Astrological speculation on Wall Street

This essay discusses the role that astrological prediction played in the culture of speculative capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To make sense of this increasingly abstract form of capitalism, astrologers used their own symbolic language, rich in metaphor, which helped to make financialization a part of everyday life. The most famous financial astrologer of the period, Evangeline Adams, defended her craft as a ‘science’ in her memoir The Bowl of Heaven (1926). At a time when it was still illegal to practice astrology in New York, Adams’s memoir emphasizes a disenchanted practice, far removed from the mysticism of the occult, by focusing on techniques of mathematical calculation and close reading. Financial advice manuals of the period used a similar strategy when they distinguished speculation from gambling. And yet despite their emphasis on rationality, both retain the language of enchantment whether in the form of prophesies or mystical ‘hunches’. The essay’s final section turns to the legal constraints on astrological prediction and how Adams successfully challenged them. At stake was the question of who has the authority to predict the future at a time when the future for financial and astrological seers was a category that was speculative, fictive, and radically uncertain.