“Alan Leo was the first person to explicitly psychologize the placements in a natal chart. … And the reason that he did that was because he was accused of fortune telling and he needed to completely change course in order to not go to jail, which in Victorian England at the time was, you know, that, and he did, he still went to jail despite that.”
Hermitix · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
A practitioner of classical astrology gives a short history of how modern "psychological" astrology began. He says older readings described things outside the person, like their father or teachers, and the shift to the inner self was partly a legal dodge.
Transcript
Let's say pop, let's say pop astrology.
Would modern astrology be more like Alan Leo?
Yes. Yes. Spawn astrology, definitely Alan Leo is one of the earliest modern astrologers for sure. And a lot of contemporary, we'll call like psychological humanistic astrology is downstream of Alan Leo. Fun fact, a little historical aside, is that Alan Leo was the first person to explicitly psychologize the placements in a natal chart. So whereas before, Sun and Pisces, for instance, meant X, Y, and Z about certain teachers that you had, what your father would be like, all these things in your life external to you, Alan Leo was one of the first people to purely psychologize that and say, no, this is just about the inner self. And the reason that he did that was because he was accused of fortune telling and he needed to…
So is pop astrology just watered down?
It's watered down. It fits on the back of a TV guide. It fits on the back of a newspaper. It's these like little potato chips that keep people buying the paper, essentially. And it's just such a complex discipline. It's not possible to fit a natal chart analysis into a paragraph. It's just not…
Because it's always subjective?
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