The larger problem, as I see it, is that astrology has not yet joined the scientific revolution. The difficulties here lie more in the definition of the subject itself and the language in which it expresses itself. These problems both have origins in the 17th and 18th centuries when other subjects, i.e. astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology adopted democratic methodologies to test the veracity of their subject material.

The scientific method is a democratic, knowledge-generating process in which nature is studied closely and experiments are conducted in order to discover the rules by which it works. The method was actually applied to astrology in a few instances but these studies were weak because measuring the effects of astrology in units was more or less impossible in the 17th century.
The science of those times was completely reductionist and required units of something to do a proper analysis. Units of temperature, pressure, velocity, distance, etc. are easily applied to most natural phenomena and astronomy, physics and chemistry were well-endowed in that regard. Geology and biology presented more difficult problems but eventually became solid bodies of knowledge through close observation and testable theories. And, very significantly, all of these subjects eventually shed any theological explanations for their interpretations. Without a solid database reducible to units and explanations that were unprovable, astrology fell by the wayside.

A Clear Definition Lacking

A subject can be both a science and an applied art or practice. The lack of a clear definition of astrology as a subject is primarily due to the overwhelming dominance of astrological practice. This is like the field of psychology putting all its focus on just psychotherapy and ignoring research, scientific studies, theory, and its own history. There are close overlaps between applied psychology and applied astrology and it could be argued that natal astrology was the earliest system of psychology. It is true to anyone that bothers to investigate the matter that astrology as a consulting or counseling profession can offer people as much, and in many cases a lot more, than licensed psychotherapists. If psychotherapists really knew what astrology can do, and it wasn’t a taboo subject for them, probably many would learn something about it. And then realize that the subject matter it is a lot more sophisticated, and difficult, than they ever imagined. But not to digress, the point here is that practice is just one facet of the subject of astrology, the study of connections between the larger cosmic environment and the Earth. And practice should be based on scientific research.

Probably the single most important overall problem for astrology is that of a mechanism, that is how does it work? Not everything is explained by a simple mechanism. But in subjects similar to astrology, such as psychology and economics, there is an effort made to distinguish clearly between what is known and what is not known. Hypotheses are proposed and then they are tested; ideologies and beliefs based on opinions or assumptions are not considered explanations. This is the critical-thinking approach that astrology will need to take in order to more fully rehabilitate itself because the very nature of the astrological effect is complex, not easily reduced to units and therefore not applicable to conventional scientific inquiry except in regard to some correlation studies. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence, which is abundant in astrology, does not carry much weight in the scientific world.

The astrological effect is a phenomenon that probably requires a multidisciplinary approach using system science, the general term for cybernetics, complexity and chaos theories, to unravel its workings. In a sense, astrology has been waiting for scientific methodologies to evolve to a point where they can be applied to the subject. This is also true for other fields, such as meteorology (long-range weather forecasting), biology (what exactly is life), and geoscience (how the Earth remains chemically stable).

Progress is Being Made

Despite the difficulties inherent in these big topics, scientists are methodically chipping away at the problems, in many cases using system science. And they are slowly establishing reliable foundations. Most importantly, these subjects use the common language of science and don’t defer to unprovable metaphysical notions. They are therefore recognized as legitimate subjects by the global cultural institutions of our time. In part because of its intrinsic nature, and in part due to the lack of scientifically-educated students and practitioners, astrology currently uses a highly specialized language and entertains unprovable metaphysical notions that are often taken as truth and not stated simply as hypotheses. This needs to change.

This prescription for the field of astrology (getting with the scientific program and speaking in a language the other fields can understand) is one the astrological community will find controversial- and expensive. Because of its marginalization, astrology gets close to zero funding. In fact, I’d bet that the total amount of funding received by a typical university science laboratory for a month is greater than the total amount of funding put in the hands of research astrologers during the entire 20th century. This is the circular dead end here: no funding equals no progress and no respectability, which in turn equals an inability to attract the brightest minds and funding for worthwhile projects. However, despite these difficulties, astrologers have steadily made progress in rehabilitating their subject and deepening their understanding of it. Astrology has essentially been reinterpreted for modern times without losing its core principles.

So what is to be done regarding the disconnect between astrology and the rest of the world?

Actually, quite a lot has already been done and credit must be given to those who have studied astrology scientifically, excavated its ancient history, and explored its theoretical dimensions – mostly for no pay. In recent years some well-educated astrologers (who we should note had to get advanced degrees in subjects other than astrology) have been interacting with professionals in other fields, mostly history and psychology. There are a few astrology journals today that publish papers on the subject, some of a high caliber and comparable with publications in history and psychology journals. Also, some of the larger astrological organizations and some private schools have created education programs and offer certification. However, most education programs are primarily concerned with how to read a horoscope. And none of the certification programs are particularly difficult by the professional standards of other disciplines that require first a four-year degree and then some serious graduate work. But at least some boundaries are being established and this is a step towards modernization of the field.

To build on this the astrological community would benefit by raising its standards in much the same way the other subjects did centuries ago. This adjustment would include distinctions between professionals and amateurs, unified education and certification standards, and recognition that the scientific method is the best method for democratically generating knowledge. If this were to happen, astrology would be looked at very differently by the rest of the world and may actually begin to once again participate in and contribute to the ongoing evolution of our culture.

It may be difficult to accept, but what we think of as going on outside our bodies – and even inside them – is a complex construction entirely subjective in nature. We gravitate toward family, friends and colleagues, sharing our opinions and absorbing theirs, thereby completing the web of illusion that makes up our daily lives.

Our body of opinion that has shaped our experience of reality over the last few hundred years is scientific materialism, which is directly concerned with the perception and measurement of the objective world. Instruments have been developed of greater and greater sensitivity to measure more and more subtle effects. When a new force is perceived and measured, it seems to have philosophical repercussions, which slowly sift down through society, until the fabric of collective consciousness is subtly reconstituted.

Perhaps this is due to the vocabulary that invention generates. When Newton’s laws of motion were expounded, the vocabulary of push, pull. Leverage, attraction, action and reaction became a way for us to represent reality, and these laws and words spawned a mechanistic view of understanding nature.

While Newton’s heritage was a vocabulary of gravity Einstein’s was a vocabulary of light and of relativity that has profoundly reshaped collective consciousness. Relatively sounded the death knell for scientific materialism because it made experience of the object dependent on the perception of the subject. Subject and object are a continuum. And just as subject and object are interrelated so too are body and mind, and matter and energy – with consciousness free to dwell at any point on this duality spectrum. Where before the whole crux of scientific investigation was to be as detached as possible from the object, relativity theory has shown this to be an ineffective and inaccurate means of investigating subtle nonmaterial forces.

