Astrology As Science

Astrology As Science

The wind whips through the canyons of the American South-west, and there is no one to hear it but us – a reminder of the 40, 000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

But then, much later, another rather curious idea arose, an assault by mysticism and superstition into what had been largely an empirical science. The Sun and stars controlled the seasons, food, warmth. The Moon controlled the tides, the life cycles of many animals, and perhaps the human menstrual period (the root of the word means Moon) – of central importance for a passionate species devoted to having children.

Astrology is a subtle and risky business. Superstition is cowardice. Image : Catty Robot © Elena

There was another kind of object in the sky, the wandering or vagabond stars called planets. Our nomadic ancestors must have felt an affinity for the planets. Not counting the Sun and the Moon, you could see only five of them. They moved against the background of more distant stars. If you followed their apparent motion over many months, they would leave one constellation, enter another, occasionally even do a kind of slow loop-the-loop in the sky. Everything else in the sky had some real effect on human life. What must the influence of the planets be?

In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology – at a newsstand, say – is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology ; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astrology; there are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, we are always asked “Are you a Geminy?” (chances of success, one of twelve), or “What sign are you?”, Much more rarely are we asked : “Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?” or “When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?”