The definitive cultural history of Astrology, written with rigour and personal honesty, addressing the question - what does our need to believe tell us about ourselves?
Astrology is booming. It drives a global industry worth billions, dominates social media feeds, and has become the unofficial language of a generation that grew up in science class. And yet nobody has written the definitive cultural history of why.
Marta Bausells has. In three parts (Past, Present, Future), she traces astrology from its origins in Babylon and ancient Greece, through its fall from academic respectability in the Scientific Revolution, to its extraordinary twenty-first-century revival as a digital-age spiritual practice. She interviews cultural thinkers, astrologers and sceptics; she interrogates the feminist and capitalist forces that have shaped its modern form; and she turns the lens on herself, writing as someone neither fully convinced nor fully dismissive.
The result is a book for anyone who has ever checked their horoscope and felt slightly embarrassed about it. Rigorous, witty and genuinely surprising, it asks what our need to believe tells us about who we are.
