My 18-year-old son and I have a long-running social media back-and-forth that goes like this: as a Virgo, he sends posts about how astrology stuff is bullshit, then his Gemini mother, a borderline witch reiki master who worships the moon at least twice a month while burning sage and Palo Santo and only has meaningful relationships with people whose Co-star charts she’s already lined up with hers, sends back funny posts about how what he sent “sounds like something a Virgo would say.”
Most people are on a zodiac scale somewhere between my son and me. You’re either full astrological eyeroll or full woo-woo. Pretty much everyone knows their sun sign and there are stereotypes associated with each, but do you know your moon and rising signs? I hope so, because they’re insightful and impactful, and not bullshit. They affect how we interact with the people in our lives.
Consider serial killers; that’s not much of a jump. We interact with people, we get along with them, we have relationships—I can tell you exactly which signs of the zodiac I get along with, would want to make out with versus never want to be in a room with for five minutes, etc.
But did you know that the most famous serial killers in American history fall into exactly four signs? Gemini and Virgo (cough, my son and I) are represented—Jeffrey Dahmer and I share a birthday which makes cake decorating so challenging every year and is maybe why I constantly said, “I brought you into this world, I can take you out” to my kids when they were in trouble. And rounding out the four serial killer signs are Sagittarius and Pisces. Those signs represent one from each of the elements—air, fire, earth and water—and also all four are mutable signs, meaning they fall at the end of a season; or as I like to explain the Gemini “sign of the twins” to people, we can be your best friend or worst enemy, it’s up to you.
Back in 2008, a Dutch statistician named Jan Ruis, PhD, looked at the birth charts of almost 300 serial killers and found that “serial killers are frequently born when celestial factors are in mutable signs.” Is astrology scientific? Absolutely not. Many would say it is the Barnum effect at hand (named for P.T. Barnum), in which if we’re told something enthusiastically or often enough, we’ll believe it. But there are a number of factors that come into play regarding why people swear by the placement of the stars at the time of their birth, and it causes no harm to follow the ancient wisdom for those who choose the path.
Besides, when you tell me you don’t believe in astrology, and I say, “sounds like something a Virgo would say,” I’m usually right about your sign half the time (and the other half, you’re a Capricorn). I used to get up every day as a kid and read my horoscope in the newspaper, and now I follow astrologers on TikTok; as I write on the day of the full moon, I’ll never stop being fascinated by the constellations and their mysteries.