How Astrology Became the New Therapy
Anita Chauhan works with startups in Toronto, and she can easily describe the kind of looks she used to get from her tech-bro colleagues when they found out she was into astrology. “It was like…” and here her face lands somewhere between the eyeroll emoji and the one that’s about to puke. Chauhan, who’s 37, has been tapped into astrology since birth—before, actually. She is Hindu and, in accordance with cultural tradition, her parents hired an astrologer who consulted her birth chart to choose the first letter of her name. When Chauhan lost her mom to cancer, astrology became a way to transcend the tragedy. Over the years she mostly kept her interest to herself, fearing the dreaded eyeroll.
Then, in 2021, she went to her sister’s baby shower. She arrived with a handmade gift: an astrologically themed baby book. She knew the parents-to-be would appreciate the personalized memento, but was surprised when she left the party with orders for half a dozen more. Today, Chauhan sells the same books on Etsy for $150 to $250. She even does synastry readings—a branch of astrology where you compare two individuals’ birth charts—for tech co-founders as a way to explore their compatibility and points of friction. “For so long this was something people mocked. Now I’m the most popular person at the party.”
The same could be said for astrology itself, along with cosmic cousins like tarot cards, energy healing, palm reading and numerology. Once the domain of a crunchy, muu-muu-draped fringe, astrology is now the darling of internet culture and investment capital. Globally, the astro market is a $12.8-billion industry; it’s predicted to reach $22.8 billion by 2031.
I first clocked a shift a couple of years ago—also at a baby shower, talking to a woman I didn’t know. When I mentioned I had a one-year-old at home, she didn’t miss a beat. “What’s her sign?” she asked. What’s her sign? I thought. What is this, a pick-up bar circa 1970? Still, my brain scrambled for the information, and only then did I realize I had no idea. Not because I shy away from ephemeral intel around my only child—I know her name comes from Old Norse; she is “Wednesday’s child” (full of woe); her birthstone is pearl (a huge disappointment). But astrology was never something I paid attention to.
“You don’t know!” the woman responded (exclamation mark, not question). I pulled in a friend for reinforcement, and she punched the relevant info into an astrology app called Co-Star. Soon we had our answer: Cancer sun, Sagittarius moon, Libra rising. I was mostly just surprised my sensible lawyer friend used an astrology app. I don’t say that to dump on astrology so much as to declare my own bias. I have always been skeptical for the same reason I’m skeptical of all 21st-century woo-woo: it’s short on evidence, long on potential for exploitation, overrun by commercial interests and, to my mind, a tool of the patriarchy. (How can women advance in matters of consequence if we’re all busy comparing birth charts?)
Later, I pressed my pal for further details, and she told me she checks her horoscope every morning. I sputtered something about science, but I can still remember her response, verbatim: “I make room for the possibility that there are things in this world that science can’t account for.” No artifice, just honesty. I felt like a philistine with a sidecar of astro-FOMO: could it be I was missing out?
Last summer, a friend invited me to join her moon ceremony, where a fresh lunar cycle presents an opportunity to set intentions. I couldn’t make it, but the astrology resurgence was officially on my radar. Here’s the part where long-time fans think, Oh, please. Astrology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and some idiot journalist thinks it’s the new big thing. I get that. My friend Jess has been into various forms of hippie-dippery for as long as we’ve known each other: in high school she drank rice milk and hung out at a spiritual bookstore. Today she sees a reiki master. She’s the woo-woo in the group. Every group has one, the same way you have the friend who’s a clean freak, the geek, the sexpot—okay, now I’m just describing the characters on Friends, but the point is that the Phoebes of the world have achieved a critical mass. Astrology has always been there. Now it’s everywhere.
