AstroLogie, are there any fundaments?

[sanctus]

I never believed in astrology, I always thought it's works thanks to self-suggestion.

 

Discussing with my girlfriend, I got an idea: maybe it's not all wrong. One can imagine that being born some time a year the earth has had some kind of magnetic field and the planets some position and therefore a kind of gravitational interaction, what then has influenced how our brain has developped and therefore our caracter.

 

What do you think? Is this possible?

 

I just want to addm that even if you say it is possible I don't think that afterwards I'll start seeing mediums;I'm just curious.

[Hypo_admin]

The gravitational pull from the house you live in is larger than the pull from the moon - not to mention Mars, Jupiter, Saturn etc. They have absolutely no effect on you, no matter what magnetic flux storm you were caught in on the day on your birth.

 

The only star to have an impact of our daily lives is the Sun, but for different reasons - this is linked with solar storms.

 

(This is posted by Tormod - I am just testing the admin account).

[Stargazer]

Sure, we're affected byt plenty of things, like radiation and such, but the gravity or electromagnetic fields of other planets, let alone other stars, are so tiny that they can not possibly have any effect on us, especially not in a particular direction.

[Freethinker]

However....

 

and I bet this will raise a few eyebrows around here....

 

I do think there may be some legitimate causal relationships which could be tied to astrology. But it is far more complex and not directly related to the stars/ constellations...

 

My proposition is based on the fact that during different times of the year, we have different environmental conditions. It might be colder/ hotter. Wetter/ dryer. Varying food sources. Each of these would affect the development of the fetus in completely naturalistic ways. It woould seem for example, that a fetus developing during a season that has more access to food woould on average be healthier than one during non-food source periods such as the middle of winter. Vitamins. minerals, ... would vary as then would the development of brain, muscle, ...

 

Naturally this would be as geographically dependant as it would seasonally. But since the astrological system we are most often exposed to is based on Western European custom, this would localize the subjects evaluated for reference.

[Tormod]

Hm, well, what raises my eyebrows is that you even bother to post such an obvious comment in an astrology discussion. :wink:

[Freethinker]

But have you ever seen it offered as a possible causal explanation for any "greater than coincidence" correlation for astrology?

[Tormod]

But have you ever seen it offered as a possible causal explanation for any "greater than coincidence" correlation for astrology?

 

No. But, huh?

 

Frankly, I fail to see where astrology plays into it at all. How does the conjunction of Saturn as related to the rise of Aqarius have anything to do with the weather system in Wisconsin? :wink:

[Tormod]

Oh I just had a lovely 2,222 post count...now it's gone. There was probably a deeper meaning to it but its lost forever now.

[Aquagem]

Hm, well, what raises my eyebrows is that you even bother to post such an obvious comment in an astrology discussion. :)

 

In my studies of models of nature, few, if any, are as sublime and full of fascinating insight as the Natural Zodiac. Notice I didn't say astrology. Astrology, in my thinking, is a pseudoscience that has grown out of the fertile soil of a metaphorical system developed by some of the best thinkers in human history. The problem is that it degenerated into a system purporting to apply to individuals deductively, rather than raising our consciousness of the world system we live in. In defense of those who corrupted it, I admit that they had no recourse to scientific knowledge, and came to all sorts of unsupportable conclusions because of that.

 

First and foremost, the zodiac is an agricultural archetype that probably traces to, oh, about Sumerian times. No doubt it had predecessors, but with the Babylonians it evolved into the calendar, possibly the most important technological advance of the Bronze Age. The calendar allowed our species to synch into resonance with the solar cycle, thereby maximizing agricultural output. The sun, as you well know, just started bouncing back from the Tropic of Capricorn, and will ascend through the spring equinox (Aries) to the Tropic of Cancer, and then back south at the start of Libra. We remember some of the names, but not the symbolism. Because we no longer think in zodiac terms, it seems meaningless, and it's an easy target for scorn.

 

Babylonian calendrical advances were adopted by the Greeks when Alexander blew into town, and in Greek hands, the symbolic component of the zodiac advanced rapidly. But the point is that the zodiac is a metaphorical system describing the agricultural, i.e., the solar, year. Knowledge and lore of this periodicity was, and still is, necessary for the success of growing things. We've largely lost sight of this, too.

