#2923: Rebecca Gordon

Rebecca Gordon is an experienced and popular … astrologist, and the author of Your Body and the Stars: The Zodiac as Your Wellness Guide. So yes: Gordon is completely and utterly unchained by anything resembling reality, and her self-help ramblings are a chaotic mess of fuzzy New Age woo, category mistakes and pseudoscientific nonsense. However, in that mess of delusions, there is at least a discernible line of ideas that to some extent gives her work a personal touch: Gordon thinks that there is a direct link between horoscopes and health:

 

“Well, we all have seen the drawing of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci…The human body is actually shaped like a five-pointed star, with a head, two arms, two legs. And you also may have seen the drawing of the Zodiac Man, where you see Aries ruling the head, the first sign of the zodiac, Pisces ruling the feet, and all of the other body parts correlating to different zodiac signs. So the point is that your zodiac sign doesn’t just govern personality traits, and all of the zodiac signs live within you, and this is really about balancing all of the signs within your body.”

 

What it would mean for a ‘zodiac sign’ to ‘live within your body’ is probably not a question you should bother asking her. But yes, the idea is that the Vitruvian Man vaguely resembles a drawing of Zodiac Man, therefore astrological signs determine the health of various body parts. At least that’s what passes for reasoning in Gordon’s circles.

 

And apparently those circles are large enough to have drawn the attention of the producers of the show of America’s favorite charlatan and pseudoscientific grifter, Dr. Oz. So yes, back in 2018 Gordon was hosted by Dr. Oz, where she also gave a public demonstration of her insights: For instance, Oz is a Gemini, and according to Gordon, Gemini rules the hands and the arms, as well as the communication, so it makes sense that Dr. Oz is a surgeon and that he hosts a talk show. How such meaningless blather can be operationalized in a medical setting (ot what qualifies as making sense to Gordon) was of course left unexplained. Also, Tauruses, as evidenced by the “neck of the bull” can easily get too stuck in life and also “get a stiff neck literally.” Is it impressive that Oz managed to keep a straight face through the presentation?

 

Fortunately – since star signs are connected to health – you can also “strengthen your star sign”. Gordon doesn’t quite explain exactly what that means, but apparently it involves standing on one foot and using a Neti pot.

 

Diagnosis: Abysmal nonsense of the kind that would be laughed out of even the remotest hamlet in the darkest of medieval times. But a lot of people listen, even today, and those people are scary.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence