A new chapter of The Financial Witch

When I created The Financial Witch in 2022, my goal was to help people like me—whom I dubbed “money misfits”—feel less ashamed about money and make more of it, so they could develop a healthier relationship to money. As someone with a personal connection to the occult, who’s experienced homelessness, chronic poverty, undiagnosed neurodivergence, and the exhilarating journey of solopreneurship, I knew that I was far from unique. There are actually so many of you (my audience) who identify closely with all of those categories, and we all have a similar experience of feeling like we missed out on some crucial financial education that all of our peers received, and they all seem to be having an easy time navigating money as adults while we’re left floundering and ashamed. Hence “money misfits.”

Of course, comparing our financial situations to others is a natural impulse but always an incorrect assessment, because you truly never know the intimate details of someone else’s relationship to money. We can’t escape money, not yet anyway, and sometimes it’s difficult to dissolve your financial shame when you’re still in a state of struggle. Feeling like an outcast, comparing your struggle to your peers’ successes, and hiding from your finances are all symptoms of financial shame.

Between 2022 and 2024, I sat down with over 100 folks over their birth charts, and used astrology to help people understand that their experiences weren’t happening in a vacuum, and that their struggles or insecurities or negative self-talk around money were not a symptom of their failures but rather a tool of capitalism.

A system that relies on exploitation will thrive when the people it’s exploiting feel personally responsible for their inability to climb into higher tax brackets. A system like this will perpetuate the “crabs in a bucket” theory to turn struggling people against each other, claiming their neighbor’s doubtfulness is the reason they can’t get ahead, while glossing over the fact that crabs do not naturally occur in buckets; someone with more power has to put them there.

So much of my astrology readings with folks centered around this concept: no matter what your placements are, there’s no “optimizing” your natal chart to win at capitalism, and furthermore, winning at capitalism isn’t actually a worthwhile goal. Actually, the goal of “winning at capitalism” is what perpetuates capitalism at all, so perhaps it’s something that’s worth distancing oneself from to establish one’s own idea of “thriving and resourced”—because that’s what we actually want when we’re trying to win at capitalism.

From 2017-2022, I was part of an MLM, and part of what they preached to newcomers was that the perils of late-stage capitalism are very real, and therefore you must create your own pile of money, your own source of cash flow, to insulate yourself and your loved ones from said perils.

Healthcare is too expensive? Better make your pile bigger.

The cost of raising children is going up? Better make your pile bigger.

There’s a global pandemic forcing working-class people to risk their lives for their jobs? Better make your pile bigger.

Climate change is making fewer places on earth habitable for humans? Better make your pile bigger.

Louis Vuitton throws you personal shopping parties when you spend a certain amount of money with them? Better make your pile bigger.

The illusion was shattered for me when I finally asked myself: what happens when everyone is just trying to make their pile bigger? They say it’s for a good reason, and they say good people should be rich so they can do good things in the world, but if everyone is always focused on making a bigger pile for themselves, is that actually helping anyone besides… themselves?

Is the answer to capitalist resource hoarding just… more resource hoarding?

Who are you really serving when you decide your life’s purpose is to make a huge pile and then give it all away? If the salvation lies in giving your pile away, why do you need the pile in the first place?

What if we all just had enough?

Eventually, just like with the MLM I was in, the illusion became shattered with regard to the work I was doing as a financial astrologer. Astrology is an excellent tool for many things, including figuring out how to make more money in your business. I can recommend you some fantastic business astrologers.

But I can no longer allow teaching folks how to make a bigger pile to be my purpose as an astrologer.

I still believe that most of the time, the majority of people’s problems would be alleviated with more money coming into their life. That’s just a fact of capitalism: money is power, money is life, money is time.

But I don’t believe my best work is simply to teach people how to be good at making money. My best work lies in teaching people how to locate the myths of capitalism when they’re being co-opted and played out, and then showing them how to subvert and reclaim these myths to build the world they actually desire, a world where money can still be a resource but doesn’t make the difference between life and death.

I believe that capitalism’s mythology includes the lie of individualism, and teaching people to use their birth charts as diagnostic tools for why they aren’t financially stable just doesn’t sit right with me anymore. The problems are much bigger than individuals, and though capitalism benefits from the lie that every outcome in a person’s life is entirely due to their personal choices, it is indeed a lie.