Where Astrology Comes In…

This is where astrology comes in as a tool for perceiving reality. Dealing more with the mind and senses of the subject, or individual, there is an intrinsic acceptance that the object – that individual’s experience – is mutually interrelated and interdependent. Rather than life simply happening to us we are constantly evoking events in a complex dance between our character and our fate, or between our consciousness and the object of our consciousness.

An astrological consultation I once gave may serve to illustrate this phenomenon. It was for a middle-aged lady who had a very tenuous grasp of reality, with powerful delusions about being followed by men. I did my best to persuade her that she was probably imagining most of the incidents, based on the astrological fact that she had the astrological sign Pisces rising on the ascendant (where the sun comes up in the East) and the planet Neptune on the descendant (where it sets in the West). In astrology speak, Neptune is the planetary “ruler” of Pisces and has been negatively identified with illusion and delusional patterns of behavior. Simply, this particular configuration might be expected to evoke a tendency for the woman to be confused in her relationships with others if other elements of the birth chart confirmed this possibility.

It was an unconvincing consultation undermined by my inability to deal with her mental state. A few minutes after she left my office I decided to go out shopping but on opening the door I found the lady on the stairs studying a bus timetable and muttering to herself. Not wishing to appear to be following her, I smiled weakly and retired to my office, waiting until she had proceeded on her way.

Acutely aware that I might confirm her fantasies if I crossed her path I walked into town using a circuitous route. Twenty minutes later I arrived in the town square and as I did so the bus pulled up alongside me and my client stepped out. She took one startled look at me and started walking rapidly in the other direction.

Experience had vindicated my client and proved to her that her version of reality was the correct one. The extraordinary thing was that my own behavior had been altered, and events had conspired to bring about that which I had wanted to avoid. This scenario plays out in all our lives as our personal character stamps its impression on a reality that is constantly adjusting to who we are and what we do.

The corollary of this is good news in terms of free will. By adapting our behavior, we can alter reality and our experience of it. And everything in our world will alter in it, including the people we relate to.

Herein lays the power of astrology, which can be released by judicious work with the energies reflected in the horoscope. And herein lies the possibility of transformation.

In fact, we’re talking about an onslaught of visionary madness. A search on Amazon.com pulls up over 500 books dealing with 2012, most of them predicting “the transformation of consciousness,” “Earth changes,” arrival of “space brothers” and the start of a New Age. Some compare our time to the last days of Atlantis. Talk show hosts on radio and television, who are mostly ignorant of the subject, assist in the transmission of these idealistic and doomsday messages allowing distorted, incomplete and uninformed ideas to further percolate through our culture.

On the cusp of December 21, 2012, what we’ve got is a prognosticatory free-for-all – an undisciplined, wishful-thinking, fear-driven rant fueling the declining book business and spicing up talk shows. So maybe it’s good for the economy? The truth is, however, Mayan Calendar 2012 subject matter is complicated and few have the patience to wade through it – a recipe for unfounded opinions. If you’ve gotten this far, and you are curious about 2012, get ready to focus your mind on some details.

Here are the Facts…

The name “Mayan Calendar” is popularly used to describe a symbolic time-count developed and employed by the ancient Maya of Mesoamerica.(1) Archaeologists call it the “Long Count.” It is a block of time 5,125 years in length – one end anchored in 3114 B.C.E and the other in 2012 C.E. I have argued in my writings that the Long Count is actually a kind of astrology created roughly 2,000 years ago by the ancient Maya of Mesoamerica.

The Long Count has some important divisions. It is composed of 260 katuns, each of which contain 7,200 days.(2) This length of time, 19.71 years, is very close to the average Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle of 19.86 years. We know from inscriptions on ruins that Maya astronomer/astrologers followed the movements of these planets and appear to have used this information to schedule important cultural and dynastic events. I suspect that the Maya saw the katun as the perfect expression in time of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle – a block of days that was aesthetically and numerologically more balanced than 7,254. Western cultures do the same sort of thing by using 7 days in a week to measure the quarters of the Moon, or 360 degrees to track the Sun’s annual cycle of 365.24 days.

It’s all about Earth cycles. After rotation on its axis, and revolution around the Sun, the Earth’s third fundamental motion is the wobble of its axis called axial precession. The Long Count multiplied by five is very close to the 25,800-year average cycle of precession measured by Western astronomers from the equinoxes. If we then take a modest intuitive leap, we see the Long Count as a calendar of precession, a way of tracking this very, very long Earth cycle. It is a complete block of time in itself, but is also one-fifth of the full cycle. Cycles can’t be relative: they must be anchored to something stable. The starting and ending point of the full precession cycle as measured by the Long Count, appears to be the precession of the winter solstice Sun across the Milky Way – but this crossing takes roughly a thousand years.

To get more precise, this passage of the winter solstice Sun can be more narrowly focused on the crossing of the galactic equator (approximate midpoint) which occurred in 1998, the tangent to the dark rift in the Milky Way (~2012 +/– decades at least) or the transit over the ecliptic position of the galactic center (a couple centuries from now). See how much is uncertain here? I would identify this as a serious, unresolved timing problem, central to the basic thesis of 2012 as an end-date.

Intriguingly, Mesoamerican cosmology talks of five creations, this concept recorded graphically in the Piedra del Sol of the Aztecs which indicates the present creation is the fifth or last section of the full cycle. Using this fact, we could take another leap and say the end of the Long Count could be seen as the end of the precession cycle that began roughly 25,800 years ago. OK, what happened then, the last time the Mayan Calendar came around? I have read that it was around that time that humans used up all the easy-to-catch turtles for food and were forced to work harder for meals. But if that was really the case, it was most certainly something that didn’t happen in one day. All we can say for certain is that one precession cycle ago the Earth was deep in the grip of an 85,000 year long ice age that began to melt 5,000 years later.

Logic Of The Mayan Calendar

The logic of the Mayan Calendar is fairly straightforward in terms of just numbers. What I am adding to this is that the Long Count has both an astronomical and astrological basis. Not only does it appear to offer a figure for the length of the precession cycle, which was barely known in the West at roughly the same time the Maya were solving this problem, but it appears to be constructed from a string of idealized Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions called katuns, and we are now at the very end of the last of these 260 katuns. I want to emphasize that these proposed linkages to the Jupiter/Saturn cycle and precession, which link the calendar to real geocosmic phenomena, are currently academically questionable. I’ve made these leaps because I’ve studied astrology extensively and know it when I see it. Still, most archaeoastronomers haven’t done this yet, at least with any enthusiasm. So take it with a grain of salt.