Suddenly the novel I was reading (Indigo’s best book of 2024) had a mystic protagonist. My favourite Canadian intimates brand released a collection of zodiac-themed bra and underwear sets. The stars of Wicked attributed their good vibes to well-matched sun signs. As the holidays approached, my inbox filled up with astro-themed gift guides. By that time I was working on this story. I started following an astrology influencer named Chani Nicholas on Instagram and was surprised to see we had 140 people in common: colleagues, camp friends, my niece, my sister’s real estate agent, Dan Levy, Jennifer Aniston. I followed a few more astro influencers, and the algorithm took off from there, populating my feeds with cosmic content for every occasion: bite-sized horoscope readings on TikTok, ads for an astrology-based parenting app on Instagram, a variation on that famous Ryan Gosling “Hey girl” meme explaining that Mercury was in retrograde.
Mercury goes into retrograde a few times a year, and in astrology it’s shorthand for tough times ahead. You may ask, Has Mercury been in retrograde for the last several years? No, but the contemporary astrology boom and a decade-long dumpster fire of earthly goings-on are crucially connected. The world is (both literally and figuratively) ablaze. There are wars, swastikas, growing economic disparity, tariffs. AI is coming for our jobs, America is coming for our sovereignty, social media is coming for our souls. Who isn’t on the verge of a full-on existential breakdown these days? And where previous generations may have looked to some god or another, religious influence is on the decline. So is trust in traditional authorities—in politicians, mainstream media, the medical establishment. For a generation grappling for meaning and connection amid the chaos, astrology has proved a popular prescription.
So how does it work? Think of the zodiac as a code cracker, a device that slices the heavens into 12 signs so that we can better catalogue and discuss the celestial movements within. The idea that each of these signs connotes individual personality traits—Tauruses are loyal, Leos are self-important and so on—is pretty new, but essential to the way modern astrology has caught on as a vehicle for self-contemplation. Astrology is not a legitimate science, but it is a legitimate system. Just like reading is based upon the agreement that a symbol makes a particular sound, astrological reading is based on the agreement that when Mercury seems to be moving backwards, you should probably go back to bed.
A recent survey shows that 45 per cent of Canadians between 18 and 34 either “definitely or probably” believe in astrology. That’s pretty staggering, but it fails to capture the full momentum of the modern movement, where the irony is baked right in. “I don’t believe in astrology, but…” goes the in-joke. The point is not what you “believe,” but what you’re getting out of it. Here the possibilities abound: it’s self help, but more cheerful; meditation, but more social; a productivity hack but sexy; adult colouring, but less likely to lose its appeal before your markers dry up. Life is hard, but therapy is expensive. And unavailable. And, let’s face it, a lot less fun. Enter astrology X technology, the ultimate collaboration for our troubled times: tiny slivers of transcendence, coming in faster and spicier than whatever you just ordered on Uber Eats.
Chani Nicholas is 49, at least a decade older than the generations that deify her. “I don’t think there is a person on the planet who has more influence over my generation,” a colleague told me. Nicholas lives in Brooklyn with her wife and their toddler. She was born in Nelson, a mountain town in B.C.’s Interior, and I tell her that an old crush of mine once ran off to Nelson. “I probably dated him,” she cracks—dry and conspiratorial, giving off that classic, cool older-girl energy that has me feeling like the Skipper to her Astro Barbie.
Nicholas didn’t set out to become the internet’s pre-eminent astrologer. At 12 she moved to Toronto with her father, his third wife and a new family of step-siblings. That’s when she met her step-grandmother, Anita, a reiki master who gifted tweenage Chani with her first astrology reading, an experience she describes as hearing a new language she understood in her bones. She did readings for friends, but never with a mind to making it her profession. She wasn’t ready for astrology, and astrology wasn’t ready for her either.
“The career I have today would not have been possible a decade ago,” Nicholas says, referring to her perch atop a thriving cosmic empire. She is an author (You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self Acceptance appeared on the New York Times bestseller list), podcaster (she hosts Astrology of the Week Ahead) and Netflix star (on Star Power, she has done readings for Jane Fonda, Amy Poehler and Chrishell from Selling Sunset). Her merch shop includes a tarot “Deck of Plenty” ($94), a collection of zodiac-themed scents and candles and the 2025 Astro Planner, which sold out by November.
