Why Do People Believe In Astrology?

Great Debates
81

While APB unjustifiably lept to a conclusion and you’re quite in order to call him on that, the above is itself inaccuate information. Either Greene (who I freely admit I haven’t read) or yourself is garbling the citation.
The only work in the British Library catalogue (you can reach it online from here) that this could be is by the Renaissance astrologer Lucas Gauricus, aka Luca Gaurico (1476-1558; Augustus Morgan describes him as the “astrologer of astrologers”). The entry is essentially as follows:

Tomus I.(-III.) Operum omnium… L.G. , etc. [Edited by Joannes Henricus Paedionaeus]

3 tom. Basileae, 1575. fol.

And, if anybody cares, the shelfmark is C.80.b.1. Your citation thus manages to get the author’s name, the title and the date of the work wrong. Without having seen it, I’d also expect that it’s actually better described as a posthumous compilation of all his writings.

At this point the issue gets murky. Turning to James Randi’s The Mask of Nostradamus (1990; Prometheus, 1993, p171-2), he discusses Gaurico’s prediction, but his details are significantly different. Based on an account in a 1835 book Archives Curieuses de la France (which he gives no further details of - boo, hiss), his version has a member of Henri II’s court, Claude l’Aubespine, claiming that on February 5th 1556 a letter from Gaurico arrived in Paris warning

So here the prediction dates from 1556, not Greene’s 1557, and it’s his 41st year, not his 42nd. Plus various other divergences. Randi then goes on to argue that in 1552 Gaurico had already predicted that Henri would “arrive at a vigorous and happy old age before he dies.” His citation for this prediction is also shoddy, but he’s evidently seen a Latin text (he thanks someone for the translation) and I’d guess it might be the:

1552 - Henricus Francorum Rex Christianissimus. Caterina Uxor Henrici Regis Francorum in Tractatus Astrologicus in quo agitur de praeteritis multorum hominum accidentibus per proprias eorum genituras ad unguem examinatus , Venise , C. TROJAN NAVO , BN :V 8783 , Col Univ

listed under Gauricus at this site.

Frankly, I have no idea whether either Greene or Randi has their text and dates accurate. Clearly at least one of them is using “credulously repeated information that was not available to [them] from an [original] historical source.” It wouldn’t surprise me if both versions are filtered through multiple intermediates. Forced to guess, Randi’s version personally seems to me more circumstantial and plausible. If nothing else, if Henri’s dates are "d.o.b.: March 31, 1519, 10:28 am, St. Germain-en-Laye. Date of injury: June 30, 1559, date of death: July 10, 1559 " then Henri died aged 40. A prediction of him dying in his 42nd year would just be wrong.

82

Since I’m being pedantic about names, that should be Augustus de Morgan. The quotation is from A Budget of Paradoxes (1872; Open Court, 1915, p43); he’s laying into Gaurico for writing the introduction to a work on squaring the circle.

83

Not quite.

You can say this about Judeo-Christianity and Islam, but many other religions involve deities that are definitely quite observable and measurable. Good old Zeus for example, and what about that Osiris?

84

You got it backwards.

It is the proponents who need to establish the case.

People remember the positives and forget the negatives. It doesn’t matter if some astrologer gets a zillion predictions wrong. They will be forgotten very quickly. On the other hand, any hits will be singled out as a testimony to the prowess of said astrologer. See the James Randi website for some analysis.

85

Sorry to be so late bumping this. Have been studying (bio, not astro) and haven’t made the time to do anything else that required more than minimal thinking. If everybody else considers it dead, okay by me, but I had a feeling I should have checked up on that stuff and I wanted to thank bonzer for doing the homework I was too lazy (and, admittedly, irritated, at the time) to do.

I have to admit I am slipshod enough not to get too exercised over Latinate endings. As to the date, Greene gives 1555 (not 1557) as the year of the prophecy, not the publication of the Operum; sorry if I was unclear about that. Apparently it was Guaricus’ wont to keep detailed notebooks over the years and then publish a compendium. I find references to earlier compendia of such notebooks of his with unclear dating, for example Tractatus astrologiae iudiciariae de nativitatibus virorum et mulierum, listed variously as Venice, 1552; Nuremberg, 1520; and possibly [somewhere else? 1540]. The Operum is probably a “collected works”, as you suggest, and the dates of prophecy and publication may be different, though it does nothing to explain the age discrepancy. Since he was an official astrologer, and it was his job to do this stuff, I’m imagining that there was some way he made his pronouncements at the time they were calculated, before being published. Also, I cannot get any of my searches to cough up that French site, which annoys me and makes me wonder what else is hiding from me. No way to know what’s in it, either, and so we reach our dead end amid a confusion of numbers and contradictory information. Murky, indeed.

