Astrology FAQ
History of Astrology
The earliest records of astrology date back to the Babylonian Empire in the 19th century BCE, when people were attempting to correlate events like famine and war with other events they observed in the skies. At one time it was believed by historians and archaeologists that all astrological systems originated in Babylon, but that theory was discarded because of the separate astrologies which existed among the Mayans and Aztecs.
It is now believed that astrology developed relatively independently in Babylon, India, China and Mesoamerica. While the Mesoamerican astrological systems always remained separate, the Babylonian ideas about astrology seems to have had a major influence on the development of astrology in India and China, even to the point where today it is difficult to differentiate between original systems in these areas and later borrowings from Babylon.
Astrology in Babylon did not exist as its own discipline, as it tends to today in the West. Instead, astrology was an integral part of the Babylonian polytheistic religion. This was a time when people believed that our planet was the center of the universe and all the stars and planets revolved around us. This leads to interesting questions regarding the origins of the assumptions about various astrological signs, as described by astrologer Prudence Jones in the Astrological Journal in 1996:
Would Venus still bring experiences of love, beauty and pleasure to our horoscopes if it was called "Saturn"? Would Mars still make us decisive if it was called "Neptune"? That is, are the significances of the planets based on dispassionate observation of their effects, or on dogmatic symbolism which forces our observations to conform to our expectations? On what basis do we claim that the movements of particular planets are associated with events of various kinds? In the modern age we assume that the association of planets with particular qualities is based on centuries of empirical observation, of the ancients looking out and observing that for example Mars generally rose or culminated at the time of conflicts. But is it? Preliminary research (e.g. that of Michael Baigent in From the Omens of Babylon) indicates that this was not what the early Mesopotamians were doing at all, that the original meanings of the planets were not based on observation but on the conventional interpretation of a celestial script, the symbolic language of the gods.
Babylonian priests were regularly called upon to use their connections with the gods to predict the future, and their two principle means of doing this were inspecting the liver of a specially sacrificed animal and reading omens in the sky. The oldest known astrological texts are dated to the first half of the Hammurabi Dynasty, around the middle of the 18th century BCE. These are primarily records of omens based upon the moon and planets, for example:
If the sky is bright when the New Moon appears and it is greeted with shouts of joy, the year will be good.
More extensive collections of astronomical observations and attendant predictions have been found on cuneiform tablets known as the "Enema Anu Enlil" series. They date to sometime between 1350 and 1100 BCE, and seem to have been created for the purpose of summarizing contemporary astrological ideas.
These ideas were not, however, isolated - they were instead part and parcel of omens derived from entrails, oil dropped on the floor, birds flying in the sky, and more. As Will Durant observed of the Babylonians:
Never was a civilization richer in superstitions. Every turn of chance from the anomalies of birth to the varieties of death received a popular, sometimes an official and sacerdotal, interpretation in magical or supernatural terms ...The superstitions of Babylonia seem ridiculous to us, because they differ superficially from our own. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
Efforts at reading the sky eventually developed into something like the astrology we have today, but not until around the sixth century BCE. Between 612 and 539 BCE, the sky was divided to twelve sections of thirty degrees each, constituting the twelve signs of the zodiac. Once mathematical astronomy developed under the Persians (539-331 BCE), it became possible to calculate some of the motion of various planets and the moon, allowing for the development of horoscopes similar to what we see today.
The oldest known horoscope is dated at April 29, 410 BCE, and is a natal horoscope not unlike the kind created by astrologers in our own century. There is not much left of the original tablet, and all we can read of the prediction itself is essentially, "things will be good for you." Even then, astrologers had begun to perfect the art of vague, unfalsifiable statements.
This system was later sent West to Egypt and Greece, where the latter added a number of important refinements. One important addition was the concept of free will, a contentious issue because the Greeks were simply unwilling to accept the idea that their fates were wholly determined by the stars. It is thus to the Greeks that we owe the astrological notion of "astra inclinant, non necessitant," which translates into "the stars incline, they do not determine." This has become a common escape-clause invoked whenever it is demonstrated that astrological predictions fail or don't even come close to the truth.
The Greeks developed what has come to be called "catarchic astrology," a name derived from the Greek term katarche, or beginning. They essentially limited the scope of astrology to particular areas of a person's life, like the best times to get married or have children. Fatalistic astrology would later return to prominence under the Romans where some emperors literally lived their lives according to the "dictates of the stars."
Astrology as we know it today, which includes this Sun Sign astrology, was codified by Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy) in the second century CE in his book Tetrabiblos. In this work Ptolemy brought together as much astrological thinking as he could and systematized it into something approaching a coherent whole. The similarities between Ptolemy's book and modern astrological works are striking. Which of the following two quotes is from Ptolemy and which isn't? According to each, Mercury produces:
...writers ...accountants, teachers ...merchants and bankers ...in short, all who live by the exercise of literature and by furnishing explanations or interpretations...
...accounts, civil engineers, ...teachers, ...bankers, inventors, orators, ...clerks.
Despite the great similarities in the content of various astrological concepts, the background premises behind Ptolemy's system were very different than what are used today, at least when it comes to understanding the universe. Ptolemy's universe was geocentric, with the Earth in the middle and planets and starts orbiting in a series of complex cycles and epicycles (cycles within cycles). This way of understanding the universe was not abandoned until the late 1500s, after the work of Kepler and Copernicus became more widely known and understood.
[Note: In case you were wondering, the second of the above quotes is from Ptolemy; the first is modern.]
