France: Quel Est Votre Signe?

In France, where rationality is carried to extremes, so is superstition. A common conversational opener is “Quel est votre signe [What sign were you born under]?”

Thousands of French astrologers last week were telling tens of thousands of their anxious clients to watch their step in 1965. This is the traditional time for the credulous to pay from $10 to $100 for private consultations, and the zodiacal word was ominous: This year’s conjunction of the planets Uranus and Pluto forming in Virgo in opposition to Saturn in Pisces can play hob with everything from De Gaulle’s plan for a French-dominated Europe to Brigitte Bardot’s love life. The last time Uranus and Pluto ganged up on Saturn was about 1200 B.C.—and everyone knows how bad things were then.*

Lover’s Doubt. The land of Voltaire and Descartes, France has been equally hospitable to Nostradamus and Cagliostro. Ordinarily tightfisted Frenchmen pay more than a billion dollars annually—more than France spends on scientific research—to an odd-lot collection of soothsayers, seers, fortunetellers, clairvoyants, gypsies, faith healers and prophets. In Paris alone, there is one charlatan for every 120 Parisians, compared with one doctor for every 514 citizens and one priest for every 5,000.

Have you lost something? A dowser, with the help of a small pendulum and a map, will find it for you. Do you want happiness, success, power? Go see any of the voyants advertised in three astrological monthlies. Are you doubtful of your lover? Visit Professor E. L. Erus, who provides an “infallible life guide in the problems of the heart,” and for 20 francs and a handwriting sample will reveal “knowledge of the loved one, his personality and his fidelity.”

Curious as to what sort of following charlatans have, the newspaper France-Soir sponsored a public-opinion poll that suggested that 58% of all Frenchmen could say under what sign of the zodiac they had been born, 53% regularly read their daily horoscopes in the press, 43% thought of astrologers as scientists, 38% intended to have their horoscopes drawn up by an astrologer, and 37% believed that character traits correspond to zodiacal signs. More to France’s credit was the fact that the most avid believers turned out to be farmers, people over 65 and workers earning less than $120 a month.

Reigning Sorcery. Brittany and western Normandy still produce a dozen stories a year of sorcery and witchcraft. Sometimes it goes beyond fun and games. In the Norman hamlet of Saint-Fraimbault last month, a woman drowned herself because she believed she was a victim of the evil eye, and a young farmer reportedly hanged himself for a similar reason. Driven to holy anger, the local priest cried from the pulpit to his tiny congregation: “You believe more in the devil’s power than in God’s. Sorcery reigns here as master!”

* Especially for the Babylonians, the inventors of astrology, who were conquered by the Assyrians at about that date.