Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Astrology for Everyone: World War I and Astrology in the United States

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Astrology and Western Society from the First World War to Covid-19

Abstract

During World War I and its initial aftermath, the US public dramatically shifted its perceptions of astrology. Previously regraded as an ancient, pseudo-scientific spiritual practice purveyed underground by mostly immigrant women and women of color, during World War I astrology transformed into a respectable and scientific discipline consulted by the upper- and middle-classes, frequently mentioned in popular culture, and featured almost daily in US newspapers. Redefining and marketing their services to a public which regarded itself as educated and modern, practitioners of astrology made efforts to professionalize their work, finding space in the changing landscapes of scientific understanding, work, and gender to meet the desire for certainty and control in a populace faced with the chaos of global war.

This chapter will examine the how astrologers changed the reputation of astrology during the years of World War I, using modern vocabularies and presentation to legitimize their work to a larger public audience desperate to understand the present situation and demystify the future. It will map how astrologers purposefully, whether to circumvent charges against newly minted public laws against divination or to raise cultural capital to expand clientele, changed notions of their practice from those based on spiritual, ethnic, and gendered gifts to ones of technical savvy, learned science, and professional practice. Astrologers’ new brand of the practice appealed to an American public hungry for a sense of control packaged in modern and scientifically savvy terms and formed the foundations of popular astrology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Astrology has become respectable, a subject the children may hear. No longer is it a hidden superstition for the unholy rich and the unhealthy poor…. It has seeped into the middle-classes who have reduced this oldest of sciences from the romantic idiosyncrasy of the few to a commodity.

-—Allene Talmy, “Evangeline Adams and her Stars,” Outlook, February 18, 1931

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Benson Bobrick, The Fated Sky: Astrology in History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 5, 11.

  2. 2.

    “Fortune-Tellers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 25, 1885.

  3. 3.

    Lawrence J. Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880–1920, 1st edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 70; Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 199.

  4. 4.

    Ian Hancock, Danger! Educated Gypsy: Selected Essays, ed. Dileep Karanth (University Of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), 196.

  5. 5.

    Olivia Howard Dunbar, “The Survival of Sorcery,” Harper’s Weekly, September 21, 1912, 12.

  6. 6.

    Suzanne Lane, “‘Black Thunder’s’ Call for a Conjure Response to ‘American Negro Slavery,’” African American Review 37, no. 4 (2003): 583–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/1512388; Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing, Black Literature and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 89.

  7. 7.

    Tammy Stone-Gordon, “‘Fifty-Cent Sybils’: Occult Workers and the Symbolic Marketplace in the Urban US., 1850–1930,” 1998, 5.

  8. 8.

    “A Growing and Dangerous Class,” The New York Times, February 4, 1867.

  9. 9.

    Stone-Gordon, “‘Fifty-Cent Sybils’: Occult Workers and the Symbolic Marketplace in the Urban US., 1850–1930,” 1998, 1–19.

  10. 10.

    “Tent of La Zingara,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 14, 1892, 13.

  11. 11.

    Suzanne Lane, “‘Black Thunder’s’ Call for a Conjure Response to ‘American Negro Slavery,’” African American Review 37, no. 4 (2003): 583–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/1512388; Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing, Black Literature and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 89.

  12. 12.

    Yvonne P. Chireau, “‘Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good’: Conjure and African American Traditions of Healing,” in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, ed. Yvonne Chireau (University of California Press, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520209879.003.0005, 95.

  13. 13.

    Chireau, 93.

  14. 14.

    William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Blue Heron Press, 1904), 196.

  15. 15.

    Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream, 70.

  16. 16.

    “One Thousand Fortune Tellers; Plying Their Trade in New York City,” The New York Times, December 12, 1909, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1909/12/12/archives/one-thousand-fortune-tellers-plying-their-trade-in-new-york-city.html. Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935, 5076 8th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–37.

  17. 17.

    “One Thousand Fortune Tellers Plying Their Trade in New York City,” New York Times, December 12, 1909, par 5, 7:1.

  18. 18.

    Howard H. Kerr and Charles L. Crow, Occult in America, First Paperback Edition (Urbana Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 4.

  19. 19.

    Henry Carrington Bolton, “Fortune-Telling in America To-Day. A Study of Advertisements,” The Journal of American Folklore 8, no. 31 (1895): 299–307, https://doi.org/10.2307/532745

  20. 20.

    Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940, Historical Studies of Urban America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 19.

  21. 21.

    Michigan, The Compiled Laws of the State of Michigan, 1915: Chapters 204–274, Tables, Topical Index (Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Company, 1916), 5236.

  22. 22.

    Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 107–114.

  23. 23.

    Code of Criminal Procedure of the State of New York (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1881), 219–220.

  24. 24.

    Leonard P. Ayers, The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1919).

  25. 25.

    U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 139.

  26. 26.

    U.S. Bureau of the Census, D727 P. 164 and D740, 166.

  27. 27.

    U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Table 1 Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2020,” Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2020, 124.

  28. 28.

    Mildred A. Joiner and Clarence M. Weiner, “Employment of Women in War Production,” Social Security Bulletin 5, no. 7 (July 1942):12, 4.

  29. 29.

    Mildred A. Joiner and Clarence M. Weiner, 4.

  30. 30.

    Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003), 465–476.

  31. 31.

    Davies, A Supernatural War, 2.

  32. 32.

    “Advertising and Selling,” July 1916, 68; “Advertising and Selling,” July 1918, 19.

  33. 33.

    Davies, 204–213; Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Changed Religion Forever (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2014), 64.

  34. 34.

    U.S. Senate. 3/4/1789-, President Wilson’s Joint Address to Congress, Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany, Series: Journals and Minute Books, 1789–2022, 1917.

  35. 35.

    Evangeline Smith Adams, The Bowl of Heaven, Reprint edition (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1926, 1927); Karen Christino, Foreseeing the Future: Evangeline Adams and Astrology in America, First Edition (Amherst, MA: One Reed Pubns, 2002), 168. Allison Gray, “People Who Try to Get Tips from the Stars,” American Magazine, December 1921, 34.

  36. 36.

    Gray, “People Who Try to Get Tips from the Stars”, 136.

  37. 37.

    Christino, Foreseeing the Future, 97.

  38. 38.

    “The Evening World. (New York, N.Y.) 1887–1931, December 14, 1914, Image 3,” no. 1914/12/14 (December 14, 1914), 3.

  39. 39.

    People ex rel. Preiss v. Adams, 32 N.Y. Crim. 326 (1914) (City Magistrate’s Court of New York, First Division, Seventh District December 11, 1914).

  40. 40.

    Davies, A Supernatural War, 129.

  41. 41.

    People ex rel. Preiss v. Adams, 32 N.Y. Crim. 326 (1914).

  42. 42.

    Adams, The Bowl of Heaven, 57.

  43. 43.

    “Feeling Runs High at Williams Trial,” The New York Times, May 14, 1910.

  44. 44.

    People ex rel. Preiss v. Adams, 32 N.Y. Crim. 326 (1914).

  45. 45.

    People ex rel. Preiss v. Adams, 32 N.Y. Crim. 326 (1914).

  46. 46.

    People ex rel. Preiss v. Adams, 32 N.Y. Crim. 326 (1914).

  47. 47.

    “Professional Spook Raisers Wax Scornful of Amateurs,” Sun and New York Herald, February 8, 1920.

  48. 48.

    “Classified Ads,” San Francisco Examiner, March 5, 1916.

  49. 49.

    “The Advertiser-Journal. Volume (Auburn, N.Y.) 1913–1931, March 21, 1916, Image 4,” no. 1916/03/21 (March 21, 1916), 4.

  50. 50.

    Christino, Foreseeing the Future, 102.

  51. 51.

    Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 268.

  52. 52.

    Bobrick; P. 267; Spencer, True as the Stars Above, 81–83.

  53. 53.

    Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 268–69.

  54. 54.

    James H. Holden and Robert A. Hughes, Astrological Pioneers of America (American Federation of Astrologers, 1988), 202.

  55. 55.

    Spencer, True as the Stars Above, 79.

  56. 56.

    Spencer, 83.

  57. 57.

    Maddox Guii, Personal communication, March 4, 2022.

  58. 58.

    Spencer, True as the Stars Above, 83.

  59. 59.

    Adams, The Bowl of Heaven, 1.

  60. 60.

    Christino, Foreseeing the Future, 124.

  61. 61.

    “South Side Observer. (Freeport, L.I. [N.Y.]) 1870–1918, March 22, 1918, Image 10,” no. 1918/03/22 (March 22, 1918), 10.

