Personal Astrology

Personal Astrology

Personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine the New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra – that is, born between September 23 and October 22.

According to the astrologer for the Post, “a compromise will help ease tension”; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’s astrologer, you must “demand more of yourself”, an admonition that is also vague but also different. These “predictions” are not “predictions”; rather they pieces of advice – they tell what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistences. Why are they published as unapologetically as sports statistics and stock market reports?

Source of the photo: Elena

Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births.

If astrology were valid, how could such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In carful tests, they are unable to predict the character of people they know nothing about except their time and place of birth.

Skepticism about astrology and related doctrines is neither new nor exclusive to the West. For example, in the Essays on Idleness, written in 1332 by Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, in Japan, we read:

The Yin-Yang teachings (in Japan) have nothing to say on the subject of the Red Tongue Days. Formerly people did not avoid these days, but of late – I wonder who is responsible for starting the custom – people have taken to saying things such as, “An enterprise begun on a Red Tongue Day will never see an end”, or, “Anything you say or do on a Red Tongue Day is bound to come to naught: you lose what you’ve won, your plans are undone.” What nonsense! If one counted the projects begun on carefully selected “lucky days” which came to nothing in the end, they would probably be quite as many as the fruitless enterprises begun on the Red Tongue days”.

We should be skeptic about popular astrology, but it is a rather amazing doctrine. Image : Animated Matte and Glossy © Elena