The fate of the Burmese junta is written in the stars. That, at least, is what the Burmese junta believes. For one of the odder and most revealing aspects of the brutal military gang that rules Burma is its faith in astrology.

When the junta moved the capital from Rangoon to a malarial town deep in the jungle, it did so because an astrologer employed by Senior General Than Shwe had warned him of an impending catastrophe that could only be averted by moving the seat of government. The same astrologer asserted that the most auspicious moment for the move would be November 6, 2005, at 6.37 in the morning. Sure enough, at that precise hour on the ordained day, the bullet-proof limousines of Burma’s generals started to roll towards their new home on the road to Mandalay.

Burma’s intensely superstitious rulers have long been guided by a belief in portents and prophecies, cosmology, numerology and magic. The time and date of the ceremony marking independence from Britain was also chosen according to astrological dictates: 4.20am on January 4, 1948. General Ne Win was the mysticism-obsessed dictator who seized power in 1962 and steered Burma from prosperity to penury; in 1989 he introduced the 45-kyat and 90-kyat banknotes, for the simple but mind-bending reason that these were divisible by and added up to nine, his lucky number. He believed this move would also ensure he would live to the lucky age of 90. Ne Win, who insisted on walking backwards over bridges at night and other rituals to avoid bad luck, died in 2002, at the age of 92, which was either good luck or bad luck, depending on how you look at it. Even the decision to change the name of Burma to Myanmar was prompted by Ne Win’s soothsayer, and announced on May 27 (since 2 + 7 = 9).

Kipling once wrote: “This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know.” In its enduring fascination with superstition, Burma’s dictators seem like a throwback to another age. Each of the leading clans in the junta has a family astrologer. The army has its own zodiacal experts, but it is a dangerous job: astrologers who make negative predictions are liable to arrest and imprisonment.

The junta’s belief in astrology in part reflects the capricious weirdness of a peculiarly nasty regime, insulated from the rest of the world and divorced from reality. But the generals also follow a long tyrannical tradition: throughout history dictators have tended to put their faith in the occult, with unpredictable outcomes. An excessive belief in the supernatural is often the hallmark of a dying dictatorship.

Politicians in general have a peculiar weakness for astrology – Ronald and Nancy Reagan famously consulted an astrologer, as did both Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. President Roosevelt would never travel on a Friday. Unelected politicians are more susceptible to superstition than democratic ones and, as a rule of thumb, the more authoritarian the regime, the more likely it is to seek explanations and omens in the stars.

Napoleon was said to fear black cats, and believed that a meal of chicken and crayfish would bring victory (and, presumably, indigestion). Leonid Brezhnev conferred with an astrologer named Dzhuna at key moments in the Cold War and was treated by a Georgian faith healer in his later years; Catherine de’ Medici consulted Nostradamus himself, while the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II had his horoscope cast by Johannes Kepler, the great German astronomer.

From the Roman emperors to the Nazis to the Burmese generals, tyrants need to feel that fate, rather then accident, has brought them to power and will keep them there. Since their own eminence is preordained, they seek to shape and predict the future. For most of us, the daily horoscope is a harmless, if pointless, pastime, but in the hands of a dictator it feeds easily into paranoia and megalomania.

Of no despot is this truer than Hitler, whose fascination with the occult shaped a regime that deliberately rejected rationalism in favour of mystical determinism. “We stand at the edge of the age of reason,” declared Hitler. “A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising.”

In July 1933, Berlin’s most famous clairvoyant. Erik Jan Hanussen, was summoned to read Hitler’s palm at the Hotel Kaiserhof. Like most mystics, he foretold exactly what the customer wanted to hear. “I see victory for you. It cannot be stopped,” he said. It did him no good, for the Jewish Hanussen could not predict his own unhappy fate: to be murdered by the SS, and dumped in a field.

During the war, British Intelligence tried to exploit Hitler’s fixation with astrology by planting fake predictions of his imminent death in newspapers around the globe, in the hope that this would destabilise him and the regime. The intelligence officer in charge of the plan wrote: “This is probably the most curious thing I have ever been asked to arrange, but nonetheless most important.”

He was right on both counts: like the Burmese junta, Hitler’s obsession with the supernatural was a mark of instability and vulnerability, and a window into his strange and tyrannical regime. Gilbert Murray once wrote: “The best seed ground for superstition is a society in which the fortunes of men seem to bear practically no relation to their merits or effort.” That was true of Nazi Germany and it is equally true of modern Burma, where the good suffer and only the oppressors flourish.

Two sets of beliefs are colliding today in Burma today. On one side the monks, devotees to an ancient creed, demanding democratic freedom and modern economic reform, and on the other a vicious modern military machine, adhering to a medieval code of prophecies, astral omens and superstitious symbolism.

You do not have to be clairvoyant to be able to predict which of these beliefs will triumph in the end.

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