Astrology

Astrology
The art of judging the influence of planets and stars on human beings—in the past, in the present, and, by extrapolation, in the future.
India and China have had astrological systems for a long time. These are highly developed, and regarded with respect. The Western version has its ancestry in Babylonia, where astronomers were listing constellations and prominent stars in the second millennium b.c. With the passage of time, they came to distinguish seven “planets,” counting the five true ones visible without telescopes plus the Sun and Moon—in other words, the seven bodies that were not fixed like stars. All seven were associated with divine beings. They were seen to travel through sections of the sky that astronomers defined by twelve constellations, the signs of the Zodiac.
In the sixth century b.c., Babylonians developed a theory that these celestial orbs influenced the world below. Greek advances in astronomy presently refined the possibilities, and the Western form of astrology took shape. Earth was located at the center of the universe, with seven transparent spheres rotating around it, one outside another, each carrying a planet. The Moon’s was nearest to Earth; concentrically outside it, in order, came the spheres carrying Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Outside Saturn’s sphere was a larger one bearing the stars, and outside that was an even larger one that imparted motion inward to all the others. The planets exerted influence on the world at the center, and, in their varying relations to the Zodiac and each other, were “interpreters” of destiny. As in Babylonia, deities were associated with them. “Mercury,” “Venus” and the rest are the Roman names of the divinities that were assigned to these planets by classical astrologers because they were thought to be the appropriate ones. The fifth planet’s influence, for example, tended towards strength, assertiveness, and anger, so it was taken to be the planet of the war god Mars.
Astronomically, the system is no longer viable, and astrologers are quite aware of the fact. But they still tacitly assume it, in its essentials, as a kind of operating fiction, its use justified by results. In practice—supposedly—it does work. A horoscope can be drawn up on the basis of the planets’ positions at someone’s birth. The most important is the Sun, which is in Aries (the Ram) during part of March and part of April, then in Taurus (the Bull) during the rest of April and part of May, and so on. The date of birth determines the person’s Sun-sign or birth-sign: Aries, for instance, if the Sun was in that portion of the sky at the time, Taurus if it was in the next portion, and so on. The Sun-sign is said to have a crucial bearing on the personality.
Complex calculations about the positions of the other six planets—sometimes, today, computerized—can be expressed on a birth-chart, and add further insights into the individual’s character and destiny. On the basis of the inferred destiny and perhaps also of the planets’ foreseeable positions at some future time, events yet to come can be predicted; or, at any rate, probabilities—the celestial bodies, to quote an astrologer,“influence but do not compel.” Auspicious and inauspicious days can be identified in advance for some
important action. The technique is not confined to individuals. It can be applied to cities, states, institutions, or whatever, preferably at the time of their foundation, the equivalent of birth. Projections into the future can be made similarly. A horoscope of the city of Liverpool, in England, is said to have shown that it will become the capital of England in the twenty-third century—an extreme case but not inconsistent with the logic of the system.
An astrologer casting a client’s horoscope in 1617. The progress of astronomy was beginning to raise doubts about astrology, but astrologers were still being consulted.
(Ann Ronan Picture Library)
To revert to history, Romans were hesitant about embracing this production of Greek cleverness, but early in the Christian era, it was growing popular at high social levels, and the casting of a horoscope at a child’s birth was becoming customary. An astrologer named Thrasyllus was an adviser to the emperor Tiberius. When some of his predictions failed, Tiberius lost patience and was about to push him off a cliff, but he managed to make a good one just in time.
After the Roman Empire became officially Christian in the fourth century, astrology began to be frowned upon. Augustine, the most influential of the Church fathers, offered rational arguments against it and argued that even when astrologers got predictions right, this was probably due to inspiration by evil spirits. For a long time, it was in disfavor. However, it began to come back in the early Middle Ages as a quasi-scientific technique. Planets could no longer be gods, but in some mysterious way, they might still play a part in earthly affairs. Scholars in the Church kept it off the list of forbidden arts, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, the leading medieval philosopher, allowed it a strictly limited validity. Its practitioners worked freely, though they stressed character reading and medical diagnosis rather then prediction. It became very popular in the sixteenth-century Renaissance. John Dee, in England, was allowed to draw up horoscopes for royalty and to set a date for Elizabeth I’s coronation. Nostradamus, in France, published hundreds of prophecies, some of them remarkable, though for him, astrology seems to have been subordinate to another method of forecasting that remains obscure.
