Astrology, an insult to your freedom.

 

 From Carl sagan's book "COSMOS: 

 

Astrology contends that which constellation the planets are in at the moment of your birth profoundly influences your future. 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 last time that, say, Venus was rising in the Constellation of the Goat; perhaps something similar would happen this time as well. It was a subtle and risky business.If the planets could determine the destinies of nations, how could they avoid influencing what will happen to me tomorrow?

Personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice - they tell what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies.Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.

Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call Ptolemy, But modern astrologers have forgotten about the precession of the equinoxes, which Ptolemy understood. They ignore atmospheric refraction, about which Ptolemy wrote. They pay almost no attention to all the moons and planets, asteroids and comets, quasars and pulsars, exploding galaxies, symbiotic stars, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources that have been discovered since Ptolemy’s time.

Ptolemy believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe; that the Sun, Moon, planets and stars went around the Earth. Astrologers still follow this model, One thing that is very fundamental has to be remembered, and that is that whenever we are doing anything – astrology, future prediction, horoscope readings, palmistry, the I-Ching, tarot – anything that is concerned with the future, it is basically a reading of the unconscious of the person. It has nothing much to do with the future. It has more to do with the past, but because the future is created by the past, it is relevant to the future too. Because people live like mechanical things, the prediction is possible. If you know the past of the person, unless the person is a buddha, you will be able to predict his future because he is going to repeat it. If he has been an angry person in the past, he is carrying the tendency to be angry; that tendency will have effects in the future. Ordinarily, an unconscious being goes on repeating his past again and again. It is a wheel-like phenomenon, he repeats it; he cannot do anything else. He cannot bring any new thing into his life, he cannot have a breakthrough.

Astronomy is a science - the study of the universe as it is. Astrology is a pseudoscience - a claim, in the absence of good evidence, that the other planets affect our everyday lives. In Ptolemy’s time the distinction between astronomy and astrology was not clear. Today it is. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we are connected - not in the personal, small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways, involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the human species.