Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor Audiobook

Tapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation.



In a cross-cultural approach to understanding astrology as a magical language, Alice Sparkly Kat unmasks the political power of astrology, showing how it can be channeled as a force for collective healing and liberation.

Too often, magic and astrology are divorced from their potency and cultural contexts: co-opted by neoliberalism, used as a force of oppression, or distilled beyond recognition into applications that belie their individual and collective power. By looking at the symbolic and etymological histories of the sun, moon, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, we can trace and understand the politics of magic--and challenge our own practices, interrogate our truths, and reshape our institutions to build better frameworks for communities of care.

Fearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat's Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things.

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"Alice Sparkly Kat’s Postcolonial Astrology does something immensely paramount: its sweeping analyses rip off the togas worn by Western astrology’s planetary gods that Rome appropriated from the Greeks. Sparkly Kat shows how their loosely woven fabric drapes nothing but White privilege created at the expense of stolen land and the labor of people of color for millennia. In their book, there is no lapsing into trying to track astrology’s depths through the jungles of Jung’s putative collective unconscious. No awestruck adoration of Western astrology’s masquerade of itself as a path toward transcendence, a map for the evolution of consciousness, or a gateway for freedom from the tortures of our supposed ids, egos, or superegos. Instead, Sparkly Kat stays rooted in a body of critical theory and postmodern analysis to expose Western astrology, as an “anachronistic archive” and a myth-making machine more for racism and maintaining Whiteness at the expense of the poor and people of color. Yet, Sparkly Kat doesn’t commission the reader to discard all Western astrology’s borrowed and tattered notions. They instead direct us to look at the shredded heap of its motley meanings as just one important story that can indeed be told differently. We can learn to connect the dots of astrology’s fabled constellations of motley meanings, assembled with blood and burglary, in ways that create a canopy of heaven that includes all peoples of Earth and leaves us whole and restored."

— Samuel F. Reynolds, MA, CAP ISAR, NCGR-III