Carl Sagan on Astrology

Excerpt from the ‘Cosmos’ by Carl Sagan  

“As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

But then, much later, another rather curious idea arose, an assault by mysticism and superstition into what had been largely an empirical science. The Sun and stars controlled the seasons, food, warmth. The Moon controlled the tides, the life cycles of many animals,and perhaps the human menstrual* period – of central importance for a passionate species devoted to having children. There was another kind of object in the sky, the wandering or vagabond stars called planets. Our nomadic ancestors must have felt an affinity for the planets. Not counting the Sun and the Moon, you could see only five of them. They moved against the background of more distant stars. If you followed their apparent motion over many months, they would leave one constellation, enter another, occasionally even do a kind of slow loop-the-loop in the sky. Everything else in the sky had some real effect on human life. What must the influence of the planets be?
 

In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology – at a newsstand,say – is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people who do not know I am a scientist, I am sometimes asked, ‘Are you a Gemini?’ (chances of success, one in twelve), or ‘What sign are you?’ Much more rarely am I asked, ‘Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?’ or ‘When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?’ Astrology contends that which constellation the planets are in at the moment of your birth profoundly influences your future.

A few thousand years ago, the idea developed that the motions of the planets determined the fates of kings, dynasties, empires. Astrologers studied the motions of the planets and asked themselves what had happened the last time that, say, Venus was rising in the Constellation of the Goat; perhaps something similar would happen this time as well. It was a subtle and risky business. Astrologers came to be employed only by the State. In many countries it was a capital offense for anyone but the official astrologer to read the portents in the skies: a good way to overthrow a regime was to predict its downfall. Chinese court astrologers who made inaccurate predictions were executed. Others simply doctored the records so that afterwards they were in perfect conformity with events. Astrology developed into a strange combination of observations, mathematics and careful record-keeping with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud.

But if the planets could determine the destinies of nations, how could they avoid influencing what will happen to me tomorrow? The notion of a personal astrology developed in Alexandrian Egypt and spread through the Greek and Roman worlds about 2,000 years ago. We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is Greek for ‘bad star,’ influenza, Italian for (astral) ‘influence’; mazeltov, Hebrew – and, ultimately, Babylonian – for ‘good constellation,’ or the Yiddish word shlamazel, applied to someone plagued by relentless ill-fortune, which again traces to the Babylonian astronomical lexicon. According to Pliny, there were Romans considered sideratio, ‘planetstruck.’ Planets were widely thought to be a direct cause of death. 

 John Graunt compiled the mortality statistics in the City of London in 1632.  Among the terrible losses from infant and childhood diseases and such exotic illnesses as ‘the rising of the lights’ and ‘the King’s evil,’ we find that, of 9,535 deaths, 13 people succumbed to ‘planet,’ more than died of cancer. I wonder what the symptoms were. And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine the New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra – that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post, ‘a compromise will help ease tension’; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’s astrologer, you must ‘demand more of yourself,’ an admonition that is also vague but also different. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice – they tell what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sports statistics and stock market reports?

Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.

Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call Ptolemy, although he was unrelated to the kings of the same name. He worked in the Library of Alexandria in the second century. All that arcane business about planets
ascendant in this or that solar or lunar ‘house’ or the ‘Age of Aquarius’ comes from Ptolemy, who codified the Babylonian astrological tradition. Here is a typical horoscope from Ptolemy’s time, written in Greek on papyrus, for a little girl born in the year 150: ‘The birth of Philoe. The 10th year of Antoninus Caesar the lord, Phamenoth 15 to 16, first hour of the night. Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury in Aries, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Leo, Venus and the Moon in Aquarius, horoscopus Capricorn.’ The method of enumerating the months and the years has changed much more over the intervening centuries than have the astrological niceties. A typical excerpt from Ptolemy’s astrological book, the Tetrabiblos,reads: ‘Saturn, if he is in the orient, makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned, robust,black-haired, curly-haired, hairy-chested, with eyes of moderate size, of middling stature,and in temperament having an excess of the moist and cold.’ Ptolemy believed not only that behavior patterns were influenced by the planet’s and the stars but also that questions of stature, complexion, national character and even congenital physical abnormalities were determined by the stars. On this point modern astrologers seem to have adopted a more cautious position.

But modern astrologers have forgotten about the precession of the equinoxes, which Ptolemy understood. They ignore atmospheric refraction, about which Ptolemy wrote. They pay almost no attention to all the moons and planets, asteroids and comets, quasars and pulsars, exploding galaxies, symbiotic stars, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources that have been discovered since Ptolemy’s time. Astronomy is a science – the study of the universe as it is. Astrology is a pseudoscience – a claim, in the absence of good evidence, that the other planets affect our everyday lives. In Ptolemy’s time the distinction between astronomy and astrology was not clear. Today it is.”