June 30, 2014

Historical analysis of horoscope advice to reveal the popular mood?

Horoscopes give the life advice that the readers want to hear. By shifting responsibility onto the stars, the reader can follow their own plans without feeling as though their motives were self-centered. Hey, it's what the star chart recommended!

But what readers want to do, and hence want to hear recommendations for, is not a constant over time. The range in typical mindsets today is way different from those in earlier periods. I doubt there was much horoscope advice in 1974 that nudged readers toward participating in a real estate bubble to get rich quick, although that wouldn't have been surprising advice in 2004. Romantic advice from 1984 would have been phrased to make something happen, while in 2014 it would be geared more toward soaking up attention.

How can we study the changes over time? I couldn't quickly find any sources online, nor any references in Google Scholar that suggest this line of thinking has been pursued in "the literature" before.

Tabloid newspapers would probably be too hard to track down, either online or in real life. Women's magazines are readily available in university library archives, and the entire history of Vogue has been digitally archived. Mass market horoscope books have been published, and would be easy to hunt around for.

I might poke around some of the public libraries and thrift stores in my area. If anyone can point me to online sources, though, I can dig through those as well.

7 comments:

  1. I'm surprised by your comment that women's magazines are readily found in university library archives. Not that I'm familiar with many colleges. It's just that at Berkeley, which has stacks and stacks of bound magazines, there are no womens' issues at all. You can read The Spectator or Harper's from 1879, but you can't find Vogue or Redbook or Self for any date.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Old issues of less academic magazines might be stored away from the main stacks, and available by special request only.

    ReplyDelete
  3. An idea obvious enough it's a wonder nobody thought of it before. If Heckman can publish "The Effect of Prayer on God's Attitude Toward Mankind", why not analyze how different paths are written in the stars over time?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I wonder if I'm irrational, because I've never given horoscopes the slightest respect, even though the one time I read one, it predicted the course of my entire life. I was about 13, and I was returning from my first golf lesson when I stopped into a bodega for licorice or something. I pick up a horoscope, and the thing says, "your strange interest in sex will ruin your life." And about 15 yrs. later, that's exactly what happened.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Horoscopes first came to American attention around 1900, but the elite have used them for ages. In earlier times, astrological readings were conducted for royalty and there were many court astrologers.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Astrology in general is more popular during times of rising-crime, when the public has a greater respect for mysticism and the occult.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yes, and many of the now famous scientists of the day - Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, had day jobs as astrologers to court and nobility.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."