Shapeshifting and the Other/worldly: The Other/worldly and the “Other”, Fictional and Real (Or, The Contemporary Astrology Novel and Social Media Astrology Communities)

Astrology’s foray into both the digital realm and contemporary fiction reveals a longstanding tension between astrology’s minoritarian possibilities and its co-optation into capitalist schemas. Digitally mediated astrology—as mode of self-making and community formation—is a theme of Anna Dorn’s 2022 novel Exalted and the praxis of two contemporary astrologers, Chani Nicholas and Colin Bedell. If assigned a zodiac sign, my argument would be Gemini: two twinned visions of astrology as meaning-making practice, one working for and the other against our sense of agency and responsibility for our lives. Ultimately, these visions are less a two-faced binary opposition and more a purposeful juxtaposition of would-be discordant meanings without rush to resolution. In true Gemini fashion, this archive opens up an energy of exchange between twinned visions that coexist and intermingle in contemporary astrology culture on a spectrum.

Exalted is about the specter of this spectrum’s extremes, about the perennial interplay, even the conundrum, between determinism via the stars versus self-determination. It is about the power of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. These stories, as Exalted dramatizes, are sometimes aided and abetted by how we interpret the stars—and so, as social media astrology discourse is likewise increasingly exploring, astrology as a meaning-making system is both potentially liberatory and a tool of subjugation to our impulses towards self-gratification (on the individual level) and capitalist co-optation (on the social). The choice, as it must ever be, is ours. 

And yet, like the symbolic multiplicity that inheres in Gemini as a sign, this is not a discrete choice, but an iterative negotiation—one that is undertaken less individually and more in (digitally mediated) communities of praxis. Our participation in astrological meaning-making practices can perpetuate both agency-denuding determinism and agency-affirming self-determination. Reading Exalted alongside discursive shifts in online astrology communities helps us examine the individual and collective stakes of the difference. It does so first by helping readers examine the stakes of this choice for fictional “others.”

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Duality, Baby: The Contemporary Astrology Novel

Exalted’s protagonist, Scorpio stellium and Gemini moon Emily Forrest, is a nearly 30-year-old failed actress-turned-internet-astrologer who does readings anonymously from her popular Instagram account, Exalted, which mostly traffics in pop astrology memes. Estranged from her academic parents, without a single authentic friendship, and seized by financial anxiety that the astrological craze might be waning, Emily’s cash is running low when she reads a birth chart for a client who apparently has each placement exalted. Interpreting this as divine intervention, Emily commences stalking the client, Beau Rubidoux, first on social media and then in person. Even as she is literally stalking Beau, she somehow allows herself to feel like it’s fate when they run into each other at the café where he geotags his Instagram posts: “I feel calm, like everything is how it is supposed to be. … Everything in its right place.”¹

Consumed by her overdetermined conception of Beau based on his exalted birth chart, Emily “feel[s] invisible strings attach on to [her] … and pull [her] toward him” (65). Tellingly, she also systematically represses information about Beau (such as that he used to sell cocaine) that conflicts with her reading of his astrologically preordained destiny: that he “will save [her] from [her] sad life” (131, 22). Emily is a limit case of the often derided, yet also curiously enthralling character who is desperate for someone to do the work, with no effort from her, of conscripting her into the life she wants to live. And so she ignores the signs even as she overinterprets the stars.

This passive outsourcing of telos is a 21^st-century archetype of what Theodor Adorno lambasted in his midcentury critique of the 1952–3 Los Angeles Times astrology column: the way mass culture creates “psychological dependency and social conformism” via the “promotion and manipulation of fatalism” that leaves modern people more psychodynamically susceptible to fascism.² Emily’s fatalistic self-assessment of her own habit of lashing out at those closest to her leads to rare, but essential, moments of clarity when she acknowledges that she’s “so drawn to astrology … because it gives [her] an out for being [her]self” (143). Most of the time, though, her overdetermined story of self as a Scorpio shuts down, rather than opening up, the kind of critical self-reflection that might curb her antisocial behavior. If the stars tell her she has bitchy tendencies, then she is excused—she excuses herself—for being a bitch. 

Tortured by the nagging sense that they could nonetheless act otherwise, astrology-obsessed characters like Emily are in this self-fulfilling way denuded of their own agency. They numb self-scrutiny with substances like drugs and alcohol, refusing to accept responsibility for their actions and instead blaming their bad behavior and less-than-desirable life outcomes on their birth charts (not their fault!) or on others, who are somehow always at fault. Emily oscillates between, on the one hand, utter denial of how her addictions, sense of superiority, and selfish actions drive away authentic human connection; and, on the other hand, twinges of self-awareness so intense and visceral that guilt and shame overtake her, only leading to more numbing out. 

