UB researcher explores astrological speculation and capitalism in Gilded Age America

The idea of financial astrology might give pause to even the most daring investors, but astrological prediction did have a role in the culture of speculative capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

J.P. Morgan had a lifelong interest in astrological prediction, as did three New York Stock Exchange presidents of that period, all of whom consulted with Evangeline Adams, the day’s most famous astrologer.

“Astrology wasn’t just a fringe and ostracized practice but has absolutely been part of the country’s cultural history,” says Carrie Tirado Bramen, professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences, and author of an essay published in the Journal of Cultural Economy that explores the fascinating entanglement of cosmic forces and market prediction in the Gilded Age.

“Evangeline Adams’ memoir ‘The Bowl of Heaven’ (1926) reveals clients with an intense curiosity and demand for having a narrative about one’s life,” Tirado Bramen adds.

She says astrology fused stories with practice to demonstrate how people were trying to make sense of events, whether those events were personal, political or economic.

A brilliant self-promoter, Adams used the cultural capital of her clients to catapult her own fame, leveraging her popularity to exploit the common thread of predicting the future that tied the market to the belief of planetary influence.

While her clients, through Adams’ counsel, sought to build their fortunes, she worked to distance herself from crystal ball fortune tellers. Practicing her craft in an elaborate Carnegie Hall office, when still prohibited by law, Adams offered a dramatic flair to her predictions. Even her courtroom appearances came with a crafted stage presence that included prominent attorneys and Adams dressed in the latest fashion.

“She was a popularizer of astrology, taking it from an esoteric occult practice to a highly accessible popular form,” says Tirado Bramen. “She produced newsletters, mail-order horoscopes, and later a radio program.”

Adams also changed the trajectory of astrology, previously dominated by men in the 19th century who had a scientific or military background that enabled them to read astronomical charts. She had been trained by a Boston homeopath and had arrived in New York City in the 1890s ready to use the new mass media to publicize her astrological predictions.

“Although there were other women astrologers in the late 19th century, none of them had the visibility of Adams,” says Tirado Bramen. “She was a pioneer for other women astrologers,” such as Lynn Wells and Marguerite Carter, and later Linda Goodman, who wrote the first astrology book to make it to The New York Times bestseller list, and Joan Quigley, whom Nancy Reagan famously consulted.  

Adams invoked a shared language where the rich symbolic tradition of astrology met the beginning of pattern-seeking in economics.

“Capitalism thrives on prediction. This is why I think speculators were attracted to astrology, which is about creating narratives of the future. It makes sense that the two would be intertwined,” says Tirado Bramen. “As an English professor, I’m interested in how she made astrology legitimate as a form of reading and interpretation of signs. She wasn’t practicing a science, obviously, but she based her predictions on astronomical data.”

That cache of knowledge lent authority to Adams’ narratives, which weren’t always rosy.

“She wasn’t about always sharing good news,” says Tirado Bramen. “And although I don’t think she was particularly accurate, she provided for the investor a way to map astronomical data with the future behavior of the economy.

“She wasn’t genuinely influencing market behavior, but mollifying anxiety.”

And the crash of 1929?

“Adams lived until 1932 and claimed that she saw the crash coming, although it’s very hard to see in her writings before 1929 that that’s the case,” says Tirado Bramen.

In a radio program on Sept. 2, 1929, Adams claimed “The Dow Jones could climb to Heaven,” and the Great Bull Market did peak the following day, but she is notably vague about October, when the crash actually happened. She did, however, predict World War II and the death of opera singer Enrico Caruso.

“But failing to predict the crash raises a lot of question marks about her accuracy,” Tirado Bramen says.