It's a shocking fact that there has never been a human culture which has not related its myths, institutions and identity to the stars. This is as true of the modern West as it was of our stone-age ancestors, and is as relevant to the last, surviving, indigenous inhabitants of Amazonia, as it is of today's American astronomers. After all, no scientist spends cold nights scanning the sky in search of new stars, or long hours decoding data from deep space, if the exercise is completely meaningless. Actually, it is profoundly meaningful and the last hundred years' worth of discoveries of the immense, incomprehensible size of our universe, combined with the sheer wonder of recent color-enhanced images of distance galaxies has proved as enchanting as any ancient story of star gods and goddesses, or of saviors descending to earth from the sky.
The name we normally give to the quest for meaning in the sky is astrology, from the Greek logos -- 'word' or 'logic' of the stars -- as opposed to astronomy, the 'law' of the stars. Astrology in the modern world has a somewhat problematic relationship with the prevailing culture. Its most familiar form is the horoscope column, relying on 12 zodiac signs, divisions of the sky invented in Babylon sometime before 500 BCE, but perhaps with origins which predate the invention of writing. The system is a familiar part of mass culture but arouses peculiar ire amongst some fundamentalist Christians, who regard it as demonic, and a small but vocal coterie of skeptics, who regard it as a barbaric affront to Enlightenment values. In the modern religious wars secular atheists find themselves in an unholy alliance with born-again evangelicals against the representatives of a tradition which can be traced to before recorded history.
The word "astrology" with all its attendant baggage is, though, thoroughly Greek. The Arabic equivalent would be Ahkam al-Nudium, literally, "the decrees of the stars," and in India we talk about Jyotish, the "science of light." The Chinese might study tian wen, or sky patterns, while the Japanese base their practices on onmyodo, the "Yin-Yang way," the endless interplay of subtle forces in the cosmos. To the historian of religion, modern astrology is actually a remarkable survival from the pre-scientific, pre-Christian near east. Filtered through classical Greece, the Babylonian system became a universal language which could do anything from finding lost slaves, working out the most fortunate time to get married, making financial deals, or assisting in the soul's ascent to the afterlife. At the pinnacle of the system stood the mighty planetary deities -- Zeus, king of Olympus, for the planet Jupiter, Aphrodite, goddess of love, for Venus, and so on.
The Greek philosophers, being philosophers, couldn't help tinkering with the underlying rationale. Having capricious gods and goddesses sending messages to humanity via the stars wasn't good enough for rationally-minded Athenian intellectuals. They secularized the system, introducing notions of celestial influence, in which the planets might be hot or cold, wet or dry, with environmental conditions on earth shaped by celestial patterns. Time was installed as an organizing principle, almost a deity itself, in which astrology worked because planets and people moved together in a beautiful, synchronized ballet, experiencing periods of tension or relaxation at exactly the same moments. (The Greek Cosmos, the root of our word "cosmetic," is best translated as "beautiful order"). Intricate systems of causation were formulated in which the cause of present events might lie in the future -- backward causation as we would now know it. Such notions flourish today in India as an integral part of Hinduism, complimented by ancient Vedic teachings and, in the West they survive amongst a very small number of enthusiastic practitioners.
That the impulse to develop meaningful relationships between sky and society is universal is suggested by the evolution of completely distinct, sophisticated, systems of astrology in two other civilizations, the one in China and the other amongst the Maya and Aztecs of Mesoamerica. In both cultures astrology existed as a complex aid to management of the state, and as a simple means of fortune-telling: to be able to work out one's fortune -- one's prospects for success or failure, were as important then as they are now. There, as in the West, astrology could be chiefly seen as a form of risk-management.
Every human society relates the shapes (usually animals) it sees in the sky, along with the repetitive motions of sun, moon and stars, to every-day life. Amongst the First Nations of North America, the living, moving structure of the cosmos was -- and is -- enacted in rituals designed to harmonize with the greater life-field of which humans are a part. The Australian Aborigines promote their well-being by engaging with the Dreaming, the primeval but ever-present timeless dimension which can be expressed through such events as the rising and setting of stars, or the brilliant appearance of the New Moon in the evening sky, as much as in primeval patterns etched in the landscape. For the Polynesians, who sailed thousands of dangerous miles between small islands in tiny craft, the stars were an aid to navigation precisely because they were set in the sky by a friendly creator.
Astrology is central to religious practice on account of the opportunity it presents to contact celestial deities, or to synchronize human affairs with eternal truths. The most important features of devotional astrology are the sacred calendars which were established up long ago in order to identify the most auspicious dates -- and often times -- to perform religious rituals. The legacy is clear in Christmas, which dramatically borrowed 25th Dec., the Roman festival of the Unconquered Sun. Easter, adapting an ancient Babylonian festival, has Christ resurrected on the first Sunday -- the day sacred to the Sun -- after the first full moon following the spring equinox -- when day and night, light and dark, are equally balanced. The Hebrew rules, set out in the Old Testament could not be clearer: God will only take notice of such rituals if they are properly coordinated with the sun and moon. To do otherwise is to risk divine wrath.
