“Born Under Unlucky Star”: Astrology, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Religious Authenticity

Was it a twist of fate—or scholarly desperation—that led me to a dig through 1920s tabloids in search of a cat horoscope? How did years of historical training lead me to a star chart for the feline whose death was astrologically foretold? Let me explain. 

I was struggling to determine the date and authorship of a unique archival document—a psychiatric case study of a Russian-Jewish immigrant, AC, who was involuntarily institutionalized after an astrologer convinced him that his Irish-Catholic wife was having an affair. This pedagogical document was circulated within clinical pastoral education networks in the early twentieth century to prompt Protestant seminarians to consider correlations between AC’s secular Jewish upbringing, his lifelong interest in esoteric religion, and his violent mental breakdown. 

In terms of dating this case study, I had my hunches. The patient reported that he converted to Catholicism in 1914, sometime after he married, and that the first child of that marriage was twelve years old. With these and other clues, I crunched the numbers. I tentatively dated AC’s case history circa 1925 and pressed on to other questions. 

But it bothered me. I worried that the murkiness of my empirical account—circa 1925—fell short of the historical rigor to which I aspired. What if my numbers were off? What if the patient was duplicitous or confused? What if the case study’s author intentionally muddled the dates to preserve patient confidentiality? Sure, I had my hunches. But my hunches left too much room for error. 

As I crunched the numbers again, the stars began to align. Attached to AC’s case study were the social worker’s interviews with professional clairvoyants, mediums, and astrologers who had interacted with the patient. According to the report, an astrologer named Mrs. T, had recently published a “horoscope of a cat” in a Boston tabloid. By some cosmic coincidence, I was temporarily living in Boston at the time. I realized that if I could locate this cat’s star chart, I could also pinpoint the year AC was hospitalized and when this pedagogical document was written. I raced to the public library and pored over microfilms of century-old tabloids. I discovered that in 1923, famed astrologer Catherine Howard Thompson published the star chart of a cat named Dicky under the headline, “Poor Dicky! Born Under Unlucky Star, Dies as Seer Foretold!” As I admired the late Dicky’s feline portrait, celebrating my archival breakthrough, I was confronted with an uncomfortable question: Did my pursuit of historical truth really hang on the astrological star chart of someone’s pet cat? 

This paper takes up an early twentieth-century psychiatric case study—a genre that operated beyond the bounds of traditional religious affiliation—as one source for expanding methodological approaches to the study of esoteric religion. My interventions are twofold. 

First, a historical intervention: Inspired by Charles McCrary’s recent work on the calculative nature of American secularism, which disambiguates sincere religious believers from counterfeits, this paper demonstrates how early clinical pastoral educators—and, by extension, American Protestants more broadly—cast esoteric religious practitioners not only as “cons” but as sincerely mentally ill. My research thus extends scholarship on the limits of religious freedom by considering spaces beyond the courtroom. I turn to an early twentieth-century psychopathic hospital as one site in which patients’ religious veracity was critically evaluated and, at times, even subjected to medical intervention. My analysis of AC’s case study, a secular Jew institutionalized (at least in part) due to his interest in esoteric religion, illuminates in new ways the role that American Protestants played in the rise of pluralist secularism (David Hollinger, Tracy Fessenden), the religio-racial politics of migration (Judith Weisenfeld, Robert Orsi), and the influence of eugenics movements on discourse surrounding interfaith marriage (Rebecca Davis, Nayan Shah). 

Throughout my historical analysis, I trace a paradox. On the one hand, by examining AC’s case study, I demonstrate how early clinical pastoral educators partnered with state hospitals to position themselves as arbiters of religious authenticity—disambiguating sincere spirituality from mental delusion. AC’s esotericism was not merely dismissed as superstition but served as medical evidence justifying his hospitalization. On the other hand, the medical establishment took seriously the professional clairvoyants, mediums, and astrologers who served as character witnesses to AC’s poor mental health. These archival fragments point to the surprising intersections of esoteric religion with psychiatric regimes. AC’s case study also demonstrates how the secular state leveraged not only the juridical power of the court but also the discursive power of the hospital (Michel Foucault) to police the bounds of authentic religion.

Second, a methodological intervention: I draw on Theodor Adorno’s critical analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column to playfully juxtapose what he calls the “pseudo-rationality” of twentieth-century astrology with the empiricist bent of contemporary historical methods. In response to Adorno’s critique of modernity’s compulsion to calculate, this paper asks: To what extent can the absurdity of our scholarly objects trouble the violence of mastery? Informed by feminist and postcolonial theories of the archive and philosophies of history (Joan Scott, Michel-Rolph-Trouillot, Gayatri Spivak, Franz Fanon), I bring Michel de Certeau’s provocation that “historians are always in an unstable position” to bear on academic approaches to the study of lived religion. This paper offers a methodological reflection on the contingent, sometimes absurd, nature of historical research. The pursuit of empirical certainty often hinges on unexpected and even arbitrary sources, from salacious tabloids to the horoscope of a pet cat.