Nicholas still sees VIP clients, but most of her time is devoted to creating content for the Chani app—the engine that turned her passion into a scalable business. Since launching in 2020, the app has experienced consistent 50 per cent year-over-year growth, with 1.4 million downloads. Nicholas is not just the internet’s most influential sky-gazer, but also one of its most impressive tech entrepreneurs.
That said, she would prefer not to be lumped in with the rest of Big Zodiac. She tells me, pointedly, that her app does not use AI and is entirely self-funded. Other major players include Co-Star, the first big fish in the astro-app pond, which raised more than $5 million in seed funding and actively promotes its use of AI to analyze data “direct from NASA.” Sanctuary, the Uber of the astrology world, launched in 2019 with big plans for a “wildly under-monetized market,” although that is perhaps less true of late. The Pattern is astrology minus the astro speak and popular with celebs (Channing Tatum once posted to Instagram about the app’s uncanny accuracy: “You need to DM me right now and tell me how you know this stuff!”). Star Child offers astrology-informed parenting techniques, Nebula is relationship-focused, Astro Future goes deep on birth-chart data and Soulloop is an integration of astrology and yoga.
Jessica Lanyadoo is another prominent Canadian astrologer who hosts the twice-weekly Ghost of A Podcast. “When I first started seeing clients, they would sometimes come to my home in disguise—I’m talking right up until a few years ago,” she says. Her CEGEP in Montreal offered a beginner’s astrology course, and she was hooked. Lanyadoo moved to San Francisco at 19 to pursue her career in a more woo-woo-friendly environment.
Toward the end of the 2010s, her prospects expanded: she started writing horoscopes for Girlboss and the Hoodwitch. These weren’t astrology publications but brands that wanted to blanket themselves in the cosmic vibes while giving their audience a reason to return on a regular basis. In other words, astrology painted with a new, internet-approved brush: less Age of Aquarius, more Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Even more important than astrology’s new aesthetic was its new medium. “Everyone has a robot in their pocket. That changed everything,” says Lanyadoo, who just turned 50. She remembers talking to some of her boomer astrology friends a few years back, when astrology was ascending via apps and social media. “They were like, ‘Here we go again—another flash in the pan.’ I said, ‘Guys, I don’t think so.’”
Lanyadoo moved back to B.C. at the end of 2024 because she always wanted to come back someday, but also because of Trump’s victory. Her political convictions are at the centre of her astrology. During the 2020 election she launched a Zodiac the Vote campaign to encourage turnout within her left-leaning audience. She didn’t do it for the more recent U.S. election because of the Biden-Harris administration’s record on the war in Gaza. It’s all a far cry from the days of “Is today a good day to buy a lotto ticket?” and “When will I find a man?” Lanyadoo says these stereotypes have helped to dismiss an ancient art form.
Like so many other Goop-adjacent wellness trends, astrology in 2025 is eager to boast its ancient bona fides, which trace back to Babylonia in 1800 BCE. Astrology regained its place in pop culture in 1930s England, when the first-ever horoscope column was published in the Sunday Express under the headline “What the Stars Foretell for the New Princess” (i.e., Princess Margaret). A year into the Great Depression, the idea was to publish something—anything!—that might instill a sense of optimism, and astrology proved just the ticket. R.H. Naylor, the astrologer who wrote that first column, booked a regular gig and became a global celebrity. His legacy is as the first sun-sign astrologer: he’s the guy who assigned personality traits to the various zodiac signs, meaning he is also the godfather of a million astrology memes.
