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.

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?”

Calendar in the Sky

Calendar in the Sky

Our ancestors built devices to measure the passing of the seasons. In Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, there is a great roofless ceremonial kiva or temple, dating from the eleventh century. On June 21, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, a shaft of sunlight enters a window at dawn and slowly moves so that it covers a special niche. But this happens only around June 21. We can imagine the proud Anasazi people, who described themselves as The Ancient Ones, gathered in their pews every June 21, dressed in feathers and rattles an turquoise to celebrate the power of the Sun. They also monitored the apparent motion of the MoonL the 28 hugher niches in the kiva may represent the number of days for the moon to return to the same position among the constellations. These people paid close attention to the Sun and the Moon and the stars.

Other devices based on similar ideas are found at Angkor Wat in Cambodia; Stonehenge in England; Abu Simbel in Egypt; Chicen Itza in Mexico; and the Great Plains in North America. Some alleged calendrical devices may just possibly be due to chance – an accidental alignment of window and niche on June 21, say. But there are other devices wonderfully different. At one locale in the American Southwest is a set of three upright slabs which were moved from their original position about 1,000 years ago.

The spiral up there in the skies is a metaphor of immortality. Image : Animated Colorful Spinning Eleptical Cercle © Elena

A spiral, a little like a galaxy has been carved in the rocks. On June 21, the first day of summer, a dagger of sunlight pouring through an opening between the slabs bisects the spiral; and on December 21, the first day of winter, there are two daggers of sunlight that flank the spiral, a unique application of the midday sun to read the calendar in the sky.

But why did people all over the world make such en effort to learn astronomy? We hunted gazelles and antelope and buffalo whose migrations ebbed and flowed with the seasons. Fruits an nuts were ready to be picked in some times but not in others. When we invented agriculture, we had to take care to plant and harvest our crops in the right season. Annual meetings of far-flung nomadic tribes were set for prescribed times.

The ability to read the calendar in the skies was literally a matter of life and death. The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse; the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world: these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.

Life Under the Conditions of Jupiter

Life under the Conditions of Jupiter

Only way to make a living under the conditions of Jupiter is to reproduce before you are fried and hope that convection will carry some of your offspring to the higher and cooler layers of the atmosphere. Such organisms could be very little or very much. These floaters may propel themselves through the planetary atmosphere with gusts of gas, like a ramjet or a rocket. We imagine them arranged in great lazy herds for as far as the eye can see, with patterns on their skin, an adaptive camouflage implying that they have problems, too. Because there is at least one other ecological niche in such an environment: hunting. Hunters are fast and maneuverable. They eat the floaters both for their organic molecules and for their store of pure hydrogen. Hollow sinkers could have evolved into the first floaters, and self-propelled floaters into the first hunters, There cannot be very many hunters, because if the consume all the floaters, the hunters themselves will perish.

Physics and chemistry permit such lifeforms. Art endows them with a certain charm. Nature, however, is not obliged to follow our speculations. But if there are billions of inhabited worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps there will be a few populated by the sinkers, floaters and hunters which our imaginations, tempered by the laws of physics and chemistry, have generated.

You have to know the past to understand the present. Biology is more like history, than it is like physics. Jupiter

You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail. There is as yet no predictive theory of biology, just as there is not yet a predictive theory of history. The reasons are the same: both subjects are still too complicated for us. But we can know ourselves better by understanding other cases. The study of a single instance of extraterrestrial life, no matter how humble, will deprovincialize biology. For the first time, the biologists will know what other kinds of life are possible. When we say the search for life elsewhere is important, we are not guaranteeing that it will be easy to find – only that it is very much worth seeking.

In biology there is a principal of powerful if imperfect applicability called recapitulation: in our individual embryonic development we retrace the evolutionary history of the species. There is a kind of recapitulation that occurs in our individual intellectual developments as well. We unconsciously retrace the thoughts of our remote ancestors. Just imagine a time before science, a time before libraries. Imagine a time hundreds of thousands of years ago. We were then just about as smart, just as curious, just as involved in things social and sexual. But the experiments had not yet been done, the inventions had not yet been made. It was the childhood of genus Homo. Imagine the time when fire was first discovered, What were human lives like then? What did our ancestors believe the stars were?

The Star Has Turned On

The Star Has Turned On

Stars and their accompanying planets are born in the gravitational collapse of a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The collision of the gas molecules in the interior of the cloud heats it, eventually to the point where hydrogen begins to fuse into helium: four hydrogen nuclei combine to form a helium nucleus, with an attendant release of a gamma-ray photon. Suffering alternate absorption and emission by the overlying matter, gradually working its way toward the surface of the star, losing energy at every step, the photon’s epic journey takes a million years until, as visible light, it reaches the surface and is radiated to space.

The star has turned on

The gravitational collapse of the prestellar cloud has been halted. The weight of the outer layers of the stars is now supported by the high temperatures and pressures generated in the interior nuclear reactions. The Sun, our nearest star, has been in such a stable situation for the past five billion years.

Thermonuclear reaction like those in a hydrogen bomb are powering the Sun in a contained and continuous explosion, converting some four hundred million tons (4x 10(14) grams) of hydrogen into helium every second. When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shining because of distant nuclear fusion.

It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent (Samuel Taylor Colbridge, Omniania). Image : Bright Colors by © Megan Jorgensen

We have examined our Sun in various wave-lengths from radio waves to ordinary visible light to X-rays, all of which arise only from its outermost layers. It is not exactly a red-hot stone, an Anaxagoras thought, but rather a great ball of hydrogen and helium gas, glowing because of its high temperatures, in the same way the poker glows when it is brought to read heat.

Anaxagoras was at least partly right: Violent solar storms produce brilliant flares that disrupt radio communications on Earth; and immense arching plumes of hot gas, guided by the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar prominences which dwarf the Earth. The sunspots, sometimes visible to the naked eye at sunset, are cooler regions of enhanced magnetic field strength. All this incessant, roiling, turbulent activity is in the comparatively cool visible surface. We see only the temperatures of about 6,000 degrees. But the hidden interior of the Sun where sunlight is being generated, is at 40 million degrees.