Great, I imagine I’ve gotten the attention of all the James Randi wanna-bes here. Naturally, I’m not some new-age freak who is going to claim that horoscopes are genuine. I want to know the answer to the above question from an etymological point of view.
The suffix -ology is used mostly to refer to serious study of a discipline, from biology to geology to ornithology to genaeology to etymology. Now, I imagine that way back when, the study of the heavens may have been intrinsically linked with attempts to divine the future therefrom. But when Galileo and Kepler and the like began to create a distinction between superstitious study of the heavenly bodies and physical study of the heavenly bodies, how did the -ology become the property of Nostradamus and his ilk, leaving the real science discipline to find itself a different suffix, -onomy?
And what’s with that suffix anyway? Wouldn’t an astronomer be someone who names stars? I imagine the scientists did name a lot of stars, but was the popular perception that that was all they did?
Mr. Blue Sky, the question regads the names of the studies, not their relevance to reality. It is an etymological question, not an epistemological one.
Astrology (or its Greek and Latin forebears) was the general name for the study of the stars. Well before the science of astronomy departed from the art of astrology, the word astronomy had been applied to that branch of astrology (all the study of stars) that was concerned with the arrangement and naming of the constellations. As the two studies began to drift apart, the name for the more limited study remained with it as the emerging science while the older word followed the (at that time) broader sense of studying and making practical application of the stars’ locations. By the time that astrology and divination were recognized to have no scientific foundation, the names for the seeparate disciplines were firmly established.
Before the scientific method came along, astrology and astronomy were the same. According to the etymology dictionary, “astrology” comes from Greek astrologia “telling of the stars”, while “astronomy” comes from Greek astronomia = astron + nomos = “star” + “rearranging, regulating”.
A distinction between the two in Latin long predates any of the OED’s citations in English. The person who’s usually mentioned as an early “splitter” on the matter is Isidore of Seville in the seventh century. Book III of his Etymologiae includes a discussion of astronomy; section 27 runs as follows:
My Latin is pretty ropy these days (and there doesn’t appear to be a translation online), but he’s defining astronomy as the study of the rising and setting of the stars, natural astrology as the study of the motion of the sun and the moon and superstitious astrology to do with prophecy. This obviously isn’t quite the modern division, but there is aleady the notion here that astronomy is sensible while astrology is partly dodgy.
That said, you did get most people using both terms (and others) to refer to what we’d now think of as astronomy for a long time afterwards.
It’s already been pointed out that “astronomy” and “astrology” were not necessarily always as separate as they are today - but remember also that many medieval scientists simultaneously studied real science and stuff we now recognize as pseudoscience. Newton, for instance, studied astrology and alchemy far more heavily than he studied real science.
And David Simmons has already mentioned “agronomy”, but I thought that “nomology” (“The study and discovery of general physical and logical laws”–Ame.Her.Dic) would be good too.
And if you ever want to piss off an agronomist, call him an agrologer - one of those charlatans who claim to be able to predict the future of wheat prices.
The Zodiac Houses were all established in about 1400 AD, right? Just a rough guess on my part, but I don’t think it’s too far off.
Hasn’t the Sun shifted out of those initial constellations by now? Which means, for instance, since I was born in early May, I’m no longer a Taurus, but could very well be a Sagitarious. Or is there some “self-correcting” feature I can’t figure out?
Not accommodating changes in the physical location of the center of your belief system sounds more like “foolish” instead of “science”.
That has an interesting background. The Earth actually goes around the Sun in a little bit more than 365.25 days, but our calendar is based upon a system with an average length just a little bit less than 365.25 days, because we like to keep things orderly, and the same from season to season. So, the physical location changes, but we ignore it. Foolish? Depends.
Ok, according to your link, it appears that perhaps he was interested in alchemy and theology (though it’s a rather occult-leaning, prophetic theology). I’ve certainly read before that he was an astrologer; if that’s indeed wrong, I apologize. I’ll have to find some more thorough discussion of it.
The standard academic reference on the myth of Newton and astrology is the old I. Bernard Cohen Isis paper cited on that page.
Newton was certainly deeply and obsessively interested in both theology and alchemy. Though I’ll note that what’s never mentioned when the “wasn’t Newton odd by our standards” argument comes up is that he seems to have become completely disillusioned with alchemy in the 1690s. While he continued to buy alchemical books as they appeared in the last 30 years of his life, he stopped writing about them or conducting any experiments. Both his theology and his alchemy - and how they tied into the rest of his thinking - have by now both been the subject of several substantial specialist studies and much academic debate, but as good a place to start would be Never at Rest (Cambridge, 1980), the excellent biography by Richard Westfall. (Westfall has occasion to discuss astrology once in the course of 900-odd pages, when he mentions the story reported by Conduitt.)
