It’s October, and You Know What That Means: Media!

On By Chas S. Clifton
It’s in this issue.

At The New Yorker, they have discovered that astrology is back. In never leaves, actually — ask the people at Llewellyn —but new media interest is cyclical as the Moon. Maybe it is just astrology’s “growth” on social media that gets noticed.

In July, I was ushered into a glass-enclosed conference room on the sixth floor of a building in Tribeca to meet with Banu Guler, the thirty-one-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of the astrology app Co-Star, whose Web site promises to allow “irrationality to invade our techno-rationalist ways of living.” Guler is a casting director’s idea of a tech executive. She is a vegan who used to design punk zines and was a bike messenger until she got into “a gnarly car wreck.” She has cropped hair, a septum piercing, and a tattoo of Medea on the back of one leg. Why Medea? I asked. “Witchcraft,” she explained. A copy of Liz Greene’s “Relating: An Astrological Guide to Living with Others on a Small Planet” lay between us. Guler hasn’t read it, but it’s been on her Goodreads list forever.

That is a little stomach-turning, in that Liz Greene is one of the best astrologers out there. When I decided that I was less into astrology than in previous years, I got rid of most of my books — except for Liz Greene’s and Robert Hand’s.

Maybe Guler needs a tattoo of Media, not Medea.

One thought on “It’s October, and You Know What That Means: Media!”

  1. Pitch313

    A couple thoughts:

    1.) Occulture has been transformed in the age of the internet. As a practitioner who learned occultural skills, techniques, and outlooks in the before the internet times, I find most occultural apps unmagical and unsatisfying. Even if convenient.

    2.) The Trads and occultural currents that carry me along endorse competency, all in all. Gaining it, then using it. What’s more, they more or less oppose occult activities in service to corporate and/or establishment world views. The practitioner as tech executive is a notion and model they would discourage. I certainly prefer personal and more or less private and countercultural occult activities.

    Still, change happens, and all of us must adapt to lots of changes..

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