In an article for The Baffler, writer Jessa Crispin begins with the story of Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 was the first woman to run for president of the United States. Not only was Woodhull a former prostitute, but she ran with a black vice president and talked to spirits of the dead. [“Madam Prescient,” Issue #32, September 2016]

“Her enemies pounced on her utopian call for sexual freedom for both men and women, and stirred up the fear of miscegenation that white voters felt, with only minimal prompting, at the sight of a white woman consorting with a black man. Meanwhile, Woodhull’s history of working as a clairvoyant and her vocal support of Spiritualism were not much of a hindrance to her campaign. Go figure.”

Actually, it wasn’t so uncommon in that era. The women’s suffrage movement was concurrent with a burgeoning interest in spiritualism. Queen Victoria herself consulted psychics. Astrologers associate the trend with the discovery in 1846 of Neptune, which in the practice has come to represent spirituality (as in “spiritual but not religious”), sleep, dreams, and collectivism, along with negative connotations such as escapism, addiction, delusion, and illusion (the film industry also began in that period).

“Of course, elections now are different,” Crispin writes. “If Hillary Clinton started summoning the spirits of the dead at her rallies, instead of merely communing with undead monsters like Henry Kissinger, her run would be over. Or if she started openly consulting with astrologers to plan strategy, surely her numbers would drop. Someone on her staff must have known how to guide her through Mars retrograding over her natal Jupiter in Sagittarius—just look at the events of the last few months!—but they were smart enough to keep it quiet. Today’s electorate wouldn’t stand for it.”

Crispin is absolutely right about Clinton’s Mars-Jupiter transit, although the article obviously was published before Election Day. Unfortunately for Hillary, Donald Trump was having a special Jupiter transit, very special. It was great, and it’s going to get even – I had a Jupiter transit in September. Terrific, terrific Jupiter transit. But it was nothing like Trump’s Jupiter transit, the greatest of any incoming president in U.S. history.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Crispin has more than a basic knowledge of astrology. And the thing is, there is some evidence – scant, to be sure – that Hillary Clinton has consulted with astrologers, or maybe studied it herself at some point. Either that, or she was more clairvoyant than Woodhull.