section: Western politics and society
question: Which country's intelligence agency did Louis de Wohl work for?
article: Astrology
candidates: Cultural impact. Western politics and society. In the West, political leaders have sometimes consulted astrologers. Louis de Wohl worked as an astrologer for the British intelligence agency MI5, after it was claimed that Hitler used astrology to time his actions. The War Office was "interested to know what Hitler's own astrologers would be telling him from week to week". In fact, de Wohl's predictions were so inaccurate that he was soon labelled a "complete charlatan" and it was later shown that Hitler considered astrology to be "complete nonsense". After John Hinckley's attempted assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, first lady Nancy Reagan commissioned astrologer Joan Quigley to act as the secret White House astrologer. However, Quigley's role ended in 1988 when it became public through the memoirs of former chief of staff, Donald Regan. There was a boom in interest in astrology in the late 1960s. The sociologist Marcello Truzzi described three levels of involvement of "Astrology-believers" to account for its revived popularity in the face of scientific discrediting. He found that most astrology-believers did not claim it was a scientific explanation with predictive power. Instead, those superficially involved, knowing "next to nothing" about astrology's 'mechanics', read newspaper astrology columns, and could benefit from "tension-management of anxieties" and "a cognitive belief-system that transcends science". Those at the second level usually had their horoscopes cast and sought advice and predictions. They were much younger than those at the first level, and could benefit from knowledge of the language of astrology and the resulting ability to belong to a coherent and exclusive group. Those at the third level were highly involved and usually cast horoscopes for themselves. Astrology provided this small minority of astrology-believers with a ""meaningful" view of their universe and them an "understanding" of their place in it." This third group took astrology seriously, possibly as a "sacred canopy", whereas the other two groups took it playfully and irreverently. In 1953, sociologist Theodor W. Adorno conducted a study of the astrology column of a Los Angeles newspaper as part of a project examining mass culture in capitalist society. Adorno believed that popular astrology, as a device, invariably led to statements which encouraged conformity, and that astrologers who went against conformity with statement discouraging performance at work etc. would risk losing their jobs. Adorno concluded that astrology was a large-scale manifestation of systematic irrationalism, where individuals were subtly being led to believe that the author of the column was addressing them directly through the use of flattery and vague generalisations. Adorno drew a parallel with the phrase opium of the people, by Karl Marx, by commenting "occultism is the metaphysic of the dopes". A 2005 Gallup poll and a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center reported that 25% of U.S. adults believe in astrology.