I have been thinking about a scientific basis for astrology. It does involve stars and constellations, but their only function is that of a calendar. Consider a primitive society living where there is a sharp contrast between summer and winter weather and/or a sharp contrast between the amount and intensity of sunshine between winter and summer. Also, this primitive society does not have modern housing or utilities so the effects of the seasons are very noticeable even when indoors. A child born in the late fall or early winter would be bundled in clothing and held closely for the first few months of his or her life to keep it warm. I child born in the late spring or early summer might be given little or no clothing and allowed to crawl about freely. Wouldn’t these different conditions in the first months of life have an impact on personality and abilities of the child as he or she grows older? Of course, these effects would be much less pronounced in a temperate climate or when climate-controlled housing is available.
I can’t be the first person to think about this. Does anyone have any cites for an earlier version of this proposition?
Does anyone want to argue against this proposition? A would like to hear your arguments.
Heck, I’ve always thought that seasonal variations during human gestation was the whole basis of astrology. I’d put more emphasis on the seasonal availability (or not) of micronutrients in the mother’s diet during various stages of fetal neural development. Or even the seasonal availability of lipid-rich foods.
The first thing you need to do is find out if there is any seasonal basis to personal characteristics. Come up with tests to objectively measure whatever characteristics you want to check on, have somebody administer it in a double blind fashion, and then build up a database. Do children born in one part of the year have statistically significant different characteristics from children born in another part of the year? If you find they do, you’ve established that a phenomenon exists.
Then if you want to test your hypothesis about what causes the phenomenon, you’re going to need to gather a database on when children were born and what the local weather was like. If your theory is correct, you’ll see evidence to support it. For example, if children were born in March but in a year when there was an early spring, you’d expect those children to have different characteristics than children born in March in a year with late snow.
Then you’ll want to test for other possible hypotheses, like mjmlabs’ suggestion of seasonal variation in diets, do eliminate those hypotheses.
I always like Chinese astrology – one animal sign, depending on the year you were born, everyone born that year: same sign and personality. What must it be like, to be a kindergarten teacher, when all your students (most of them anyway) are the sign of the horse – fiery of temperament.
“Oops, poor fortune there Shen, you get 39 fiery horses.”
“I know, I know, I’ll be drinking early tonight”
I like to tell people my star sign is Ophiuchus – the constellation in the middle of the zodiac that the ancients simply ignored because 12 star signs was enough. People ask, “Could that really be you sign?”
“Sure. I was born right when it should be. Or next to it, at any rate. Or actually, no where near … for all that it matters.”
Its astounding how people who’d mock believing in God get so testy when astrology is mocked.
-I am unaware of any scientific studies linking personality traits to birth during particular seasons of the year.
-I am unaware of any scientific studies linking personality traits to particular astrological signs.
-Insofar as astrology links particular personality characteristics to particular groups of signs, these occur at different times of the year. For example people born under the fire signs of Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius are supposed to share the characteristics of being passionate, impulsive, and spontaneous. However Aries occurs in the spring (March-April), Leo in the summer (July-August), and Sagittarius in the fall (November-December). Similarly the Earth, Air, and Water signs are supposed to share personality traits but are scattered through the year. According to astrology itself, people with similar personality traits are born under vastly different environmental conditions.
-Modern astrology is based on traditions that originated in ancient Mesopotamia and which were elaborated in ancient Greece, where there isn’t the sharp contrast between seasons that you posit. (There is variation, of course, but it’s not that strong.)
In short, the hypothesis you propose fails the simplest analysis.
Following on the above, are “Cancers” different from “Leos”? If so, why? - they’re both born in the heat of the summer (perhaps only a day apart!) - similar for “Capricorns” and “Aquariuses” in the winter.
Your hypothesis could be tested against astrology because the latter predicts that all children born under Ares, for example, should be similar in some fashion. Your hypotheses says that Northern hemisphere babies born under Ares should be similar to Southern hemisphere babies born under Libra which occurs in the same spot in southern spring.
Of course the astrological predictions found in modern newspaper columns or even in ancient Mesopotamia are complete B.S. I was really thinking more about the prehistoric origins of astrology. And I am not about to launch a double blind study and develop databases; I lack the time and resources and I am too lazy. Also, finding a suitable test population in the modern world might be difficult. I acknowledge that if I make an assertion then it is up to me to prove it and not up to y’all to disprove it. But hey, Internet message boards wouldn’t be much fun if we always had to follow that rule. I have probably never had an original thought in my life. Does anyone know of an existing scientific study that tests my original hypothesis? Also, mjmlabs hypothesis about gestational nutrition sounds very interesting.
But if prehistoric peoples observed that there was an actual, real correlation between personality types and seasons, why would Mesopotamian astrology develop in such a way to ignore such correlations?
There is evidence that certain disorders - schizophrenia is one - occur in births unevenly throughout the year. It is thought that if the fetus is in a critical period during times of higher disease spread, it can affect normal growth. This also occurs higher in big cities with more exposure to others.
AFAICT, there is no evidence for “prehistoric origins of astrology” if by “astrology” you mean genethlialogy, i.e., the casting of predictive individual horoscopes based on an elaborate quantitative predictive model of planetary positions at the moment of the native’s (subject’s) birth.
Mathematical astronomy at a level of sophistication that allows reasonably accurate prediction of planetary positions dates back only about 3000 years or so to ancient Mesopotamia. And its original form, like that of most other state-supported divination practices, was state-focused, not individual-focused. The predictions were about what would happen to the ruler and the kingdom, not what the future of an individual would turn out to be.
