Varieties of astrology

Quick question that’s been bugging me for ages. We call the 12-year cycle with the rat, dog, cock, boar, etc “Chinese astrology”. What’s the name given to the astrology familiar to westerners… Aquarius, Pisces, etc etc? Greek astrology? Roman astrology? Pagan astrology? What?

Back of the Magazine astrology, I guess.

But seriously, I would say either Sidereal or Tropical.

The newspaper-horoscope sort of astrology that tells your fortune if you’re an Aquarius, Capricorn, or whatever is “Sun Sign Astrology.”

The actual casting of a horoscope based on your birth time (not just date; the houses are determined by the time of day) is Genethliacal Astrology.

There’s also a term for the variation on Genethliacal Astrology which attempts to figure out what is supposed to be affecting you in particular, with your particular horoscope, at a given date (e.g., today) but I don’t recall the proper term for that. I know the term for advancing the “planets” (including Sun and Moon) from birth date to the present is called a “progression.”

Of course, none of this suggests any validity to the results. But it’s worth noting that the people who cast horoscopes professionally take into account the birth information for the specific individual, and look down on the sun-sign one-of-twelve-signs-fits-all stuff of newspapers and magazines.

Comparing newspaper horoscopes to actually drawing and interpreting a natal chart is like comparing a See ‘n’ Say to Laurence Olivier in acting ability. Casting a horoscope is not a simple task by any means - I learned enough about it to draw mine, but not enough to interpret it. It’s a fascinating thing to learn about, even if I don’t particularly believe in it. It’s rather a complex matter, though.

The casting of natal horoscopes based on a particular set of rules for interpreting planetary positions at the moment of birth is called “genethlialogy” (alternatively, as Poly noted, “genethliacal” or “genethlialogical astrology”, developed around the second century BCE by Greek astronomers, probably in Alexandria, based on the proto-astrological birth predictions of late Babylonian astronomy.

This Greek science (now classified as a pseudoscience, but according to “actors’ categories” considered a science within the intellectual context of its time) became the foundation of similar astrological traditions in Rome, Persia, India, the Islamic world, Western Europe, and elsewhere. So if you need a specific cultural marker for it, I’d just call it “western astrology”.

By the way, the astrological variant that uses horoscopes to find a “lucky” time for undertaking a certain action is called “catarchic astrology”. The kind that predicts a future event, based on a horoscope cast for the moment when the client asked for the prediction, is called “interrogational astrology”.

And yes, all these techniques are indeed a lot more complicated than the simple “sun-sign astrology” you see in magazine and newspaper astrology columns. (Not any more accurate, in my skeptical view, but definitely more complicated.)

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Thanks.

I do have a related follow-up question… do the Chinese refer to what we call “Chinese Astrology” as “Chinese Astrology” (adjusted for translation) or does it have a different name?