Astral Birthdays
June 28, 1990. The first Thursday after the first New Moon after the Summer Solstice. My birthday.
Birthdays are boring and simple. But what if they were exciting and complicated? Tradition dictates that we track this linear progression of days, and every 365th one, we hold a party: no surprise, no variation, nothing to be excited about. No meaning to parse, except one more year. But that’s not the only way.
Like birthdays, most holidays happen on a specific calendar date, like July 4th. A few others spice up the formula by happening on a specific weekday of the month, like the last Thursday in November. But when the Catholic Church had to determine the day to celebrate their most important holiday, Easter, they eschewed the static, linear calendar, and instead looked to the dynamic convolutions of the heavens. They took into account the day of the week, and that day’s relation to sun AND moon. They set, not a date, but a formula: the Sunday following the full moon following the Spring equinox.
What if we did the same with our birthdays, triangulating the state of those most powerful celestial bodies, the sun and moon, at the time of our birth? I followed in these theological footsteps to create the Astral Birthday Calculator, a jumped-up spreadsheet (and subsequent Python implementation). Try it out!
A snippet of the Python implementation.
This calculator will not only tell you the formula for your Astral Birthday (mine is the Thursday after the New Moon after the Summer Solstice), but will also tell you your Astral Birthday’s calendar date in any year up to 2100 (in 2020, mine was June 25th, and in 2019, it was July 4th). By the quirks of the heavens, if you’re born in early January or late December, you might end up having two birthdays in one year, or zero!
Each year, use your roving Astral Birthday to reshape your relationship to the year. How long is your Nth year—10 months? 14? Does this particular birthday come late or early? What other, static holidays does your birthday orbit around, then settle upon? These things, once the static bedrock of your chronological experience, can now be just as excitingly unpredictable as everything else.
This writeup once had a section exhorting the reader to use their Astral Birthday formula as a tool for self-discovery and annual prediction, ascribing vague essential meaning to Monday or Friday, Before or After, near or far, full or new, Solstice or Equinox. It had this section because I initially conceived of this project in an attempt to mock the concept of astrology. Though I’m intrigued by the stochastic narratives of systems like Tarot, astrology never clicked for me because it is essentialist— I won’t always draw the Hanged Man, but I will always be a Cancer with my Mars in Aries. On meeting me, nobody will smugly say “Ah, you drew the Hanged Man?” and presume to know me. I thought to expose the ridiculousness I saw there with an equally ridiculous system.
I’ve replaced that section with this one, to say three things I think are more important.
Altering your perspective on static systems is genuinely cool and good. Question everything, especially the things others view as unquestionable.
Spend your time and energy on things you like, not things you don’t, and especially not on making others dislike the things they like. You’ve only got so much of either to spend, and the Internet is already quite full of noisy dislikers.
Don’t let the circumstances of your birth, no matter how neat cool or clever, tell you who you are. Find out for yourself.
Now that I’ve gone and serioused it up, consider either lightening the mood with another fun project, or deepening it further with my thoughts about linguistic ethics.
Or, perhaps you want to talk about time, or what I could possibly mean by “stochastic narrative”?