“I could always be wrong. I have been wrong before. And I think every astrologer has been wrong before,” she says.
The strategy seems to be working. Rivers says that in the weeks following the June 21 presidential debate and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, she saw her following on TikTok jump by 30,000—she now has more than 200,000 followers on the app. She also added 466 people to her paid tier on Patreon, where she charges between $5 and $22 per month.
Joe Theodore, an astrologer on TikTok who started his account in mid-July, now has nearly 10,000 followers. His first video, in which he predicted that Harris would win the election, garnered more than 350,000 views. “The couple of videos I put on there have been just blowing up a little, but I didn’t expect that at all,” he says.
Though astrology itself has been practiced in some form or another for thousands of years, it has seen a resurgence in popularity, driven largely by millennials and Gen Zers. In 2019, investor David Birnbaum told the New York Times that he estimated the “mystical services market” was worth upwards of $2 billion. In 2021, the astrology app Co-Star raised $15 million and has been downloaded more than 5 million times on the Google Play Store since launching in 2017. The Chani app, launched by astrologer Chani Nicholas in 2020, reached more than a million downloads in 2023. Many of the astrologers who spoke to WIRED teach courses online or have their own apps as well.
Rivers acknowledges that seeking out astrological predictions, particularly around politics, could easily lead users down a conspiracy rabbit hole. “People, when they are scared, gravitate to belief. And people feel very powerless,” she says. “It is so important to understand how to communicate in ways that are responsible.”
New Age spirituality, of which astrology is often considered a part, has been an entry point into conspiracies like QAnon and is correlated with anti-vaccine beliefs. “We’ve seen how conspiracy, elections, politics, health, wellness, crystals, protein shakes all kind of came together in a swirl of connectivity because of the way platforms were making suggestions,” says Jiore Craig, senior fellow of digital integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“Our algorithms are pointed toward outrage and engagement,” says Jessica Lanyadoo, a professional astrologer and host of the astrology podcast Ghost of a Podcast who has 117,000 followers on Instagram. “The best way to get somebody engaged is to feed them conspiracy theories and cultish content, which astrology can be for some people, depending on the astrologer and depending on the motivations for the person who’s consuming astrology content.”
Nowhere is this pipeline more evident than in the recent case of astrology influencer Danielle Johnson, who had more than 100,000 followers on X where she posted under MysticxLipstick. Johnson had spent the better part of a decade building a platform talking about astrology on social media, but tweets toward the end of her life indicate that Johnson believed antisemitic conspiracy theories and conspiracies about Covid-19. In the hours before the April 8 solar eclipse earlier this year, Johnson killed her partner and two children before taking her own life. Her last post on X was a repost from a QAnon account, warning people not to look at the eclipse, and that “something big is coming.” On April 5, three days before the eclipse, Johnson had posted, “WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE. EVERYONE WHO HAS EARS LISTEN. YOUR TIME TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS NOW.”