If you gotten this far you now know that the “end of the Mayan calendar” in 2012 could be seen as both the end point of the current fifth part of the precessional cycle (the Long Count) and the terminal point of the entire precession cycle itself. This end-dating is where that cultural psychosis called millennialism and all the Earth-shaking prophecies come in. But what did the Maya have to say about this? The fact is that Maya prophecies for the end of the Long Count range from non-existent to a shred of pure obscurity. There really are, however, Maya prophecies for a section of the Long Count that is called the Short Count, but these don’t latch onto the year 2012 and they seem to be unknown to nearly all the published prophets.

Here’s all we have. A few years ago a badly weathered inscription was found at a minor Maya archaeological site that appears to link the end of the Long Count with the descent of an obscure Maya deity called Bolon Yokte. But not much more is clear, even who Bolon Yokte is in the Maya pantheon. Still, this minor discovery has been loudly touted as evidence that Maya were at least thinking about 2012 a long time ago.

So in the end, all we have for certain is a calendar end-date that we know with precision to be December 21, 2012. We can surmise that it may be linked to the precession of the winter solstice point through the approximate midpoint crossing of the Milky Way. We don’t know exactly what the Maya were intending in making this calendar, though we know the winter solstice Sun did cross the galactic equator in 1998. Finally, we don’t have much of an authentic Mayan prophecy to interpret so we are left with the creative imaginations of people who are dissatisfied with society and are looking outside of themselves for answers, justice and salvation. Not all writers on 2012 are in this category, but I think most of them are.(3)

Anyone Can Be A Prophet

Anybody paying attention these days can be a prophet. First of all, it’s obvious that humanity is at war with nature. We are fighting over increasingly scarce resources and degrading the Earth to such an extent that we have accelerated the natural cycles of climate change. Worse, many are in denial that humans are causing such problems. But the elephant in the parlor that is conveniently ignored is over-population. It seems people can’t really deal with reproductive issues (birth control, abortion, homosexuality, etc.) without emotional charge because we’re hard-wired like other animals to reach our biotic potential. Reproduction was crucial for 99% of our existence as a species but now it’s making things worse. So we are simultaneously over-consuming, over-populating and soiling our nest and surely we will pay the price over the course of the next century.

Anybody paying attention will also note that changes, both positive and negative, have already begun – at least for some people in some places.(4) It’s not that all of this is unprecedented, there are parallels with past crises – but never before has our planet been loaded up with this many domesticated primates! It just can’t go on for much longer the way it has been, so predicting either a new age or an Atlantis-like destruction is sort of a no-brainer. Predicting such events to occur right on 12.21.2012, which is most likely going to just be another Friday full of last minute Christmas shopping, is desperately audacious, however. Hopefully, enough smart folks will prevail and some kind of realistic accommodation with our Earth will be the outcome over several decades, visible in retrospect a century from now. As for visits from the space brothers, well, that’s a wild card. More likely we’ll find bacteria on Mars or Europa and finally know that we are not alone.

Notes

1. It should properly be called the Maya calendar according to convention, but it’s too late to change that now.

2. The Long Count appears to be a large-scale version of the 260-day astrological calendar of ancient Mesoamerica called the tzolkin. If you want to understand Mesoamerican astrology you should begin with the tzolkin.

3. If you wish to dig deeper into this subject in a balanced way, I recommend you consider the writings of both Anthony Aveni and John Major Jenkins.

4. The square of Pluto and Uranus, which has a long history of social disruption, is presently occurring and will be a factor for several years. This aspect, by itself, makes a strong case for major changes in culture and society. This is, of course, Western astrology and the coincidence with the end of the Long Count is just that, coincidence.

The recommended changes would also do calculated damage to the system astrologers use to track the Sun’s travel through the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

The reason why some are motivated or inspired to change or reform the calendar is because the basic natural units of time don’t fit neatly together. The year does not contain a whole number of days; it has 365.2422. The synodic month (the time from one new moon to the next) is not a whole number either: it occurs every 29.53 days. Also, the year doesn’t have a whole number of lunar months — there are 12.37 of them.

There are seven days in a week, but there is not a whole number of weeks in a solar year: 52 weeks come to only 364 days, which is 1.24 days short.

So any calendar using natural units of time must make some needed adjustments. Our own calendar, the Gregorian, adds an extra day every four years (with some exceptions). This means consecutive January 1sts never fall on the same day of the week. Every year has a different layout. And the months are not aligned with the actual lunations (new moons).

Is there a better way? At John Hopkins University astrophysicist Richard Henry and economist Steve Hanke believe we should adopt a calendar that begins every year with January 1 on a Sunday. There would be just 52 weeks in the year totaling 364 days. To remain in step with the solar year, an extra week (seven full days) would be added every five or six years (it varies).

This is one form of a “perpetual calendar,” so called because it’s the same every year (except, of course, for that awkward extra week, which is not added on in a perfectly regular way). What’s gained by simplifying one thing is lost by complicating something else.

Would Approach be Better For Business?

Hanke and Henry argue that their calendar would be better for business because it is more consistent. Everyone would know what day of the week any particular day would fall on, it being the same every year. The professors think this approach would produce economical advantages for everyone. The occasional extra or off schedule week would not be disruptive, they insist.

Perhaps, but not everyone is buying into this idea. It’s one thing for us to adjust to an extra day (as we do now). But how would we handle a full seven day interruption? Would it turn into an official seven day shopping spree? This might be good for business but hard on our pocket book!

But wait, that’s not all. Hanke and Henry also propose that we get rid of time zones. They think everyone should live according to Universal Time (that is, time according to the clock at Greenwich, England). This would mean, for example, that for New York City sunrise would happen on the new clock at about 1100 hours, ”noon” at about 1700 hours and sunset at about 2300 hours.

In most locations around the globe the clock would not be in sync with the sun. Hanke and Henry say we would eventually adjust. And we’d be living in an efficient global framework where there no longer is confusion regarding “what time” it is. We’d all be on the same clock.

It’s reasonable to question whether this approach would be psychologically natural or healthy. A clock time that is just a number is not the same as clock time that is tied to the natural cycle of day and night. It would be like we’re all working in the same world-wide office building; whatever is going on outside, in nature, would not really matter.

Some more questions: Does it matter if our calendar and our clocks become ever more artificial? Is human nature and psychology a part of the larger natural world and essentially connected to the natural rhythms of time? If our timekeeping (by clock and by calendar) becomes disconnected from these natural cycles, do we become disconnected not only from nature but alienated from ourselves as well? Is global efficiency worth all that?

