ask jeanna: on horoscopes, co-star, & prayer

a new column

It’s the first edition of Ask Jeanna! a monthly column featuring questions from paid subscribers in the astrology for writers Discord. Anything to do with astrology, spirituality, witchcraft, writing, and/or traditional publishing is on the table.

Today, we are tackling whether you should read horoscopes for your sun or rising sign (or both), using Dolly Parton’s chart as an example; the utility of astrology apps, and Co-Star in particular; and my relationship to and history with prayer, as an ex-evangelical (it gets witchy).

Those of you who have been here for a while know that brevity is not my strength. I’m a Mercury in Sagittarius native who grew up in the rural Midwest. No surprise, I went long here. Hope that’s alright. This is a new format, so let me know what you like/don’t like!

And also!

Before we get going, one last reminder that today is the last day to register for Showing Up to the Work: 12 Weeks to a Viable Draft, the writing sprint we will be doing together for all of Q1. We start TOMORROW MORNING! AHH! If you’re looking for a built-in writing routine and writing community to jump-start your 2024: this is it.

And now, for your questions!

Question 1: I often hear that you should read both your horoscope for your sun sign and for your rising. But how should I think of both in relationship to each other? Does the Sun give you the big picture and the rising, the details? Other way around? I sometimes feel like the horoscopes end up canceling each other out.

This is an incredibly good and thoughtful and common question, but one that I often forget about. Thank you for asking it. 

My probably unpopular answer is that, in my opinion, if you’re reading your horoscopes for actual accuracy rather than entertainment, you should only read the horoscopes for your rising sign. If you don’t particularly think astrology has anything to offer you beyond entertainment value, then you don’t really have to read this missive any further, and you can feel free to read whatever horoscopes you like. Go forth and prosper!

But if you do think that your horoscope has some valuable information to offer you on a monthly basis, then stay with me. 

The caveats astrologers (myself included!) include for the sun sign are there primarily for folks who do not know their birth time. Sun sign horoscopes, mind, are far from ideal, especially if an astrologer (like myself) is writing horoscopes based on the rising sign rather than solar horoscopes, which is a style of horoscope writing which puts the sun in the first house no matter what. (If you don’t know what a “first house” is, don’t worry. This will make sense further down.) Rising sign horoscopes are far more common than solar, and astrologers rarely explicitly differentiate for readers which kind they are writing. 

But I also do say that folks have the option to read for sun sign because there are, and I am going to just be very frank here, some extremely stubborn people who insist that they are astrologically savvy while also insisting that they could simply never read a horoscope for their ascendant, because they love their sun sign so much. And, like, sure? I understand feeling connected to and seen by parts of the chart, like the sun. I’m a Capricorn sun. I love that about myself. 

But I never ever ever read or listen to or pay attention to other astrologers’ Capricorn horoscopes! Because they are not accurate for what is going on in my chart! 

The horoscopes for my rising sign are. 

Horoscopes aren’t a meme. They aren’t about “relating to” a sign. They’re about the information that is pertinent to what is happening in my life now. And that is determined by your ascendant, or rising sign.

Maybe it’s the Capricorn in me — I like being right and being able to strategize with all the information far more than I care about being able to “relate to” something. 

So let’s pull back a minute and talk about what horoscopes actually are, and how astrologers like myself even get that purportedly accurate information in the first place. This connects to why they are based on the rising sign, which will help you understand why the ascendant is of primary importance. 

And let’s stick with a Capricorn for an example chart! Let’s use the chart of our legendary mother of the House of Glitter and Glam, Dolly Parton. 

This is what a birth chart looks like when an astrologer pulls a chart for you. Those of you familiar with astro.com and more traditional astrology apps will recognize this kind of chart (A!  List! Is! Not! A! Chart!!!!).

Take a moment to familiarize yourself. You can see that the circle is divided up into 12 identical pieces of pie (the “houses,” which are numbered on the inside). This is because I use whole sign houses, where each “house” of the birth chart, which each have to do with a separate area of life, each belonging to a different sign. You’ll notice that the first house does not begin with the ascendant itself, as it does in a Placidus house system, but rather that the ascendant falls within the first house. 

You may recognize some of the sign glyphs in that thin, very outermost ring, which are color coded in my software by element (so the glyphs that are water signs are dark blue, fire signs are red, earth signs are brown, and air signs are light blue). 

You may even recognize some of the planetary glyphs. Dolly’s sun is easy to pick out — a circle with a dot in the middle, there in the Capricorn 5th house. It’s sitting with Venus (another very recognizable glyph!) and Mercury. 

The moon, too, is an easy one to find. It’s in her first house, with her ascendant, or rising sign, which is at 14 degrees of Virgo. 

Guess what horoscope I would have Dolly read if she were my client? 

If you guessed Virgo — and not Capricorn — you would be correct. 

