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LordShadowfire Astrology wasn’t originally used to predict personality. That came in modern times.
The actual beginnings of astrology are lost in history. From the Old Babylonian period (1800-1700 B.C.) we have the first records of attempts to correlate such simple, basic problems as famine, death, or war with the positions of the stars and planets. These records were kept over a wide range of territory, from what is now Turkey to Iraq and Iran. The “Venus Tablets of Ammisaduqa,” recording the motions of the planet Venus, were themselves copies of earlier observations made in the time of King Ammisaduqa, tenth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon, circa 1626 B.C.
Astrology was, in its beginnings, a genuine search for knowledge — an attempt to find, in the configurations of the stars and planets, some meaning for humans that might enable them to ascertain something about the future, as if that future were written, obscurely but gloriously, in the heavenly patterns that nightly present themselves to observers.
Only five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — were known to the early observers. Since they were named after gods and were believed to represent the actual bodies of the gods, the movements of those objects against the background of mythical figures represented by the constellations seemed important. It was that relationship of god to “sign” that was the basis for the notion that the fortunes of humanity were to be found by examining the night skies.
John Maddox, editor of the science journal
Nature, has commented on astrology as it was dealt with in his publication:
". . . one of the things we have published on astrology a few years back was a very carefully done study in California with the collaboration of 28 astrologers from the San Francisco area and lots of subjects — 118 of them altogether — and lunar charts were made by the astrologers. It turned out that the people couldn't recognize their own charts any more accurately than by chance. . . . and that seems to me to be a perfectly convincing and lasting demonstration of how well this thing works in practice. My regret is that there's so many intelligent, able people wasting their time and, might I say, taking other people's money, in this hopeless cause."
(Maddox was referring to the project of Dr. Shawn Carlson of San Diego, which tested astrology and was reported in
Nature.)