Astrologers and the readers of newspaper horoscope columns would have their own set of issues with the Hanke and Henry reformed calendar. Had the reformed calendar been adopted at the beginning of 2012, the dates for zero Aries for the years 2012 to 2018 would be as follows:

Obviously, the date is the same each year in the Gregorian calendar currently in use. But had we adopted the “reform” calendar, the date would fall back a day every year, until the extra week adjustment. It would then jump forward by five days (in this example). Every year the sign of Aries would begin on a different date, and the same would be true for the other signs as well.

Imagine the confusion! Astrologers would understand that this is merely an artificial effect of the calendar, but the public may not be so forgiving. Presumably, Henry and Hanke did not take birth signs into account when they came up with their recommended changes. But newspaper editors and publishers have opinion polls that tell them how popular daily horoscope columns are with many of their readers. Might the proposed changes cause heads to roll? Would readers riot in the streets? Or might Henry and Hanke be burned in effigy?

Most likely, none of the above. But, almost certainly, the idea would be dead on arrival as far as the general public is concerned.

What Changes Might Astrologers Recommend?

If astrologers were consulted, what would the ideal calendar look like?

It might be nice to have the months line up with the signs. Currently, the change from one astrological sign to the next happens in the third or fourth week of the month, so it might be more convenient for the change to happen on the first of every month. But is this even possible?

The short answer is no. There are many reasons for this, but basically the Sun doesn’t spend a whole number of days in any sign. There is always a partial day that would prevent a one-to-one alignment of months to signs. If we’re to remain in touch with the natural cycles of the year, the month or the day – or the unbroken cycle of the seven day week – there isn’t a choice. We’ll need to make some adjustments.

Even the things we think of as fixed are, in fact, changing. For example, slowly over time, the year is getting shorter while the day and the cycle of the moon are getting longer. Perplexingly, the rate of these variations, and many others astronomers are aware of, are also irregular. So whatever adjustments we put into our calendar today will become invalid sometime in the next few thousand years. We may wish to reform the calendar for the sake of eternal perfection, but perfection will always elude us.

So why not just chuck the whole natural calendar idea?

Hanke and Henry have shown us what a calendar designed to increase efficiencies in the business world would look like, and it’s possible to take this idea even further. We might, for example, create a calendar with only 10 months in the year. Each month would have only three weeks, and each week would be 10 days long. Therefore, the ‘year’ would have only 300 days, so that every shopping holiday would happen much more frequently. The retail industry, especially, would be able to do something special with a format like this. But the astrology lobby, if there were such a thing, would vigorously resist this unnatural calendar as well.

Another possibility calls for getting rid of the calendar altogether. Instead, days would be numbered consecutively in an unbroken sequence. There would be no weeks, months, years or time zones. And no hours, either. Instead, decimals would do.

Effectively, this is just what the Julian Date does. Developed for astronomical use, it counts days from January 1, 4713 BC, starting with day zero at Greenwich mean noon on that day. So January 1, 2012 at noon is day 2455928.00. A quarter of a day would be 0.25 instead of 6 hours, half a day would be 0.5, and so on. That’s all one would need to know to be exactly on time.

What could be simpler or more universal, you ask?

Perhaps we should be asking ourselves what is the calendar really for? Do we really want to live with abstract numbers and decimal points, or do we need something that makes human sense? The simple answer is human beings appear to have adapted rather nicely to the familiar but raggedly uneven weeks, months and years we‘ve been journeying with for centuries. We may even need the irregularities of time in the same way we need the irregularities of life itself.

Further Reading

Online:

Calendar Reform

Time for a change? Scholars say calendar needs serious overhaul 

Changing Times | Steve H. Hanke and Richard Conn Henry | Cato Institute: Commentary 

Books:

Duncan, David Ewing, Calendar, Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year, Avon Books, 1998.

McCready, Stuart, ed., The Discovery of Time, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2001.

Richards, E. G., Mapping Time, The Calendar and its History, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Steel, Duncan, Marking Time, The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000.

In a recent issue of History Today, historian Lauren Kassell, PhD, a senior lecturer in the Pembroke College Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, points out that during this period poets and playwrights used astrological language to convey correspondences between terrestrial and celestial realms, often expressed in terms of an analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Shakespeare excelled at this enterprise like no other, demonstrating more than a casual familiarity with the dynamic system of celestial correspondences astrologers of the period used to evaluate personality traits and “temperament.”

But playwrights and savvy theatre goers weren’t the only subjects of the realm with an abiding interest in planetary alignments. It was not uncommon for those with a head, stomach or back ailment to urgently seek the advice of a medical astrologer to cure whatever ailed them. Many found their way to the office of Simon Forman, an enigmatic, street savvy practitioner who apparently was out of phase with the century he was born into.

Astrology was widely used by physicians in the ancient world and enjoyed a revival during the Renaissance, when it was taught as part of the medical curriculum at universities throughout Western Europe. However, by the time Shakespeare was writing his brooding, psychologically taut tragedies the Copernican revolution was gathering momentum and medical astrologers were persona non grata in London, officially at least.

Still, falling ill in Elizabethan England was a frightening proposition. Physicians continued to prescribe the same medieval treatments and remedies that originated in the second century with Greek physician-philosopher Galen. The idea was to balance the body’s four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, which were believed to be the root of illness. Depending upon the diagnosed illness, barber surgeons might be called upon to perform bloodletting. Or apothecaries would fill prescriptions using substances designed to evacuate the body through vomits, purges or sweats.

In the treatment model that evolved, university trained physicians were the city’s medical elite; surgeons and apothecaries usually learned their craft through on-the-job training and were down a rung on the hierarchical ladder. But the lowest rung was occupied by an assortment of irregular practitioners who were operating without the approval of authorities.

According to Prof. Kassell, authorities believed Forman to be “the most obnoxious of the unlearned and unlawful practitioners lurking in many corners of the city.” The astrologer was harried, harassed and repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, either for malpractice or for practicing without a license. At one point he paused long enough to earn a medical degree from Jesus College at Cambridge University (in this period he was able to accomplish the feat in months, not years). But he still was run out and forced to work down river in the town of Lambeth, which located him just outside the jurisdictional reach of The College of Physicians of London, the organization tasked by the Crown to regulate the city’s medical community.

Upsetting the Medical Apple Cart

Apparently, Forman was not the only member of the irregular group to defy the college’s authority. But he was the only one professing the supremacy of his methods and challenging the established medical hierarchy in the name of astrology. His answer to the college’s treatment model was a one-stop-shop approach that placed the astrologer at the center of the patient’s universe. The astrologer consulted the stars, diagnosed the patient‘s illness, prepared and administered his own medicines and performed surgical bloodlettings as needed.

