Astrology is real

I'd never really thought anything of tarot card readings before, I'm not into fortune tellers or even horoscpes to be honest. However, a few months back I watched this vlog by Naomi Smart and I was very intrigued. (If you want to watch it, the relevant section is from minute 21.)

She said how she has a traditon with her friends to go to this tarot card reader in Brighton once a year. Naomi said, "They're always so accurate."

I still wasn't convinced at this point, but then she went on to explain what she'd been told and I suddenly thought it would be interesting to go along.

I booked in for a 30-minute session and had NO IDEA what to expect.

On the website the session is described as the following:

The session starts by the reader letting you pick 10 cards out of their pack, and then what follows is discussions around what cards have come up for you. I got a bit lost with the card situation because she also used others from her pack of about 100, not just the 10 I picked, but she definitely had a system.

I'm not going to go into what she told me because that's very personal, but it was scary how accurate she was. Don't get me wrong she's not going to tell you what's going to happen on certain dates, but she was telling me things about my past that were impacting me now and I just don't know how else she'd know those things.

I didn't tell her anything or give her clues before or throughout. She knew my first name and that was all.

It didn't feel hippy-dippy either. It was a bit like a therapy session if anything. She'd lay out a card (she had a certain order of doing all this) and then discusss what that meant and then relate it to me.

At times she was saying things that made me want to cry which is why I'd compare it to therapy. She was telling me issues I'd buried and ignored, and sometimes that's hard to hear - especially from a stranger.

My friend also went and she found it a very positive experience too. She said, "I found it incredibly interesting. Not 'airy fairy'. I'd highly recommend it and would go in with an open mind. I found it empowering in a way! It all felt very genuine. Plus the reader was very personable.""

"Western astrology is a form of divination based on the construction of a horoscope for an exact moment, such as a person's birth.[94] It uses the tropical zodiac, which is aligned to the equinoctial points.[95]

Western astrology is founded on the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies such as the Sun, Moon and planets, which are analysed by their movement through signs of the zodiac (twelve spatial divisions of the ecliptic) and by their aspects (based on geometric angles) relative to one another. They are also considered by their placement in houses (twelve spatial divisions of the sky).[96] Astrology's modern representation in western popular media is usually reduced to sun sign astrology, which considers only the zodiac sign of the Sun at an individual's date of birth, and represents only 1/12 of the total chart.[97]

The horoscope visually expresses the set of relationships for the time and place of the chosen event. These relationships are between the seven 'planets', signifying tendencies such as war and love; the twelve signs of the zodiac; and the twelve houses. Each planet is in a particular sign and a particular house at the chosen time, when observed from the chosen place, creating two kinds of relationship.[98] A third kind is the aspect of each planet to every other planet, where for example two planets 120° apart (in 'trine') are in a harmonious relationship, but two planets 90° apart ('square') are in a conflicted relationship.[99][100] Together these relationships and their interpretations are said to form "...the language of the heavens speaking to learned men."[98]

Along with tarot divination, astrology is one of the core studies of Western esotericism, and as such has influenced systems of magical belief not only among Western esotericists and Hermeticists, but also belief systems such as Wicca, which have borrowed from or been influenced by the Western esoteric tradition. Tanya Luhrmann has said that "all magicians know something about astrology," and refers to a table of correspondences in Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, organised by planet, as an example of the astrological lore studied by magicians.[101]"