The idea that stars express Divine Will goes back some 2,300 years to the
Babylonians. They could see with the naked eye seven objects (that they called
stars) that moved through the sky - the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn. They believed that the gods lived in these stars, and
controlled the destinies of individuals and nations. They thought the gods
controlled us either directly by meddling in our affairs, or indirectly, by the
intricate relationships of these stars with each other.
To describe the positions of these stars more easily, the Babylonians divided
the sky into 12 slices (they had a numbering system based on 12, not 10 as we
have). Today, we call these 12 slices the 12 Houses of the Zodiac - eg, Aries,
Pisces, Aquarius. The Babylonian astronomers/astrologers closely observed the
sky, decade after decade. They noticed that these seven stars seemed to move
through the Houses of the Zodiac in totally repeatable ways - coming back to
the same location in the same house at the same time, year after year.
But this is where the big problem is.
The constellations shift by about 1o every 72 years, thanks to the drifting of
the Earth's spin. The Earth spins around an imaginary spin axis that runs
through the North and South Geographic Poles. But it doesn't spin true. If you
have ever spun a top, you'll see that this spin axis soon begins to wobble. The
spin axis will slowly sweep out a complete circle.
The same thing happens with the spin axis of the Earth - except that it takes
about 26,000 years to sweep out a complete circle. So roughly every
2,000-and-a-bit years (26,000 years divided by 12 Houses), the star signs get
shifted by one House. The horoscopes you read in the daily newspapers (and that
are often written by the most junior journalist on that shift) are wrong by one
House. You should be reading the star sign before.
But this is not a new discovery. Back in 129 BC, Hipparchus was the first to
find this shifting-of-the-stars when he compared the astronomical records with
what he saw with his eyes.
But there's another major problem with astrology, and that is there are so many
problems with Astrology, that it's hard to know where to begin.
... none of the detailed statistical studies that have looked at astrology have
found any merit in it.
For example, a psychologist from Michigan State University, Bernard Silverman,
looked at 2,978 married couples and 478 couples who divorced. He found
absolutely no correlation between which couples divorced, and which couples
were born under alleged incompatible signs.
The famous French Astrologer, Michael Gauquelin, offered free horoscopes to any
reader of Ici Paris, if they would give feedback on the accuracy of his
supposedly individual analysis. He wanted to scientifically test his
profession of astrology. He sent out thousands of copies of the same horoscope
- and 94% of the readers replied that his reading was very accurate and
insightful. What they didn't know was that the horoscope was that of a local
mass murderer, Dr. Petiot, who had admitted during his trial that he had killed
63 people.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/12/16/1266452.htm
