If you ask my opinion, Astrology is indeed a scientific field on its own regard, yet, the vast majority of Astrologers nowadays are not as scientific as the discipline requires. What is more, Astrology is definitely not an art, and far from being a divination or psychic process. These later characterisations are conveniently used by gurus, influencers and incompetent astrologers that have no scientific education whatsoever. It is their way to justify and advertise their mostly self-claimed exquisite abilities to their clients and the general public.
To start from the beginning, as it is widely known Astronomy and Astrology were a singular and unified scientific field. Since their conception, and at least in the times of ancient Greece that I am aware of, they were bound together and worked hand in hand. Apologies for having to hereby refrain from including examples from other civilisations as both my interests and knowledge is limited to the Greek scientific heritage. To continue on the path of these disciplines, later on, they had been forced to split because of societal reasons, and as you would naturally expect, on the basis of their distinct subject matters as they evolved.
Fair enough up to that point, but still claiming that only Astronomy is a science just because there is mathematics involved does not automatically exclude Astrology from being an equal partner as a scientific field. To the astonishment of many, Astrology is not at all arbitrary in its nature. It is extensively based on her Astronomy sibling, which is actually its most important prerequisite and a critical requirement for its further study. Being backed by the precise astronomical calculations of planetary positions, Astrology is enabled to add another layer on top of Astronomy while resting on its shoulders. By doing so, it focuses on how human behaviour might be correlated or affected by our Solar System’s state at any given time.
I need to pause here for a disclaimer. I do not even consider predictions as part of the Astrological inquiry. If you use Astrology as a tool to know yourself better, you wont be needing any kind of predictions anyway. To also ponder; if mathematics were only used in the casino, would you consider them as a science?
Since mathematics which I adore are brought to our discussion, not all scientific fields are directly described that way. History for example and other scientific disciplines do not directly access mathematics for they are more qualitative and evidence based in nature. However, History is considered a scientific field and most rightly so. Astrology however, whose scientific nature is always under question, is much more coupled with mathematics than History. Every planetary position, every relative aspect and every orbital period directly goes into behavioural pattern descriptions. Mathematics are always just below the surface, not buried in a deep layer like in other disciplines.
Now, there is the Astrological statement that behaviour of living beings is influenced by our Solar System’s state. Lets take the most measurable of experiments first involving Sun, Earth and Moon. When all preconditions are met, and the Moon positions itself between Sun and Earth in such a way, we get an Solar Eclipse as a result. For a few minutes we cannot see the Sun and this is happening in the middle of the day. During that time, it is scientifically proven that the Sun’s radiation towards the Earth undergoes a big amount of change in just a few minutes as the Sun’s beams are blocked by the Moon. This is more like a shock event as darkness falls upon us outside the normal day to night cycle.
Despite wolves howling like in the movies, is there any behavioural change in humans as well? Can we investigate that change in a scientific manner? Can we hand out questionnaires to ask people for any notable changes? Can we calculate or measure changes in the endocranial pressure or any other of the physiology parameters during this extraordinary event? Does these changes involve any kind of automatic response from the nervous system? Is it not fair enough to investigate? There are just so many questions to be asked. But science always begins with questions and the answers should lead to even more questions.
On the less measurable side are the ‘correlations’ that Astrology tends to get the most criticism for. There is the famous Astrological statement ‘as above, so below’, but also, there is the Mafia’s saying ‘We have heard about coincidences, however we just haven’t seen any’. We describe this hypothesis for cases where there is no practical interference between Earth and lets say the faraway dwarf planet Pluto. Being at the edge of our Solar System and also being so small in diameter, Pluto can have no gravitational pull of any significance or otherwise down to us here on Earth. Rather, according to this theory there is a harmony between the way the Solar System moves, and the going about of life business on Earth. As this is always found difficult to be explained, I like to think of fractals. Given the pattern of the whole image, if you zoom into a fraction of it you can still observe the same pattern being replicated in miniature. What a symmetry indeed. However, we have to admit that there is a lot of work to be done in order to prove this claim. But this is an initial Hypothesis as in so many other disciplines. We have to test it beyond intuition, find ways to observe, collect data, and reproduce. Again, these are scientific steps once more, just at the early stages.
Not all sciences always gave us the answers we needed, and that continues to happen in a large number of problems. Take Medicine for example. Not that many decades ago, doctors would drain the blood from a patient in order to cure them. You do not want to know the survival ratio from procedures like that. Does this makes Medicine not to be a scientific field? Modern Medicine has greatly improved our lives just because we have involved better scientific methods throughout its evolution. It is not perfect yet, it may never be so, but it continuously and iteratively improves. In the same way, just because the mainstream Astrologer does not have the required scientific background and says what comes to mind to their clients, does not mean Astrology is not a scientific field. It just means that we have to get our sleeves up, get serious, observe, document and gather evidence, analyse our hypothesis and check them against real life scenarios. But this is a scientific approach, isn’t it?
Go ahead now and tighten your seat belts for the difficult part. The question rather is, do Astrologers today want to perceive Astrology as a scientific field? I doubt it. It is so convenient to be an artist or a spiritual guide or even a guru. You do not need to prove anything that way. You can self-indulge in your supernatural abilities. You can have your own cult as well. You can have followers and exploit wounded people, that just because they do not know any better, they listen patiently to whatever you through at them.
If we want Astrology to be perceived as a science we need to greatly improve on our methods or rather built them from the ground up. That is by no means an easy task. First, an Astrologer cannot afford anymore to be a mere lookup reader of the ephimeris or any Astrological software. Looking up ephemerides and even drawing up charts with given data does not have anything to do with knowing how our Solar System lives and breaths, it is rather an illusion. If you asked me, you have to be an Astronomer first and become an Astrologer later. How else can you explain how the Solar System state affects human behaviour if you do not already know how the Solar System works? The same applies for Medicine. How can you explain the effects of the Solar System state to humans if you do not have a clue about how human being works? No wonder why Astrologers of old were already mathematicians, physicians and philosophers i.e. top scientists. As is frequently the case, they just new better.
I hope it is clear by now that studying Astrology should be a serious scientific endeavour and not to be taken lightly. Everyone seriously involved needs to set up a demanding curriculum for themselves. So, go ahead and get your education in Mathematics, Astronomy and Medicine. Doing so will take a long while. However, it is only after enough people do that, that there can be hope for valuable research in Astrology, so it can reclaim its place among the pantheon of sciences. And please do not worry, the master of correlations, i.e. Artificial Intelligence, is on the Astrologer’s side, both as a proven concept as well as a tool.
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