In these twinges of recognition, Emily confronts a nascent and unflattering awareness that she relies on reductive astrological typologies to justify her narcissistic unconditional positive regard—even in the face of behavior patterns, like social withdrawal, that bring undeniable loneliness and malaise. She reflects, “I can never tell whether I have certain traits because I am a Scorpio or because I know I am a Scorpio” (139, emphasis original). Emily’s overdetermined reading of her own placements also inheres in her propensity to view others as flat and uninteresting. She admits: “once I know someone’s chart, I have a rubric for interpreting that person. They become less mysterious and, more importantly, less frightening” (34). By shutting down curiosity and providing a false sense of control, astrology is Emily’s defense mechanism for existential and social anxiety, offering her an artificially “clean system where everything fits” (18). While situated in the social media age, Emily’s internal dialogue begs the age-old question: Is astrological meaning-making a way of helping us understand our own complexity and work with ourselves to build the lives we want, or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy, a deterministic excuse? 

This novel decidedly flirts with what it means for astrology to be both. “Astrology is a con, but it’s also divine,” Emily observes. “My Gemini moon is holding both conflicting ideas at once—duality, baby” (80). Ironically and paradoxically, Emily uses a fact about her birth chart to interpret her ambivalence about using astrology as an interpretive system. Though here with characteristic pop astrology framing, the tension she evokes is, again, as old as astrology itself: the extent to which the placement of the stars at the time of our birth controls our personality and destiny (fate, determinism) versus the extent to which we decide the same (freedom, self-determination).

Exalted offers us a characterological template that maps this spectrum as lived out, for better and for worse, by a fictional “other.” It’s worth underscoring that, on the formal level, Emily’s ambivalence takes a both/and, rather than either/or, structure: “I both revere astrology as among the oldest belief systems in the world, a cosmic tool kit to realize our best selves, and find it a trendy new age crutch, a way to justify bad behavior” (18, emphasis added). This both/and enables Emily to at once take astrology utterly seriously and manipulate others’ capacity, mirrored in her own, to mistake self-aggrandizement for self-actualization. This slippage is what she, with savvy cynicism, commodifies in her Exalted account; because she knows that her readings are a product she must sell, she tells clients what she thinks they want to hear about themselves. “Everyone needs direction,” she wryly observes, “and that’s how I pay the bills” (133). All the while, she believes herself to be above this “scam occult wisdom” she “deal[s]” (152). She quips: “Astrology is wrong, but I am always right” (82). There’s irresistible dramatic irony in the reader’s awareness that Emily operates towards her clients the same way she operates towards herself: through systematic self-deception.

Until, that is, Emily realizes that she, like her clients, has been guilty of suspending her own agency to the stars—and declares as much in an article she pitches to Vice after the veil of illusion falls with Beau: 

This Substack-esque moment, verging on intertext, reads like contemporary cultural critique. Emily confesses that we have many systems for escaping, but not enough systems for facing, ourselves. If astrology can facilitate honest and unabashed critical self-reflection, then it is good for us. But if we use it as an out for what we see and don’t like in ourselves, then this narrator, herself symptomatic, also diagnoses something about contemporary culture—how blaming the stars or others for our malaise is too convenient, how the lie of self-sufficiency is bound up with extractive systems like capitalism—that we need heed now more than ever.

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But/And Also: Contemporary Social Media Astrology Communities

Critical self-reflection is a rhetorical touchstone of Chani Nicholas’s brand, which revels in complexity and contradiction. Nicholas’s greatest cultural resource is her “but/and also” mentality as she reminds that two, even seemingly opposing, truths can be true at once. Adorno would have us wonder whether this is just another turn of the screw of capitalism, of giving the people what they want. Chani’s success as a brand does suggest that at least some of us (perhaps especially those wary of authoritarianism) are just plain tired of stark binaries—which are only perpetuated by algorithmic social media information ecosystems. (There’s a uniquely 21^st-century irony here, given the extent to which the Chani brand hinges on both social media and a proprietary app.) And yet, while Adorno’s critique—that horoscopes are passively consumed as irrational fodder for totalitarianism—applies to Emily’s hoaxy meme account, Chani’s case is more complex because Nicholas continually encourages seekers to actively co-construct meaning, to see astrology as a framework for understanding as much the human condition as the individual experience, and to question the systems in which we are embedded, astrology included. (To boot: Exalted has a wink-and-nod intertextual moment when Emily mentions Chani as “a respected astrologer, not a con artist meme-maker like me” who “learned astrology mostly from Instagram” [20].)