The ancient zodiac signs survive in the modern West because, uniquely, in an age of aggressive consumerism, media-overload and scientific materialism, they encourage people to reflect on themselves and their inner worlds; their hopes, fears and secret motivations. In mass culture, astrology replaces the remote scientific language of relativity and light-years with stories of love and luck. In an era when we are now aware that we live on an insignificant planet on the edge of a minor galaxy, astrology restores each individual to the center of their own cosmos. According to its practitioners it provides a sense of personal meaning and purpose and, sometimes, a guide to action. Both astrology's advocates and its critics find rare agreement on this point. This has nothing to do with the truth of astrology's claims, but it does explain its survival in the 21st century.
Astrology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Astrology - The Sacred Knowledge - Hidveghy, Agnes
Astrology was a good business about 6,000 years ago - it's been downhill ever since.
Or maybe it wasn't all made up.
Astrology is pseudo-scientific nonsense. The amount of energy that stars, or even reflected light from planets, impart on the Earth is nearly unmeasurable because it is so small. For things to affect each other, there must be some sort of energetic connection. The sun heats the earth, a refrigerator sucks the heat out of the matter we put inside it, etc...The connection there is obvious.
The light from stars affecting me? Hardly.
Still we must marvel at the "power and mind" of our God and Father in Heaven! Hallelujah!
We don't know where they come from. It's OK not to know. We are not compelled to make up explanations. Not knowing things we wish to know is useful because it stimulates curiosity and, unlike religious dogma curiosity, moves us forward. But wait, there’s more: The "Where does X come from?" questions lead only to infinite regressions. If god particles come from god the next question is where does god come from? There's no getting around it. If a god can be without cause then so can the universe. Talking as if god is an explanation is useless -- with an interesting exception. The exception is that if you take all of the natural laws & processes we know about, evolution included, to be the mechanisms that god actually uses to create the universe, then fine. You've got an
excellent explanatory framework and you can use every bit of modern science to support your belief in god's mechanisms. That's not a bad solution. Oddly, however, you can then drop the god idea and guess what? Nothing changes. You've still got the best explanatory framework around and it works just dandy without god. Actually it works even better to drop the god idea because then you no longer have to explain away all the really nasty things that he lets happen, like letting babies burn up in real fires without taking the trouble to rescue them. Lol.
Dismissing astrology out of hand sounds more like superstition than science.
The best way to prove astrology for oneself is to start with your own chart and adopt an empirical approach. Again, go to Wikipedia for these separate topics: astrological aspects, astrological transits and planets in astrology. Observing daily aspects of current transiting planets and their interactions with your birth or natal planets is a very good way to decide if astrology has any validity or not. Naturally this will take a certain commitment and patient objectivity to prove or disprove for oneself.
1). If these planets are included in horoscopes now for the sake of accuracy, then ALL horoscopes cast before their discoveries MUST have been inaccurate, and there goes the argument of historical accuracy. Or
2). If, in an attempt to preserve historical accuracy, the inclusion of the trans-Saturn planets is dismissed, then ALL horoscopes that include them and their supposed "influence" MUST be inaccurate. So much for the claims of accuracy!
For instance if one is born with a Mercury/Mars conjunction (both planets within a few degrees of one another), then one is expected to be impatient, very direct in speech, quick-witted and argumentative. Adding Uranus into the equation may exaggerate all of those mentioned characteristics, but it won't take anything away from them. Adding Neptune might tend to drive those same propensities inward and therefore could create conflicts with asserting oneself or expressing anger in a healthy way, but impatience and anger issues may still be there.
Same thing applies to predictions--if the transiting or current Mars in the sky forms a square or 90 degree aspect with one's natal or birth Mercury, then there are possibilities of getting in an argument, having an accident, being very impatient, having troubles with computers or other forms of communications etc. Adding Uranus along with Mars could increase the chance of those same things happening but some form of the basic Mars to Mercury aspect will still express itself, with or without the trans-Saturn planets.
One of these was the movement of the celebrations of Christs' birth and Resurrection to coincide with pagan festivals. This was done to appease the pagan masses in the Roman empire, and to help Rome with her goals for Christianity.
I don't know of any Christians who consider the alignment of the stars to be in any way related to the celebration of these events. We celebrate those things not to garner faith with God, for we are saved through grace. No, we celebrate those things in order to remember Christ and celebrate his life and his love for us.
Gobbledygook
Gibberish
For example, my natal sun is in Scorpio - and that's how people see me. My ascendant is Virgo - and that's how I am with regards to my "true self".
To me it is the same issue with the clear belief that the world was flat, according to the authors of the bible. You can't find very many believers that will admit this obvious fact. It is just too embarrassing, I guess, to associate the perfect word of god with such blatant ignorance regarding the universe.