DaveC426913 said:
Was there anything you wanted to being to ouir attention, or do we simply read the whole thing?
"Although he always remained highly critical of astrology in general, his attitude towards its existence changed as his studies progressed in the study of the diurnal cycle, which is related to the astrological houses.
"Subsequent results only confirmed and amplified my initial discovery about the physicians. On the whole, it emerged that there was an increasingly solid statistical link between the time of birth of great men and their occupational success. ... Having collected over 20,000 dates of birth of professional celebrities from various European countries and from the United States, I had to draw the unavoidable conclusion that the position of the planets at birth is linked to one's destiny. What a challenge to the rational mind!"[2] (Neo-Astrology, 1991) "
Playing devil's advocate...
Here are two possible plausible defenses of astrology.
1) Its all in the mind.
All knowledge systems, be they magical, mythological, theological, or scientific, were conceived within the human mind. Whatever description of nature you favor, it was a human being who came up with it.
To this extent then different knowledge systems may be seen as equivalent accounts of nature albeit accounts that can be rated according to their perceived efficacy - ancient Greek mythology rating obviously lower than physics.
This dependency of the origin of knowledge systems, might perhaps connect them in some significant way, however different they may be. Human beings are known to share a common psychological traits, individuals being biased towards one or another direction. These common psychological traits and biases are routinely rolled out as the one dimensional archetypal characters of Hollywood blockbusters.
Might it be possible that in formulating a description of nature as a whole or just some particular aspect of nature, inevitably, something of the psychological bias of the human being doing the describing gets projected into that description. In other words, our knowledge of the external natural world inevitably contains a little of our own internal world.
Astrology, then, might stand out as being somewhat unique among knowledge systems, because it, unlike most, in seeking for signs of human traits in the heavens, actually and quite deliberately projected all human psychological traits outwards onto its description of the natural world.
So rather than the motions of the heavenly bodies having a direct physical causal relationship with human traits and fates, and rather than there being a mystical synchronistic relationship between the two, perhaps when astrologers read the heavens they are merely recalling common traits of human psychology that were originally projected outward - a map of the human mind projected on our description of the night sky.
The motions of the heavens mark time and as the original post suggested personality and psychological bias may be dependent on the seasonal variations and time of ones birth, so a correlation could conceivably be made. Who knows, maybe the degree of sunlight one is born into determines ones personality - that would make a lot of sense since sunlight is responsible for pretty much everything else.
The difficulty in finding such correlations scientifically perhaps being due to the fact that these traits are traits everyone has and it is only bias that is unique to individual psychology. Also, bias says nothing about aptitude, ability or competence. Just because ones astrological sign suggest one might be prefer work in a particular career, and just because one actually does prefer that particular vocation doesn't automatically mean that one will excel in it or that there won't be anyone of a different sign in the same line of work who isn't better at it than you and still be of a personality described by his/her own star sign. Scientific studies would likely lose any correlation if they take ability as synonymous with bias.
2) Argument from the need of social power elites for a guide to maintaining dominance.
Back in the days of small kingdom states and dynastic royal linages, would not ruling elites in each state gain some benefit from reading the heavens in order to maintain the dominance of their own familial lines?
Aside from the reconnaissance reports of spies and diplomatic communiques, a ruler would know precious little about how the current states of affairs changed in a neighbouring kingdom. Astrology would either consciously or unconsciously offer a surprisingly useful guide and almost telepathic powers to read the intent of a neighbouring ruler, and here's how.
If I am a ruler and I know that you, as a neighbouring ruler, consult the skies every night in order to gain foresight that may aid your decision making process - and I know damn well that you do, because we are all as paranoid and superstitutious as each other! - then surely I would consider myself a fool, if I were not to do likewise and incorporate what decisions you are likely to draw from your reading of the heavens into my own.
In this way there would be a time for war and a time for peace dictated by the heavens. As rulers, reading the heavenly signs and with executive power, we would have foreknowledge of these times and the power to initiate them. This edge would enable us to maintain dynastic dominance within a kingdom, regardless of the sway of political relations between neighbouring states as they compete for resources and collaborate for trade.
It is easy to see how in this way astrology might have played a significant role in the rule of ancient dynastic kingdoms far off in humanities distant darker history, but, it might be somewhat unsettling to consider that perhaps global power brokers even today still employ the same reliance on the motions of heavenly bodies to guide them.
