Maps of the stars existed long before maps of the earth. Archaeologists have found cave paintings, mammoth tusks, and bones marked with lunar phases. The Babylonians also known as the Chaldeans continue what the Sumerians started, inventing the first astrological system over thousands of years. They created the zodiac wheel that we use today with planets and houses around B. The oldest known horoscope chart is believed to date to B. The modern names for planets and zodiac signs come from Greek literature.
In A. Tetrabiblos contains core techniques of astrology used to this day, including planets, zodiac signs, houses, and aspects or angles. The Roman Empire falls. Western astrology disappears for years and the Arabs continue studying and developing Greek astrology.
The Sumarians and Babylonians, by around the middle of the second millennium BC, appeared to have had many divination practices — they looked at spots on the liver and the entrails of animals, for example — and their idea that watching planets and stars was a way to keep track of where gods were in the sky can be traced to The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa. Imagine a straight line drawn from Earth through the Sun and out into space way beyond our solar system where the stars are. Then, picture Earth following its orbit around the Sun.
This imaginary line would rotate, pointing to different stars throughout one complete trip around the Sun — or, one year. All the stars that lie close to the imaginary flat disk swept out by this imaginary line are said to be in the zodiac. The constellations in the zodiac are simply the constellations that this imaginary straight line points to in its year-long journey.
These Western, or tropical, zodiac signs were named after constellations and matched with dates based on the apparent relationship between their placement in the sky and the sun. The Babylonians had already divided the zodiac into 12 equal signs by BC — boasting similar constellation names to the ones familiar today, such as The Great Twins, The Lion, The Scales — and these were later incorporated into Greek divination.
The astronomer Ptolemy, author of the Tetrabiblos, which became a core book in the history of Western astrology, helped popularize these 12 signs.
In fact, the chronology has really shifted one sign to the West. That means zodiac sign dates, based on the mathematical division of the year, basically correspond today to the presence of the sun in the constellations of the signs that come before them. For centuries, astrology looking for signs based on the movement of the celestial bodies was considered basically the same thing as astronomy the scientific study of those objects. Most ancient cultures associated these seven objects with various supernatural rulers in their pantheon and kept track of them for religious reasons.
Even in the comparatively sophisticated Greece of antiquity, the planets had the names of gods and were credited with having the same powers and influences as the gods whose names they bore. From such ideas was born the ancient system called astrology , still practiced by some people today, in which the positions of these bodies among the stars of the zodiac are thought to hold the key to understanding what we can expect from life.
Astrology began in Babylonia about two and half millennia ago. The Babylonians, believing the planets and their motions influenced the fortunes of kings and nations, used their knowledge of astronomy to guide their rulers. When the Babylonian culture was absorbed by the Greeks, astrology gradually came to influence the entire Western world and eventually spread to Asia as well. By the 2nd century BCE the Greeks democratized astrology by developing the idea that the planets influence every individual.
Natal astrology reached its peak with Ptolemy years later. Each sign was named after a constellation in the sky through which the Sun, Moon, and planets were seen to pass—the sign of Virgo after the constellation of Virgo, for example. Figure 1: Zodiac Signs. The signs of the zodiac are shown in a medieval woodcut. However, more than years have passed since the signs received their names from the constellations. Because of precession, the constellations of the zodiac slide westward along the ecliptic, going once around the sky in about 26, years.
In most forms of astrology, however, the signs have remained assigned to the dates of the year they had when astrology was first set up. This means that the astrological signs and the real constellations are out of step; the sign of Aries, for example, now occupies the constellation of Pisces. When you look up your sun sign in a newspaper astrology column, the name of the sign associated with your birthday is no longer the name of the constellation in which the Sun was actually located when you were born.
To know that constellation, you must look for the sign before the one that includes your birthday. A complete horoscope shows the location of not only the Sun, but also the Moon and each planet in the sky by indicating its position in the appropriate sign of the zodiac. However, as the celestial sphere turns owing to the rotation of Earth , the entire zodiac moves across the sky to the west, completing a circuit of the heavens each day.
After a decade and a half of translation work, Project Hindsight claims to have revived the old astrological methods. No longer a folksy way to look at our individual personality and character, astrology as we know it is getting pushed aside and being replaced by older techniques of looking at why real-world events happen. Traditional Hellenistic astrology brings a rigor and harmony to astrology that modern methods washed over.
The modern system flattened the houses, which describe worldly matters like money, love, and career, into the zodiac signs of the star constellations. The ancient texts never conflated the two. Prying these important pieces of astrology back apart clarifies how the ancients related movements of the heavens with events on earth.
Compare this to new-age psychological astrology, which over accentuates internal matters of the mind and spirit, opening up far too much room for confirmation bias. Modern astrology also hastily assigned outsized influence to the newly discovered planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto without the centuries of observational data that the Hellenistic astrologers were working with.
One of the greatest sticking points where traditional and modern astrology diverge is destiny. Hellenistic astrology describes a causal relationship between the movement of planets and stars and the material world on earth.
The ancients also believed in the notion of fate. Fatedness runs counter to our modern notion of free will, and therefore many find traditional astrology unpalatable. However, we do not need to believe in a fatalistic view of planetary movements to revive some insights in the work of the ancient astrologers who espoused them. Now, modern psychology can enrich those parts of the astrological tradition. Her writing carries strong feminist and social-justice overtones, hitting on the zeitgeist of the moment not unlike what Alan Leo did in his time over a century ago.
Her audience is devoted and growing, with a regular readership reaching over 1 million people. While people can now preach openly about crystals or sound-vibration healing and only get a single eye roll, those who look to astrology for answers are still in the proverbial closet.
The revival of traditional astrology is still in its early days.
0コメント