The definitive cultural history of Astrology, written with rigour and personal honesty, addressing the question - what does our need to believe tell us about ourselves?

Astrology is booming. It drives a global industry worth billions, dominates social media feeds, and has become the unofficial language of a generation that grew up in science class. And yet nobody has written the definitive cultural history of why.

Marta Bausells has. In three parts (Past, Present, Future), she traces astrology from its origins in Babylon and ancient Greece, through its fall from academic respectability in the Scientific Revolution, to its extraordinary twenty-first-century revival as a digital-age spiritual practice. She interviews cultural thinkers, astrologers and sceptics; she interrogates the feminist and capitalist forces that have shaped its modern form; and she turns the lens on herself, writing as someone neither fully convinced nor fully dismissive.

The result is a book for anyone who has ever checked their horoscope and felt slightly embarrassed about it. Rigorous, witty and genuinely surprising, it asks what our need to believe tells us about who we are.



Marta Bausells was born and raised in Barcelona, studied Political Science and Journalism at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and has spent her career doing what good cultural critics do: paying close attention to things other people dismiss. Based in London, she founded and edited the Guardian Books Network, serves as editor-at-large at Literary Hub, and has written for British Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, the Financial Times, the Paris Review and Elle. Arts Council England and the London Library have both backed her work. She was nominated for Arts & Culture Writer of the Year in 2021. Astrology: A Cultural History is her first book.