Astrology has a rich history and has assumed a lot of different roles in the world views of individuals and cultures all over the planet. These roles have varied from being a widely accepted means of understanding the world and the place of humans in the world for many millennia to it’s current status as a popular pseudoscience in the present.
In ancient times, astrology and astronomy where one and the same in that astrologers were the only people to study the behavior of the stars and planets in any detail. While we can only guess about the extent to which many of these cultures believed that events in the heavens influenced events and people here on Earth, many ancient cultures paid attention to celestial events in a great deal of detail. For example, there are Mayan pyramids that are designed to cast shadows in specific ways at specific times of the year. One pyramid casts a shadow in such a way as to make it look like a snake is slithering on its side on the summer solstice. The Druid Stonehenge is thought to be an observatory of some sort, and many other cultures kept similar track of events in the heavens. There are even thousand year old Chinese documents describing a supernova in the crab nebula thousands of light years away. (Although by all accounts, that explosion was so spectacular that it’s a wonder that there aren’t more records of it in existence.)
One thing that we can be sure about was that the ancients saw all of this movement and all of these events taking place in the sky and they wondered how it must relate to them. This probably sprang from the widespread notion that humans occupied the center of the universe, and therefore all of the things that took place in the heavens must relate to humans in some way. Astrology was the combination of this world view and the studies of the heavens, and influenced people’s view of themselves, others, and the decisions that they made for thousands of years.
Astrology divided from astronomy and began to take a back seat to empirical evidence when the scientific revolution began several centuries ago. As scientists promoted a way of thinking that required proof and disproof based on hard evidence, astrology went from being a science to much more of a pseudoscience in the views of many people. This of course has engendered a debate between practitioners of astrology and those who rely on the, and the scientific community about the validity of astrology as a way of predicting events and analyzing our place in the world.
Many astrologers argue that even if there isn’t any way to reconcile astrology with the prevailing (and largely corroborated) scientific world view, astrology should still be accepted because of its predictive abilities. The reasoning is that since astrology’s correlative value still makes it worth practicing.
Unfortunately though, many scientists have done some simple but convincing experiments that detract from the argument that astrology has even a correlative ability to describe the real world. These experiments do more to uncover the suggestibility of the subjects more than they support astrology’s predictive abilities.
While astrology may have fallen out of favor among intellectuals, it should still be pointed out that a lack of evidence in support of a theory does not automatically make that theory false. In other words, astrology could still move from the realm of pseudoscience into the light of scientific understanding.
Vidonia Von Ulf has been a practitioner and teacher of Wicca for over 15 years. She is a professional artist and believes in using her magick in her art and her art in her magick. Vidonia teaches and practices cross-cultural healing techniques from Celtic, Native American, South American, and Greek shamanic traditions, among others.