ASTROLOGY

Millions of people believe in astrology, sure in the knowledge that their future is in the stars. Many famous and powerful people have led the trend. Even US President Ronald Reagan became a slave to the practice. All state decisions were checked out by his wife, Nancy, with her Californian astrologer, Joan Quigley. Winston Churchill used astrologers during World War Two. This wasn’t that he believed. Rather, Hitler did, and had a whole staff of astrologers. Churchill simply wanted a team to attempt to second-guess what Hitter’s astrologers told him.
Many great historic claims have been made for the success of astrology. Elizabeth I’s astrologer John Dee was said to have predicted the bad weather that helped destroy the Spanish Armada. Later, the 17th century astrologer William Lilly was said to predict the Great Plague and Fire of London. With the former, Dee was actually asked to cast a false prediction to put off the Spanish. He was no doubt as shocked as anyone when the bad weather happened. As for Lilly, experiences throughout Europe had shown how crowded places eventually brought plague; and if built of wood, would eventually catch fire. Nostradamus himself used astrology in his predictions. But as with Lilly, all that was really needed was a dose of common sense.
This said, businesses all over the west employ astrologers by the thousand to predict business and stock trends. If they didn’t get it right more often than not, big business would not employ them. So what exactly is going on? Perhaps, to understand, we need to know just what astrology is.
First of all, no true astrologer would claim to predict the future. Rather, astrology involves casting a horoscope for a particular event, usually a person’s birth, dependent upon the positions of the planets at a particular time. It is based on the principle that, seeing the planets move in a predictable way, their course could reflect the predictability of a life. And in this way, astrology becomes a guide, and not a definite predicted future.
Known to date back 4,000 years to the Babylonians, it is the planets that are important rather than the stars. The word, planet, means wanderer, and in this sense includes the sun and moon. The Earth actually wobbles on its axis, thus causing the planets to shift positions in relation to the constellations. Seeing the planets as a form of astronomical clock, they move in a small band of sky which is split into the twelve houses of the Zodiac. In this way, the planets move through houses, thus allowing movement to be charted.
Astrology used to be very much a science. A school of astrology was set up on the Greek island of Kos in 280BC. Until this time, priests had only cast horoscopes for kings in order to gain power, but with the Greek experiment in democracy, horoscopes were downsized for anyone, the Greeks opening up astrology to the people. During the Middle Ages astrology became an academic subject in Europe with the University of Bologna founding a chair of astrology in 1125. Most academics of the day were astrologers, reaching Cambridge by 1250. But with the Inquisition, it was deemed un-Godly and shunned.
The popular astrology we know of today began with the creation of the Astrological Press in the late 19th century, founded by Richard James Morrison and Robert Cross Smith, and infiltrated the papers with the casting of a horoscope for Princess Margaret. Today, hundreds of papers have the stars. However, even though millions of people live by the stars, most astrologers would see them as meaningless entertainment. The casting of a horoscope is a personal and individual practice, very different to what we read in newspapers. This accepted, is there any reality to the claims made by proper astrologers.
In the 1950s the young mathematician Michel Gauquelin applied statistics to astrology in order to discredit it. He was shocked to discover that most categories of professions had a statistical bias towards validating astrology; although later statisticians claimed that the way he did the statistics loaded them in his favour. Controversy still reigns on this point, making Gauquelin’s claims invalid.
Several scientific theories have been aired to validate astrology. For instance, we know that the gravitational pull of the planets affects tides, and it has long been suspected that the phases of the moon affect moods – the term lunatics cones from the word lunacy, or moon. But these effects in no way validate astrology in terms of any predictive quality.
A further problem is that life does not begin at birth, but conception. So how can birth have any bearing on the path a life will take? The psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, was well aware of these problems when he studied astrology. Jung invoked his theory of synchronicity to explain the phenomenon. To Jung, apparent non-causal coincidences could occur, somehow directed by the person. Just how, he wasn’t quite sure. But if we become less exotic, we do know that we have an in-built ability to only see what we want to see. Further, studies of luck have shown that we can create our own luck based on whether we have a pessimistic or optimistic frame of mind.
Psychologist Dr Richard Wiseman explains such ‘luck’ as an in-born ability to calculate odds combined with a form of amnesia that allows us to forget the bad times, or vice versa. However, the important point here is that our attitudes CAN seem to order the world about us. And our attitudes are based very much on what we believe. For instance, if you believe in God, you will see his work everywhere. And by the same route, if you believe in Astrology, chances are your attitude will confirm that your horoscope will come true.

(c) Anthony North, 2003