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 idle controlled the tides the life cycles of many animals,and perhaps the human menstrual* period - of central importance for a passionate species devoted to having children. There was another kind of disapprove in the sky the wandering or go stars called planets. Our nomadic ancestors must have felt an affinity for the planets. Not counting the Sun and the idle you could see only five of them. They moved against the accent of more distant stars. If you followed their apparent communicate 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 cause on human life. What must the influence of the planets be?
A few thousand years ago the idea developed that the motions of the planets determined the fates of kings dynasties empires. Astrologers studied the motions of the planets and asked themselves what had happened the measure measure that say. Venus was rising in the Constellation of the Goat; perhaps something similar would happen this measure as well. It was a subtle and risky business. Astrologers came to be employed only by the State. In many countries it was a capital offense for anyone but the official astrologer to read the portents in the skies: a good way to overthrow a regime was to guess its downfall. Chinese act astrologers who made inaccurate predictions were executed. Others simply doctored the records so that afterwards they were in perfect conformity with events. Astrology developed into a strange combination of observations mathematics and careful record-keeping with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud.
Among the terrible losses from infant and childhood diseases and such exotic illnesses as ‘the rising of the lights’ and ‘the King’s evil,’ we sight that of 9,535 deaths. 13 people succumbed to ‘planet,’ more than died of cancer. I wonder what the symptoms were. And personal astrology is with us comfort: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example we can investigate the New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21. 1979. speculate you are a Libra - that is born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post. ‘a compromise ordain help go 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 are pieces of advice - they tell what to do not what will come about. Deliberately they are phrased so generally that they could bear on to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sports statistics and stock merchandise reports?
Modern popular astrology runs directly approve to Claudius Ptolemaeus whom we label Ptolemy although he was unrelated to the kings of the same label. He worked in the Library of Alexandria in the back up century. All that arcane business about planetsascendant in this or that solar or lunar ‘house’ or the ‘Age of Aquarius’ comes from Ptolemy 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 Philoe. The 10th year of Antoninus Caesar the ennoble. 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 idle in Aquarius horoscopus Capricorn.’ The method of enumerating the months and the years has changed much more over the intervening centuries than undergo the astrological niceties. A typical excerpt from Ptolemy’s astrological schedule the Tetrabiblos,reads: ‘Saturn if he is in the lie makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned robust,black-haired curly-haired hairy-chested with eyes of discuss coat of middling stature,and in temperament having an excess of the moist and cold.’ Ptolemy believed not only that behavior patterns were influenced by the planet’s and the stars but also that questions of stature complexion national character and change surface congenital physical abnormalities were determined by the stars. On this point modern astrologers be to have adopted a more cautious position.
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Related article:
http://drvasu.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/carl-sagan-on-the-psuedo-science-of-astrology/
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