  62. 62.

    Christino, P. 123; Davies, A Supernatural War, 129–131.

  63. 63.

    Davies, A Supernatural War, 129–131.

  64. 64.

    “Oswego Palladium. (Oswego, N.Y.) 1908–1925, March 14, 1918, Image 6,” no. 1918/03/14 (March 14, 1918), 6.

  65. 65.

    Walter S. Poague, Diary and Letters of a Marine Aviator (Chicago: n.p., 1919), 165.

  66. 66.

    Davies, A Supernatural War, 117.

  67. 67.

    “The Pokeepsie Evening Enterprise. (Pokeepsie [i.e. Poughkeepsie], N.Y.) 1892–1918, July 27, 1916, Image 9,” no. 1916/07/27 (July 27, 1916), 9.

  68. 68.

    Guii, Personal communication.

  69. 69.

    Carol Silverman, “Everyday Drama: Impression Management Of Urban Gypsies,” Urban Anthropology 11, no. 3/4 (1982): 377–98, 386.

  70. 70.

    Guii, Personal communication.

  71. 71.

    Guii.

  72. 72.

    C. G. Jung, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, ed. Roderick Main, Revised ed. edition (Princeton University Press, 1998), 11.

  73. 73.

    Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 282–83.

  74. 74.

    “The Pulaski Democrat. (Pulaski, N.Y.) 1853–1985, February 26, 1919, Image 2,” no. 1919/02/26 (February 26, 1919), 2.

  75. 75.

    Jung, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, 11.

  76. 76.

    National Endowment for the Humanities, “The Washington Times. [Volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1902–1939, December 11, 1921, SUNDAY MORNING, Image 26,” December 11, 1921, 26.

  77. 77.

    Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 274.

  78. 78.

    Bobrick, 276.

  79. 79.

    Christino, Foreseeing the Future, 185.

  80. 80.

    Dunbar, “The Survival of Sorcery”, 258; Travis Hoke, “The Heyday of the Fortune Tellers,” Harper’s Monthly, January 1932, 236.

  81. 81.

    Hoke, “The Heyday of the Fortune Tellers”, 236.

Bibliography

  • Adams, Evangeline Smith. The Bowl of Heaven. Reprint edition. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1926, 1927.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Advertising and Selling,” XXVI, no. 2, July 1916.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Advertising and Selling,” XXVIII, no. 2, July 1918.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ayers, Leonard P. The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1919.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Houston. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Black Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bobrick, Benson. The Fated Sky: Astrology in History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bois, William Edward Burghardt Du. The Souls of Black Folk. Blue Heron Press, 1904.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bolton, Henry Carrington. “Fortune-Telling in America To-Day. A Study of Advertisements.” The Journal of American Folklore 8, no. 31 (1895): 299–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/532745.

  • Chireau, Yvonne P. “‘Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good’: Conjure and African American Traditions of Healing.” In Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, edited by Yvonne Chireau, 0. University of California Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520209879.003.0005.

  • Christino, Karen. Foreseeing the Future: Evangeline Adams and Astrology in America. First Edition. Amherst, MA: One Reed Pubns, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • San Francisco Examiner. “Classified Ads,” March 5, 1916.

    Google Scholar 

  • Code of Criminal Procedure of the State of New York. Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1881.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davies, Owen. A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunbar, Olivia. “The Survival of Sorcery.” Harper’s Weekly. September 21, 1912.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, Lawrence J. At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880–1920. 1st edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Fortune-Tellers,” October 25, 1885.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldstein, Bluma. Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives. University of California Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gray, Allison. “People Who Try to Get Tips from the Stars.” American Magazine, December 1921.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guii, Maddox (President, Aquarian Organization of Astrologers, Kansas City). Personal communication, March 4, 2022.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hancock, Ian. Danger! Educated Gypsy: Selected Essays. Edited by Dileep Karanth. University Of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoke, Travis. “The Heyday of the Fortune Tellers.” Harper’s Monthly, January 1932.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holden, James H., and Robert A. Hughes. Astrological Pioneers of America. American Federation of Astrologers, 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  • Humanities, National Endowment for the. “The Washington Times. (Washington [D.C.]) 1902–1939, December 11, 1921, SUNDAY MORNING, Image 26,” December 11, 1921.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jenkins, Philip. The Great and Holy War: How World War I Changed Religion Forever. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jung, C. G. Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Edited by Roderick Main. Revised ed. edition. Princeton University Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kerr, Howard H., and Charles L. Crow. Occult in America. First Paperback Edition. Urbana Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lane, Suzanne. “‘Black Thunder’s’ Call for a Conjure Response to ‘American Negro Slavery.’” African American Review 37, no. 4 (2003): 583–98. https://doi.org/10.2307/1512388.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Michigan. The Compiled Laws of the State of Michigan, 1915: Chapters 204–274, Tables, Topical Index. Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Company, 1916.