The waning of Earth-centered astronomy was naturally adverse to astrology, and it declined again, but it never expired, and eventually, it began to recover. It could be rationalized, as it still can, by the argument that it reads the heavens as they appear to be, and no astronomical proof of what they actually are can make any difference. Its Western revival had its origin in Theosophy. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the movement, endorsed it in her book Isis Unveiled, published in 1877. One of her followers, writing under the name Alan Leo, was its first popularizer and produced a handbook entitled Astrology for All. In England, France, and the United States, interest gradually revived. However, it was only in Germany that astrology became a serious field of study, thanks partly to another Theosophist, Hugo Vollrath. The suffdrings of Germans in the great inflation of 1923–1924 and in the ensuing years of mass unemployment contributed to a longing for a doctrine that would make sense of events and perhaps foreshadow a better time ahead. An Astrological Congress in Munich was the first of a series. Germans of academic standing tried to make astrology an authentic system.
During this interwar period, astrology also enjoyed a vogue on radio and in newspapers. Exponents in English-speaking countries, such as Evangeline Adams and R. H. Naylor, made forecasts on topics of public interest. However, their occasional successes were outweighed by numerous failures. Later in the twentieth century, while astrology of a sort still flourished in the press, it was more cautious and largely confined to minihoroscopes for the day (or week or month) giving vague advice to readers born under each sign and avoiding specific detail about the future. In 1967, a well-informed writer on astrology, Ellic Howe, pronounced, in the light of his own negative findings, that prediction was its “Achilles’ heel.”
The astrology of a more responsible kind that continues to be practiced is concerned chiefly with character and destiny. Howe’s adverse verdict on prediction might be allowed to stand if it were not for an exceptional case history, that of Germany under the Nazi regime, from 1933 on. Seemingly, the activities of Vollrath and other enthusiasts showed predictive results that cannot be dismissed. Someone had cast the horoscope of the German republic on the basis of the date of its proclamation in 1918, and several attempts had been made to cast Hitler’s. There is evidence—some of it indisputable, some of it circumstantial but good—for correct long-range forecasts of Hitler’s career and the fortunes of Germany in World War II and its aftermath. Hitler, it was foretold, would be triumphant at first, and Germany would be victorious for two years, but in 1941, the tide would begin to turn. There would be major disasters in 1943 and a cataclysmic end, including the Führer’s downfall, in 1945, though a recovery would be under way after three years of peace. All of this was right. Hitler did not believe in astrology, but his awareness of its prediction for 1941 as a threat to morale was shown by a clampdown on astrologers in June of that year.
The German successes raise a problem. Can astrology predict after all? If so, how to make sense of these facts? Whatever astrologers may say in defense of their art, it remains the case that the universe is not what it looks like from below. They have done their best to fit in the three planets added to the traditional seven, but much more is involved than that. The crystal spheres and their resident deities have gone. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, together with the three latecomers, are barren globes moving through a void at vast distances from Earth and from each other. Medieval astronomy recognized greater distances than is commonly thought, but came nowhere near the remoteness of the stars, which are not only remote but in spatial relationships to each other that have nothing to do with the Zodiac: its constellations would disappear for an observer from a different vantage point.
An astrologer today might speak of correlations or synchronisms rather than influences. If such a claim were borne out by results, it would deserve to be investigated, but results are lacking. The German phenomenon may be thought to hint at some quite separate factor. The same could be said of the rare but documented triumphs of character reading by horoscope (or ostensibly by horoscope), such as one recorded at the University of Freiburg, where an astrologer named Walter Boer diagnosed the problems of a juvenile delinquent unknown to him in virtually the same way as a team of psychologists. Ellic Howe, who draws attention to this case, takes the view that such successes are not really produced by the subject’s birth-chart as such but by a kind of intuition making use of it, which few would-be astrologers are capable of. Jung, as is well known, took an interest in astrology, but he used patients’ horoscopes chiefly as therapeutic aids rather than sources of information.
One quasi-astrological finding has stood up to scrutiny, often very hostile. In 1955, a French statistician, Michel Gauquelin, proved that a significant number of people with certain abilities were born when certain planets were either just clearing the horizon or at the apex of their passage across the sky. Many outstanding athletes, for instance, were born when Mars was either rising or “culminating.” Jupiter seemed to be connected with famous actors in the same way. The ironic fact is that Gauquelin’s correlations are totally unrelated to traditional astrology, for which he found no support whatever.