The Sky Speaks — An Astrologer Reacts to Astrologers Guessing People’s Signs

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today I am going to react to astrologers who put themselves to the test guessing people's signs. I've noticed this as a trend over the years. Every now and then someone sends me a video and says, Is there anything to this? Or in fact, people at different social gatherings throughout my life. As soon as they find out I'm an astrologer, they go, Okay, guess my sign.

So from time to time, I'm able to do this. Why? How is that possible, that we can do that as astrologers, and also, why is it a bad idea? I want to talk about this guessing people's signs.

There was a video that someone sent me recently, and I'm going to show you a clip from it as a way of illustrating the general idea behind this, and then I'm going to talk through it. I wrote a reflection on this today after watching the video that someone sent me and just sitting with it.

So there's a kind of, kind of journal entry, reflective space that I entered into with this one. And I hope you'll find this useful, especially since you yourself may, once in a while, find that you are just immediately understanding the sun sign or moon or rising sign of someone sitting in front of you, and it's like, well, how did I just do that?

But then again, you, like most of the people that are submitted to these tests, would probably fail if put in a room of a dozen people and asked to guess their signs. What's going on here? That's what we're going to talk about today.

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Okay, let's get into it. I am going to first show you this video that I was sent. It includes an astrologer, and I want to make it clear I'm not criticizing this astrologer. This is not like, let's slam this guy for doing this. You know, I think it's interesting, but I want to talk about it today.

So I'm going to show you a little bit of the video first, and then we're going to discuss. Okay, so here he is in a room of 12 people, and he is given these placards with, you know, like little name tags that have the 12 signs on them. And he spends some time with each person trying to guess their sign and then the results.

So I'm just going to show you some clips from this. I won't show you the whole thing, just so you get the feel for what it's like.

Got fish teeth so bad? No, it's Pisces. Let's see him. No, my name is Rey Couture. I'm a professional astrologer.

And how long have you been an astrologer? Between 45 and 50 years? Have you ever done anything like this?

So Phil, like a long time seasoned vet. I don't know him personally or anything, but he's been doing it for a long time. They ask him about his experience. They ask if he's ever done anything like this. And he goes, Well, no, not in like a group setting, but he does mention that casually. He's done this for years. So watch this,

not in a group setting, but wherever I am, I look at somebody and say, Are you a Pisces?

This is important because this is the point I'm going to make today. I one of the points I want to make is that all astrologers know what Rey is talking about. We all have moments where we go like, Wait, are you a Pisces, you are. Oh, my God. What is that? How does that work?

And then why does Rey miserably fail this exam he's about to take with 12 people in a room in a group setting, when he himself admits, I've never done it like this before. That's important, and it's really important for us astrologers to talk about something like this. Let's see the rest.

Sometimes they say, yeah, and sometimes they say, none of your business.

All right, let's get everyone lined up. They're gonna stand behind you. So what happens now is they each individually walk up to him, and he asks some questions and looks at them and then assigns what he believes their sign is. So I'll show you a few examples.

What's your name? Nathan, how Tao? Are you 5'10", can I see your profile? Okay, Scorpio. What makes me a Scorpio to you the intensity.

So he looks at his profile, kind of sizes them up, and says, the intensity that makes you Scorpio? Okay, let's see another one.

When you were growing up, what kind of problems did you have with your parents?

They could never decide if they wanted to be together or not, you worry a lot, absolutely, mainly about my son. Just face Ellen.

What are you looking for?

Oh, the ears of a Capricorn are just chiseled. I'll go with Virgo. Change it now to Libra. Why he accepted it too fast.

Okay, so really interesting, right? He's asking them questions. What I want to point out, and I will point out again when I read you my written reflection, is, astrologers need context.

The reason that we're able to guess people's signs is always because something contextual appears and the symbols speak in context. Context is always where symbols appear, and so he's gathering some context and seeing if he can intuit the presence of symbols, let's say, in this person's birth chart, by means of gathering some context about them.

What I'm going to talk about today is that context is not the same as science, and that's really important when it comes to symbolic identification. Let's talk about this a little bit more in a bit. I have to watch how people act too.

What did you study in college? I didn't go to college. Do you travel? Like would you say a lot, a lot.

So he goes on to give her Sagittarius, because she travels a lot, you know some stuff that I think everyone's probably pretty familiar with. The one I want to get to that I think, I thought was pretty interesting was this one which he correctly identified. Actually,

I'm going to try Capricorn with you. It could be Aquarius, so it might change later. Okay, thank you.