As Prof. Kassell puts it, Forman “fashioned himself a modern magus, driven by a passion for learning and chosen by God to overcome adversity and ultimately acquire knowledge of health and disease, life and death and the secrets of creation.” In the treatment model he advocated, the astrologer “provided a complete service in tune with the cosmos; he alone could judge whether a disease was natural, demonic or divine. And he alone could fashion amulets and potions charged with occult forces.”

In an age teetering on the brink of enlightenment, the public’s apparent acceptance of Forman and his methods had to be especially galling to authorities. The astrologer built a flourishing practice with a clientele that included courtiers and their mistresses, merchants’ wives and their servants, clergymen seeking preferment, celebrity actors and ordinary people worrying about their health. The poet Emilia Lanier, believed by some historians to be the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, was a Forman client. And Shakespeare’s landlady, Mrs. Mountjoy, apparently visited the astrologer as well.

Another sore point for authorities: the astrologer’s wealthy friends in court repeatedly rode to the rescue during his many scrapes with the law.

Inexplicably, Forman proved himself to be a better scientist than many who criticized his methods. When British astrologer William Lilly went in search of Forman’s papers two decades after his death he found what historians believe to be the most extensive set of medical records available from that period (1596 -1634). Like a modern medical researcher might do, Forman and his protégé Richard Napier, a clergyman from Buckinghamshire, hand-recorded more than 50,000 patient visits, meticulously observing and describing symptoms, corresponding astrological alignments and the treatments prescribed. How or even if he analyzed the data isn’t clear at this point, but in his fixation on documentation he was clearly well ahead of his times.

From Lilly we learn that diagnosing sickness using the divination technique astrologers call horary was Forman’s masterpiece (meaning his area of specialization). The horoscopes he created were cast for the moment a patient first appeared in his office with a complaint, or took to their bed with an illness. About 90 percent of his consultations were medically related.

The Simon Forman Casebook Project

Today, the astrologer’s records (casebooks) are contained in 64 hefty volumes housed at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The documents are written in Forman’s scrawling hand and legible only to those with a trained eye. However, they will soon be transcribed and posted on the internet as part of the Simon Forman Casebooks Project. Prof. Kassell estimates this will be a million-word task that will not be completed until 2013.

In the papers Forman left behind are hand-copied books, manuscripts and notes on subjects that interested him, from astrology to astronomy, medicine, religion and mathematics. There’s even a volume he called his Bocke of Plaies; which contains rare eyewitness accounts of live performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale on stage at the Globe in 1611. But the astrologer doesn’t exactly qualify as the quintessential Renaissance man.

Shakespeare was a master at making hair on the heads of his Elizabethan audiences stand on end, and he routinely showcased the fatalistic assumptions of an age in which the concept of predestined futures continued to maintain a stranglehold on the public psyche. Forman worked the same audience, presumably with the intention of healing but apparently with the morals of a troll.

In his autobiography, Lilly refers to Forman as an “old fashioned magician.” Others have been less charitable, commenting on his alleged demonic allegiances and on the lurid details of his sexual prowess. The astrologer was a notorious womanizer and known to suffer with venereal disease — his reward for a lifetime of lustful dalliance. Despite flirtations with piety, in his bag of tricks were obscene wax images for use in love magic. He allegedly dabbled in devil worship with ladies of the court and was involved in dangerous liaisons and mischievous intrigues as well, to the point of being implicated in a scandalous murder plot. All of which makes it easier to sympathize with official efforts aimed at getting him off London’s streets.

Prof. Kassell hints at a broader problem: the Elizabethan period was unable to contain the astrologer’s implausibly conflicting persona. “From Jacobean plays to 19th-century romance novels Forman became the stock cunning man of old whose work was sinister and foolish in equal measure.” she observes.

And now, in the current century, the man is rapidly morphing as a ringer for the debauched, stereotypical conjurer skeptics seem to have in mind when scaring each other with tales about the evils of astrology. What else cultural historians will be able to learn from his fully transcribed notes and records remains to be seen, but Forman has clearly emerged in the information age looking for all the world like astrology’s worst public relations nightmare. Effectively, he personifies the archetypal charlatan authorities have been attempting to stamp out or suppress for 400 years and counting.

A More Optimistic Assessment?

Forman was no prize, but the Simon Forman Casebook Project, the first seriously funded research activity of its kind to focus exclusively on the thoughts and deeds of an astrologer, might conceivably project as a precedent-setting event that winds up opening doors to other funded research projects in the future. And there’s an outside chance Prof. Kassell’s scholarly inquiry into the life and times of a perversely interesting 17th century medical astrologer leads to further discussions regarding the legitimate role astrology can and should be playing to help alleviate pain and suffering on the planet.

Placing the astrologer at the epicenter of a magical medical treatment model isn’t likely to find much support or traction, certainly not in the western world. But a case can be made for the use of astrology in modern medicine during the discovery stage, when efforts by trained medical professionals are focused on diagnosing the origins of a disease or disorder. And astrology can be hugely helpful whenever a fertility doctor, pharmacologist or surgeon needs helpful timing advice.

Astrologer Eileen Nauman believes astrology is a cost-effective diagnostic tool that has provided life-saving insights in clinical situations. It has proven itself to be especially useful in situations where conventional medical scanning techniques have failed to diagnose the problem, or when it’s not clear to the medical professional where she/he should be looking for clues.

Nauman is author of Medical Astrology and the developer of Med-Scan, a program created to help medical practitioners use astrological “signatures” to ascertain likely psychological or physical weaknesses that might be causing disease. A trained Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) she also is author of Homeopathy 911, What to do in an Emergency Before Help Arrives and other books. Her Med- Scan program has been translated into several languages and currently is posted in English on the Cosmic Patterns Software website under the health link.

Insights and resources have continued to evolve, but professional pressures in Western societies make it difficult for medical practitioners to openly embrace astrological methods. And most are reluctant to learn enough about the subject to make an informed judgment about it. If anything, Nauman says authorities in the current era (the American Medical Association and groups like it in other Western countries) are even more unrelenting in their efforts to stamp out astrology — and any other alternative treatment options currently out of favor with the controlling organizations.

It’s unlikely we’ll see the sort of defiant push-back that characterized Forman’s rebellious antics anytime soon, but resistance has not been snuffed entirely. For example, Nauman says her Med-Scan program was greeted by a stony wall of silence when introduced 20 years ago, but some tiny fissures in the wall have appeared. She currently is working with a group of about 25 medical doctors from around the world who seek her advice when diagnosing difficult cases.

It’s a start, she believes.

Yes, you read that right: astrologers.

