History of Astrology

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Modern science may regard astrology with the deepest suspicion but that doesn't

stop millions of newspaper readers and internet users turning every day to find out

what their stars have in store for them.

If you open any popular newspaper or magazine nowadays you will usually encounter a feature bearing a title on the lines of What The Stars Foretell. It contains a brief summary, inspired by the date of your birth, of what kind of day, week, month or even year lies ahead of you. “Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19). This is a good day for getting out and about, seeking new friendships and new experiences. Think twice about a proposition concerning money.”

These horoscopes are usually the creation of paid writers, who often hide behind some romantic-sounding gypsy name, and nobody is meant to take them seriously. For two thousand years, however, astrology played a serious part in men's affairs and was a respected science. The very name horoscope, from the Greek horoskopos, indicates its ancient lineage.

It survived the Roman Empire, Roman Catholicism, Humanism and the Reformation-but not the invention of the telescope. Although astrology still has its enthusiastic devotees today, it is now generally looked upon as merely a pseudo-science.

Ancient Art

Babylon, more modernly known as Mesopotamia, was the astrological center of pre-Christian times. Thousands of astrological documents and fragments, some believed to date back to before 2000 B.C. in origin, were found in the library of King Assurbanipal (669-626 B.C.) at Nineveh.

Astronomy, to which they made a substantial contribution, interested the Greeks far more than astrology did.

Their scientific discoveries met up with Babylonian lore in Egypt, however, and in no time at all astrology became the “in” thing. When the Hollywood sheik slides from his panting steed, clasps the heroine in his arms and murmurs between passionate kisses, “Our destiny is written in the stars,” he is being true to a tradition twenty centuries old.

From Egypt, astrology swept the Greco-Roman world where it had a firm hold until the eighteenth century. This is rather curious. You would expect the notion that our destiny is written in the stars to flourish in Arabic countries because Islam is essentially fatalistic. Even as late as 1909 Sultan Abdul-Hamid II of Turkey had a court astrologer. Yet it is odd that it survived so long in a culture which believed that man had the freedom of will to decide his own destiny independently of what the stars might have in store for him.

The typical astrological viewpoint of the Roman Empire before Christianity had taken a firm hold on it was expressed by the Stoic philosopher Lucius Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65) when he wrote, “Our fates lead us, and the hour of birth has determined how much time remains for each.” It is just as well he could not foresee all the stars had in store for him: the Emperor Nero thought Seneca was conspiring against him and forced him to commit suicide.

What to learn more, read on...

Powerful Force

Such fatalistic views as Seneca's were later attacked on a wide front. The Latin author Aulus Gellius, who died in the year 130, pointed out that “penalties for the guilty have been wrongfully established by laws if men do not commit crimes voluntarily but are led to do so by fate.” St. Augustine (354 - 430) took up the theme of lack of personal responsibility with his ironic statement: “You will be an adulterer because you have Venus:

you will be a murderer because you have Mars.”

Despite this basic hostility by the church, however, Popes still- had their personal astrologers as late as the sixteenth century. The clash between Christianity and astrology was rationalized in the Latin phrase: Inclinant astra, non necessitant (“The stars influence, they do not compel”).

Even after the Age of Humanism, which looked back to the Greeks, and the Reformation which followed it, astrology remained a powerful force.

Leading astronomers like Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and, later, Newton were usually astrologers as well.

Vintage Years

And King Umberto I of Italy was introduced to a restaurant proprietor and remarked upon the similarity of their appearance. Upon inquiring it was learned that the King and the restaurateur had been born on the same day, at the same time, had married wives with the same name, and both had sons named Vittorio. The restaurateur had gone into business the day the King ascended the throne.

“The King then learned that the restaurateur was to take part in a shooting match in which he was to present the prizes; and the King expressed the wish to meet his double again. But when the time came the King learned that his time twin had been killed accidentally while cleaning his gun. And before he could be taken to the scene of the accident, the King himself was shot and killed by an anarchist assassin.”

Astrologers are also pleased to be able to cite Carl Jung, pioneer of one of the mainstreams of modern psychology, as a believer. “We are born in a given moment, in a given place,” he said, `and like the vintage years of wine we have the qualities of the year and the season in which we were born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.”To elaborate on Jung's wine analogy, it is said that a curious 11-year cycle observable in the great vintage years of Burgundy wine had been shown to have a direct relationship with an 11-year sun spot. This same sun spot appears to coincide with changes in the pattern of the rings of trees and the behavior of human beings. Statistics are put forward to show that traffic accidents in Russia and Germany increase by as much as four times after a solar flare-up and that admissions to psychiatric hospitals in New York show a marked increase on days when there is strong solar activity.

The moon, too, is held to have a profound effect on human behavior. It has long been believed that the mentally unbalanced become even more unstable at the time of the full moon, and American criminal statistics show a definite upward trend in psychotic crimes during the time of the full moon. While much of this information is beguiling, it is hardly necessary to say that it is surrounded by arguments about validity of statistical methods and to what degree we are dealing with coincidence rather than cause. Without entering into these complex debates, what can be said is that most thinkers have considered astrology a dead duck since the invention of the telescope in the eighteenth century. The discovery of two more planets, Uranus and Neptune, hundreds of planetoids between Mars and Jupiter, and thousands of new stars seriously undermined the foundations of what had until then been considered a science.

Astrology, apparently a neat system, was shown to be neither neat nor systematic. Many of its tenets about relationships between the heavens and human characteristics and behavior are now considered arbitrary assumptions without any scientific basis. Its predictions have not, by and large, stood up to modern statistical analysis. Its position has been further damaged by the fact that its practitioners frequently disagree in significant details, and even over fundamental assumptions, of their profession.

Nevertheless, astrology still has a widespread appeal for men and women who are by no means always to be classed as either credulous or ignorant. Even the Nazis used astrology in planning their strategy in World War II. The fact that they lost the war should not necessarily be put forward as an argument against astrology. It could be just that they had rotten astrologers.

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