Horoscopes: What type are you?

If you are here to gain insight to the personality types, then I suggest you go to www.astrology.com. I'm not an expert. However what I'd like to share, is some perspectives....

Horoscopes and personality. Astrology and compatibility. These are questions that plague my teenage years and to some extent my adult as well. I don’t normally have a superstitious mind, but some how or rather, the uncanny resemblance to ourselves, as well as the number of accurate “prophecies” about the couple does make one wonder what is it about this particular branch of study so darn mystical.

Or is it?

I have been thinking about this topic for a long time, and the more I try to study it, the more confused and familiar. Confused because it has its own lingo. The cusps, moon signs, retrogrades is enough to make my head spin. Familiar because it is systematic, and very very similar to what I’m doing in my own line of work.

Astrology require so much interpretation of signs – semiotics if you will – on the mysteries of ourselves. We take a single aspect of our character, to link with the description and in so doing, draw affirmative conclusions that the description we read is wholly applicable to us. We then culminate this sense of wonder, “how accurate the astrological description” applies to us, and hence exhort it to the realm of mystcism that it is therefore quite accurate. However, there will be people who will then say, “oh but this aspect doesn’t really apply to me”. Lo and behold, astrology will introduce yet even more variables. Perhaps it’s the ruling planet during the time you’re born, and also the fact that your parents’ horoscopes also influence yours etc. To me, it really is just another system of looking at the infinite variables that make up a person. It is no idfferent from psychological studies, or “tests” that try so hard to determine and classify us in boxes, to dictate whom who should or should not be, can or cannot do.

You are a “I” persona, so therefore you are better suited for working in jobs that require attention to detail, for instance.

I find it difficult to swallow the half-truths and quarter-mark deductions because while we all share general characteristics, it is not due to our starsign or our time of birth. It is simply due to the circumstances that bring us to where we are – our parents, the environment we are in, the place we are born – create certain Persons that shape our outlook. Since people are social, they learn from each other and before long, one would realise we come to share certain qualities and dispositions, which can then be calcuable and classifiable. It is not any divine intervention or roll of the dice. If I may quote from a line from V for Vendetta, “I, like God, do not play with dice and do not believe in coincidences.” Hence, our personalities and character, that is written in the “stars”, is nothing but yet another system describing and pigeon-holing people to make this complex world more understandable.

That’s why I mentioned, it’s familiar to my line of work, because hermeunetic social science understand signs and derive conclusions about society from it. We might not make generalisations to the population (everyone is this-or-that from a small sample), but we make generalisations to the themes that are derived from our observations, which can then be generalised depending on the context. So the compatibility of the star signs, or any astrology for that matter, is a self-propagating cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies. We generalise what is convenient and what we want to see, and explain all other exceptions as the other variability of the stars. I cannot accept this.

In any case, I might be completely wrong, and Gemini might be laughing at me right now for being the staunced-head Virgo that I am.