“Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll

embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?”

ASTROLOGY(“arse-troll-ogy”)

( a.k.a. astronomy’s schizophrenic great-uncle (or pseudo-uncle?))

-the math, the myth, the money and all that malarkey ...

“What’s your sign, baby?”

“I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.”  (Arthur C. Clarke)

Of Celestial Spheres

and Spherical Astronomy

9 planets + 12 constellations + Sun + Moon = Much predictions!

Retrogrades and other such Calamities

A brief and most definitely incomplete

and perhaps inaccurate account of the history

of astrology ..........

• Babylonians: Knowledge of constellations and ascribing shapes to them

• Greeks: Spherical Earth(330 BC) - Celestial Sphere (the heavens are “perfect”)

• Indians: Vedanga Jyotisha:(1400-1600 BCE)

• Chinese: linked to Chinese philosophy - 12 year cycles

• The “zodiac signs” travelled the world earlier and at a much faster rate than science ever did

• Ancient objections: Cicero, Plotinus and Favorinus

• And then came Ptolemy with his Tetrabiblios (90 AD) who argued that “astronomy and astrology are complementary studies, so that whilst astrology is less self-sufficient and factual, its employment makes the practice of astronomy more useful.”

Early + Dark Ages

The Math• Babylonians: Moon phases and tides • Trigonometry: Varaha Mihira and the law of sines and cosines• Egyptian Astrology• Greek Astrology: Understanding retrogrades: Epicycles and later, conic sections• Islamic astrologers - turned - mathematicians/astronomers -- understood precession•Cardano (and some say even Fermat) - origins of probability theory tried to use astrology to predict outcomes of gambling, etc.

The Renaissance: Astro(log/nom)ers

• Bruno, Kepler, Tycho were all paid for their astrological services

• Telescopes were thought to make predictions more “accurate”!

• Until Tycho incorrectly predicted the death of king Suleiman of Turkey

• Heliocentricity replaced the “fixed Earth” paradigm

• Marks the beginning of the separation of astronomy from astrology

“In the field of Astrology, too, we carried out work that should not be looked down upon by those who study the influences of the stars. Our purpose was to rid this field

of mistakes and superstition, and to obtain the best possible agreement with the experience on which it is based. For I think that it will hardly be possible to find in this field a perfectly accurate theory that can come up to mathematical and astronomical truth. Having in my youth been more interested in this foretelling part of Astronomy that deals with prophesying and builds on conjectures, I later on, feeling that the

courses of the stars upon which it builds were insufficiently known, put it aside until I should have remedied this want.” (Brahe 1946, 117)

Post Modern World and attempts at disproving astrology

• Tests on twins; (No evidence to show that time of birth being so near has any effect on personality/life. Duh.)

• One famous experiment included 28 astrologers who were asked to match over a hundred natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) questionnaire. The study, published in Nature in 1985, found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better than chance, and that the testing "clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis".

• Inconsistencies within astrology: Occulus, Pluto not being a planet any more, wrong calendars - accounting for precession,etc.

• Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper: In contrast to scientific disciplines, astrology has not responded to falsification through experiment.(and hence the “pseudo-science status”)

Astrology in India (today)

< Conjugal Happiness > = || < Dude0s Birth Chart|Girl0s Birth Chart > ||2

(Arranged marriages - Kundli Matching)

• When should I take a flight?• When do I start a course?• When should I get married?• When should I change jobs?• When should I invest in Stock “X”?• When should I buy this piece-of-land/gold/*anything*?• What time of the day would be “auspicious” to “start something”?• Can I buy a car now (pretty please!)? The mnemonic phrase is "7.30am Mother Saw Father Wearing The Turban Suddenly"

• Mother = Monday (7.30 AM-9.00)• Saw = Saturday (9.00-10.30)• Father = Friday (10.30-12.00)• Wearing = Wednesday (12.00-13.30)• The = Thursday (13.30-15.00)• Turban = Tuesday (15.00-16.30)• Suddenly = Sunday (16.30-18.00 PM)

(Yep, it’s all there in Wikipedia!)

The planets have the answers!!

(Navagrahas: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus,

Jupiter, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu)

Astrology and Theology

All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

—Catechism of the Catholic Church

(Islam and Christianity reject Astrology. Jews and Hindus have a slightly different view.)

Politics and Astrology

•Louis de Wohl worked as an astrologer for the British intelligence agency MI5, after it was claimed that Adolf Hitler used astrology to time his actions. The War Office was "interested to know what Hitler's own astrologers would be telling him from week to week".In fact, de Wohl's predictions were so inaccurate that he was soon labelled a "complete charlatan" and it was later shown that Hitler considered astrology to be "complete nonsense".

• After John Hinckley's attempted assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, first lady Nancy Reagan commissioned astrologer Joan Quigley to act as the secret White House astrologer. However, Quigley's role ended in 1988 when it became public through the memoirs of former chief of staff, Donald Regan

•Indian politicians almost always have their favorite astrologers around as part of their coterie

Psychoanalyzing the so-called “Zodiac personalities”

“Since you want to know my opinion about astrology I can tell you that I've been interested in this particular activity of the human mind since more than 30 years. As I am a psychologist, I am chiefly interested in the particular light the horoscope sheds on certain complications in the character. In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle. I must say that I very often found that the astrological data elucidated certain points which I otherwise would have been unable to understand. From such experiences I formed the opinion that astrology is of particular interest to the psychologist, since it contains a sort of psychological experience which we call 'projected' - this means that we find the psychological facts as it were in the constellations.”(Jung on Astrology)

Astrology in the “Internet Age”

• New Age Revival that started in the 70‘s

• In the U.S. alone, the astrology/psychic services industry have a 2.2 billion dollar revenue

(NSF survey)

(EU Survey)

“.........It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are.  It lets you see the

words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden.  The graphite's not important.  It's just the

means of revealing their indentations.  So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy.  It's just to do with people thinking about

people.” 

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of

possibilities.  They are communism at its best.  Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody

has a palm.”  - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.