Why in an age of advanced technology, should so many people still cling to an ancient belief In part it must be because astrology--claims to tell us something about ourselves, and all of us are interested in ourselves. I think it is because astrology is presented as if it were a science by its modern practitioner, and many people are misled by this.
In fact, astrology was never a science. It was not a hypothesis or theory developed to describe natural phenomena, and until fairly recent times, there was not attempt to test or verify its predictions. Astrology began approximately three thousand years ago in Babylonia; it was applied to monarchs and kingdoms, but not to individuals. It spread in the 6th century BC as far as India, where it flourishes today. The Egyptians, meanwhile, developed their own kind of astrology. But the astrology now practiced in Europe and America is that developed by the Greeks, who synthesized the ideas of the Babylonians and Egyptians and enriched them with concepts from their own fertile imaginations. The Greeks believed that the earth was composed of four elements, and the heavens of a perfect crystalline material. The planets themselves were variously thought to be gods, residences of gods, or at least manifestations of gods. The gods were immortal, but otherwise had the same attributes of anger, happiness, jealousy, rage and pleasure as we do. Now if what the gods’ thought was capricious (变化无常的), at least the planets were predictable in their movements. Because our own lot in life is so unpredictable, it must be purely at the mercy of gods. But if the gods are the planets, or somehow associated with them, then we have only to learn the rules of the motions of the planets to understand the whims of the gods and how they shape our own lives. So the belief developed that each of our lives is preordained by the precise configuration of the planets in the sky at the time of our birth.
Astrology could not, of course, have seemed as incredible to the ancients as it does to us. The role of the sun influencing our daily and yearly lives is obvious; it was a natural extension to attribute other powers to the other planets as well. It wasn’t until the time of Newton that we understood that the laws of Nature apply to the celestial worlds as well as to the terrestrial one. During antiquity, however, all great scholars believed in astrology.
Many people are misled by astrology because it is presented by the practitioners as ______.