Because it is the rising sign that “sets up” the entire chart. This, below, is where all the planets, today, are “landing” in Dolly’s chart. Your birth chart, that snapshot of the sky the moment you took your first breath, always stays the same (that inner circle!). But one major way that astrologers know what is “happening” in your life is by tracking where the planets are landing in your chart now — and that, as you can see, is determined by your rising sign.

It is a Virgo horoscope, not a Capricorn one, which would recognize that Dolly has been having that transformative Pluto in Capricorn transit through her fifth house of creativity for the last 15 years. And while a general horoscope itself would not necessarily know that Dolly’s sun (sense of purpose), Venus (artistry), and Mercury (writing life) are there, it would still account for the underworld journeys and absolutely transformative rebirth in artistic vision she has had. As Pluto goes over her sun yet again, she has released her Rockstar album to great critical and commercial acclaim. There is an extraordinary focus on creative legacy. 

Other astrological events of the last few years have also been very explicit transits in Parton’s chart. Consider the Cancer/Capricorn eclipse cycle of 2018-2020, which for Parton landed in her 11th house of greater community and 5th house of creativity. Those years saw the rise of COVID; it also saw her almost immediate $1 million donation to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s research and work on the Moderna vaccine. A Cancerian 11th house north node quite literal community care experience if ever there was one. 

Or go much earlier, back to 1995, when Parton founded her Imagination Library (the cornerstone of the Dollywood Foundation), a program inspired by her father’s illiteracy. Jupiter, the healer-teacher, was going through her fourth house of home, roots, and heritage. Dreamy Neptune and innovation-inspiring Uranus were in her fifth house of creativity (and children!), asking, what could we do if there were no limits? (“We just started this in my home county… We thought, ‘Well, maybe if we’re lucky it might go a couple of counties over,'” Parton said in the 2020 documentary The Library That Dolly Built.) And boom. You have the cosmic conditions for something magical to happen, especially when talking about someone with her level of resources and a pre-existing foundation already in place. 

Sticking with the Imagination Library example, she was also having north node eclipses in her Scorpio third house — the kind of eclipses that are hungry to create transformative change in our local neighborhood. Incidentally, K-12 education also lives in this part of the chart! 

The examples go on and on. 

But only if we use the Virgo rising — which is what sets up the chart in the first place. 

mother is mothering

Question 2: given your background, I'm very curious what your advice is for astrology newcomers regarding apps to use and how to approach the content in them. my friends take costar very literally sometimes.

What the question asker is alluding to is my (significant) work history with astrology apps. (I’ve written about this before.) The fact that I’ve worked on so many apps should indicate that I do find (some of) them useful. 

Fact: most folks don’t have their entire chart memorized. Fact: most folks aren’t astrology experts. Fact: even professional astrologers sometimes need to check what sign the moon is in on the fly, and most of us aren’t carrying around an enormous ephemeris. To that end, I think that apps can be an incredibly helpful reference to have for when you forget your Mars sign or need to check the moon phase or the planetary hour or what have you. And I think that resources that are accurate and actually encourage astrological fluency among everyday folks, like the CHANI app, are, generally, a good thing! Reading about your daily transits, for example, can really help your understanding of the rhythm of the planets and deepen your relationship to planetary energy over time. Again: a net good.

But apps are only ever a reference or a starting point. They are not the end-all, be-all, and I don’t think they should be anyone’s sole source of astrological education. For one, they are not designed to be (and I would know!). Some are more comprehensive than others (Sanctuary’s library, for example), but an app is never a substitute for a live reading with an astrologer that is entirely dedicated to the nuances of your birth chart. And if you really want to dig into learning more about astrology, I do think it’s essential to know the lineage you’re getting your information from. Whether that means reading books or subscribing to folks’ Patreons — there are many ways to deepen your knowledge.

But I would like to say something else in regards to this question that I have wanted to say for a very, very long time:

Delete Co-Star. Forget it ever existed.

Everything I said about how apps can be a net good and a helpful resource and a good starting point? DOES NOT APPLY TO CO-STAR.

Banu Guler, who founded Co-Star, understands how to build a trendy product. And she should. Her work history is in building “immersive tech experiences” for brands such as Diane von Furstenberg, Alex & Ani, Ann Taylor, and Michael Kors. She served as Director of Product and Design at VFILES, which is, ironically, a mission-driven fashion organization here in New York. But then, she saw an early market opening in the tech space for astrology and jumped on it.

Creating an astrology app doesn’t make her an astrologer. To be fair, the founder doesn’t have to be! But no matter what she tells Chris Brennan on a podcast, her actions demonstrate that she has never been invested in the spiritual or ethical implications of her product. She was invested in getting investors (which she has done, successfully, to the tune of millions) and followed the NYC startup playbook, with some classic marketing and publicity stunts from her fashion days thrown in. Leading with “NASA data” in the PR sheet was a nice touch.