Knowing the precise time in a given location is a key ingredient in casting an astrological chart. For most of history, timekeeping has been a local affair – when the Sun was directly overhead it was “noon” and clocks were set accordingly. However, with the advent of mass transit and mass communication came the need to standardize timekeeping. An international convention met in 1884 to set the international dateline and establish 24 global time zones.

Since then, how individual countries and cities have related to this global timekeeping tapestry has been an ever-evolving system. Consider Daylight Saving Time, how regions on the border of time zones shift their temporal allegiance, adding leap seconds and other changes and a picture of the complexity of the question “What time is it?” emerges.

To keep up with these changes, astrologers have done what they have always done – they keep records. Over the decades, hundreds of astrologers have shared their data with one another. In the pre-Internet days, they contributed to periodicals like the Mercury Hour, to the collection efforts of individual astrologers such as Doris Chase Doane, or through astrological organizations like the American Federation of Astrologers. Astrologers used these sources as references for determining birth time when calculating charts by hand.

Then in 1978, Neil Michelsen’s company ACS Publications released the American Atlas (followed in 1985 by the International Atlas.) Astrological researcher and programmer Thomas G. Shanks combined the materials from earlier astrologers with data from national railway schedules and other public sources, as well as his educated guesswork, to create the most comprehensive single source for time zone information available at that time.

Meanwhile, with the advent of the information age, computer networks rapidly grew in complexity. Programmers of computer operating systems also recognized the need to have access to accurate information on time zone changes for desktop computers, transportation systems, banks, commerce and more.

In the late 1980s a group of programmers and researchers, including Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, began to collaborate to create a standardized time zone database optimized for the needs of the information age. Although their time zone database (also known as the TZ Database) has an original database structure and a large number of volunteers who update and improve the database, when it was first established one of its sources for time zone data was the Thomas Shanks astrological atlases.

The September 2011 lawsuit filed by Astrolabe, the current owner of the ACS database, against the organizers of the TZ Database, claims that the use of data from the ACS tables in the tz database infringes on ACS’s copyright. Touching as it does on issues of intellectual property and copyright law, the case will be a matter for the courts to decide.

Regardless of the outcome, the fascinating footnote in the history of the information age remains: Data collected over decades by astrologers in order to produce accurate birth charts became a building block of time zone calculations used by modern information giants such as IBM, Apple, Google and others. Not since the days when astrological ephemerides of planetary positions were used by scientists to demonstrate that the Earth moves around the Sun has data collected by astrologers played such a role in the evolution of technology.

That the practice of astrology impacts society in such deep and unexpected ways is something of which astrologers can certainly be proud.

The Friends of Astrology Library contributed to this story.

Update February 27, 2012: Astrolabe formally withdrew its complaint against TZ Database researchers Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. “Astrolabe’s lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one’s property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint. We deeply regret the disruption that our lawsuit caused for the volunteers who maintain the TZ Database, and for Internet users,” said Astrolabe in a statement released last week.

This gives me a pinch of sympathy for the likes of scientist Richard Dawkins who debunk astrology as primitive superstition and utter nonsense because it does not agree with the part of the cosmic elephant science has hold of.

But what Dawkins and other debunkers usually mean by “astrology” are those sun sign blubs in newspapers. Most astrologers agree that sun sign astrology is ridiculous. What sign or constellation the sun was in when you were born is but one aspect of a full astrological reading. And many, if not most sun sign blurbs are conjured by supposing everyone born with the sun in a given sign took their first breath as the sun was peeking over the horizon at 0 degrees of that sign—a ridiculous assumption.

In this regard, debunkers of astrology are like a flock of crows perched on a telephone line, eyeing a field of corn that is “guarded” by a bunch of straw propped up by a stick and dressed to appear as a human. Their angry chatter is about a scarecrow version of astrology.

Precession Is Old News, Astrologers Say

Then there are the debunkers who proclaim that modern Western astrologers are wrong because of the procession of the equinoxes. The precession means that our map of the zodiac changes by one degree every 71.6 years. This in turn means that everyone’s sun sign is really regressed by 24 degrees after 2,000 years. Those born with, say, Sun in Sagittarius really have Sun in the previous sign, Scorpio. Scorpios are really Libras, and so forth around the zodiac.

But astrologers have been keenly aware of the precession for the past 2,000 years or more. Mayan mathematicians calculated it with much more precision than any others, and ancient Hindu Vedic astrologers have based their charts on it for centuries.

And there is more to the precession than the apparent backward movement of the constellations and/or signs of the zodiac that appear to surround our solar system. The telescopes of modern astronomy have taken us into the vastness beyond and shown us a fury of cosmic activity.

“Our Milky Way Galaxy has two distinct parts in its outer reaches that rotate in opposite directions, astronomers announced today (Oct. 15, 2010). The galaxy has a bulbous core where stars are tightly packed and orbiting rather furiously around the central black hole. Then there’s the big flat disk with its spiral arms, also orbiting the galactic center somewhat in the manner of a hurricane’s spiral bands. We live on one of those arms. Around it all is a halo of stars that don’t all behave in such an orderly fashion.” http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/071212-milky-way-halo.html

The astrological signs map “neighborhoods” in the cosmos. These extend so far beyond our solar system that it is hard to imagine. Used as geocentric maps, and taking into consideration the mysterious goings-on in galaxies so distant we have yet to find them, the ancient astrological signs continue to serve their purpose. This is especially so when we keep the focus on what’s happening within our own tiny solar system.

Western astrology is sometimes called “seasonal” for it calculates based on the four seasons, the two equinoxes and the two solstices. If we calculate according to the precession, a couple of thousand of years from now the spring equinox will occur in the middle of winter. But when the sun reaches the spring equinox degree in Aries each year, it’s the end of winter that we experience. So it’s really a question of which perspective we choose. We can calculate our position according to the precession of the equinoxes, or we can calculate it according to the seasons of the year as we experience them.

Pluto A “Dwarf” in Name Only

Debunkers also denigrate astrology because there is no known “medium” or cause-effect mechanism for why the planets influence us. Astrologers agree: No one knows why there is a correlation between what goes on “up there” and “down here.” The ancient astrological saying, “As above, so below” captures this observed synchronicity. No one has discovered why or how such influences work. Gravity? Certainly not. Pluto—so small it was downgraded by astronomers to a “dwarf planet”—is so distant from the sun, and its orbit so idiosyncratic that its history of coinciding with major turning points when forming certain angles has no other explanation except that offered by the astrological paradigm.