All right, the next girl that steps forward, watch what he does here. It's really cool.

Hi. What's your name? Amalia,

when you were growing up, what did you want to be like a leader or like actress or something like fun, an entertainer, for sure.

Do you like to control things around you. Yes, I like it my way. Mostly those are like that.

He says, most Leos are like that. So first of all, notice, oh, he actually says this. Let me show you. Here I am. See how he see how he identifies her, stepping forward so boldly, like that, in addition to the other context she provided. And he sees Leo, see most of the time when astrologers, any of you me listening to this, are able to identify some feature of a person's chart, it is almost always because the context has dramatically shown a symbol.

And he does a nice job with this one, and this is one of the ones he got correct. Anyway, let's go forward just a little bit more, and we're going to go right here.

Okay, they look like me and your phone answer is Aries. Hello. Hello, my Gemini. How are you good? How are you? Where did you go to school? I did not go to college. I think so. Okay, so there you have it.

All right, raise your hand if he got you correct. So that's four, four out of 12 that he got correct. Now the video goes on, and if you want to watch the rest of it, you know, feel free to check it out. It's on the channel is cut, and its title is an astrologer. Guess the stranger zodiac signs, Rey, and there's a number of others that are shown. Some of the other videos I'm sure would be equally interesting to watch.

What I want to talk about now is why I think something like this works, like he got that Leo right. And anyone who knows astrology knows exactly why he got it right. And if we all asked more questions to these people and got more context, there'd probably be more that we'd be able to get right.

But there is so much wrong with this. There's so many things that I want to just offer some gentle criticism here, too. So I wrote, as you guys know, I love to write, and I recently wrote a reflection on a study that was done claiming that astrologers are narcissistic and unintelligent. And I really enjoyed creating kind of a spoken word meditation that I wrote almost as a journal entry.

So I did the same thing here. I just, I tried to drop in and go into the most authentic voice and space I can find in myself as an astrologer, like, how do I process this? What are, what are my heart's feelings and thoughts about this.

And rather than offering a rhetorical, you know, talk with points, I write out, I'm just going to read you this, because it really is much more like the private diary of an astrologer for me. Then it is like a talk, and I want to try to speak from that space more often, especially in these Sunday videos.

So this is what I wrote after watching this, and what comes to my mind in thinking about this kind of exercise in general, I want to reflect now on what it means for an astrologer to guess someone's sign, and what a demonstration like this does or doesn't do for the dignity of our craft. And just to be clear again, this isn't a critique of the astrologer in the video. It's a reflection on astrology itself, its capacities, its limitations, and the reverence that it deserves.

In the clip, we saw an astrologer walk into a room of strangers handed placards and is asked to match person to sign, no charts, no context, no aspects or house placements, just a few questions, some glances at faces and hands and whatever intuitive sparks come through. And in the end, he got four out of 12.

Right now, that's not great statistically, but it also isn't surprising, because what is legitimate here is that every astrologer who has practiced long enough knows that sometimes something about a person lights up an archetype instantly. It could be a gesture, a facial expression, a way of stepping forward, a tone of voice, these small human details can call a planet or sign to mind before you even know why symbolic recognition in astrology is real.

Astrologers live in the language of patterns. We feel Saturn or Venus or Mars in the air around someone, so to speak, without needing their chart. But here's where the method breaks down. Astrological symbolism is multivalent. It shows up through many layers of the chart, and intuition rarely tells you which layer you're reading.

So someone might feel Saturnian, not because they're a Capricorn sun, but because Saturn is angular or squaring their ascendant ruler, or ruling their moon, or currently transiting a major point in their chart. That ambiguity is normal for astrologers. It's part of the craft.

But when a test like this forces you to hang the entire human being on one small part of the chart, the sun sign. The exercise is already flawed, and that brings up something deeper the way astrology is presented in this video and in popular culture.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm thankful that astrology is gaining some traction socially, but multiple times, the cameraman in this video asks, Why are you looking at her hands, or what are you seeing in her facial profile, or what are you looking for? And the astrologer responds with very literal explanations, things like Capricorns don't waste anything so their ears tend to sit close to their head.

