#2582: Jennifer Hollie Bowles

Jennifer Hollie Bowles is a homeopath and astrologer and generally promoter of anything fluffy and magic and nonsensical she comes across without the faintest trace of concern over whether what she says has anything whatsoever to do with reality. Bowles is the astrologer for the website Holistic Horoscopes, and has putatively, for some reason, “studied Astrology for almost twenty-five years”. Her fundie musings (for at this level, astrology is a brand of religious fundamentalism – a very snowflakey brand, but fundamentalism nonetheless) have been published on a variety of websites – including NaturalNews – and she has even written a book, Eyeteeth of Goddesses, which we don’t pretend to have bothered to look up.

 

According to Bowles, however, astrology is serious business: “the study of astrology involves a deep learning process with high-order concepts, calculations, history, and beyond.” And astrologers “must check their theories and knowledge of planetary energies and aspects with actual chart data and people data at every step of the way.” Notice that testing the hypotheses against reality is not part of the scheme. “How is this process ever considered non-academic or ‘fluffy’ enough to be excluded from formal education in the United Sates?” wonders Bowles, and cites anti-astrology bias and conspiracies going back to the scientific revolution, when such practices were apparently discarded for being insufficiently objective. Not for Bowles the simpler (and correct) story where modern science has been concerned to check whether the hypotheses actually work, and have found that astrology doesn’t. No: here be oppression. Scientists are afraid. Evidence? Scientists tend to label astrology “bunk”, yet – asks Bowles – isn’t such labeling precisely “how people react when they are afraid of something”? (not for Bowles to consider the possibility that people use the label ‘bunk’ because astrology is, you know, bunk). You see, “astrology poses a threat to knowledge that has been controlled and dominated by the few” and is “a threat to those in power who seek to control and dominate the individual.” Just the fact that some of you might react to her reasoning by asking for evidence shows how deeply mired you are in the oppressive paradigm of science, whose goal is to keep free-spirited ranters like Bowles in their place.

 

As a Holistic Practitioner – who needs med school when you’ve been writing horoscopes for decades – Bowles pushes homeopathic remedies, but can also talk about prayer, gemstones, astral projection and Tarot reading, among other things. Apparently, she believes that “we are all manifestations of Spirit, and our Spiritual Bodies manifest through the development of our relationship with Mind-Body-Soul, or the Divine Trinity”, which is what it is, we suppose. At least it departs significantly from last entry Geoff Botkin’s hard and hatefilled fanaticism.

 

Diagnosis: Good grief.