A Brief History of Astronomy and Astrology

Sun-Mercury conjunct synastry is concerned with the observation of the motions of heavenly bodies, and reduces to mathematical order these observations. Astrology is the study of the effects the movements of these celestial bodies have on human affairs. Via prolonged observation, the ancient astronomers had been in a position to predict the recurrence of cosmic phenomena, and astrologers started to forecast the earthly events which coincided with these.

Astronomy is most likely as old as man’s conception of time itself. In the beginning, astronomy was largely applied to predict climate patterns and the most propitious time for sowing and planting crops. Later, these orbs of moving light the planets, had been believed to be gods, and the subsequent quest for divine information and facts was just about surely the starting of astrology.

Ancient Origins

Astronomy-astrology is talked about to have originated with the Chaldeans, in Babylon, Mesopotamia, (now Iraq) about the fourth millennium BC. It was practiced in the temples, exactly where it was blended with religious components. Later, it spread to Egypt, and about the third millennium BC was becoming utilized by rulers to predict the fate of nations: war or peace, famine or a lot.

The Chinese had been also skilled astronomers, and are believed to have independently begun to use types of prediction, along with the Maya of Central America and the peoples of ancient India. Some experts believe that Chinese astronomy could extend as far back as 5000 BC.

Current researches into the Pyramids and Sphinx of Giza recommend that observation of heavenly bodies may possibly have even much more distant origins. There is startling new proof that the principal Giza monuments form an precise terrestrial “map” of the three stars of Orion’s belt as these constellations appeared in 10,500 BC.

Greek and Roman Instances

A lot later, immediately after the death of Alexander The Wonderful, astrology started to influence Greek life, as Greeks and Orientals mingled in the kingdoms of the Seleucids and Ptolemy. It became an increasingly critical portion of Greek and Roman life. The Stoic philosophers secularized this ancient art: Hippocrates, the “father of medicine” taught astrology to his students so that they could figure out the important days in an illness and the poet Hesiod, who lived in the 8th century BC, wrote in his lengthy poem “Functions and Days” that the positions of the planets and stars require to be produced use of to predict propitious times at which to start points. Astrology reached its zenith in imperial instances, was employed by people of just about just about every social strata, and in reality, was a aspect of virtually just about each branch of ancient culture.

About the 2nd century A. D. Ptolemy, a Greek scientist, wrote a colossal operate on astrology, which is divided into two elements: The Almagest and The Tetrabiblos: The Almagest delivers with the movement of the Sun, Moon, and planets the Tetrabiblos with the interpretation of these movements as they influence man and human events. These books are maybe the most comprehensive written records of ancient astronomy and astrology that have remained to us, and are a compilation of performs from prior centuries.

The Middle Ages

The tradition of Greek, Arabic and Medieval astrology which was inseparable from the parallel tradition of alchemy, believed that Man responds to particular indefinable energies or vibrations of the Sun, Moon and planets, and words nonetheless utilized appropriate now to define a variety of human qualities, such as mercurial, saturnine, lunatic, venereal, jovial, martial, came from the astrological-alchemical schools of the 13th to the 17th centuries, remaining a tribute to the function of these instances.

The Age of Explanation

Astrology for centuries was created use of by kings, emperors, popes, scientists, physicians, the bourgeoisie and the poor alike, and together with astronomy was taught in the schools and universities of the globe. But, as with most challenges, it was destined to attain an interval in the affairs of guys, and toward the close of the sixteenth century in Europe, astrology was losing ground despite the truth that in England it continued to flourish through most of the 17th century.

The causes for the decline in astrology are varied. A new scientific age was dawning and with it an excessive demand for technical explanation-each and every small factor not scientifically provable or rationally explicable was rejected, such as astrology. The vast distance of the planets in in between each and every other was discovered, and guys and girls began to say that these distances have been as properly exceptional for any influences to attain earth. Also, the realization that the sun, and not the earth, was at the center of the solar method somehow added to the devaluation of astrology-even even though Sir Isaac Newton, and other folks, pointed out that astrology is about the partnership involving planets, and could consequently be valid no matter which heavenly body was at the center of the system.

To add to all of this, an rising quantity of “quacks” appeared out to make speedy funds, mingling with the genuine astrologers, which could not have helped matters-and when it is true that there have generally been consultant astrologers and their customers-in Europe and in America, astrology for a extended period seemed to lie dormant, and was utilised for tiny further than the publication of Almanacs for predicting the climate.

The Twentieth Century

It was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that began the present revival of interest in Astrology. Substantially of this is owed to the terrific Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustave Jung, who utilized astrology in his studies and wrote on the topic extensively, awakening at the really similar time the interest of other scientists.

The English astrologer Alan Leo, and Russian, Madame Blavatsky did drastically for the resurgence of astrology in England and Germany. There had been others, also, such as the American, Dane Rudhyar, who came to astrology by way of investigation in music and philosophy, and wrote a useful carry out referred to as “The Planetarization of Consciousness” in 1970. In this way astrology was revived in America, in France, and in Holland. Associations and schools for skilled astrologers were founded in America and in Britain, and at present astrology is once once again practiced in almost each and every nation of the planet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *