folk

Starsign people will inherit the earth

February 15, 2023 / ,

A Celestial map from Planisphærium cœleste.

Amanda Montell talks in Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism about how astrology — and TikTok tarot readings, crystals, online alt-spiritualism — gained popularity as a reprieve for people who are marginalized by mainstream complexes of belief. Spirituality, it turns out, is highly marketable. Systems that corner the market on metaphysics tend to feed their beneficiaries well. As with every power structure, lots of people get left out in the lurch, except this time the usual haggardness of inequity comes with the kicker that your soul is also somehow lesser. You’re poor because you don’t work hard enough; you aren’t slim because you don’t eat well; and your soul is unfit for salvation.

So, we seek beliefs that don’t resemble the beliefs of powerful people. You could be stuck in an elevator with a medical doctor, with a priest, with a Fortune 500 CEO, but once you’ve mastered something beyond their control they can’t touch you.

“What, you keep your emergency fund in a savings account instead of an ETF?”

“I don’t know, that sounds like a pretty Libra thing to do…”

Or something. You can at least steal some of their social capital.

None of this is groundbreaking — which, good, because it’s also not my area of study. Research at the intersection of faith and discrimination is vital and has been pursued at length by people who aren’t me. But among many failings I’ve overcome with effort, I used to be an “astrology is bogus” guy. It’s not bogus! It’s populist! I had invented someone in my head who discriminates againts others based on starsign. I imagined someone who decided everything only after watching the sky.

(If that’s someone you know, I ask you this: What do you use to make big decisions? Intuition?)

Now I actually respect astrology, way more than I ever thought I would. It’s an extremely robust system. It never demands that you hate somebody because of their astral chart, it always offers you some way to judge after seeing. “I usually hate Capricorns, but we get along so well! Oh, your Venus is in Sag? That explains it.” Better still, it actually demands that you have a conversation with somebody before deciding how you feel about them astrologically, since nothing about a person’s signs is written on their body.

Overwhelmingly, people I’ve spoken to who are into astrology, even extremely into astrology, tell me it’s mostly for fun. It’s a frame of cognitive play, a highly complex exercise in pattern-finding. Horoscopes prompt us to remember things and direct our attention along paths they otherwise wouldn’t tread. And, sure, I don’t know — if there’s some subvisible squirm beneath the skin of the cosmos, the motion of the stars may manifest there as well as anywhere else.

I’m Cancer sun, Pisces moon, Leo rising btw.

Paths of least resistance

February 12, 2023 /
A side-by-side image of a stone block set on water, next to an image of the same block wet up to half its height.
Water goes “up,” just not uphill.

An interesting fact about water: it will basically never flow uphill. Water follows the laziest path, whichever declines the most nearby, towards a place where there is no further decline to follow. It follows the path of least resistance. Even if there’s a good reservoir just one bump in the pavement behind it, the water will go miles and miles, through rivers and into oceans, in order to move forward.

“Path of least resistance” comes to us from folk physics, which refers to our regular perception of how the world moves. It also owns maybe the most derisively editorialized Wikipedia page I’ve ever seen. In the, say, 300 words of its runtime, only half a clause actually reference the energy states (the real principle at play here). The rest is a takedown of intuition that would make Vince McMahon blush.

Probably the scientists and educators actually discovering these things aren’t also the ones dunking on layman observations about the physical world. Because their discoveries are really interesting. For example, what came to me as a metaphor-rich puddle in my parking garage led me through a steeplechase of circumstances in which, actually, water does flow uphill. Do you know what a superfluid is? Its whole raison d’être is to flow uphill. The atoms of a superfluid work in perfect unison, and that zeroing of internal friction allows it to slip through microscopic cracks and climb up walls.

(This ruins the central visual theme of this post, but note that water definitely can’t be a superfluid. Helium, as far as I know, is the only one we’ve discovered. Although I did find a weird video essay doomsaying water as a potentially apocalyptic superfluid.)

Why would the fluid climb up walls? Because lots of fluids climb up walls. Usually friction and cohesion are enough to stop runaway water molecules from escaping up the edge of a cup. But if adhesion to the walls is stronger than cohesion between the molecules, you get capillary action, which is a basic function of sustaining life.

Personally, I’m not reading too much into the metaphorical heaviness of capillary action. I thought it was symbolic how a puddle would rather take the low road than do something just a little hard. Then I looked a little harder through that instinct and started wishing I could always find a way to flow forward, even when I’m surrounded by so many impossible endpoints. There’s something in the unison of a superfluid and the impulse to climb that rings in those other vignettes, too.

In any case, a little observation is always a good thing. Folksy or otherwise.