Today, a person’s sun sign is just a starter culture. Astrology devotees obsess over birth charts (a blueprint of the solar system at the moment you entered it) and talk in terms of the “Big 3”: your sun, moon and rising signs. Also relevant: the positioning of various planets, transit patterns and lunar nodes. If all of this sounds like a lot to take in, just think of it in terms of a nearly limitless supply of personal data points that once required expert deciphering, but can now be crunched and codified. The implications for custom content are mind-blowing.
Hilary Henderson is a Toronto-based comedian and content creator who went viral in 2023 for a TikTok post pairing the signs of the zodiac to Canadian cities: Guelph is Taurus (forever seeking life’s comfy cozy corners), Toronto is Aquarius (endlessly self-important). From a content perspective, it’s a no-brainer: “I’m looking to connect with my audience, and astrology is something they connect to,” she says. Recently she posted about Pierre Poilievre. “I could give my followers a lecture on why I think his policy is horrible or I could just say, ‘He’s a Gemini.’ Like, if you know, you know,” she says.
Unlike knitting or fly fishing (both resurging in the young-adult demo) modern astro-mania is the kind of thing where you can dip a toe or dunk your entire being. “I dabble” was something I heard a lot in interviews for this story. There were the girls beside me at a pho restaurant who discussed a difficult friend in terms of her astro profile. One woman paid $75 for an astro manicure, another dropped $4,500 to attend a week-long astro-yoga retreat in Costa Rica. I spoke with Jen, a Toronto relationship columnist who noted how astrology has become an unavoidable criteria on the dating scene (last year, the dating app Bumble introduced a resident astrologer). Stephanie Ho works in the financial district and loves the Blue Jays, and astrology is a way to go deeper on both fronts: she and her brother share season tickets, and she says he is always getting mad at her for spoiling the endings of the games. She is completing a 12-week, $1,200 intensive on financial astrology at the Rock Store, a mystical emporium in Toronto, and recently pulled up the birth chart of Bitcoin to evaluate crypto investments. (Day trading based on astrology and lunar cycles in particular has exploded over the last few years. Both astrology and financial analysis use past patterns to predict future outcomes, goes the thinking.)
Jean-Olivier Richard is a science historian at the University of Toronto. Last fall, he started teaching a new course called Playing With Fire: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic, which filled up quickly on registration day. He assumed magic was the big draw (he’s not on social media) and was surprised to find his class filled with pop-astrology fans. Richard has spent a lot of time studying the role of mysticism in ancient societies, and he’s used to science students. “They come into class on day one eager to debunk a particular practice as pseudoscience,” he explains. In Playing With Fire, it was the opposite. Students would ask questions like, why are some planets female and others male? “Not ‘why did ancient astrologers believe this,’ but more as a statement of fact,” he says. I ask him how this lines up with the “I don’t believe in astrology, but…” mentality, and he agrees that irony is a big part of the pull, but also a generational shift towards pluralism (the belief that multiple truths can coexist) and the search for self-understanding: “Historically, astrology was practised to understand the physical and the natural world. Now, astrology is about the search for identity—almost like a Myers-Briggs personality indicator,” he says.
Or a Rorschach inkblot test, or your love language or your attachment style. What is your birth order or your Hogwarts house? Is the dress blue and black or white and gold, and what could this say about your place in this place in this vast and uncaring universe? Of course, this is all ripe for parody: Generation Avocado Toast at its narcissistic zenith. But millennials and Gen Z didn’t ask to be raised on social media, where expressing one’s identity has turned existence into performance. Loneliness is an epidemic, and maybe what reads as navel-gazing is actually a cry for community: I’m an empath, I’m a Virgo, I’m a Hufflepuff—where my people at?
Nat Foote is a Toronto publicity professional who got into astrology last year after a bad breakup. In her mid-20s and lacking connections in a queer community, she wanted to change that—she just wasn’t sure how. When she started visiting the city’s queer bars, she learned that a cursory understanding of astrology was the cost of admission. “I remember someone asked me about my Big 3, and I didn’t know what they were talking about,” says Foote, as if confessing a major social taboo. Remedying the situation was easy: she downloaded Co-Star, and it was all right there. “It’s a way to get past the small talk,” she says.