There are a multitude of socioeconomic factors that contribute to your quality of life and a likely staggering percentage of them are outside of your control. While cause and effect certainly isn’t canceled out in this case (folks manage to change their financial situations, for better or worse, through sheer will all the time), capitalism perpetuates the myth of individuality to make you believe that your suffering is entirely your fault and also that your successes are entirely up to you. But in reality, in the rest of the natural world, that’s not how anything works.

All species are interdependent on one another, and dreaming up a new world must involve a worldview that doesn’t place humans at the top of a pyramid or in some special category due to our cognitive abilities. Relating to the planets as ancestors isn’t required, but it does help orient yourself in the cosmos as one instance on a web of timelines, utterly dependent upon the entire planet you inhabit.

I pulled back from The Financial Witch for the first half of 2024 while I internally recalibrated and asked myself some big questions about what I truly want to accomplish with this business & this platform. And while I did that, what I realized with increasingly disturbing clarity was that astrology itself had been co-opted by capitalism and was in great need of its own recalibration.

Thus, Anti-Capitalist Astrology was born, and so was a new era in my business. Astrology doesn’t always have to be about the individual’s psychological layout and how to optimize one’s perceived weaknesses in the birth chart. This is a capitalistic approach that erodes the animist and collective nature of astrology, because astrology at its core is a timekeeping system.

Time happens to all of us. Capitalism feels inescapable because it has attached itself, like a cancer cell, to the very concept of time and infected it with the myth of progress. We cannot escape time, but it’s also not the linear, never-ending forward march to an unforeseeable End of mythological progress, where human life is fully optimized and leisurely, which the capitalist ethos claims to be creating.

Astrology is a meaning-making device that also happens to be a giant clock in the sky. Capitalism has no purpose outside of perpetuating itself, therefore it must attach itself to the ways humans make meaning out of life in order to co-opt a purpose and masquerade as a natural facet of human nature. The myth of competition is one such co-option we are all familiar with.

If capitalism is successful in co-opting something, then it will no longer have to try so hard to perpetuate itself because humans will apply meaning to it all on their own, and eventually even take up arms on its behalf. The people who defend capitalism (even when they own no capital to speak of) are not defending an economic system; they’re defending the meaning they’ve made out of it, or the meaning they’ve been told to take from it. They’re defending the idea of themselves they hold in their mind because capitalism has co-opted the idea that every person consciously creates themselves and is in full control of their own destiny. They’re not defending capitalism, they’re defending their self-concept. It’s very dangerous to threaten someone’s self-concept in an individualist society.

I knew I did not want to work with folks who needed to be convinced that capitalism is not good for them; that’s not my wheelhouse. What I realized during my recalibration phase is that I’m great at empowering people who know they feel a certain way, but struggle to articulate why or defend their feelings against scrutiny.

If we want more people to understand anticapitalism, we need more people to talk about anticapitalism. And if we want more people to talk about anticapitalism, we need to make it simpler to talk about. I knew a certain type of translation was needed. But you know what else involves a lot of translation? Astrology.

Now, my focus as The Financial Witch has shifted. I’m still an astrologer, and I will still be teaching and doing readings, but no longer with an individualistic perspective. I now teach and interpret astrology through the lens of collective liberation, of understanding core mythologies and developing goggles through which one can easily locate the myths of capitalism being perpetuated. I give people an education in anti-capitalism in laymen’s terms, without assuming that everyone who is interested in anti-capitalism already has a robust working knowledge of global politics and economic systems.

My upcoming course, Anti-Capitalist Astrology, is a thorough exploration of the history of capitalism and the myths of capitalism, delivered with an astrological perspective that connects the myths of the planets with the myths of astrology. For astrologers, you’ll be able to use what you learn in ACA to structure your practice in an anti-capitalist way that aligns with your values. For astrology enthusiasts, you’ll gain a new perspective on capitalism’s grasp on astrology and how you can locate & combat harmful narratives when you see them show up in astrological content. For non-astrologers, ACA is a wildly valuable foray into the power of mythology and astrology as meaning-making practices, where you’ll gain insights to widen your anti-capitalist perspective and connect it with other ideas in complex & fascinating ways.

I’d love to have you there. Trust fall pricing opens in a few days for waitlist members only, so make sure you sign up before then to get access.

Thank you for reading.

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Thank you, and I can’t wait to bring you more anti-capitalist astrology and magic.