real, they are adult, and almost everyone who has attacked the practice has failed to notice them. The answer this book eventually offers is not one every reader will accept. It is disclosed on page one, argued for late, and never smuggled in. For readers who would rather hold an honest question than a dishonest answer.