Although planets repeatedly form primary angles to each other—the most frequent being the phases of the Sun and Moon—they do so in an ever-changing celestial context. Every New Moon occurs with the other bodies of the cosmos arranged differently than the last New Moon. The modern scientific method relies on duplication of results. From an astrological perspective, history repeats but does not duplicate. No two moments in cosmic time are every the same.
A new perspective on astrology arrived with the rise of the uncertainty principle, quantum physics, which also overturned some long-standing beliefs of Newtonian physics, or what some call “the old science.” Quantum physicists found something very curious happening in the subatomic cosmos: “…every subatomic particle knows what every other subatomic particle it has ever interacted with is doing no matter how great the distance between them becomes.” (“The Science and Astrology Debate“) Each responds to the other’s changes. This interaction of subatomic particles is as mysterious as our interaction with the planets. No one yet knows why, or what cause-effect mechanism is at work in either realm.

This mystery also connects with the ancient astrological saying, “As above, so below.” Both the cosmos and the subatomic realm hold secrets yet to be unlocked. What we know about both is that there is some kind of interaction taking place. What we don’t know is how these interactions operate. Yet, just as quantum physicists can count on certain subatomic results, so astrologers can count on certain planetary cycles coinciding with the same kinds of events they repeatedly coincided with in the past.

For instance, every time Saturn (strictures, established systems, protector of the status quo) has arrived in mid-Capricorn and simultaneously formed a 90 degree angle to another of the outermost planets moving through Aries, the nation has experienced a great depression: the 1930s, 1870s and 1840s. The most indicative angles formed by the planets are conjunctions (when two or more planets are within 10 degrees of each other as seen from Earth), 90-degree squares, 180-degree oppositions and 270-degree squares.

Every approximately 248 years when Pluto’s orbit returns it to Capricorn, major cultural restructurings or revolutions have occurred. This is so going back to the Roman times, the last two times being in the late 1700s (American and French revolutions) and the early 1500s (discovery of gold and silver in the Americas). This suggests that the astrological belief that Saturn “rules” Capricorn is valid.

We are now moving through another time of Pluto in Capricorn (2008 to 2023) and during much of this 25-year period, Pluto will form a 90-degree square angle to Uranus in Aries. This will put Pluto opposite the USA’s natal Sun in Cancer. Since the US Sun is square the US Saturn in Libra, and Libra is opposite Aries, Uranus will be simultaneously opposite the US Saturn. The “transit-to-natal” pattern thus formed is what astrologers call a grand cross. It can be counted on to bring tremendous and long-lasting changes in all dimensions of our earthly experience.

Astrology cannot predict exactly what will change how, but it’s possible to deduce some pending changes from the thrust of current events, and what systems in human affairs have gotten out of balance. Economically, the gap between the super wealthy few and the rest of humanity has never been greater. This suggests that the kind of revolts taking place in the Middle East and USA’s Midwest in early 2011 are likely to spread and intensify as this aspect tightens to exact by 2015.

Most debunkers of astrology have hung a “do not disturb” sign on the door of their beliefs. If they were to examine astrology on its own terms, they would find that this part of the mysterious cosmic elephant helps define other parts.

People fly from far away to see me. My waiting list is a year long. Many of my clients have names you would recognize. Earnest strangers walk up to me in restaurants and say, “Aren’t you . . . ?” I have been on TV. I’ve been on the radio. I am all over the Internet. I have been interviewed more times than I can remember. I fly all over the world and speak to large audiences. I have a dozen books about my work in print, translated into many languages. Esquire magazine called one of them “truly outstanding.” Sting praises my “language that is as intelligent and cogent as it is poetic.” Robert Downey, Jr. says, “I can’t recommend him highly enough.”

All that ego-adrenalin, and yet I live with a primal fear: it is the thought that somebody’s conservative grandfather will come up to me at a party and ask that simple, ubiquitous social question, “By the way, Steve, what do you do?”  Often I say “counselor,” and try artfully to squirm away from the subject. Occasionally, and never among the Gifted and Talented, I have assumed a professorial air and intoned, “Psychological Astronomer.”

But inevitably there are times when artifice fails, and the truth comes out: I am a professional astrologer.

Perhaps it is the reflectiveness that comes with age. Perhaps it is a response to the “spokesperson” role I play from time to time. But lately I find myself thinking dark thoughts about science and history, cosmos and consciousness, truth and lies… all pivoting around one humbling self-observation: I am often embarrassed to say what I do. In random social situations, am nervous about saying that I am an astrologer.

It shouldn’t be that way, I know. I have a lot of respect for my clients. In any other area I would honor their collective judgments. By and large, the men and women whom I counsel are bright, educated, dynamic individuals, the people who shape the life of their communities. They are psychotherapists and physicians, architects, professors, novelists, lawyers and artists of every discipline. They are ministers, executive, stockbrokers, true leaders in the hard-headed world of business. Emphatically, they are not the “hapless victims of astrological charlatans” so often lamented in the anti-astrology press.

And they return to me year after year. They encourage their friends to make appointments with me. With their support, I prosper.

And, of course, I would not have their support if I didn’t give them something they value.

I value it too, despite my embarrassment. Astrology, when approached seriously, provides personal, concrete, “feel-able” proof that we inhabit a meaningful universe. Properly applied and understood, it restores to the cosmos some of the mystery and enchantment that modern life tends to sap, and it accomplishes that task without asking us to surrender our intellects. Carl Jung, the seminal psychoanalyst, called astrology the repository of all the psychological knowledge of ancient humanity. The modern bard, Robert Bly, described it as “the great intellectual triumph of the Mother civilization.”

But those voices are in the minority. Most educated people today have been programmed to put astrology in the same benighted category as human sacrifice and the fear of black cats.

Who is to blame? First on the list are astrologers themselves, at least some of us. The majesty, emotional valence, and intellectual rigor of the astrological symbolism has often been reduced to cutesy Sun Sign formulas. “Scorpios are sexy, Virgos are picky, Aquarians wear purple leotards.”

Who can take silly one-liners like that seriously? Not me. Not anyone with enough brains to brush his teeth without hurting himself.

“Well, Steve, what do you do for living?” When I hear that question, I know that I am trapped. I can lie. Or I can tell the truth—and know that what will be heard is a lie.

I am not alone in this predicament. A Harris Poll released in 2003 indicated that 31 percent of Americans said that they believed in astrology, while 51 percent actively disbelieved and 18 percent were not sure.  Every one of those believers has at least a couple of friends who are convinced that their use of astrology is evidence that they are soft in the head.

Astrology was not always so ridiculed. Pythagoras “believed in” astrology. So did Galileo and Plato. Johannes Kepler too. And Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. Throughout the lion’s share of human history, in virtually every society, the validity of some form of astrology was taken to be self-evident.