    Google Scholar 

  • Joiner, Mildred A. and Clarence M. Weiner. “Employment of Women in War Production.” Social Security Bulletin 5, no. 7 (July 1942): 12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935. 50768th edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • The New York Times. “Feeling Runs High at Williams Trial,” May 14, 1910.

    Google Scholar 

  • The New York Times. “A Growing and Dangerous Class,” February 4, 1867.

    Google Scholar 

  • The New York Times. “One Thousand Fortune Tellers; Plying Their Trade in New York City,” December 12, 1909, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1909/12/12/archives/one-thousand-fortune-tellers-plying-their-trade-in-new-york-city.html.

  • “Oswego Palladium. (Oswego, N.Y.) 1908–1925, March 14, 1918, Image 6,” no. 1918/03/14 (March 14, 1918): 6.

    Google Scholar 

  • People ex rel. Preiss v. Adams, 32 N.Y. Crim. 326 (1914) (City Magistrate’s Court of New York, First Division, Seventh District December 11, 1914).

    Google Scholar 

  • Pietruska, Jamie L. Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America. University of Chicago Press, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Poague, Walter S. Diary and Letters of a Marine Aviator. Chicago: n.p., 1919.

    Google Scholar 

  • Portnoy, Edward. “Clairvoyant Housewives of the Lower East Side.” October 25, 2021.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tenement Museum, New York. 1:00:50.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGrPNtjtZtI.

  • Silverman, Carol. “Everyday Drama: Impression Management Of Urban Gypsies.” Urban Anthropology 11, no. 3/4 (1982): 377–98.

    Google Scholar 

  • “South Side Observer. (Freeport, L.I. [N.Y.]) 1870–1918, March 22, 1918, Image 10,” no. 1918/03/22 (March 22, 1918): 10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spencer, Neil. True as the Stars Above: Adventures in Modern Astrology. Orion Publishing, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stone-Gordon, Tammy. “‘Fifty-Cent Sybils’: Occult Workers and the Symbolic Marketplace in the Urban US., 1850–1930,” PhD. Diss., Michigan State University, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sun and New York Herald. “Professional Spook Raisers Wax Scornful of Amateurs,” February 8, 1920.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Tent of La Zingara,” August 14, 1892.

    Google Scholar 

  • “The Advertiser-Journal. Volume (Auburn, N.Y.) 1913–1931, March 21, 1916, Image 4,” no. 1916/03/21 (March 21, 1916): 4.

    Google Scholar 

  • “The Evening World. (New York, N.Y.) 1887–1931, December 14, 1914, Image 3,” no. 1914/12/14 (December 14, 1914): 3.

    Google Scholar 

  • “The Pokeepsie Evening Enterprise. (Pokeepsie [i.e. Poughkeepsie], N.Y.) 1892–1918, July 27, 1916, Image 9,” no. 1916/07/27 (July 27, 1916): 9.

    Google Scholar 

  • “The Pulaski Democrat. (Pulaski, N.Y.) 1853–1985, February 26, 1919, Image 2,” no. 1919/02/26 (February 26, 1919): 2.

    Google Scholar 

  • U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975.

    Google Scholar 

  • U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Table 1 Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2020.” Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2020, 124.

    Google Scholar 

  • U.S. Senate. 3/4/1789-. President Wilson’s Joint Address to Congress, Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany. Series: Journals and Minute Books, 1789–2022, 1917.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National World War I Museum and Memorial, Kansas City, MO, USA

    Patricia Cecil

Authors
  1. Patricia Cecil
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Patricia Cecil .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    William Burns

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Cecil, P. (2023). Astrology for Everyone: World War I and Astrology in the United States. In: Burns, W. (eds) Astrology and Western Society from the First World War to Covid-19. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40486-3_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40486-3_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-40485-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-40486-3

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation