WAS the American Empire brought down by astrology? The thought is hard to avoid when you read The New Yorker’s review of a life of Linda Goodman, who made astrology fashionable in the 1970s. Her books sold 30 million copies, and, in 1978, she sold the paperback rights for Linda Goodman’s Love Signs for $2.25 million, the most ever paid for a non-fiction book at the time.
Rachel Syme, who reviews Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s forgotten astrology queen by Courtney Ann LaFaive, thinks that the attraction of astrology is “the feeling, at once comforting and enlivening, that your idiosyncrasies can be traced to forces far greater than yourself”; but this seems to me precisely backwards. The attraction of astrology is that it tells you that there is no one in the universe greater or more interesting than you are. It lets you into the secret of looking at the universe so that it all falls into place around you.
As an example of what Ms Syme calls Goodman’s “bold, conspiratorial tone”, this is the passage that enchanted the biographer when she stumbled on it at the age of 13: “The Aries girl will open her own doors. She’ll also put on her own coat, fight her own battles, pull out her own chair, hail her taxi and light her cigarette without any masculine help. . . Scarlett O’Hara is the very epitome of the Mars-ruled Aries female. . . Both the O’Hara and the Aries characters are tough enough to defy convention, face an advancing army, or even shoot a man through the head with icy calmness, if he threatens her loved ones.”
Even before she published any books, Goodman could charge up to $1000 (about $9500 in today’s dollars) for a single birth chart in Manhattan — cheap, really, for the reassurance that the entire universe thinks you’re important.
The one fact that really cannot be fitted into the solipsistic world-view is death, and Goodman decided that death must be an illusion, too. “Physical immortality is natural — and death is unnatural,” she wrote. She suggested that her readers “imagine the spirals of your cells turning the opposite direction and repeat aloud, I am immortal, and I now ordain my body to demonstrate this.”
She first came to this realisation when her daughter, Sally, aged 21, killed herself. “The police allegedly found an eight-page note and a bottle of barbiturates at Sally’s side, and Sam identified his stepdaughter’s body. . . The police deemed it a suicide, but Goodman refused to accept the ruling — or even the fact that Sally was gone at all. Instead, she consulted Sally’s birth chart and concluded that somewhere, somehow, her daughter was still alive. . . Goodman flew to Manhattan not to mourn Sally but to look for her. She had dreamed that her daughter was alive, and took it as a sign. The Times later reported that Goodman was so frantic that she hung around New York in a daze for weeks, sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She begged N.Y.P.D. detectives to take her seriously, insisting that someone had replaced Sally’s body with a double.”
This appeared to LaFaive as an example of patriarchal oppression, and she set out to write the story of a forgotten feminist heroine. To do her credit, the review shows her discovering that the truth might not be quite that simple.
Goodman died a “fruitarian”, who thought that she was working towards becoming a “breatharian” immortal who could survive on air alone. The flaw in this is not so much that it’s unscientific (she died of diabetes), but that it is untrue to the moral facts of our existence as well.
Outside the rich world, the belief that the universe is set up to give you personally what you want is still largely confined to toddlers; but contemporary America makes no sense without it. It saturates the storytelling culture, too: films must have a hero, and preferably a superhero, around whom the other characters orbit. Books are marketed as stories of individual triumph over adversity. Algorithmic social media make each reader the centre of a comforting and comprehensible universe.
It’s not just America, but every American who is told that they’re entitled to a manifest destiny. America has now twice elected a President whose greatest political asset is his “bold, conspiratorial tone” and utter disregard for truth, and the story of Goodman helps us understand why. But death comes to empires as well as to astrologers, and denying that it can will get you no further than the Strait of Hormuz.