It was Co-Star that told me to text my mother, because the app needed the information to produce my natal chart, which uses the positions of planets and stars at the exact time of one’s birth. It produces horoscopes that some say are far more sophisticated than the generic “good luck in finance and love” you see in many newspapers and magazines.

“Astrology is this incredible way of looking at a story about you,” says Ross Clark, chief executive of Sanctuary. “So your chart is a representation of different elements of yourself, or parts of your life’s journey.”

Amid the millennial self-care set, astrology is back. After the heady “What’s your sign?” spirituality of their parents’ youth, the practice receded to the edges of culture as a kooky space-filler in the newspaper, albeit one that was read devotedly.

But now, the pseudoscience isn’t as much of a taboo as it used to be. It’s been embraced by young people, who joking­ly ascribe the inconveniences of life – a delayed train, a broken laptop – to Mercury’s retrograde. They know that Pisces are sensitive and Leos are self-involved and Geminis are kind of the worst. They follow astrology podcasts such as “Stars Like Us,” buy zodiac-themed candles and fragran­ces and crystals, and share astrology memes from Insta­gram accounts such as Drunk Astrology and Not All Geminis.

I mean, come on. No one actually thinks that the stars and planets determine their personality. Except, the tumult of one’s late 20s is because of Saturn’s return, and what if water and earth signs really do just get along better?

“I call it getting into the woo,” says Shanna Quinn, 37, a Chicagoan who checks four astrology apps daily. Woo, for that “woo-woo” stuff.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been getting into the woo, too. A sceptic, I wanted to learn why seemingly everyone my age was looking to the stars. I downloaded all the apps. I got a few readings, and I am now the reluctant owner of four crystals. And I realised why it seems like everyone’s so into astrology again, even if no one claims to believe in it, and it isn’t real: it’s kind of like psychotherapy plus magic.

Astrology is an ancient art but the modern horo­scope came about in 1930, as a gimmick for British newspaper the Sunday Express, which wanted something splashy in its pages after the birth of Princess Margaret. Astrologer R.H. Naylor wrote an article predict­ing that the princess would have “an eventful life” – bold prediction there – and that “events of tremendous impor­tance to the royal family and the nation” would happen in her seventh year. That last one basically came true – in 1936, her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne, and her father, George VI, became king. And Naylor became a star astrologer with a weekly column.

One enters the craft by taking courses or training under experienced astrologers. The practice has undergone tech­no­logical upgrades: there used to be a lot of maths involved but modern astrologers can pull up a natal chart in seconds by plugging your birth details into a software program.

“Astrology is a combination of myth and maths,” says astrologer Shelley Ackerman, publicity director for the International Society for Astrological Research.

There’s a good chance some of the descriptions of me above may have resonated for you. Plenty of people are riddled with doubt, or have dated people who weren’t right for us.

That’s how horoscopes work, says James Alcock, a professor who researches parapsychology at York University, in Canada. It’s a phenomenon called the Barnum Effect, named after circus founder P.T. Barnum. Basically: if an astrologer or palm reader makes a statement that could apply to many people during a reading – something like, “You’re generally a very open person, but sometimes find it hard to share things even with your closest friends” – someone is more likely to ascribe it to the teller’s abilities.

Astrology is “part of my routine,” says Katie Murtha, 29, from Cleveland, who reads the Elle magazine horoscopes online. “When it’s right, it feels really interesting and kind of weird and magical. And if it’s totally wrong, it’s just something to laugh about.”

So when Dave Campbell, president of the American Federation of Astrologers, tells me that my chart shows that I have a brother who was born when I was three, and that the age of 19 was a bad year for me, he is correct. When he tells me that the position of the asteroid Sappho in my chart could indicate that I’m a lesbian, or bisexual, he is not.

“But one of my best friends is bi, and many of my male friends are gay,” I volunteer, because that’s the trick astro­logy plays on your mind: you’re compelled to think of ways the predictions might be true.

Eighty years later, Naylor’s professional descendants are branching out into new mediums – ones that have a potential to earn a lot of money in the US$2 billion “mystical services market.” Bull and Moon is a recently launched app that purports to help users pick stocks according to their astrological signs. Collective Gain is a company that brings astrologers, intuitives and energy healers to the workplace, using staffers’ astrological charts to help them work better together.

“It is costing organisations money when people are showing up not engaged and not knowing who they are,” says Lizzie Alberga, the company’s founder and chief execu­tive. Some might balk at the notion of astrological readings in the workplace, but Alyssa Rogers, a 31-year-old Collective Gain astrologer, says they’re a means of under­standing “the complexity of a group and getting a team to understand that, you know, not everyone is the same. And the complex­ity is actually what makes that dynamic really strong.”

Another astrology business takes its cues from the gig economy.