Of course, so was the idea that the Earth was flat and that God had a long white beard.

But astrology is different. Its claims are demonstrable. They are testable, at least subjectively. Isaac Newton’s servant once said of his master, “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime either in riding out to take the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that were not spent in his studies.”

Newton was a Capricorn, a sign that emphasizes self-discipline and seriousness of purpose. While Newton’s attitude toward astrology is not known definitively, it is clear that he was immersed in the metaphysical and alchemical perspectives of his era. Had Newton read that his nature was playful and sociable, would he have believed it?

God’s beard is hard to study. Human nature is not; we see it everywhere. And Isaac Newton, arguably the most acute observer who ever lived, never felt moved to comment critically upon astrology, even though it is a virtual certainty that he had contact with it.

What happened? How did astrology lose its credibility? Why is there a dusty little shelf in the back corner of every bookstore labeled “Astrology, Occult, UFOs?” The story is long and winding and I explore it as thoroughly as I can in The Night Speaks, the book from which this short introductory piece is extracted.  But here it is in a single line: The tabloid press got its hands on the symbolism. That is not history exactly, but it captures the essence of the catastrophe. Popular astrology did, to a degree, in fact fall into the hands of charlatans.

Far more deeply, astrology’s current predicament is linked to a clash of paradigms—those all-embracing sets of assumptions which shape the way a culture looks at life. In astrology, the universe is purposeful and alive, and we are in active communion with it. This notion, so attractive at first glance, is actually quite subversive. It challenges the domination of our minds and spirits by the mechanistic “dis-enchanted” view of human existence that has us all watching our streaming videos, waiting for the world to end.

Since the 1960s, in the Americas and Europe, an astrological renaissance has taken place. Many factors have spurred it: the widespread return to the “old religion”—celebrating the sacredness of earth, sky, and consciousness itself; the popularization of psychotherapy as a developmental avenue for “normal” people; the spread of computers which have made astrology’s formidable mathematics less of an obstacle; the rise of genuine astrological scholarship in terms of statistical and historical astrological research; the success of small, specialized publishing enterprises, which have in five decades produced a body of technical astrological literature unrivaled in history.

I have watched it unfold. I know a lot of the personalities involved. Many of them I would call friends. In a small way, I have been part of the process. Over and over again, I have been struck by one overwhelming and dispiriting observation: hardly anyone outside the narrow walls of the technical astrological community or its committed clients even knows that the renaissance has taken place. To the person on the street, it might as well not have happened.

Why?

The answer, I think, is tied up with my embarrassment. Astrology has a terrible public relations problem. To that person on the street, it still looks dumb. Or irrelevant. Or like something “he could safely laugh at,” as Jung once put it.

It is time to address that issue. I celebrate this website, the hard work of those who envisioned it, and the support of the astrological organizations for the outreach it represents. I love the idea of a simple web address to which an intelligent “believer” could send his or her skeptical friends. I think we can demonstrate that astrology is intellectually plausible and spiritually healthy today, much as it was in Neolithic villages, among the gleaming pyramids, the Renaissance chambers where Leonardo walked.

Here, in a nutshell, is the website I pray that conservative grandfather might have visited before he buttonholes me at the party and says, “Steve, tell me… what do you do for a living?”

Some people think that the planets send rays of some kind, or perhaps transmit force-fields and affect human life in this manner. This would make astrological influence the result of some kind of purely natural, but as yet unknown, interaction between humans and the cosmos. If this is the case, then astrology is potentially a subject of science pretty much as we know it and, if so, astrology does not really challenge modern science in any serious way.

Science is not threatened by natural phenomena that it has not yet discovered. It is expanded. In fact, whenever science discovers something new using its basic tools and thinking about things in its own peculiar way, it becomes more confident and certain about its ability to answer just about every question that could be asked.

Is Astrology Natural?

So is astrology just an undiscovered natural phenomenon of the kind that is finally amenable to science? Some people think so. These people are not numerous because astrology is considered a heresy by many in the sciences. It is not politically safe in the sciences to mention any kind of correlation between terrestrial and celestial phenomena unless it can be quickly explained in terms of known gravitational or other force-field effects. Anyone who does so has to move quickly to avoid being branded as a charlatan, while making all kinds of disclaimers that what he or she is doing is not astrology. Often even that is not enough to save an investigators reputation. So whether or not we may agree with people who investigate “astrological” phenomena from within the framework of science, as we know it, we do have to applaud their courage.

Is Astrology Magnetism?

One such investigator is Percy Seymour of Great Britain. He has proposed that the phenomena of astrology are the result of planetary influences on the geomagnetic field of the Earth. It is not clear just how the planetary motions affect the earth’s magnetic field, but there is evidence that there may be such an effect.

In the late 1950s and 60s, the late John Nelson of RCA developed methods by which he claimed he could forecast solar flares, sunspots and geomagnetic disturbances well in advance using the heliocentric positions of the planets. In more recent times, Theodor Landscheidt, a former judge of the German court system, has developed a similar system.

A linkup between solar and geomagnetism and planetary positions is an intuitively plausible one, although in some circles it has provoked the usual phobic response to anything that looks vaguely like astrology. It seems as if here one might find a causal mechanism for a planetary effect that would do violence to basic scientific paradigms. This appears to have occurred to Seymour as well. This is the source of his quite well-reasoned effort to explain astrological effects in terms of geomagnetism.

Scientific Theories and Philosophy

When I say “the problem with the scientific approach,” I mean a scientific approach that is reasonably consistent with science as it is currently understood. And when I say “understood,” I refer to the philosophical assumptions of science, not its theories as they are currently presented.

Each science consists of two layers of ideas. On top, so to speak, are the theories believed to be “true” at any particular point in time. Under these are the philosophical assumptions on which the science is based. To give a simple example that is relevant to astrology, physics has believed that no two objects in the universe can affect each other unless they either 1) collide or 2) interact by means of a well defined set of known forces. What those forces may be is the subject of theories. The philosophical assumption is that objects cannot intersect at a distance from each other except by means of some kind of force. This assumption came into being in the seventeenth century. It is not only not proved, it is not provable. That is the way with most philosophical assumptions. They are adopted because they seem useful, not because they are proved.

You can see how this relates to astrology. The planets are clearly not colliding with the Earth, so they cannot have an effect by collision. Therefore, they either affect the earth by acting at a distance, which the assumption rejects, or there are forces that we simply do not know or understand. Astrology seems to be action at a distance with no intermediate forces. This is one of the reasons why astrology fell from grace in the seventeenth century. Seymour and others like him are trying to solve astrology’s philosophical incompatibility with science by proposing theories that do not violate science’s philosophical foundations.