The spectrum between determinism and self-determination subtends the Chani app, which might be read as juxtaposing the Gemini “twin” of Emily’s Exalted account. For her part, Nicholas often underscores that the stars provide interpretable information, not a teleological script. The app identifies learning and reflecting as the pathway to growth and healing—which has proven a practice-based product that people want. For its part, Exalted is about the uphill battle of being truly seen and known—a challenge no doubt exacerbated by social media (Emily is followed by many but known by almost no one). Together, then, the Exalted account and the Chani app are two instances of social media and astrology partnering up to address this challenge in ways both cynical (in the novel) and sincere (in the Chani app). 

As a reviewer of Nicholas’s 2020 book, You Were Born For This, acknowledges, “being known… is the most comforting thing in the universe.” The Chani app promises a digitally mediated protocol, even a portal, for coming to see oneself as “knowable and worth knowing.”³ This curated experience is comforting, but also requires sustained effort, as the work of understanding (oneself) can never be finished (Linda Goodman wrote in 1970: “Isn’t that really life’s major problem? Understanding?”⁴). And even more so because this work of understanding oneself is cast as prerequisite to collective reckoning. Nicholas often claims, for instance, that capitalism is to blame for American culture’s resistance to “reflect on its past and think about what went wrong… and why all this inequity and injustice exists.” Even as her brand exists in a capitalist infrastructure and is therefore complicit with capitalism, Nicholas wants the reflection process that her app scaffolds to work against oppressive structures like capitalism. 

All this reflection and personal/collective accountability is timebound—not static but constantly in flux. You are never “done” as long as the planets keep moving and you keep breathing. Read cynically, Chani’s rhetorical focus on the paradoxical permanence of change could be seen as a marketing strategy to keep users coming back to the app. And yet, the whole premise of astrology is change and flux. Isn’t it true that the only way to find comfort in this chaotic world is to accept change, and uncertainty itself, as the only constant? The app teaches this lesson by prompting a daily check-in with oneself vis-à-vis the cosmos. Interpretation and “reading” are less static, final, and summative, and more iterative, unfolding, and dynamic. For the Chani brand and its following, astrology is less about finding certain answers and more about asking certain questions. 

The contemporary astrologer Colin Bedell, @queercosmos on Instagram, similarly uses astrology as a collective tool for not just accepting, but leaning into uncertainty as itself curative against contemporary trends towards fundamentalist dogma. Bedell is both prolific on social media and the founder, in 2017, of QueerCosmos, “an astrological resource for LGBTQIA+ identities and our allies,” as well as author, among other works, of a 2019 book, Queer Cosmos: The Astrology of Queer Identities & Relationships. On his website in 2025, Bedell described our cultural moment as a “post-truth era … that weaponizes certainty.” By contrast, he articulates his imperative as an astrologer to “keep people safe by holding them in uncertainty through ritual and gathering while setting them free to … confidently relate to the unknown and experience aliveness.” As this imperative intimates, the major themes animating Bedell’s public work are safety and freedom—but crucially, safety does not mean “minimizing the unknown and having faith in a predictive technology,” but rather “stay[ing] present with uncertainty—without collapsing, numbing, withdrawing, or rushing to fix it with meaningless predictions and ‘control’.” Astrology, then, should be a practice of coming to understand what it means on an embodied level—for both individuals and collectives—that aliveness comes not from controlling the unknown, but cultivating safety in uncertainty.

What is compelling about Bedell’s public reckoning with the legitimacy of his own profession is that he frames astrology as one such “controllable predictive technology” on which the world is “becom[ing] increasingly reliant.” (Again, the irony of such a critique made and mediated on a social media platform is not lost on Bedell.) Along these lines, in a May 2025 (Gemini season!) post that asks, “Anyone else feel disillusioned by ‘Astrology’?”, Bedell warns against “confus[ing] ideas with ideologies” and thereby rendering astrology yet another all-encompassing system we use to make our uncontrollable lives feel “controllable.” On a practical level, Bedell’s call to experience aliveness requires remaining willfully awake to fundamentalist messaging, wherever it occurs, and resisting false promises of safety, wherever they are made. Astrology should be about fostering, rather than deadening, critical interrogation of systemic power. 

This sustained critique of the “astrology industry” is the conceptual backdrop for Bedell’s recent turn to using social media more and more as a platform for bringing people together in real life to create shared, embodied spaces of healing. He models astrological meaning-making as a process less of figuring myself out and more of being in healing community with others. As resources for living with and through uncertainty, Bedell emphasizes trust, not in astrology itself but in the collective rituals and embodied communities of praxis that it enables. In Bedell’s “live,” relatively unscripted, and iterative chronicling of growth as a practitioner on the @queercosmos account, we apprehend a phenomenon as salutary as it is rare—the questioning of one’s own meaning-making practices as totalizing systems. We see a 21^st-century legacy of Adorno’s critique of astrology newspaper columns abetting readers’ mindless playacting of preordained futures—a legacy not of prescience, but of repudiation. 