For Foote, her journey into woo-woo-dom has gifted her a group of like-minded friends: mostly queer women who get together at each other’s houses, drink wine, do a moon ritual. They’ll exchange tarot readings or write intentions for the week ahead on a bay leaf. Astrology has always landed in groups that feel abandoned by the mainstream: queer and racialized communities and now an entire generation of young Canadians who’ve watched their future fall out from under them. Astrology may not be bulletproof but neither were the promises of a bright future, a safe planet, rent control.
Hilary Henderson, the comedian who called Poilievre a Gemini, is tired of defending herself: “I don’t see young women reflected in the commentary around Canadian politics. If men can scratch their balls, sniff them and then log onto Jordan Peterson, we’re allowed to make these judgments about astrology.”
In 1911, Carl Jung wrote a letter to Sigmund Freud explaining how astrology provided clues to “core psychological truths.” Freud was more into the whole everything-is-about-sex-and-mothers thing, but his most famous protege would go on to set the stage for astrology in its modern iteration. Before, the ancient practice of celestial deciphering was often linked with gloomy determinism—the planets foretold the state of your cosmic bed, now prepare to lie in it. But Jung saw it as a helpful tool for analysis and personal growth. He likened astrology to his signature belief in a collective unconsciousness, a shared set of beliefs and understandings that were based on ancestral and not personal experience. The evidence was empirical: it worked because it worked.
Fast-forward a few generations and our quest for meaning is set against the backdrop of a mental-health epidemic. Across the country, anxiety and depression have soared since the pandemic, particularly among 18-to-29-year-olds. Astrology is one tool in a vast Swiss Army knife of self-help and self-care solutions.
Jennifer Fukushima is a registered psychotherapist as well as a trained astrologer in Toronto. “People come to an astrologer and a psychotherapist for similar reasons: they’re feeling lost, they’re in a life transition, they’re trying to figure something out,” she says. She offers a hybrid service called astrological psychotherapy, which speaks to the overlap. So does common sense. Take, for example, the Saturn Return: the moment when Saturn returns to the same place in the sky as it was when a person was born, an orbit that takes between 27 and 29 years. In astrology, this is a prompt for taking responsibility—a time to get real and get #adulting. The Pluto Square is when Pluto hits a 90-degree angle from its position on a person’s birth chart. It usually arrives around 40 and is more or less astro-speak for a midlife crisis.
Of course there are important distinctions between her two gigs: Fukushima’s relationship with her clients as a psychotherapist is ongoing, based on regular sessions, governed by a code of professional ethics and often covered by benefits. Astrology is less of a commitment and perhaps, she says, a gentler way to peel back the layers. “Sometimes people are in a situation that they can’t do anything about, or maybe they have a terminal illness,” Fukushima says. “We can’t change the situation, but astrology can help us reframe and bring a sense of acceptance, reduce suffering.”
COVID-19 didn’t cause Salina Jane Vanderhorn’s mental-health struggle—childhood trauma did that—but it forced her to sit in the wreckage. “Before that it was just like, ‘Power through, never process,’” she says. Then, boom, she was stuck at home, stripped of all the usual distractions. She started seeing a therapist, and together they concluded that most of her issues were connected to a lack of control over the future. “Astrology has helped me to find comfort in the fact that I don’t know what’s next—and that’s okay,” she says.
Vanderhorn is a huge fan of Chani Nicholas; she pays $14.99 a month for a premium subscription to her app. Every Sunday at 3:30, she will run a bath just as Nicholas’s “week ahead” reading lands in her inbox. “I call it my ‘Chani time,’” she jokes. Every now and then a reading will feel eerily on the nose: Nicholas suggested changes in Vanderhorn’s 10th house (public image and long-term goals) just days before she was longlisted for a writing prize. Mostly, though, it’s a validation of the things that Vanderhorn is already going through. “It’s helpful to know that when I’m feeling something, I’m feeling it for a reason. It’s okay—it will get better.”
