What about astrology?

This is dedicated to @DorothyNewman2 Go check out her books on Crystals and Tarot cards as well as many other things of interest.

We've all heard of this. People ask you what your sign is. They mean what astrological sign were you born under. You can look up your horoscope and what you should be aware of for a particular day. Astrology has been a part of humankind for a very long time. It's a pseudoscience born out of antiquity's urge to understand the role of stars and planets on our lives. Before the age of enlightenment, no one really understood what stars were or what they were doing up there in the heavens. Now, we know that they are other suns far away from us and the moving stars were objects that were much closer.

The ancients depended on astrology to predict the outcome of life decisions and battles. It was a mainstay of Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman religious beliefs. Arabic texts on Astrology translated into Latin were attributed to Islamic scholars. The idea goes back two thousand BC. So, there has been a lot written about it over the ages.

The world astrology comes from a Latin world that was stolen off of the Greeks and means 'account of the stars', ore more precisely 'star divination.' Divination means to foresee.

Astrology relies on a precise understanding of the orientation of the celestial sphere. That's what the night sky is supposed to be, a giant sphere on which stars, planets and other cosmic objects are located. The other principle idea is the Zodiac. This is the band of recognizable constellations that the Sun, Moon and planets move through as they journey across the sky. You all know about the constellations: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pieces. The ancients saw these unique arrangements of stars as animals, people and insects: Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Sea Goat, Water Bearer and Fish.

Horoscopes are the bread and butter of astrology, and they are based on constructing a horoscope for a precise moment, the most important being a person's birth. The simplest method of casting a horoscope is to determine what constellation the sun was in at the precise time of birth. Each Sun-sign (constellation) has an element associated with it (Earth, Air, Fire, or Water) and a polarity (Positive or Negative) and a celestial body (planet, moon or sun) associated with it. An astrologer needs an ephemeris (gives positions of astronomical objects in the sky) to work out the precise conditions for a horoscope. There are computer programs to make this easier. A horoscope takes the positions of planets in the horoscope houses into consideration. The houses are related to the signs or constellations. Then there is the ascendant and descendant axis and things like the zenith and nadir or the midheaven and coeli axis. Then there are the angles formed by the planets relative to each other that is called the aspects, and throw in for good measure the Lunar nodes. I won't go into the details of this because it would require a book (like the ones that DorthyNewman2 wrote).

These ideas go back into antiquity. I once constructed a horoscope for a character in a story I was writing, but I used an astrological computer program to do it. I admire the skill of astrologers that did this all by hand using charts. They had to have the knowledge and skill to do something takes a lot of time, something that most people wouldn't do now.

Thanks for reading.