“It’s sort of like a cosmic ride-share app, if that makes sense,” says Clark, of Sanctuary, which raised US$1.5 million in venture capital. With the premium version, US$19.99 a month, users can summon an astrologer for a 15-minute text message reading each month, on demand. I log on, and am soon joined by an astrologer who, by request, focuses the reading on relationships with my friends, which he says will be important next spring.

“I’m sure most of your friends are women and/or quite pretty,” writes Arthur, and I wonder: is my astrologer sucking up to me? It was not a generic prediction, he later tells me.

“The 11th house is friends and groups, and yours is ruled by Venus, the planet of love and beauty and feminine things,” he says. “Yours is very close to an angle, it gives it a lot of extra strength.”

The astrologer, it turns out, is Arthur Lipp-Bonewits, a 29-year-old who achieved internet fame after procur­ing the birth time of Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to read her natal chart. (Dissecting celebrity natal charts is a popular hobby among astrologers, who are intimately familiar with that of US President Donald Trump: that he released his long-form birth certificate is “one of the few good things to come out of the birther controversy”, Lipp-Bonewits says.)

Lipp-Bonewits specialises in predictions. Here’s one of his: the winner of the 2020 election, “whether it’s Trump, whether it’s one of the Democrats, is almost certainly going to be assassinated or die in office,” he tells me.

Because the apps are social and often free, they’re like the gateway drug to the woo. Get sucked in and you may find yourself researching Akashic Records or Human Design, or getting your aura photographed – like a cosmic Instagram filter. At Campbell’s suggestion, I build a small altar at my work desk to help “manifest the positive” into my life.

I cover a piece of gold tissue paper with talismans of good fortune, including a seashell to represent a holiday I hope to take, a cheque from a journalism award I’ve recent­ly won, and The New York Times bestseller list, for the book I hope I will write one day (“Aim high,” my editor says). I go online and buy my first crystal – moonstone, associated with my zodiac sign – which came with instructions to “activate” it by leaving it out in sunlight or a full moon, and then speaking my intentions to it.

“I activate this stone,” I whisper, so my colleagues won’t make fun of me. I am instructed to “feed” my altar every day with pennies to “create positive energy”. But by day four I have forgotten them, so I feed it some paper clips.

That’s what happens if you analyse the woo too much: you realise you seem totally nuts. Alcock, no fan of astrology, compares it to another non-scientific, ancient method for supposedly gaining insight: “If I said, ‘Look, I just killed a fox and I’ve read its entrails, and you’re going have a really great day,’ most people would say, ‘Oh my God, don’t do that. That’s just disgusting,’” he says.

But as long as people aren’t letting their lives revolve around astrology, they’re not doing much harm. They may even be doing some good.

“It gets people to talk about their personality and their emotions and life experiences in a way that they usually wouldn’t,” says Tayla Jones, 23, who runs the meme account Drunk Astrology with her friend Sam Gorman, 24. Astro­logy makes expressing your feelings “kind of a game”. It isn’t about telling people who they will become, but rather, who they may not realise they already are.

The messages I keep getting from the apps encourage me to be introspective and gentle with myself. They require no leap of faith.

“Tap into your inner voice. What is your gut telling you?” Sanctuary says.

“It takes real courage to let another human see you,” Co-Star says.

“Your struggles may be the source of your greatest strength,” the Pattern says.

Those don’t seem like horoscopes to me. They seem like therapy. In fact, some of the things the apps have pinned on me are things I had already been working on with a professional.

Astrology has seamlessly integrated with the wellness industry. Most people who are using these apps aren’t trying to predict the future – they see it as a tool for self-discovery and emotional exploration. And its marketing has kept pace, pivoting from witchy spirituality to the blandly luxe aesthetic of Goop. It’s talked about in the same breath as vitamins, yoga or a spa treatment. And for a generation that has struggled financially and emotionally but lacks access to affordable mental health care, some may even be using it as a cheap substitute.

Even though some of the self-empowering platitudes in the astrology apps could have just as easily been found on the inside of a Dove chocolate wrapper, people put more stock into them because of their medium.

“There’s a tendency that if there’s an app for it, it somehow gives it more credibility,” Alcock says.

But the app horoscopes are just like the wrappers: momentarily poignant, but disposable. When you look at your natal chart, you’re the centre of the universe. But everyone else is the centre of theirs.

There was one other thing several of the apps and astro­logers could agree on in my chart. Maybe this article has been in the works for 34 years, or perhaps since the begin­ning of time and the creation of the universe. Because 13.8 billion years later, the alignment of the stars and planets and constellations at the precise time of my birth in 1985 drew a distinct pattern.

My Mercury is in the eighth house, which rules Scorpio and is forming an aspect to Uranus, Rogers says. I have the natal chart of a person interested in the “occult, the things that are different, unconventional, maybe even taboo”.

So, it was in the midst of working on a story about astrology that I found out my astrological chart indicates that I am interested in … astrology.

Text: The Washington Post