And, usually, it does. This is not astrology so much as the journey of life, which can often feel like an endurance test. The only way out is through, goes the famous mental-health truism. Astrology helps people to take those crucial steps forward by providing critical distance. Like, your crippling need to be liked is not based on unresolved trauma but because you’re a Gemini. Your impossibly thorny relationship with your mother? Well, you’re a water sign and she’s all fire—what do you expect? We spend so much time ruminating and spiralling, second-guessing and self-blaming. Astrology places the faults of the past in our stars and points us toward the future.
In her book, You Were Born for This, Chani Nicholas writes that the popularity of astrology can be whittled down to a simple truth: we all want to be witnessed. And while this idea has become a groan-worthy cliché, there is no better way to explain how I felt after my 25-minute mini-reading where Nicholas explained that maybe I don’t associate so much with my sign (Scorpio) because Mercury is in Sagittarius, which is more adventure and exploration. (Now we’re talking.) My Virgo rising gives me a thirst for knowledge. “You’re motivated by details, by fact checking, by understanding how things work,” she explains. But because of Mercury’s placement, I have trouble staying on task: “You’re someone who will go around the world to get down the block.” (I really am.) “Okay, so that’s a very top-level read,” she says, and it feels like the horrible moment when a massage therapist rings the chime to signal the end of the session. Only this massage was on the inside of my brain, and I left feeling not just relaxed but invigorated. No more convinced of a relationship between celestial movement and human behaviour, but eager to book a follow-up.
Nicholas, and all the other astrologers I spoke with, are adamant that they’re not looking to convert anyone. “If astrology doesn’t work for you, I hope you find something that does,” she tells me, and that seems like a good place to end it. It’s just that I am a person who needs to get to the bottom of things, and I’m not sure that we’re there yet.
A 2017 study commissioned by the Ontario Science Centre found that anti-scientific beliefs are more prevalent among 20- and 30-somethings than older adults. Like astrology, this group cuts a wide swath: the predictable melange of anti-vaxxers and Fuck Trudeau–ers and tinfoil hatters, but also those who approach facts from a more pluralistic perspective. “I think my generation is more willing to embrace ambiguity,” Nat Foote told me. I take her point, but my brain can’t get away from the first time I heard the phrase “alternative facts” from Kellyanne Conway as hundreds of thousands of women in pink pussyhats marched in the streets.
The rise of Trumpism has driven people to astrology as a balm, but the same Trumpism has played a role in that choose-your-own-adventure approach to information that has RFK Jr. running the U.S. health department. Timothy Caulfield, the research director of the Health and Law Institute at the University of Alberta, has become a national authority on misinformation. “When you look at the growing popularity of astrology, it benefits from a blurring of fact and fraudulence,” he says. Caulfield coined the term “sciencesploitation” to describe the practice of using valid science and scientific-sounding language to market a vast array of magic beans. “But what about making room for the things in this world that science cannot account for?” I ask him. He counters that a fact-based worldview doesn’t lack for wonder: “Black holes! Quantum physics! Flying dinosaurs!” he says. As for whether science can explain astrology, he says, “It can: it’s not real.”
Anita Chauhan, the startup worker who now does readings for tech bros, is newly into astrocartography, an age-old astrology-geographybrid that indicates optimal destinations according to your zodiac info (it prompted the recent Vogue headline “How to Travel According to Your Astrocartography Chart”). Chauhan spends half her year in Paris, a city she fell in love with based on the culture and architecture, she says. And because her astrology said so? I ask, given the context of the conversation. She laughs, and suddenly I’m the one putting too much weight on the planets. “I’m in Paris because I love it. Astrology says I should be in Rio.”
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here, subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.