Of course there was a whole folklore of supposed “omens”, both astral and terrestrial, and related divination practices such as foretelling the future from oil drops on a water surface or the behavior of randomly observed animals and what not. But astrological prediction in the sense we understand it—predicting the future from celestial events which can themselves be predicted via mathematical models—did not start out as a way of predicting the future of individuals. So everybody please rein in the idle speculations about what prehistoric people might have observed about personality traits and birth seasons.
It’s thought that astrological prediction shifted to the development individual nativities (birth horoscopes) in the late first millennium BCE largely as a result of the Achaemenid Empire taking over Babylonian territory. The Achaemenids had little interest in the Babylonian deities, and little reason to support a state-temple institution of astrological prediction that was ultimately supposed to provide divine messages from said deities. So the temple astronomers started to take their astrological-prediction business to a private clientele interested in the fate of their children, rather than the governmental client looking for predictions about the state. And then Hellenistic Greek scholars in Alexandrian Egypt got hold of the system, and the rest is (more) history.
(ETA: See, for example, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture by Francesca Rochberg.)
This is not a ‘scientific basis’ for anything. You’re doing science wrong. It starts with observing that a phenomenon exists - until that is done, no explanation why or how it exists, is necessary.
If there were anything at all to astrology, people born under a specific sign would inordinately be drawn to careers in the military, the priesthood, or prostitution. I don’t have a cite, but recall some science fiction writer (Asimov?) checking the available public records and finding no correlation between military personnel being born more heavily under Mars than Venus. No month was statistically over- or under-represented.
If the version on restaurant placemats is to be believed, I’ve thought it gave practical advice about matchmaking because the people you should avoid are usually near the other end of the chart, i.e. around 6 years age difference, which is large enough that you are likely to be at different stages of life but small enough to not realize that initially. Whereas any smaller difference, a match (whether self-arranged or not) might not be affected by an age difference, and a larger difference would be so great it would have to be taken into consideration.
The essence of science to take a hypothesis (maybe conjecture is a better word), ask can it be refuted and if so how. Then try to refute it. If you fail, you are beginning to have evidence. Try another way of refuting it. Repeated failure to refute it begins to establish it. If you are unwilling to do this, then what you are doing is idle speculation.
I now wish I had titled this thread “A rational basis for the prehistoric origins of astrology.”
Mangetout says that I am doing science wrong because I did not observe a phenomenon. But I did observe a phenomenon, i.e astrology exists in modern times. I think we can all stipulate to this. I am not trying to prove that modern astrology is correct in any sense. My personal opinion is that modern astrology is complete nonsense. My hypothesis is that astrology had its origins in prehistoric folklore that originated from actual personality traits that varied depending on the season in which one was born. Imagine the following conversation among prehistoric women sitting around the campfire after a hard day of gathering roots and berries:
PREHISTORIC WOMAN #1: Throg and Grog sure make a lot of noise when their daddy comes back to camp with a dead animal.
PREHISTORIC WOMAN #2: Of course they do, Throg and Grog are summer babies.
PREHISTORIC WOMAN #1: But Brog, Prog, and Juanito just go hide in the bushes.
PREHISTORIC WOMAN #2: Of course they do, Brog, Prog, and Juanito are winter babies.
PREHISTORIC WOMAN #3: Winter babies are very timid.
PREHISTORIC WOMAN #4: Yeah, everybody knows that.
**Colibri **asks, “… why would Mesopotamian astrology develop in such a way to ignore such correlations?” This is mere speculation on my part (as is almost everything that I have said already) but maybe the Mesopotamian government found that astrology was a useful way to control the population. Or maybe some entrepreneurial Mesopotamians figured out a way to make money from astrology.
Horatio Hellpop posits that different signs would be drawn to different careers. My response is that I think by the time society had differentiated into specific roles for soldiers, priests, and prostitutes then the effects of birth season were no longer observable. It probably only worked in societies in which everyone had the same role of hunter/gatherer/prostitute.
I am not a paleoanthropologist. I am getting older but I am not an anthropologist. How would a skillful paleoanthropologist with sufficient time and resources approach this hypothesis? Suppose my original hypothesis had been that modern funerary practices had their origins in prehistoric attempts to prevent disease and discourage scavengers. At least then the paleoanthropologist would have physical evidence such as gravesites, campsites, etc. But for my hypothesis about the origins of astrology, all we have are maybe unrecorded oral traditions. That makes things difficult.
The closest academic report on birthdate relates to the age when children begin a specific grade/academic year compared to their birthdate.
It is a fairly known and reasonably well researched phenomenon that the younger children in a school class tend to perform less well unless specific measures are taken to address this - and these measures are apparently quite modest
That’s about as close as I can get in trying to relate astrology to personal characteristics, but if there is to be any effect of birth date then it is highly likely to be due to environmental issue such as diet availability - and I would expect that in first world nations that would be pretty minimal since these are not subsistence or hunter gatherer economies.
As for directly relating personalities to star signs - the best that might possibly be said is that there might be an association since certain astronomical features are seasonal. Note also that star signs are utter bunkum anyway - they are just some arbitrary way of noting a 2 dimensional astronomical map to some notional and cultural image of what they might represent,instead of the 3 dimensional reality of what is actually present.