 

By the time the zodiac had been coopted by the Catholic Church, and later destroyed systematically by proponents of the new mechanistic view of Newtonian physics, its deeper significance as an organismic model of nature had been largely lost, a problem that continues down to the present. Its close association with astrology doesn't help in any way, except that we still have the form in fairly good repair. I have a two-volume set of books entitled "Music of the Spheres" by Guy Murchie, a great canvass of the whole realm of science. I understand it's been updated (originally published in the '60's) and is available again -- worth reading. In there, he made a pregnant statement, which was something like, "We have never produced a Newton of the zodiac", which I regard as a charitable nod to the possibility that this model might still have something to show us.

 

Let me try putting it this way --

 

The zodiac is to the world of life on Earth as quantum mechanics is to the smallest discernible orders of magnitude and relativity is to the largest. It's a symbolic representation of basic life processes. As I have written elsewhere, "The zodiac is not of the stars, but of the ground."

 

Aside from that, the fundaments of astrology consist of the zodiac, seriously misunderstood and universally mis-applied, and a ragtag bunch of miscellaneous superstitions left over from the Greeks, Romans, and later, Europeans.

 

I would love to prepare a first-year science curriculum that starts out with the metaphors of the zodiac and show how modern science has arisen from the ashes of the METHODS of astrologers (though not defending their content or their validity) -- Don't forget, Newton and Kepler were both accomplished astrologers, and it was in large part their metaphysical fascination with the idea of a deeper level of meaning in the universe that propelled them to their greatest discoveries.

 

You don't have to be right all the time. But you do need to be willing to learn from your mistakes to get closer to the truth!

[IrishEyes]

You don't have to be right all the time. But you do need to be willing to learn from your mistakes to get closer to the truth!

 

Very, very true.

 

Aquagem, I don't think I've taken the time to WELCOME you to Hypography yet. Sorry about that. I will tell you that I have enjoyed reading your very informative posts on a myriad of subjects. Your thought process is astounding. And I am impressed by your ability to communicate your ideas effectively. Thanks so much, and I can't wait to read what you will write next! :)

[Tormod]

bla bla bla bla bla bla

Aquagem - your posts are brilliant but they are so long! Maybe you could break them up into smaller parts? I fear some users will skip your posts simply because they can't be bothered to read (wot? no pictures?) :)

[Freethinker]

No. But, huh?

 

Frankly, I fail to see where astrology plays into it at all. How does the conjunction of Saturn as related to the rise of Aqarius have anything to do with the weather system in Wisconsin? :)

My contention is that it is conincidental. It's pattern recognition and that some people are better at patern recognition. That a pattern was detected in how people behaved by the same people that detected a pattern to the stars. They then made the false causal connection between two noncausal set of patterns.

[Aquagem]

Aquagem - your posts are brilliant but they are so long! Maybe you could break them up into smaller parts? I fear some users will skip your posts simply because they can't be bothered to read (wot? no pictures?) :)

Yeah... sorry about that. It's a very old problem. That was my motivation in saying I didn't want to clobber the airwaves with too much stuff. The problem for me that nature is just too darned interesting and science is just too fascinating. I'll try hard to shorten things up. But it's hard to answer a post that asks, "Do we have free will?" with something like "Yup, I guess so."

 

(I'm going to have to shorten things up, cuz I don't have enough time to keep up this pace!)

 

 

I'll look for some pictures... :)

 

From something I wrote long ago:

"Simple answers to complex problems is what I call... fundamentalism."

[Tormod]

Yeah... sorry about that. It's a very old problem. That was my motivation in saying I didn't want to clobber the airwaves with too much stuff. The problem for me that nature is just too darned interesting and science is just too fascinating.

I agree completely. It's easy to let the posting fingers go on and on. But some of us here play the post count game and the only way to make it to our Top 15 posters list is to say things in bits and pieces. :)

[Tormod]

Of course, *I* could care less about my post count.

[Tormod]

Or something.

[Tormod]

My contention is that it is conincidental. It's pattern recognition and that some people are better at patern recognition. That a pattern was detected in how people behaved by the same people that detected a pattern to the stars. They then made the false causal connection between two noncausal set of patterns.

Okay, we're on the same wavelength here.