Anything in the Stars?

The one thing about which we are all experts is ourselves, but we tend not to trust our own opinions. No sooner do we pose the question Who am I? than we go scurrying off to look for answers somewhere else. Many people turn to psychiatry, others pore over religious texts, but perhaps the most popular of all is to look for the answers in the stars.

Over the June 15 weekend the National Council for Geocosmic Research held its annual conference at Hunter College. It was a gathering of astrologers from across the country. When I arrived on Saturday morning a group of them were standing together drinking coffee and talking shop. A handsome middle-aged man described his approach to column-writing: "Light, tight and bright!"

The more serious business of the conference kicked off in the lecture hall with a broad overview of American history as seen from the astrological perspective. The lecturer, Rob Hand, slid an astrological chart onto an overhead projector and pointed to the position of Pluto in 1702, noting, "The Pluto return occurs right after World War II, when it is abundantly clear that Russia and the United States are the only remaining superpowers." Heads nodded.

Hand had the jokey, self-confident manner of a high school science teacher. He closed his speech with an analysis of current events, most particularly the 9/11 tragedy. "The fundamental meaning of this period in time is how do we respond to it. If we respond to it inappropriately, then 2030-2031 could be a major catastrophe on a world scale. It could even be the collapse of the United States. Which, frankly, I don't see. But then, whoever does see these things coming on?"

Who indeed? At first I thought Hand was just hedging his bets, but later I came to the conclusion that professional astrologers are, on the whole, a remarkably unassuming bunch. They may have knowledge of the heavens but it is not a special knowledge and they have no desire to beat you over the head with it. After the lecture I sat down with Shelley Ackerman, one of the conference speakers, and asked her about the predictive power of astrology.

"It's not really about prediction," she said. "Astrology, for me anyway, is ultimately about aligning yourself with the will of the cosmos and understanding what your role is and how does it correlate with the universe. Some people just want to know when to get married and when to buy a shirt, but it really evolved in terms of understanding people."

Ackerman is a funny, lively woman with big blonde curls and the ease of a natural storyteller. She is often told she looks like Bette Midler, but she dislikes the comparison. "As a matter of fact, the first time I met Bette Midler, on my 18th birthday, she wanted to know my sign and my chart. She was a Sadge [Sagittarius], of course?"

I asked Ackerman how she became an astrologer. She said she never expected to. The daughter of a rabbi, she grew up on the Lower East Side and always wanted to be a performer.

"I went to the High School of Music and Art and it was wonderful. Did you ever see the movie Fame? That was my life? My earliest memory of astrology was, I think, age 13, when I picked up a little pop book. I knew I was a Libra, but then I read about my moon being in the sign Capricorn. I remember reading: 'You are ultimately guaranteed success, but it will come later in life.' Now, for an ambitious 13-year-old bursting with talent, to read that success will come later in life was about as big a blow as you can imagine."

After high school Ackerman worked at the Improv as a singing waitress and began to develop a nightclub career. "So anyway, during the 70s and 80s I was doing a lot of cabaret work. I did tv, movies, but then there was a real crisis around 1990. All of a sudden, after all the work I did, nothing was happening. People would ask me to do their charts all the time, but I wouldn't do it because I didn't want the responsibility. So then in the summer of 1992, a friend of mine invited me to his condo in Montauk. After being on the ocean for three days and detoxing from all the sound of the sirens and traffic, I heard the ocean speak to me?"

I had told Ackerman I was a skeptic. She hesitated. "Now I know you're going to have a field day with this, but I don't care." She grabbed my tape recorder and yelled a string of good-natured obscenities directly into the microphone before continuing.

"Anyway, I heard the ocean tell me to go to Gurney's, which is a big spa in Montauk, and ask if they needed an astrologer. It was kind of an undeniable voice that overcame me, but I wanted to dismiss it. Then I went across the street and a woman had a boutique there and I started asking her birthday and we started chatting and she goes, 'You know, you should go to Gurney's and see if they need an astrologer.' And I said okay, that's it. I put my hands up and I went there and the rest, as they say, is history. Within weeks I had a client base, and the very people I would have cut my arms and legs off to audition for were lined up at my table for readings. So it was humbling. The universe wanted me to meet these people, not as a girl tap-dancing her way into America's heart, but as an adviser."

Ackerman paused to reflect. "For me, astrology gave me the permission to be quirky. I have Sun square Uranus, and that means that all those years of growing up and not fitting in I wasted time feeling bad. If I'd understood at age four that I was never going to fit in, it would have been easier."

I returned to the conference on the following day to watch Ackerman moderate a panel discussion on the Middle East. "Hey, the politicians can't solve it, why not give the astrologers a shot?" Prior to the panel discussion she asked if I was still a skeptic and I said I was. She said, "Well, even though you came here to have a big laugh, I hope you leave with a different sense of it."

Certainly I did. Two floors below the astrology conference, in the same building, a large church group had gathered to perform its children's ministry. The beaming, empty faces of the girls with their Bibles were much spookier than anything Ackerman believes in. If people insist on seeking answers, they could do worse than ask the stars.