In 1979 Christopher Lasch saw his book, The Culture of Narcissism, become a best-seller, an unusual event for a cultural historian. President Jimmy Carter quoted it in one of his televised fireside chats despite its Marxist and Freudian leanings. While Lasch's work was an indictment of the private, selfish existence of North Americans, the operative word of its title was not an American coinage; a German psychologist introduced "narcissism" in 1899 to designate self-absorption carried to the point where normal feeling and action become impossible. Narcissism is a common fact of life evocatively named after a Greek myth - that of the supremely beautiful Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection in a pool and killed himself in frustration.

Now, an opinion popular among New Age astrologers holds that celestial bodies "come to our consciousness" (i.e. are discovered and named) when new ways of being or perceiving become widespread; each orbiting rock magically acquires the very name that will turn it into a strikingly relevant message in any horoscope where it happens to draw attention to itself.

This idea, the Doctrine of Names, is most clearly defined in an essay by Jacob Schwartz, The Significance of Asteroids (ca 1995). "In a mysterious and profound way not fully understood," writes Schwartz, "it appears as though whatever energy motivated the namer to name the asteroid carries an energy through times before the asteroid was discovered, and thereafter."

I'm curious about the energy that carries an energy, but I'll pass on that and ask the question that has really been bothering me: Why is there no asteroid Narcissus?

As of this writing, the Harvard list of Minor Planet Names was last updated on 28 March 2002. It now contains 9213 names of rocks, an average of 25.6 per degree of the Zodiac. In recent months Beiderbecke, Elephenor, Farpoint, Hermannweyl, Springsteen, Ohm, and South Dakota have been added along with many others. It seems taken for granted that classical mythology has been exhausted; astronomers have had to label their rocks with acronyms such as ANS, ASCII, GNU, ISO, and NOT (for Nordic Optical Telescope). Many names, for instance (5945) Roachapproach, are cute. But there's no Narcissus.

One might suspect that the committees which supervise asteroid names have all the flaws astrologers usually accuse astronomers of having - credulity disguised as skepticism, lack of intuition, pedestrian ways of thinking, etc. New Age dogma makes one exception, though: somehow, astronomers become the voice of the universe when they name asteroids. So if more than 9000 rocks have been labelled without a hint of Narcissus, it must be that the Cosmos knows narcissism isn't real.

The Cosmos apparently knows other strange things. For example, although "The naming of a new planet reflects a simultaneous activation of a consciousness in the human psyche" (Schwartz again), surprisingly little human consciousness has been activated in Chinese. According to my spot-check Chinese names account for less than three percent of the asteroid population, although at least fifteen percent of the human population must be thoroughly familiar with Putonghua Chinese.

But is this so surprising? The Doctrine of Names clearly appeals to people who assume that English unilingualism is normal. Nothing else explains why an eminent Californian astrologer believes, as she assured me in a seminar I attended a few years ago, (a) that asteroid names could be used to indicate whatever they meant as English common nouns - thus (1826) Miller could stand for someone who mills grain for a living - and (b) that if no suitable name exists, then one can resort to a monicker that sounds close to the right word - so (569) Misa can tell us something about a miser.

When I protested that none of this works in French, she replied, "I don't know what those asteroids would mean in a French chart, but that's what they mean in an English-speaking person's chart." We must keep this narrow cultural focus in mind when asking ourselves why Schwartz believes that asteroid (5080) Oja had nothing better to do in 1995 than to be in the right place for the O.J. Simpson trial.

The Doctrine of Names raises other puzzling issues. The asteroid list includes (1388) Aphrodite, (5731) Zeus, and (4341) Poseidon, which are respectively the Greek names associated with Venus, Jupiter, and Neptune. If the name says it all, we are now confronted with planet clones. As for the Moon, she has a multiple personality problem involving (78) Diana, (580) Selene, and (1067) Lunaria.

Other areas of astrology have been affected. Many people assume uranium, neptunium, and plutonium to be the metals of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto for no other reason than the similarity of names. (Lithium was assigned to Neptune sometime before 1948, and it seems like a sensible choice; my own candidates for Uranus and Pluto are magnesium and hafnium.)

Students might wonder if I am upsetting the whole applecart. After all, Mercury is mercurial and Mars is martial. Does my skepticism about names mean that I reject all the conventional associations of astrology? Not at all. I assume that the names of the seven visible bodies were chosen after many generations of practical experience with them

I can speak about my own observations with Mars, having lived for twenty years in peaceful rural surroundings in various parts of Quebec, usually with no visible neighbours. Manifestations of Mars are more noticeable in such places than they are in a big city. Whenever a noisy, violent event impinged on my life - it might be one of the children pushing another much too heartily into the refrigerator, or some idiot tourist using my meadow as a rifle range - Mars would be angular. It is inconceivable that such correspondences would go unnoticed for thousands of years; or that, having been noticed, the relevant planet would be named after some god of love or justice. The god of war was an obvious choice. The name comes from the observed action of the planet, not the action from the name.

A believer in the Doctrine of Names might object that while this is true, the action of a planet includes motivating astronomers to choose an appropriate name for it, so we need only consult the mythology dictionary - or make a dreadful pun - to understand how it works.

Fortunately, this is not what happened with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Although attempts are occasionally made to explain Uranus and (less often) Neptune by appealing to classical mythology, and although lip service is always granted to Pluto as "Lord of the Underworld", the interpretation of the modern bodies has developed gradually out of the workaday experience of practitioners.

Writing the second edition of his Text-book of Astrology in 1911, A. J. Pearce had the following to say about Neptune:

In the first edition (1879) of this work, the author stated that: "Sufficient time has not yet elapsed to enable astrologers to determine the precise nature of Neptune's influence. Until more experience shall have been gained as to its influence, it may be accepted that its general character is fortunate, and that persons born under its sway are healthy and good-natured." (111)

The intervening 32 years had changed Pearce's mind, and he now opined, interestingly, "that Neptune's influence is quite as malefic as that of Uranus - when afflicting the Sun, Moon, or Mercury, and receiving no assistance from either Venus or Jupiter."

It is reassuring to note that Pearce, both in 1879 and in 1911, did not pre-judge Neptune by looking up "Neptune" in a mythological dictionary.

Three fallacies underly the Doctrine of Names.

The first fallacy - that the English language, including English misreadings of non-English names, is a privileged conduit between human consciousness and the cosmos - is patently absurd.

The second fallacy is that "bodies" are the sole key to understanding, so only by having more bodies in the horoscope can we hope to find more meaning therein. This notion has become credible thanks to the catastrophic decline of technical astrology (surprising as the fact may be to some people in this age of silicon). In the essay quoted above Schwartz writes: "Astrology wasn't always so complicated. Our professional ancestors learned their craft in a world described by only seven planets." Schwartz seems unaware of the careful weighting of factors, of the many- levelled interpretations, of the geometric projections involved in various kinds of primary direction, in other words of how much more complex astrology was 400 years ago and how far astrologers could go with only the big planets. (Apologies to Jerry Makransky, Isaac Starkman, Rumen Kolev, and others who are keeping technical astrology alive, and to the memory of great practitioners like Edward Johndro, but they have been a precarious minority throughout the 20th century: in a discipline which claims to draw conclusions about the shape of the sky in human symbolic terms, the shape of the sky is now virtually ignored and adding a lot of catchy names to charts is thought to be the height of sophistication.)

The third fallacy is a pandemic cultural disease affecting much more than astrology: our inability to withold judgment and maintain an attitude of provisional skepticism about anything. When a new body is discovered, we must understand its action immediately. We want certainty and we want it fast. Not for us the wisdom of Hippocrates: "Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult."