Kary Mullis – “I Am A Capricorn”

Kary Mullis, the Nobel prize winning biochemist and co-inventor of the PCR test was renowned or notorious (depending on whom you’re speaking to) for his eccentricity. 

An avid psychonaut, he speculated that many of his scientific discoveries came via his home-made LSD and he had outlier views on climate change, HIV and the paranormal dimensions.

But interestingly for us, he was avidly into astrology, an interest that most commentators also put into the “crackpot” category, naturally.

This is from his autobiography Dancing Naked In the Mind Field and while obviously I can’t extract the whole chapter, he goes on to thunderously discredit the traditional scientific disdain for astrology.

“I BEGAN TO think about astrology in the mid-1960s after three strangers had correctly classified me as a Capricorn. The probability of that happening by chance is 1 out of 1,728. The first was Emma, a ten-year-old neighbor in Atlanta, where I was a student at Georgia Tech. I was walking up the steps with my groceries when she proclaimed, “You’re a Capricorn, aren’t you?” I stopped in my tracks. How did she know? I asked her how a Capricorn acts. She replied, “Like you.” If Emma was just guessing, it was a good guess….

The next time somebody came at me out of the blue with my sun sign was three years later in Berkeley. I was at a party talking to some woman and she stopped in mid-sentence. “You’re a Capricorn. I know it.” How did she know? She said it was the way I was waving my hands when I talked. And the way that I held onto the countertop when I was not waving them. I was also leaning forward, then backing off. In terms of the number of people who had told me my sign, and the number of people who had been right, that was two for two. They both could have been guessing. It’s one in twelve. Two for two on a one in twelve is one in a hundred and forty-four…

One night about a month after that party in Berkeley, I was camping by the Navarro River in Mendocino County. People were walking all around from fire to fire and some guy stood outside of our circle listening to me tell a story. When I was done, he stepped into the light and announced that I was a Capricorn. He turned around, and I called to him. “How do you know?” He turned. “Because of the way you come on, really strong and then back off. You act like one…

He left haughtily, a swagger in his step, like a goddamned Scorpio. Three for three of one in twelve—1 out of 1,728. That’s the probability of three consecutive people independently announcing your sign correctly. I was convinced that it was not a matter of chance. Those people were observing my behavior and making a reasonable estimate of my sun sign. If people can really do that from a little bit of information, then astrology is worth investigating…

“One little experiment I did was by accident. I had my chart done by a shop in La Jolla that sent your birth date, time, and place, to a company in L.A. that used a computer to do the calculations and then to select a number of paragraphs about you from a huge number that they had about everybody. It was what you would call a computerized expert system. Most of the things that the fifty-page document said about me were correct.

But some of them were entirely wrong. It turned out that the ones that were wrong were derived from my rising sign. The rising sign in a chart is sensitive to the time of birth more than anything else in the chart. It is the part of the sky that is coming up over the eastern horizon at the time and place that you are born. It changes every minute.

The computer assumed that someone would not really know what actual time he was born if he was born during World War II in America. We had an extra hour of daylight savings time. In 1944, when I was born, if your birth certificate said that you were born at 1:53 PM in December, you were really born at 12:53 PM. I knew that when I filled out the form. I put in the right time and called it EST rather than EWT. The computer figured I didn’t know what I was writing and corrected EWT to EST.

The result was that I got a horoscope that was an hour off. My moon was misplaced just a half degree to the west. Against the backdrop of the stars, the moon moves slowly toward the east, not to be confused with its apparent movement to the west caused by the earth’s rotation. But my rising sign was way off. It was Taurus instead of Aries. Being educated in these things, I was more entertained than damaged. God forbid I had been dependent exclusively on that computer to tell me about myself.

To be an Aries rising and to mistakenly think that you are a Taurus rising could cause you to conclude that you were fucking up. A Taurus rising feels himself to have physical substance, he takes care of things like a farmer, he doesn’t depend on others a lot because he knows they can’t be trusted. His humor is ironic if at all, and he is thoroughly fixed. He is a mountain. He does not pray for he knows that nothing changes. But he believes.

An Aries rising feels his oats, but not his substance. He does new things. He is alone and so he originates. He has a conscience because everything that happens is his fault, but he can behave excessively since no one else is there. He dares. He prays. But he does not believe. I knew that a mistake had been made when I read the paragraphs that were based on my rising sign…”