How do invocations of history inform speculative discourses in Western astrology? This article examines how events from the recorded past factor into predictive forecasts among professional astrologers for whom celestial patterns are indicative of shifting and evolving world-historical trends. Drawing on examples from prominent voices in the North American astrology community, across a range of commercial and social media platforms, I outline the parameters of what I call “astrological historicity,” a temporal orientation guided by archetypal principles closely associated with New Age metaphysics and psychodynamic theories of the self. I argue that while such sensibilities reinforce an ethos of therapeutic spirituality, they are not so narrowly individualistic as to preclude social and political considerations. Astrological historicity is at times a vehicle for culturally resonant expressions of historical consciousness, including critical awareness of historical legacies of racial and social injustice that directly link the past to the present and foreseeable future. Furthermore, while astrological accounts of history emulate aspects of modern historicism, including its orientation toward linear temporality and developmental themes, they rely on a nonlinear framework predicated on recurring cycles, correspondences, and synchronicities, bringing a complex heterotemporality to bear on world-historical circumstances. In seeking to understand the moral and political entailments of this area of occult knowledge production, this article aims to shed light on astrology’s cultural appeal not just as popular entertainment, spirituality, or therapy, but as an intellectual and cultural resource for many people searching for ways to express their frustration and disillusionment with reigning political-economic systems and authorities.

This article examines the career of pioneer British psychoanalyst David Eder (1865–1936). Credited by Freud as the first practising psychoanalyst in England, active in early British socialism and then a significant figure in Zionism in post-war Palestine, and in between an adventurer in South America, a pioneer in the field of school medicine, and a writer on shell-shock, Eder is a strangely neglected figure in existing historiography. The connections between his interest in medicine, psychoanalysis, socialism and Zionism are also explored. In doing so, this article contributes to our developing understanding of the psychoanalytic culture of early twentieth-century Britain, pointing to its shifting relationship to broader ideology and the practical social and political challenges of the period. The article also reflects on the challenges for both Eder’s contemporaries and his biographers in making sense of such a life.

The 2012 Mayan calendar prophecies have attracted considerable popular interest, thought little academic attention. Following the papers presented in the 2012 Session at the conference, I suggest that the ‘2012 phenomenon’ is the latest in a historic series of millenarian movements that form an established part of Christian culture. The 2012 prophecies, while Christian in neither tone nor affiliation, may be contextualised within secularised versions of western millenarianism as a whole. My purpose is to create a framework for analysis, placing the 2012 phenomenon within a wider cultural milieu and analysing its texts. I suggest that Karl Popper's paradoxical theory of historicism and activism, and the model of pre-versus post-millenarianism, may both provide means of analysing competing forms of 2012 prophecy.