At any rate, it seems some sort (possibly two sorts) of prediction was/were made and it was deemed the astrologer’s job to do so. My point wasn’t that they were correct (often they weren’t), but that objections to being predictive in the Medieval/Renaissance sense don’t generally apply to modern astrologers, who have evolved a more interior, psychologically based understanding of the relevant symbols.

To take a whack at Fornit’s question about where “the rules” come from, the answer would probably be “tradition.” It’s been done for a long time and the associations were set down thousands of years ago. That’s not meant to be an argument for their accuracy or veracity, simply their origin. As to what the original searchers of the skies used to make their associations, if Jung is correct, as seems likely to me, the answer is “psychological projection”, which is very often a way of seeing what ain’t there. Or rather, taking what is inside oneself and seeing it in something outside. When the outer planets were discovered, I believe astrologers set about collecting data in the manner of #3, but I don’t get the feeling this is/was done in any collectively organized way and they may simply find what they’re looking for. Nevertheless, there seems to be general agreement about the symbolic associations due the new planets. I suspect there is something to this collective unconscious thing, but it doesn’t make a symbolic art a science.

86

Well, in truth, when the outermost planets were discovered, astrologers more or less took stabs at it. At any rate, the outer planets are less, how can I put this, distinct, for want of better. They are more important by way of aspect (the relationship of one planet to another) than by location, Neptune was in Libra for a long time.

87

Why Do People Believe In Astrology?

I have the answer. I acquired it after more than 30 years of research.

Many people are morons.

88

elucidator, you are right about outer planet aspects being considered more significant than sign. I would add transits, as well.

As far as I can tell, some based the stabs they took on the concept of “higher vibrations” (whatever that means) - the idea that the significance of an inner planet is expressed on a personal level and the significance of the correlative outer planet is expressed on a collective level. It’s not totally random, since the signs given the outer planets are related to their inner planet by exaltation (Venus in Neptune’s Pisces and Mercury in Uranus’ Aquarius) or former rulership (Mars in Pluto’s Scorpio). Thus one can observe aspects of emotion in Venus and Neptune, aspects of intellect in Mercury and Uranus, and aspects of desire/aggression in Mars and Pluto, on different levels. This is part of the structure that I find pleasing, simply as a way of organizing ideas about our bits and pieces. Since the structure was “built in”, so to speak, it retains an integral systemic logic, but it also offers perhaps too easy opportunity to see what you’re looking for.

I have seen some astrologers write things like “some say the significance of such-and-such is thus, but in my experience, I observe this.” So I get the feeling they are going by an accumulation of personal work they do with individual charts, but I don’t get the feeling it’s anything more than anecdotal and would not constitute a database of any sort.

89

Actually, the english translation you gave is much more clear than the french text is. Reading it, there’s no way I can’t tell if the young lion will overcome the old one or the old one the young. . “champ bellique” indeed looks like a reference to a battlefield. I don’t know if the fight is “single” or “weird”. The eyes aren’t pierced in * in their* cage (which would imply the helmet) but in a cage (they could have been pierced while the victim himself was in a cage…adding “their” seems particular disingeneous to me) As for “classes” meaning “wound”, I’ll have to take the translator on faith. Perhaps this word indeed meant “wound” in old french. Or perhaps not. In modern french it would mean “category”. Finally the wording and structure of the sentences in english is much more regular and meaningful than in the french version.
So, since you’re saying that the english translation of the prophecy is “vague”, let me tell you that it’s way more so in french. The translator seems to have made some efforts to make it not only more understandable but also less ambiguous and even more easy to connect with the actual event (the death of Henri II).
A more honest translation would be :
The young lion the old will overcome
In bellic field by singular fight
In golden cage his eyes will pierce
Two classes one, then dying, cruel death.
Yes…I know, it’s gibberish. But for once it’s not related to my competence in english. It’s a reflect of the actual meaning (or lack thereof) of the original prophecy. One has to be quite creative to relate that to the death of Henri II. So, if it’s really the best Nostradamus has to offer…

90

Thank you.

Yes, I incorrectly gave your quote for Greene’s date as 1557 rather than 1555 - still an off-by-one difference from Randi’s date (my main point), but in the wrong direction.
In composing my post I wasn’t greatly concerned with testing Randi’s version in detail (as I indicated, I don’t think it’s terribly clear as a standalone account) - I just wanted to point out that Greene’s version as relayed by you was problematic. However, out of curiousity while in bookshops for other reasons, I’ve had occasion to glance at the current Nostradamus literature and I think I can clarify what I think’s going on. (Ian Wilson’s recent book on Nostrodamus seems to give the fullest account of Gaurico’s letter, but regarding the crucial documents he’s quoting from someone else.)

