Modern Popular Astrology

Modern Popular Astrology

Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call Ptolemy, although he was unrelated to the kings of the same name. Ptolemaeus worked in the Library of Alexandria in the second century. All the arcane business about planets ascendant in this or that solar or lunar “house” or the “Age of Aquarius” comes from this scientist, who codified the Babylonian astrological tradition. Here is a typical horoscope from Ptolemy’s time, written in Greek on papyrus, for a little girl born in the year 150: “The birth of Piloe. The 10th year of Antonius Caesar the lord, Phamenoth 15 to 16, first hour of the night. Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury in Aries, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Leo, Venus and the Moon in Aquarius, horscopus Capricron”.

The method of enumerating the months and the years has changed much more over the intervening centuries than have the astrological niceties. A typical excerpt from Ptolomy’s astrological book, the Tetrabiblos, reads: “Saturn, if he is in the orient, makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned, robust, black-haired, curly-haired, hairy-chested, with eyes of moderate size, of middling stature, and in temperament having an excess of the moist and cold”.

Stars are campfire. Ptolemy developed a predictive model to understand planetary motions and decode the message in the skies. Image: © Elena

Ptolemy believed not only that behavior patterns were influenced by the planets and the stars but also that questions of stature, complexion, national character and even congenital physical abnormalities were determined by the stars. On this point modern astrologers seem to have adopted a more cautious position.

But modern astrologers have forgotten about the precession of the equinoxes, which Ptolemy understood. They ignore atmospheric refraction, about which Ptolemy wrote. They pay almost no attention to all the moons and planets, asteroids and comets, quasars and pulsars, exploding galaxies, symbiotic stars, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources that have been discovered since Ptolemy’s time. Astronomy is a science – the study of the universe as it is.

Astrology is a pseudoscience – a claim, in the absence of good evidence, that the other planets affect our every-day lives. In Ptolemy’s time the distinction between astronomy and astrology was not clear. Today it is.

As an astronomer, Ptolemy named the stars, listed their brightness, gave good reasons for believing that the Earth is a sphere, set down rules for predicting eclipses and, perhaps most important, tried to understand why planets exhibit that strange, wandering motion against the background of distant constellations.