In the midst of the witching hour, I call upon the mystic acuity of the cosmos to conduct my weekly ritual: writing my horoscopes column. As I consult the source of infinite wisdom, cafeastrology.com, I transcribe each planetary transit into my open Google document. Despite my heavy eyelids, I steadily observe the phases of the moon, the next Mercury retrograde phase and the upcoming sun sign ingress. The insipidity of this week’s celestial motion nearly tempts me toward the sweet embrace of slumber, until — hark! Something wicked this way comes: Venus has a transit this week.
I will close my thesaurus in order to tell you that, in simple terms, I do not enjoy writing about Venus in my weekly horoscopes. In astrology, Venus rules over the second and seventh houses of money and love respectively. I have no qualms against telling a different sign that they need to save money each week, but I do feel apprehensive about writing about each sign’s love advice. The general public tends to have a very shallow understanding of modern western spirituality. I fear that the people exclusively drawn to love readings may not be interested in fully understanding the practice.
When I started talking to all my friends about astrology in high school, first and foremost everyone asked about their love life. Synastry charts and love readings are among the most popular and prominently featured pages on several astrology websites while focused readings about career and inner-self are rarely advertised. Even beyond astrology, the large majority of the most popular tarot card readings on YouTube center around romance. Of course, love is an incredibly important part of our lives, so the high demand only makes sense.
Don’t get me wrong, love readings do give extremely in-depth advice, and I don’t want to seem dismissive of love as a whole. However, most people who came to me for love readings were not interested in becoming better partners and working toward healthier relationships — they just wanted to know if their shitty exes would come back to them. This stems from the popular belief that astrology’s sole purpose is to predict the future, which I found a rather reductive view of the practice. The wisdom we gain from astrological readings is supposed to help us uncover the parts of ourselves that have been hidden and bring them to light. Simply hearing about natal placements and astrological forecasts without acting upon the advice given will never help us advance toward our goals. Our future is up to us to create for ourselves, but we cannot improve our satisfaction with life without refining ourselves first.
As The Daily has implemented search engine optimized titles into our work, I’ve been trying to make Michigan in Color Horoscopes more attractive for users. Every time I finish writing a horoscope, the temptation to market the article as a love reading is overwhelmingly enticing. I could draw in more engagement, but how many of those readers will really process the information and act upon it? Ever since the conception of MiC Horoscopes, my main goal was always to help people understand how astrologers make judgments based on planets and signs. However, each time I write about love, I am always afraid that my audience will hyperfixate on whether or not their Tinder dates that ghosted them a week ago will suddenly hit them up again rather than trying to use astrology as a catalyst for their own self-improvement. When one of my past horoscopes hit The Daily’s “most read” section, I was so overjoyed, yet a Venus transit made love central to the messages that week. As Venus exits Virgo in two weeks, Michigan in Color’s summer production comes to an end. I am extremely blessed to have started this horoscope project, but I wonder if I have really accomplished my original goal.
MiC Columnist Andrew Nakamura can be contacted at ajkn@umich.edu