What isn’t obvious from Randi is that Claude l’Aubespine is the primary source amongst Nostradamus researchers for the Gaurico story. He was a senior courtier and the person who translated Gaurico’s letter from Latin into French so that Henri could understand. Subsequently, he wrote a memoir of Henri’s reign and this lay, presumably as a handwritten document, in French archive until the 19th century. The Archives Curieuses de la France is a vast multi-volume compilation of historical documents that prints this manuscript. (It’s in the British Library catalogue, while you can also get the details for l’Aubespine’s part by entering his name seperately.) No writers on Nostradamus seem to reference anything earlier than this 1835 transcription of l’Aubespine’s manuscript for details of Gaurico’s exact prediction. In that respect, Randi appears to be quoting from the primary source. (I’d half expect that l’Aubespine’s manuscript could, with perhaps some effort, actually be dug out of the French archive, but nobody seems to have bothered to do that since 1835.) Furthermore, all these writers on Nostradamus seem to agree with Randi that the date of the reception of the letter in Paris was 1556 and that it predicted that Henri would die “near his forty-first year.”

More broadly, it should be noted that the fact that someone had predicted Henri’s death was well-known in the period: Bacon alludes to it, without any details, in XXXV of his Essays. Other accounts than l’Aubespine’s survive. The crucial fact appears to be that his is the only testimomy for what Gaurico actually predicted. [There’s the difficulty here that nothing I’ve seen is terribly clear on what is l’Aubespine’s quotation from Gaurico and what is commentary.]

To be blunt, none of this makes me liable to believe that the best version of Gaurico’s prediction can be found by wading through the Operum omnium of 1575. A “letter” is admittedly a bit vague for the period: this could be a personal letter or it could be a pamphlet. If the former, there’s no reason to expect it to turn up in the “collected works” (in practice, likely to be aq

91

To continue after an inadevertant posting:

If the former, there’s no reason to expect it to turn up in the “collected works” (in practice, likely to be a quick lash-together-the-published-works in an era before copyright). If the latter, why have none of the Nostradamus researchers - admittedly, not the most respectable bunch - hit upon this? The most likely explanation still appears that Greene is garbling the story about Gaurico.

92

I’m a virgo and we don’t believe in astrology. If your interested in theory that proposes that the ideas behind astrology may have a basis in physics read the book excerpted here:

http://www.arthuryoung.com/astroexc.HTML

He invented the Bell Helicopter and his book “The Reflexive Universe” is the single most amazing piece of speculative metaphysics I’ve ever encountered.

93

Hi Surreal and others,

Belief is a problematic thing. We need a certain amount of it to get around and otherwise function, but belief can sure mess with clear thinking and good understanding.

Belief is a poor guide to truth. The important things are learning, observation, awareness, and unwillingness to make statements based on dogma or to render a judgment unsupported by credible and adequate evidence. It is especially important that people who make a statement or render a judgment do so with adequate information, study, knowledge, experience, experimentation, and guidance from an experienced teacher, practitioner or institutional structure set up for learning (though sometimes it works when the teacher takes the form of a book or personal discovery without formal learning–but only with difficulty and in rare instances).

Astrology presents a particular problem for a few reasons. One reason is that the art has been seriously degraded since its heydays, which ended quite definitively in the 17th century. There’s a lot of poorly done astrology and junk out there. And, astrology flies in the face of modern dogma that gained ascendancy during and after the 17th century. Another problem astrology faces is a modern distortion and arrogation of the word “science,” and a confusion about the requirements and standards for attaining knowledge of the given world, and the means we can use to attain it.

Still-contemporary dogma and confusion about what the given world is, and about how to investigate and understand it, is the biggest problem for many people to understand astrology. Dogma makes it difficult for many people to even investigate it properly.

Anyone who has not seriously studied astrology–including the great tradition of astrology in the West and Arab nations, or the tradition of India–has no basis on which to denounce the great art. It is a terrible intellectual misprision, and it should be a serious embarrassment, to make statements and render judgments from ignorance.

You cannot know from modern science, which of course includes many true and useful things, that the traditional art of horoscopic astrology is false, or that it is superstition, pseudo-science or ridiculous. The practices of modern science, and the knowledge gained from them, do not in any way prove astrology false. You venture into metaphysical dogma when you assert belief that astrology is false based on…what? On what does anyone in this forum who has announced the falsity of astrology base the statement? I’d say false belief, which, when held to persistently, is dogma.

