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

This is part two of a critical analysis of the Barbault Basket configuration, a much-lauded and hyped planetary configuration occurring in July 2026. You can find part one here.

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.

In Part One, I called into question Barbault’s worldview and asked the community what it means if we, as astrologers, parrot his predictions without critically analyzing them, citing evidence of his misogyny, (possible) pedophilia, and Nazi apologism. In Part Two, I am setting the stage of the broader ideological frameworks that Barbault was working under. In Part Three, I will pull apart specific predictions by using this ideological underpinning as a framework for analysis. My argument is that Barbault’s predictions were based in a Eurocentric western liberal worldview, rooted in Enlightenment ideals, which privileged the status-quo at the expense of resistance and revolutionary actors and perpetuated whiteness and misogyny (and all their requisite harmful social problems). We too, are immersed in similarly-rooted societies (bear in mind that this is written in English and will be received by a primarily western audience) but agency and free will comes in to play - how we choose to decolonize (or not?) our minds informs our engagement or rejection of these ideological bases. As in Part One, this piece asks us to sit with and think about the Barbault’s Basket phenomenon and try, as we might, to imagine a different future.

One of the issues that has arisen, not only in the process of my research but from what I’ve witnessed in the community, is the lack of access to the primary sources. Barbault wrote exclusively in French, in which language all of his predictions were made, and it is very very difficult to find any of his work published online, especially in English. All kinds of statements have been made - including assertions that Barbault wrote about the planetary formation - without citing the actual piece of writing. I guarantee you that the majority of people who are writing about this summer and his takes on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the cyclical index are doing so without ever having read anything that he actually wrote. The least insidious reason for this is simply the lack of access to the primary sources, and the most insidious reason is simply that of the echo chamber the astrological side of the internet has become.1

In my search for documents written by Barbault himself available online, this is what I have found:

This article about pandemics in French.

The same article translated into English.

A 1990 self-review, translated into English.

Despite this utter lack of primary sources, there’s a wealth of secondary sources, readily available:

Lunarium

The Mountain Astrologer

Substack - Damian Sebouhian

Substack - Mark Shryock

Augurine

I was unable to locate any of the back issues of L’Astrologue online, nor was I able to find his 2014 book (English translation) The Value of Astrology which is the one consistently referenced by English-language writers online, except for on Amazon, which does not exist in Lebanon (and I wouldn’t support it anyway if it did).

If anyone has access to PDFs of any of his written materials and would share, I would be greatly appreciative!

Astrology is the oldest form of history2 and the purpose of history (ideally, although you wouldn’t find it to necessarily be the case in our very individualistic world) is to record the past, interpreted from a viewpoint in its future, in order to understand and bring context to our present. By the very act of doing astrology one is doing history. In the process of the Scientific Revolution and (so-called) Enlightenment, astrology and spiritual tradition were ripped away from academia and de-legitimized, in the name of SCIENCE!!!!!3 Science became law and relationship with the divine became relegated to the Church. Divinatory practices became something to fear and astrology went from a scholarly pursuit to being labeled an occult science. The Enlightenment argued that the power of human reasoning outweighed any sort of divine knowledge and in the process of ripping astrology out of academia, hundreds of years of codified tradition was largely lost.

In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas places the Enlightenment in the context of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, which he describes as:

perhaps the most richly abundant and brilliantly elaborate sequential patterning in the cultural and historical record. The expansive and elevating archetypal impulse associated with Jupiter seemed to interact in an unusually dynamic, mutually enhancing, and readily visible manner with the emancipatory and innovative principle of sudden radical change associated with Uranus. Major alignments of these two planets coincided with a consistent cyclical unfolding of successful creative milestones and liberating events in every field of human endeavor...The patterns of this archetypal complex were especially evident in the area of high culture - the arts and sciences, philosophy and the humanities, the history of ideas - but by no means exclusively so.4

The Enlightenment created a new ideological paradigm, under which we are still subject, and from which arose the priority given to reason, progress, and logic which facilitated and underpinned the creation and expansion of the nation-state system, western liberal thought, and global capitalist markets through colonization. The western liberal order is ideologically rooted in Enlightenment thinking and whether or not you personally believe and agree, you are still subject to it. It is the underpinning of the current world order.5 As a citizen, or a stateless person, of a nation-state - you are subject to this system. The Enlightenment thinkers were largely from western Europe and although dissenting ideological frameworks continue to exist and outlive colonization, Enlightenment thinking proliferated worldwide. There is no physically getting around it. You can decolonize and liberate your mind and your work but it will always be there.

