How astrology is used in the Marvel universe

The Zodiac cartel

I'll say it plainly: Marvel took the twelve signs and made them a gang. Twelve leaders, each with a sign for a name, each with a costume to match, and a boardroom I picture as having a very large round table.

The founder and money man was Cornelius van Lunt, who went by Taurus. I have no quarrel with that casting. The bull is the sign's symbol, and van Lunt's power was property and cash, which is about as Taurus as a villain gets. Marcus Lassiter ran things as Aries, which is also right, because somebody has to charge in first.

What I find funnier is how often the whole thing gets destroyed and rebuilt. There was an android version that killed most of the human leadership, which is the kind of plot you only get when writers love a concept too much to leave it dead. Twelve costumed criminals with star signs is, apparently, too good to bury.

Scorpio and the Zodiac Key

Scorpio is the one member with a real arc, and that's because of the Zodiac Key, an artefact that hands whoever holds it a great deal of power and no manners.

The big reveal is that Scorpio was Jake Fury, Nick Fury's brother. I like this more than I should. It takes a themed henchman and turns him into a family argument, and family arguments are the only thing comics do better than explosions.

The Key matters for a reason I'd argue is structural. Without it, the zodiac in Marvel is branding: twelve crooks in themed outfits. With it, the astrology does something in the story. That's rare. Most fiction that borrows the signs never gives them a job.

Marvel's Zodiac cartel is the laziest use of the signs in comics, and I still enjoy it. Both things are true, and I'm not choosing.

What Marvel does with astrology generally

Very little, frankly. Once you step past the Zodiac, Marvel's cosmology runs on cosmic entities, alien empires and things that sound like physics if you don't listen too closely: the Infinity Stones, the quantum realm, gamma radiation.

When Marvel wants mysticism it reaches for sorcery, not stars. Dimensions, spells, pacts with things that have too many syllables. Nobody's powers come from their birthday, which I'd argue is a relief for everyone born in a boring month.

So the zodiac in Marvel is naming and structure, not a belief system. The signs organise a team and decide who wears the horns. They don't decide anything about anyone, which is, if you think about it, exactly how the signs work in real life too. The same borrowing shows up in video games, and for the same reason.

The reverse question

Fans have been assigning signs to the Marvel roster for as long as there has been a roster, and I've done it myself on a slow afternoon. Tony Stark is a Gemini. I will not be taking questions.

It's entertainment and it can't be anything more, because a fictional character has no birth moment. They have whatever a writer typed, and different writers have typed different things across sixty years of continuity. Reading a chart for Wolverine is reading a chart for a committee.

That's also the cleanest example I know of a wider problem with celebrity charts: when you already know the life, the chart will always find the features that explain it. With fiction the problem is total, because the life was written first and the chart drawn afterwards to match.