I had the Today Show on this morning, as I do most mornings for background, and they had a long segment on astrology with an ‘expert’ astrologist, in which they asked several questions of her, taking her as seriously as if she was the freakin’ lead scientist on a CERN Hadron Collider project or something.
Yeah, the Today Show has plenty of fluffy segments, but astrology? At least, mercifully, Savannah Guthrie was not part of the interview segment-- I respect her as a fairly ‘hard news’ journalist who I thought did a good job handling trump in one of the 2020 debates.
Which got me thinking, is there anything as old as astrology that is still widely believed or practiced to this day? A quick googling led me to a britannica.com article which states:
[astrology] originated in Mesopotamia (c. 3rd millennium bc) and spread to India, but it developed its Western form in Greek civilization during the Hellenistic period.
So it’s pretty old! I’m guessing “belief in the literal word of the Old Testament of the Bible” might be a candidate. But according to this article:
…the oldest Biblical text we found is about 2700 years old. Of course, this is just what we’ve been able to locate and date. The first Biblical stories were passed down orally and only written down later by various authors. Most Biblical scholars believe the Book of Genesis was the first book to be written down. This would have happened around 1450 BC to 1400 BC.
So, if those dates are correct, even the Book of Genesis may not be not quite as old as the origin of astronomy.
The very notion of that there is a god or gods who care about being appeased or praised, and the disagreement is only on who are they, would be an obvious candidate.
I’m not sure if this even has a name, but what would you call the practice of eating certain animals in the belief that it will somehow impart to the consumer certain characteristics that that creature is believed to possess? You know like eat bear meat and one acquires the strength of a bear, or eat a cheetah and be able to run more swiftly, or be fearless like a lion. The modern version of this seems to appear on shelves as a dietary supplement. Prevagen is made from ‘immortal’ jellyfish. By consuming jellyfish’s proteins, one can supposedly improve one’s memory.
Obviously Buzzfeed’s standards of journalism are about 12 steps lower than those of the properties within NBC News (such as The Today Show), but regardless, I still expect them to have some standards. Well, some number of months ago there was an article about some sort of conflict or something, the details escape me, but the author had written, “This Guy and That Guy, both Sagittariuses…” As if that mattered. And the editor left it in! The comments section roasted the writer.
Yes, “worshipping things as gods” in general is as old as humanity, but I was thinking more of an organized, pseudoscientific set of beliefs similar to astrology. I was originally going to just make the title about pseudosciences, then I added 'general worldview / belief" to open the topic up a bit. But I think that just makes the subject too broad.
Given certain values of organized I would say that a common belief that certain things are lucky or unlucky are probably near the top. Since it ties into the basic human lack of understanding between correlation and causation and is endemic as a nearly subconscious level to almost every person…
Such things probably informed the earliest taboos and belief systems that became our various religions although there may well be a chicken and the egg element there.
Again I bring this up because while religions are wide spread I know plenty of people who don’t believe in God, but have lucky numbers days colors etc.
I’d say animism is a contender, even before more highfalutin ideas about all powerful gods, the idea that there are spirits in the objects and animals around you that need to be appeased is as old as humanity.
Such things as a lucky item, the believe because I wore this shirt my team won, which may be biased in some truth, because I used this bow the hunt was successful, that bow may be a bit better, but then we start looking for other such relationships, and get into bargaining with gods and try to enchant items. etc.
Yes, I think belief in supernatural phenomena in general is probably as old as humanity, and its evolution into what we know as “organized religion” today was very gradual.
I suspect if we’re discussing beliefs that are detailed enough to be described as a “psuedoscience”, astrology is probably the oldest. Divining the future through examining the entrails of sacrificed animals might be older, but that’s not widely practiced anymore.
I nominate a belief in contra-causal free will. I’d estimate that belief at 99%.
The “winner” of this thread will inevitably be deemed not to qualify, because most people here still believe in it.
ETA: I just realized I may have misunderstood the OP. @solost - since you led with the word pseudoscience and you were saying mean things about an astrologist, I took it to mean the oldest pseudoscience or [false] general worldview…? Did I misunderstand, and you just wanted the oldest belief, valid or not?
I thought of another ancient practice still widespread to this day that rivals astrology for age, though describing all of it as ‘pseudoscience’ may be a little controversial: traditional Asian medical practices.
Certainly using substances such as powdered tiger penis, bear gall bladder or ground-up rhino horn to improve strength, vigor or sexual function can be pretty well agreed by most, especially here in the West, to be pure pseudoscience.
Acupuncture may be a little more controversial. Western medicine has found absolutely no evidence that sticking needles into various ‘meridians’ to increase or control the flow of ‘chi’ has any basis whatsoever in fact. I know a lot of people swear by the effectiveness of acupuncture, but the placebo effect is very real.
Yes, I meant the oldest pseudoscientific practice, similar to astrology as in something that has an organized belief system, that is still in widespread practice to this day; yet can pretty much be proven to be [false] when a true scientific method, or even close scrutiny, is applied to it.
…was I “saying mean things about an astrologist”? Hope I didn’t offend you! You sound like a total Scorpio, very sensitive
How about the dualism of body and soul? How old is that thought? We’ll probably never know, but I think hints given by prehistorical cave paintings and other finds are evidence of early shamanism that expressed this dualism, and I’m convinced that the majority of people today still believe in it.
Ah ok, I did see your post but I didn’t pick up that it was in reference to Asian medical practices, I thought you were going for a more general ancient belief that if you eat part of a rival or more powerful creature you can gain its power (icky when that rival is also human ).
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