But that's not objectively true. It's not some kind of objective physiognomy. It's not measurable. It will never be scientifically provable for all Capricorns, or even most of them. What is true is that, over years, his symbolic eye, his personal relationship with the Oracle has trained itself around certain idiosyncratic correlations, and that is beautiful.

That is one of the most enigmatic, beautiful parts of astrology, that the symbols in our symbolic eye is entrained uniquely for each one of us, as we learn and grow and practice astrology over long periods of time, that is beautiful. That is a part of the mystery of this craft, that is part of the epistemology of this craft, which we should seek to understand at deeper and deeper levels.

Astrologers develop intuitive, symbolic pattern recognition that becomes uniquely our own, but can also speak somewhat objectively to things that are actually there. In a birth chart that we're actually picking up on, there are meaningful correlations that repeat for us as practitioners, and through long practice, those correlations become part of our personal divinatory intelligence. In this way, astrology is truly shamanic.

But that does not make it a universal rule of astrology. It does not make it a science of facial features. It does not mean every Capricorn has tight ears. A good practitioner, in my opinion, would say something like this. Symbols can speak in a lot of different ways. Over the years, certain patterns have shown up for me. They don't appear in everyone, but in my practice, the Oracle has trained my eye to see certain signatures in particular ways.

That kind of honesty preserves the integrity of astrology. It explains the part without turning intuition into a rigid doctrine, a pseudo science. The issue is that in videos like this one, we don't take time to explain how astrologers perceive symbols or why that perception doesn't translate into objective testing. And when we fail to provide that explanation, astrology ends up looking shallow or ridiculous.

Let me bring this back to the example from earlier in the clip. He correctly identifies a young woman as a Leo. Her bright, forward energy practically announces itself. I could see it. But in real practice, if that same woman sat across from me in a counseling context, struggling at her work or in her marriage, simply identifying Leo would be the least interesting part.

Maybe her Leo Sun is square Saturn. Now astrology becomes meaningful. Now the symbol opens because I can say your impulse to shine, to lead to be seen, it's real, but Saturn is square to the sun, and so you've had to carry doubts or delays around expressing that essential fire. I can talk about timing, Uranus, transiting that configuration, periods of release or breakthrough moments when the karmic knot tightens or loosens.

That's astrology. That's the art, not guessing the sign, not matching a face to a label. It's the interpretive unfolding of symbols in context, in real living life, context with sensitivity, with timing, with the ability to articulate meaning.

When astrology gets reduced to guesswork, even the correct guesses fail to demonstrate what the craft actually does and when it fails, as it often will under these artificial conditions, it makes astrology look worse than it actually is.

So my point isn't that astrologers can't have fun, or that intuition isn't real, or that symbols can't be seen in someone's bearing or face or mannerisms. They can. We all know they can. If you spend just a little bit of time with astrology in your own life, you'll see that they can.

My point is that astrology is so much more than that, and when we try to validate it through parlor tricks or quick hits, we risk cheapening the very thing that gives its life, its depth, its context, its artistry. Its spiritually informed intelligence, its ability to illuminate a person's path.

Astrology isn't a guessing game. It's a dialog, a dialog with meaning itself. And when I see videos like this. It's always my desire to protect honor and remember what astrology is really about.

In this case, I think it's also fun to say what it is that's actually working when someone guesses some of these things correctly, that's the nuance we need. How does this work and why isn't it enough?

Because there's a whole camp of people for whom, if you say this doesn't work, this isn't real, they'll be like, Well, I have this happen to me all the time where I correctly guess people's signs. You can't tell me it's not real. But if you talk to professional astrologers who get really frustrated by this kind of testing, they'll say this is bogus.

So we need thoughtful conversations that say, why is this real and why isn't it also enough, those are my honest reflections. That's the what the interior space of my heart looks like, digesting and processing this video, which also, I will say, gave me some good laughs, because it's just it's fun.

Astrology can be so much fun when you meet someone to get those hits. When I'm at a professional astrology conference and I feel safe and I'm with people, we're sitting down, we're talking, or we're at dinner, and I'm with students or practitioners colleagues, and we're describing something people are always like, is that? Is that Gemini was that this? Was that that because symbols are dancing in front of us all the time as astrologers, and naming them and playing with them is part of the joy of this craft, so let's never take that away.

But let's also be clear what we're actually doing, what's actually at work when it's working. All right, that's what I've got for today. I hope this was interesting. Feel free to add your own comments and thoughts. I'd love to hear from you.

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