Barbault's Basket and the Need for Critical Analysis in Astrology

This is the first installment of a critical analysis of the Barbault Basket configuration, a much-lauded and hyped planetary configuration occurring in July 2026.

This piece of writing is directed particularly to astrological practitioners, but anyone who engages with astrology would benefit from this kind of critical analysis as well.

In an age where critical thinking is being stripped from us by the AI overlords, engaging with this kind of challenging thought process helps us to free ourselves from the shackles of the dominant culture.

The #MeToo movement was a turning point for feminist theory and approaches globally. Working off of the decades of sustained work of Black and BIPOC organizers, feminism and the rights of women and girls to a safe and empowered workplace shifted cultural expectations of behaviour worldwide, not limited to the workplace, but in how women and girls expect to be treated. Naturally the movement blew up and was claimed by a white woman, Alyssa Milano. The Black founder of #MeToo, Tarana Burke, in the tradition of the pioneering Black feminists to whom she belong, understood the dangers of the movement being swept away into whiteness and the importance of continuing to include and center marginalized communities, including transgender and Native American women and girls, who are at disproportionate risk for sexual assault.

In 2018 in the heart of the #MeToo movement, prominent and well-respected astrologer Lynn Bell published an article honoring famed astrologer André Barbault, known for his sweeping predictions of world events. In it, she wrote about the experience of making a one-hour documentary interviewing 84-year old Barbault in 2005, remarking “What a delicious experience that was! André’s intellectual gifts were keen and quick, his humor ready, and he could still read an ephemeris without glasses.” I was curious as to what was so exciting about this interaction, and luckily the 1-hour documentary is on YouTube, hosted by the Astrological Association.

In the first minute, I felt a little inspired! This dude is one of the most-hyped astrologers this year due to the predictions he has made, and there is no more anticipated alignment than the Barbault Basket. They begin the interview talking about his family, and he talks about coming from a working-class background and self-educating. All interesting things! Then not even three minutes into the video, he talks about his brother, whom he says he admires, referring to him as his ‘spiritual father’.

As Barbault gleefully describes how his brother invented a “girl’s breast reading” with his friend, in which they would profile girls based on the shapes of their breasts, Lynn Bell’s laughter rings clearly through. After talking a little more about this brother, Bell remarks, “Everybody was brilliant in your family.”

Listen, I understand this was 2005 and rape culture and pedophilia was all over the place, and I know that there is some level of sexual promiscuity built into the French context. I believe in bodily autonomy and I think every human has the right to exercise their sexuality in whatever way is healthy and safe for them and for their partners. I know that this man was 84 and gReW uP iN a DiFfErEnT TiMe. I am a cisgender woman and understand how threatening and weird it can be to be presented with this kind of information from older men, especially those in positions of power, and when you come from a society with no context for how to react to these inappropriate behaviours. I am not bringing this up to divorce it from its context, nor to necessarily shame Bell, but rather to put context to the astrological leaders that everyone looks up to and think critically about their positionality when we take into account their predictions. And to hold accountable those big names in our community who continue to gloss over the problematic and recent histories that are built into the community as a whole. The article that Bell wrote, praising Barbault, was published in 2018 and again in 2019. I think two full years after #MeToo entering the zeitgeist is enough time to exercise some level of critical analysis about what one has unwittingly promoted in the past. People are allowed to make mistakes, but if they do not acknowledge them - why? in fear of community retribution? - they are, especially in this case, in service of whiteness, misogyny, and perpetuating unhealthy power dynamics.

A couple more minutes into the video, Barbault, flipping through a book of hand-drawn charts, settles on Pétain, who Bell describes as a “hero of WWI” and Barbault calls “a great man”. Philippe Pétain was the military leader of Vichy France, collaborating with Nazi Germany and actively participating in the Holocaust. In describing the chart of Pétain, Barbault focuses on his Mars-Venus opposition, Mars and Venus in one anothers’ signs, on the IC/MC axis and his rising Moon. “He defended the poor who were killed for nothing. He was very human. So he lived WWI in a positive way. As for WWII…he gave up.” Reducing his actions in leading Vichy France to “giving up” is attempting to absolve a war criminal for his part in an international genocidal atrocity due to his, what? Old age?

On account of his old age, some more interesting revelations came to light. I’m going to leave this here without commentary and let you do the work yourself. Just know that Bell was selective in her translation of the last slide, so I offered the original French for you to translate on your own.

Astrology is an interpretive art. History is an interpretive art. There is no objective history just as there is no objective astrology. It is always, always subjective. Yes there are facts, but facts are interpreted by those who witness them, and by those who write them down. This is the absolute power one wields as an historian or an astrologer.

As historians, we are taught to acknowledge and recognize our biases before writing, and to make clear our positionality to our audience while we are contributing to the literature and to the historical record. As astrologers, we should be doing the same. It is important to recognize the worldview of the Astrological Greats - and realize what worldview we are perpetuating and supporting by believing in and sharing their predictions and writing. Yes - there are concrete significations for each planet, sign, and house - but everyone has their own subjective experience of them, and interpret them based on that subjective experience. This is what needs to be acknowledged and analyzed, especially when talking about world-shifting once-in-a-lifetime major transits and configurations.

Barbault, at the age of 84, laughed and joyfully described misogynistic womanizing (possibly pedophilic) behaviours, glorifying these behaviours to a young woman who then proceeded to laugh along. This young woman became one of the biggest, most influential names in the astrological community, and continues to show him respect and near-reverence. If in the cultural awakening post-#MeToo people are quick and ready to hold people like Donald Trump and Joe Biden accountable for being pedophiles and sexual abusers, why are we not holding the Greats in our own community accountable?

And almost more importantly, why are we considering the predictions of a man who openly praised the womanizing tendencies of a genocide-enabling Nazi-aligned war criminal as ushering in a new and beautiful world?

If Donald Trump was a lauded professional astrologer who developed a rigorous and tested system of analysis of astrological trends and he said that this year is going to be the most spectacular exciting glorious shift for humankind - would you question it? Would you think, I wonder what Donald Trump’s opinion of a glorious shift for humankind is?

I bet you would.

The point here is not to deny Barbault’s research nor the very real predictions he made, but rather to think critically about what exactly those predictions were in the context of his worldview, what that means about what we should be expecting, and how we should be navigating a world in which we recognize the harmful ideologies held by persons in positions of influence in our community. In the next part, I will be decoding some of his predictions through an analysis of the western hegemonic thinking and liberal ideology which he espoused in his work. I hope this installment helped you question, even a little, why we are blatantly platforming a misogynist, and someone who glorifies pedophilia. Yes, it is really hard to find people in the past whose views on women weren’t outright misogyny, and it would be foolish to pretend that we can exist in an intellectual vacuum as if our ideas do not have progeny. The times were different and he is a product of his time, sure, but refusing to acknowledge or even question his values as we regurgitate his predictions is dangerous.

When Thomas Jefferson talks about freedom and liberty, we question it. Freedom and liberty for whom? We know he held enslaved people captive, many of whom he fathered, and his legacy has been exposed. We receive his words differently, knowing the true past of his behaviours.

We need to be applying this same level of analysis to the astrological community.

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