One thing that Barbault absolutely got correct in his predictions was the suggestion that, now, we are at a very real crossroads - that we are witnessing a new world being born in front of our eyes. That is undeniable. But the point of this series is to think: what exactly is the new world that he imagined? This is absolutely conjecture, but given the times and what we can pull out from Barbault’s limited available online writing, we can extrapolate that he was not only immersed in the Enlightenment-rooted ideologies of the western liberal order but fully subscribed to and supported them. In a concrete, well-researched but rather admiringly framed take on Barbault and his observations of planetary cycles, Charles Harvey, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century British astrological milieu, writes:6

Such a global vision is that promulgated by the fine French astrologer André Barbault. For whilst other individual astrologers have periodically interested themselves in correlating the cycles of history with astrology (e.g. Jayne, Rudhyar) the resurrection and systematic reconstruction of mundane astrology on a methodical basis is due almost entirely to the industries of one man, André Barbault…7

Systematic reconstruction, methodical basis, one incredible man… this Scientific Revolution/Enlightment-based approach privileges the masculine and is white supremacist in nature.8 This approach is how the community at large sees and writes about Barbault and his achievements, and this approach is how a mythology around the ‘Barbault Basket’ was created when the term was used by a contemporary astrologer and was incorrectly referenced by using a Google translated version of a French article9 quoting parts of Barbault’s work and predictions.10 This approach is how astrologers using misquoted and misinterpreted and mistranslated materials, and/or simply not citing anything at all, maintain credibility and continue to make predictions that feed into public hype. This is how we got where we are today.

Thanks in large part to the pioneering work of Black and POC feminists and activists,11 the ideological paradigm in which we live is changing. We are witnessing it daily. We live in a highly globalized time and thanks to the internet it is hard to really pull apart the influences of one society from the next but US and western hegemony is real and palpable and the worldwide cultural influence exerted in these contexts has been exponential in our lifetimes. The movements are faster and more concentrated in the imperial core and societies rooted in the ‘Old World’ and the Global South are more resistant to change, but change is happening nonetheless.12 We have seen, even in the last decade, a huge shift in the way people identify, converse, and are conscious about their social impacts. Of course, socio-cultural advancements denouncing capitalism13, whiteness, heteronormativity, environmental destruction, etc, have and will continue to be appropriated and used by corporations and the imperial machine to enrich themselves and dilute the message, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop fighting.14

Astrologers are historians and guides and we have a responsibility to apply radical, revolutionary, and inclusive praxis to our work.15 We have a tangible and affirming impact on the people we work with, on how they see the world and understand their place in it. Our responsibility includes not only understanding our own positionality and worldviews when we approach our astrology, but also those of the people we read - and a reverence and respect for the material that necessitates academic rigor. If we want the dream of the new and beautiful future for humanity to manifest then we need to start here, now, today, and ask ourselves, all things considered, is the Enlightenment-rooted western liberal order the ideal foundation for a multivalent and inclusive approach to astrological practice, and, if the answer is no, what we are doing to dismantle these ideological foundations within ourselves first - before interpreting the language of the stars for others?

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Note: After publication, Jamie Wright of Desire Lines published this piece, in which they brought to my attention the plethora of essays available on Barbault’s old site, including an essay in which he talks extensively about 2026. An essay, which to be sure, has been neglected by the community as a whole in these discussions. You can find that piece here:

The more conservative historians in the room might disagree.

For an excellent piece detailing the place of astrology in the context of the history of science, see: Darrel H. Rutkin, “How to Accurately Account for Astrology’s Marginalization in the History of Science and Culture: The Central Importance of an Interpretive Framework.” Early Science and Medicine 23, no. 3 (2018): 217–43.

Richard Tarnas, “Quantum Leaps and Peak Experiences,” in Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York, N.Y.: Plume, 2007).

