A week away from the American election, and the polls cannot tell us who will be president. But can they ever? A poll is, as the pundits always remind us, a snapshot of public opinion, not a prediction. Nate Silver himself said that anyone dissecting an individual poll is ‘just doing astrology’. So what predictions are actual astrologers making about the election?
She looks relieved when she draws the High Priestess: a trump card, but possibly not a Trump card
Under the electoral college system, nationwide data is not as important as predictions for the swing states, so I look for astrologers in the seven states which will decide the election. The drawback to this methodology quickly becomes apparent: predicting the future is illegal in half of them.
Beck Lawrence runs the Serpent’s Key, a ‘witchery and apothecary’ in Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes). ‘I was getting ready to set up my shop – our grand opening was going to be on Halloween – and the police chief came in with another officer and said, just so you know, any sort of divination for financial gain is illegal.’ The maximum penalty for one who ‘pretends for gain or lucre, to tell fortunes or predict future events, by cards, tokens… or by consulting the movements of the heavenly bodies’ is a $2,500 fine or a year in prison.
Beck is suing the police chief for breaching her First Amendment rights, but is able to tell me – ‘for entertainment purposes only’, as the disclaimer on every wall of the shop reads – that there will be political unrest and restructuring as Pluto moves into Aquarius. As we speak over Zoom, she reaches for her tarot deck for confirmation: the first card is the Tower – quite literally a White House, she giggles – quickly followed by the four of wands, reversed, which ‘kind of speaks to a lack of clarity about the situation. It’s going to be a really, really close race’. She looks relieved when she draws the High Priestess: a trump card, but possibly not a Trump card, reflecting as it does the divine feminine.
Ms Margo, a Native American seer from Michigan (15 votes), has a more productive relationship with her local police force, and has used her clairvoyance to help them locate missing persons (including one murder victim). She shows me her collection of animal bones and stones, passed down through the Chippewa people, wrapped in a deerskin; she casts them on a beaver skin but, she says, mainly for the benefit of the person receiving the reading – ‘People like things tangible’ – rather than because she needs them. She receives visions, some of which, like the police work, are harrowing, others more pleasant. In one reading, she tasted butter pecan ice cream – which turned out to be the last thing her client’s partner ate before she died.
Her visions about the American election, however, are not so exciting, at least at first. She sees a race between a donkey and another animal running neck and neck, which sounds like one of those boring and unfunny editorial cartoons that American news-papers go in for – but then she sees a Kamala Harris victory. ‘It’s just, it’s not being done or prepared right,’ she says, her eyes closed, gently swaying. ‘I feel like damage or something is going to happen afterwards. I don’t know if it’s six weeks afterwards or six months.’
The sense that election day is not the end of the story is shared by Michael West, an astronumerologist from Georgia (16 votes). ‘There’s definitely going to be a recount,’ he says. Michael is regularly consulted by ‘high-net-worth individuals’ on political matters – deciding which districts are worth investing in or living in – and bases his predictions on planetary alignments re-inforced by numerology. ‘That gives the astrological patterns that they’re in more energy.’ His view is that too much attention is paid to the day of the election, where the candidates are finely balanced: Saturn, which rules authority figures, is elevated in Kamala Harris’s chart, ‘so that says a lot’, but Mars, which governs contests, is in Donald Trump’s 11th house. By inauguration day, however, ‘after they do the recount, it’s all her’.
I find no one willing to break the laws against using occult or crafty science in North Carolina or Wisconsin, and – as every pollster knows – people in Nevada are notoriously hard to pin down, so I look for someone who can give me a national overview. Political astrology is known as mundane astrology, which is a ridiculous bit of branding for the least humdrum type of astrology. (Having said that, some mundane astrologers predict the election by thinking about how miserable they will be on 6 November if Trump wins, and checking that against their diurnal chart for the day. Which is mundane.) At its highest form, mundane astrology is about seeing correlations between celestial cycles and earthly events – like the British astrologer Julian Venables, who predicted Brexit because, in 2016, Saturn and Pluto met in Capricorn for the first time since 1517; history may not repeat itself, but leaving the church of Rome and the treaty of Rome certainly rhyme. It’s rather beautiful.
There are no such obvious correlations on 5 November. The opinion of the mundane astrologers: it’s too close to call, but Kamala might squeak it. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad name after all.
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