Reading the Sky as Our Grandmothers Did

Our grandmothers were astronomers, though few called them that. They read the sky for planting and for prayer, timed travel by the moon, and knew which stars meant the season had turned. The knowledge lived in the body and passed hand to mouth, uncredited by any academy.

Across the Black and Indigenous Americas, celestial timekeeping was survival. Enslaved people watched the same heavens for the road north; Lowcountry elders read the tides against the moon. To look up was to orient oneself in a world that kept trying to disorient you.

When we practice astrology now, we are not adopting something foreign. We are resuming an inheritance — taking back the right to read the sky and to let it counsel us, exactly as the women before us did.