The dream of the cyclic index and the Saturn-Neptune Aries point rejuvenation as ushering in the collapse of this world order and bringing in the new - sure, I can vibe with that in terms of we are watching the collapse of this liberal western order as we speak. We are living the collapse. The most ambitiously optimistic part of myself wants to believe in its collapse paving the way for a new and more equal and just global society, but I’m too much of a realist for these kinds of delusions. The New and Shiny Future that is being ushered in is literally a sci-fi AI nightmare. This dude takes a really Eurocentric and rather affirming view of the liberal order, but an interesting read nonetheless: John G. Ikenberry, “The End of Liberal International Order?” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 94, no. 1 (2018): 7–23.

In a future piece I will be dissecting his take on the foundation of the state of Israel through what he wrote in Mundane Astrology because HOO BOY do we have a lot to unpack there, especially when talking about maintaining a revolutionary and anti-colonial stance in our work.

Charles Harvey, “Part 2: The Planetary Cycles and Their Interpretation,” in Mundane Astrology: An Introduction to the Astrology of Nations and Groups (CPA Press, 1992).

If we take the root of western liberal thought and one of the cornerstones of the thinking that came out of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment - that of PROGRESS - then the idea that WOMAN is closer to nature and less evolved than MAN, and that time is linear and we are ever moving FORWARD, then we can see a part of Barbault’s (and his contemporaries’) philosophies shining through. These ideas of MAN vs WOMAN are very Eurocentric - although patriarchy is a common concept worldwide (often spread by the Catholic church), matriarchy is also alive and well and parity between the sexes including rigid gender binaries are not a universal truth around the world. For an examination of feminist development out of the Enlightenment, see: Sylvana Tomaselli, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women.” History Workshop, no. 20 (1985): 101–24. For an interesting and novel (albeit modern) take on the Barbault Basket formation from a more feminine and intuitive lens, see:

The article itself can be found here: https://www.scribd.com/document/809895309/La-Decouverte-de-l-Astrologie-Mondiale-par-les-cycles.

I had been hearing about how the Basket was thusly deemed by SJ Anderson so I went searching on his YouTube. Please do not take this the wrong way, this is not an attack on Anderson or his astrology. This is an observation that is not only applicable to him but to the community as a whole. This example just happens to be pertinent because the term ‘Basket’ is credited to him, and in some way that makes his work the progenitor of this phenomenon.

Internet fame and seeing your ideas go viral can be wildly addictive, I’m sure, and, understandably, one may not know how to handle themselves when they’ve made an error. That’s why I understand the backtracking. That does not make it less dishonest, however, and in this internet arena of PUBLISH OR DISAPPEAR people are making mistakes. They’re not doing their full due diligence and research. That’s fine. It’s not ideal, but this is the situation we are in. Make mistakes, but own up to them. Saying, “I didn’t mean to say that” is not the same as “I mischaracterized the words of a man who spoke and wrote in a language that I do not speak or write in”. Watch the video - he says that Barbault wrote about the basket. He simply didn’t. A part of me writing this whole series is to own up to the fact that I TOO published, without reading or thinking or researching, about the Basket.

This is the first instance I found in which he talks about the term Basket, and he refers back to a tweet he made in 2020 or 2021 in which he apparently coined it. In this video you can see his use of Google translate and the misrepresentation of Barbault’s words:

After all the hype, he met with Lynn Bell and backtracked:

For instance, see the emergence of the term intersectionality and its theory here, which is now a part of the canon of any revolutionary thinker: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1 (1989).

I don’t fully subscribe to core-periphery theory but as of yet lack a suitable theoretical basis to fully express how this kind of cultural influence and diffusion works outside of that theory, so roll with me please.

See, for instance, this article in a law journal by a CORPORATE LAWYER informing their fellows on how to EMBRACE AND UTILIZE anti-capitalist thought to BETTER THE CORPORATIONS. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/legal-ethics-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2023/03/GT-GJLE220054.pdf. Absolutely bonkers stuff.

For a thought-provoking take on antinormativity in queer studies, see: https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article/26/1/1/34269/Introduction-Antinormativity-s-Queer-Conventions.

Astrologers such as , , , , , Elly Higgins, , and are examples in doing the work to challenge the status-quo and imagine new ways of thinking about astrology. Shout out to Ian Waisler and the Queer Astrology project - some of the first in my sphere to challenge me to think differently about what and how I was reading and engaging.