‘I’m writing the equivalent of War and Peace’

Astrology, the celebrity astrologer Susan Miller is telling me over the phone from the Upper East Side, is not like tarot, I-ching or numerology. It’s not mere “fortune telling”. Rather, astrology is “the study of the mathematical cycles of the planets”. She is “doing math all day long”, a skill inherited from her engineer grandfather – which explains why she describes almost everything in numerical terms. 

Twenty-eight is the number of years her website, Astrologyzone.com, has been on the net. Twelve is how long she studied astrology. There are 3,000 certified astrologers in the US, 2 per cent of whom “know how to write”. Miller produces 40,000 words per month for the monthly horoscopes – written five months ahead – which is in addition to the “1,000 to 1,100 a day, times 365” offered on her daily horoscope app. As a child, Miller was in hospital for 11 months. She has had 40 blood transfusions. James Corden has three children, and he lived in the US for eight years. President Bush married Laura Bush after six weeks. The constellations move by one degree every 72 years. 

The numbers that matter the most are also the biggest. Astrology Zone gets 123 million page views a month and 1.5 million unique views. Miller’s website has been running since 1995 – the same year as Match.com and Amazon (“That did really well!”) – and still more readers keep coming.

Her long, detailed horoscopes have become a cult favourite among anxious, ironic millennials, and are a trusty source for people across “Silicon Valley, Silicon Prairie and Texas”. She counts Cameron Diaz, Kirsten Dunst, Cynthia Rowley and Lindsay Lohan among her fans. In recent months, she’s seen a significant upswing in the number of men interested in her work – around 40 per cent of her readers, she says, are male. “They’re a new generation who are curious,” she explains – “and also, well, the bottom line is: astrology works.” 

Miller’s popularity is undoubtedly linked to the surge in interest in astrology more broadly over the past decade. It has found new life in an online community looking for concrete ways to express their identities – putting your star sign in your social media bio is an easy way not only to tell people you possess the traits of a Virgo, but also to signal that you’re the type of person who believes in astrology.  

As well as conventional horoscopes, cool-girl astrology accounts, such as The Astro Poets, have found huge followings, TikTok fizzes with matter-of-fact videos about your Saturn Return, and astrological language has been memeified (one could claim to be, for example, a Carrie sun, Samantha moon and Miranda rising).

A birth chart, with its complicated aspects, nodes and houses, approximates the nuances of a life, or a person – never has it felt more tempting…