Co-Star certainly hasn’t disclosed that they only recently started hiring astrologers to work for them. For years, all of their push notifications and horoscopes and descriptions of your signs were written by marketers who were basing their content off of stereotypes. But the thing is, if they just stuck to stereotypes, they would have faded to the background by now, absorbed into the internet memeification where so many other apps and accounts dwell.

First to market does not equal most successful, after all.

No — they have done something much worse than rely on mere stereotype.

teen vogue did an article on their “bizzare alerts” back in 2019 featuring these screenshots, which includes the, uhh, wildly insensitive one about service animals???? wtf?

Co-Star has developed “astrological” content that is manipulative on a scale I’ve never seen from another astrology or occult app. And this should tell you something: it is not designed from an ethos that understands astrology as a mindfulness practice, or as any kind of practice at all that might bring you into a deeper relationship with yourself, let alone the world around you. Co-Star actively, purposefully reduces astrology to a gimmick in order to exploit people’s vulnerabilities and put them in a state of reactivity and fear — all for clicks and cash.

Anyone reading this who has worked in marketing knows that the most successful emotions to activate in consumers to elicit a response are anger and fear. Not joy, not excitement. Not lust or desire, even. Definitely not sadness — that’s a depressant that dulls motivation. If you can make people angry or afraid, they’re much more likely to respond, which is to say, click and/or buy.

It’s the kind of marketing that reaches for the lowest common denominator, for the basest parts of our humanity — and Co-Star does it every single time.

This is not an astrology I recognize. It’s not one I would ever recommend to any student or client. It’s not one I would want even a casual passerby to catch a whiff of. If the option was introducing someone to astrology through Co-Star or never introducing them to astrology at all, I’d pick the latter. It would do less harm.

i simply! do not! give a fuck! about keeping quiet about that app anymore!

Question 3: How (if at all!) does being exvangelical affect your approach and/or relationship to prayer in your life now?

In the initial years after leaving the church in my mid-to-late twenties, I did not pray at all. It felt too loaded and too raw, but it also felt like I was cut off from this essential part of myself. 

I didn’t start praying again until my now ex-partner and I moved to New York City back in 2016, and honestly, it wasn’t even until a while into living here — in late 2017 — that I started praying regularly again. Living in Harlem near the Hudson helped; I’d walk down to this very hidden park on the river and sit on a bench and just stare at the water, and something about living in that neighborhood for so long, and being so close to the water, and really having a ritual around that where I would try talking to the universe, often stopping and starting because the rhythms of my language were so baked in decades of praying to Jesus — it was a place where I felt like I was unweaving something and starting over from scratch, but with no judgment. 

I was still so cagey and cautious about acknowledging or explicitly addressing spirit relationships and non-Christian deities, then. I suppose this is where I should stop and say that when I wrote in Heretic that I had audible conversations with Jesus throughout my life, I meant that quite earnestly. I don’t see things, but I have heard things, always, and just because I don’t believe that Jesus is the son of God or the only way to heaven (or that there even is a heaven) anymore doesn’t mean I don’t believe that Jesus is some kind of spirit, and certainly a powerful one that I had a very significant relationship with for most of my life. 

Anyway, this is just to say that for me, prayer is a very real, very embodied, very somatic and often literal conversation with the world around me. It’s talking to the world and seeing what talks back. My mother drilled into me when I was very young that I should never talk to spirits I didn’t know, that if anyone showed up then I should tell Jesus to tell them to go away. Which is, first off, actually a sound practice: asking your patrons to Address Things and intercede for you, especially in the case of unfriendly others coming around. 

But which also tells me that spirits were around me when I was younger, and that I was talking to them, and that I had a mother who took that seriously. She raised me with a very deep understanding of and appreciation for what she called a “spiritual realm” where things were taking place that we, as humans, could not necessarily see or hear or understand, but that we were to be mindful of. She talked a lot about how you could accidentally invite something into a space, or how if you stumbled into an area that had a bad vibe, basically, you could cast things out Christ’s name — that kind of thing. I mean, that was straight up banishing work. 

This is all to say. Praying again in that park really unlocked the flood of spirituality and, frankly, magic that has now infused every waking part of my life, and that transformed my at-the-time decidedly not-spiritual practices of tarot and astrology to Something More: was praying again, and communicating with the land, and finally opening back up to the Otherworld in a way where the door was not blocked entirely by the musculature of the church and my own internalized limitations, but where there was a freedom of movement between me and many on the other side. 

a very basic photo i took from that park overlooking the hudson, from late march 2020 in early covid times when everything was on lockdown and going there to Be and to pray was a respite // and one of the only photos i have of my time there!

I can now acknowledge that I first learned how to pray, how to hear Spirit, and most especially how to journey while still within the confines of Christianity. When I was still in the church, I journeyed all the time — I just didn’t call it that. I’ve had to learn how to use those muscles in a different way, these last few years, but it’s been incredible so far, and I’m so excited to see where the rest of my life takes me.

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