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Co-creating the Other/worldly: From Prediction to Potentiality

The crux? Both of these contemporary astrologers are moving from Buzzfeed-like “How to Seduce Sagittarius” content to more serious, and frankly political, community-building roles. The cultural role of the (social media) astrologer is less and less aligned with oracle, sage, and top-down dispenser of certainty and more and more co-creator of indeterminate interpretive space. Bedell, in both his in-person offerings and meta-reflective social media commentary, invokes an opening where “astrologers become the living evidence of the future that we’re not predicting, but co-creating.” Key word: co-creating. 

Bedell’s rhetorical emphasis on collective action and co-creation of meaning dovetails with Nicholas’s focus on the way one’s personal situation is both inflected by and inflects concentric circles of relationality, all the way up to what she calls “the global collective.” As Nathan Snaza observes, esoteric practices like astrology are ways “of storying the world in its ongoing unfolding, … of sensing tendencies flowing through the present that are virtual, subjunctive, potential.”⁵ Snaza’s evocation of the subjunctive tense, of potentiality, also summons Christopher Joseph Lee’s observation that “astrology stages a stubbornly relational and anticipatory frame—not optimism, necessarily, but an understanding that good things can still happen despite the sinking sensation that things are only getting worse.”⁶ In their astrology work, Nicholas and Bedell harness the stubborn relationality of social media, the virtual ways of our world, to otherworldly ends. They do so not by short-circuiting the “sinking sensation that things are only getting worse” but by insisting that we sit with it. We must anticipate a reprieve not from the stars, but from the uncertain unfolding of our collectively wrought efforts to call forth futures that differ, intentionally, from our present.  

Using astrology this way opens up pathways to resist the inertia of the status quo, the Gemini “twin” of determinism (“that’s just the way things are”) with the “twin” of self-determination, the momentum of “that’s not the way things have to be.” This mode of astrological meaning-making might shift the focus from prediction to potentiality, from me to us, thereby transcending the spectrum between determinism and self-determination. In so doing, it might recast our gaze, ever fixed on the horizon line, to apprehend something like collective determination. This mode of astrological meaning-making, then, is one viable response to the question Alice Sparkly Kat poses in Postcolonial Astrology: “Can we use Western astrology to respond to the West?”⁷

To do so would mean combatting the oppressive forces and extractive systems that confront each of us differentially. As Nicholas said on her podcast in 2024: “capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, all of it, says ‘boundaries’ and ‘borders’ and ‘separation’ and ‘you’re isolated.’ … And the way to dismantle that is to remember the ways in which we are connected.” Astrology, especially as mobilized among minoritized communities, invites us to resist the fundamentalist belief systems that rely on our fear of working together across difference and otherwise, beyond the systems entrenched in their dogged determination to keep things going the way they are. Astrology can show us that the way things are only feels like safety (and only for some)—and can help us collectively determine that this illusion only inhibits our freedom. 

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1. Anna Dorn, Exalted (Unnamed Press, 2022), 64. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 
2. Theodor Adorno, “Introduction” and “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column” in The Stars Down to Earth, ed. Stephen Crook (Routledge, 2002), 13, 16.
3. Jazmine Hughes, “Your Favorite Internet Astrologer Wrote a Book,” New York Times, January 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/style/chani-nicholas-astrologer.html.
4. Linda Goodman, Sun Signs (Bluebird, 2019), xviii.
5. Nathan Snaza, Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (Duke University Press, 2024), x. 
6. Christopher Joseph Lee, “Solace in the Stars: Queer Astrology, Capitalism, and Colonialism,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 9, no. 3 (2022): 165.
7. Alice Sparkly Kat, Post-Colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor (North Atlantic Books, 2021), 5. 

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  Anna Mukamal

  Anna Mukamal is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on real-world problems such as mental health and gender-based violence. She works across the fields of the digital humanities, literary studies, and the health humanities to explore the multivalent psychosocial work that literature does for people at scale. Her scholarship appears in journals such as American Literary History, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and the Journal of Cultural Analytics as well as in edited volumes published by Edinburgh University Press and Cambridge University Press. Her PhD in English and Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities are from Stanford University, where she was a Core Research Member at the Stanford Literary Lab. At UNC-Chapel Hill, she collaborates with the HHIVE (Health and Humanities Interdisciplinary Venue for Exploration) and DIAL (Digital Innovation and AI Literacy) Labs.