It is difficult to prove a negative, and that truth should be taken seriously. People who pretend to proceed on careful observation and according to rule and reason should be careful to apply careful observation, rule and reason to the statements they make. What observations, rules and reason can anyone here give as adequate grounds to judge astrology false. Metaphysical assertions won’t do it.

If you have not carefully studied, understood and put into practice the theory of astrological significance and method of astrological determination that Jean-Baptiste Morin de Villefranche stated and demonstrated in Book 21 of Astrologia Gallica (1661) (available in original Latin and English translation by Richard Baldwin) you lack necessary information, study and understanding to make the statement that astrological practice lacks efficacy and fails to provide knowledge of the real world. (Statistical tests of astrology that fail do so because they fail to understand and apply a proper theory of astrological signification and proper method of astrological determination. If researchers applied Morn’s theory and method, they’d design different tests and would get different results. This is very obvious to anyone who understands Morin’s theory and method.)

For the first few decades of my life, I thought astrology was ridiculous. Ok, I thought, some people just need to believe weird, unproven, clearly impossible things. I was not interested. I had a dogma and saw no reason to take it for a walk that would have put it to the test. A friend bugged me about it long enough that I finally took a look with her. I saw that once my dogma was willing to take a walk away from the stake to which it was tethered, I found I needed to look further because things didn’t turn out to look like my dogma said they should.

Don’t make statements about things you know nothing about–except what you read in the newspapers and their early 21st century functional equivalents, or in poor or mediocre astrology books, or even by dabbling in or trying to practice astrology without proper understanding of horoscopic theory and method. If you don’t know the real deal on astrology–and you don’t if you don’t understand Morin’s theory and method–don’t make statements in your ignorance.

Let your curiosity get and put to use the best of your intelligent, inquiring, principled self, and learn enough about the true, ancient and traditional art of horoscopic astrology to understand it well enough to presume to make a statement about it.

With regard for our best human selves, observational and reasoning capacities, and our willingness to learn and ability to know what’s true–even when what’s true turns out to be very surprising and against the dogma we heretofore have lived by.

94

Previously this thread, from 2002, was about astrology. Now it’s about raising the dead.

Zommmmmmmmmmmmbiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!

95

Hi begbert2,

I didn’t notice the date and consider the topic current. I’m a person, not a zombie. If the topic interest you, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

96

I believe that to fully evaluate your views, the topic needs to be moved to the area known and the Barbecue Pit.

97

My thoughts are that “you have to immerse yourself in this stuff before you can criticize it” is a specious and terrible argument.

Full disclosure - I’m a believer in a materialistic universe. For things to happen, there has to be a way for them to happen.

There is no mechanical way for astrology to work. Thus, it doesn’t.

98

Oh, and my somewhat childish zombie call refers to the fact that this is now what is known as a “zombie thread” - one that has lain dormant for a long time before suddenly being posted to again. This is considered a bad thing because the people from years ago are unlikely to be in a good position to jump in and support their ancient arguments. Especially the banned ones. Typically it’s best to start a new thread, to increase the chances that everyone participating in it is still breathing.

99

Hi begbert2 and Darren,

I would be willing to move the post to a new thread. I don’t much like the sound of the Barbeque Pit, but I can take a look.

But in the meantime, taking some license in response to your comment, begbert2, if I tell you Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity are bogus because they are clearly ridiculous based on what we can all clearly perceive, and the mathematics that supports them clearly are bogus (I took algebra and geometry and I know better than to believe that malarkey) and do not describe the real world of mechanical forces we all know, you would be right to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. I should study physics and mathematics and maybe then I’d understand the theory and the math. That’s not a terrible argument. It’s not even really an argument. You simply would be telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and that would be true. And that’s what I would say to someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about when they speak of astrology and judge it nonetheless. Making unfounded false statements on matters of importance to human beings and life is a terrible thing in my view.

A belief in a material universe is a metaphysical belief. How do you support it?

You put the cart before the horse when you believe in a material universe, and then will only investigate what your beliefs say can possibly be true. You will only look at possible materialist worlds. But those aren’t the only possible worlds.

Beliefs can get us very confused. I prefer to stick with sound techniques, arts and practices that, properly practiced and consciously engaged, reveal the real world.

And the truth is, if you studied it correctly, and were willing to see what is in front of your face, you would know that you would need to change your mind. The proviso “if you studied it correctly” is somewhat difficult to comply with because the degradation of the discipline has rendered the field confused in some significant ways.

I know astrology seems impossible to you. But that’s because you’re in no better position to evaluate and judge astrology than I am to evaluate and judge special and general relativity theory and the mathematics that supports the theories.

With regard,

psjt

100

Do you plan on showing us the math behind astrology that makes it work?