Pranam
T H E S T O R Y O F A S T R O L O G Y by J M Woolfolk
KR FYI how they construe and there are many variations in our scriptures
and theirs.
The study of the Sun, the Moon, stars, eclipses, day and night,
began well before recorded history. There are reindeer bones and tusks of
mammoths from the Ice Age that have notches carved on them picturing the
phases of the Moon. These bones and tusks are dated between 25,000 and
10,000 b.c., and some scientists place them as long ago as 32,000 b.c.! The
path of the stars was recorded 6,000 years before Christ was born. As early
as 2767 b.c., a horoscope was cast in Egypt by Imhotep, the architect of
the great Step pyramid in Saqqarah. That horoscope still exists! Ancient
astrologers charted the movement of planets and stars, and made predictions
about eclipses, upheavals, famine, and fortune. They developed calendars
for marking and measuring the passage of time. You can still read star
charts that were made by Egyptian astrologers in 4200 b.c. In ancient
societies, astrology and religion were inextricably linked. The astrologers
were mainly priests.
In fact, the Sumerian symbol for divinity was a star. Even the
patterns that the stars form in the heavens were given names and worshipped
as gods. Druids, Egyptians, Incas, and Hindus were all sun worshippers. In
the ancient Hindu religion, Vishnu is the embodiment of the Sun, the symbol
for life itself.
In the south of England there stands the magnificent structure known
as Stonehenge. Stonehenge consists of a series of stones, some as high as
twelve feet, placed in a circular pattern. Outside the stones is a circle
of holes or pits. In 1961 Professor Gerald S. Hawkins, an astronomer from
Boston University, submitted the pattern of Stonehenge to analysis by an
IBM computer. He discovered that these strange stones and holes can be used
to record the positions of the Sun and Moon, and that virtually every
eclipse of the Sun and Moon can be predicted from them. Obviously, the
people who built Stonehenge in 2500 B.C. were not just barbarians who
painted themselves blue with woad. They built what is, in effect, a
sophisticated astronomical observatory! In the United States a structure
called Casa Grande, built by Hohokam Indians in Arizona around A.D. 1300,
has eight openings that are aligned with the risings and settings of the
Sun at both solstices and both equinoxes— the four cardinal points of the
zodiac.
HINDU (5000 b.c.–3000 b.c.) Hindus trace their religious wisdom back
to seven ancient sages known as the Rishis. The word rishi means “to
shine,” and the original Rishis were the seven stars of the constellation
Ursa Major (Big Dipper). Hindu religion literally began with the stars.
Vishnu, the reigning god of Hinduism, is the Sun incarnate, their most
divine being. Sometimes, when the world is in discord, Vishnu takes various
forms and visits the Earth. Some of the shapes he takes on are the Ram, the
Bull, and the Lion, and carvings of these shapes are found on temple walls
dating back 7,000 years. In modern astrology we still use those three
symbols: Aries the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Leo the Lion. The Hindus divided
the sky into twenty-eight equal parts, called Lunar Mansions, each part
representing a passage of the Moon through its twenty-eight-day cycle. The
lunar cycle, in fact, is a basis of Eastern astrology.Western philosophy is
founded much more on the solar cycle. As a result, astrologers often refer
to the Western world as children of the Sun and to the Eastern world as
children of the Moon. The Indian zodiac has twelve signs, the same number
our zodiac has. However, in India there is a concept not found in Western
astrology. This is the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. Karma is the
journey of the soul through various lives (incarnations). A person’s karma
is based on three things: 1) the influence in this life of acts committed
in previous lives; 2) the influence of one’s present acts on the next life;
3) unrealized acts.
EGYPTIAN (3000 b.c.–300 b.c.): Egyptian astrology was also bound
up in their religion. The priests held the secrets of the heavens. Within a
complicated hierarchy of gods and deities, each god had a specific power
and ruled over a particular kingdom of influence. For example, Osiris was
god of the dead. Isis was Osiris’s wife and sister, protectress of the
dead. Thoth was the god of learning, inventor of hieroglyphs, and scribe of
the gods. Many Egyptian symbols and deities reappear in the present-day
occult study of Tarot cards. The Egyptians were the first people to
foretell a person’s character by the date of birth. They also gave to each
month, and indeed to each day, a special deity who ruled that day and that
month. At first, Egyptians divided the sky into thirty-six sections. (The
Greeks later called these sections dekanoi, meaning ten days apart, from
which we get our words decan and decanoate.) These thirty-six decanates
remain unchanged to the present day Later, the sky was divided into twelve
parts, and each part was given a form and a name. Each part of the sky was
assigned three stars to call its own, and each was given a boat in which to
cross the sky.
CHINESE (2800 b.c.–present): With Marco Polo’s adventurous travels
in A.D. 1275, Europeans learned for the first time of the great beauty,
wealth, history, and romance of China. Untouched as they were by outside
influences, the Chinese had developed their astrology along somewhat
different lines from the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Greeks.
Life in ancient China revolved around the Emperor. Some historians mark the
beginning of Chinese astrology during the reign of the Divine Emperor Fu
His around 2800 B.C. The Bamboo Annals (a manuscript found in a Chinese
prince’s grave in A.D. 281) tell about Emperor Yao, who named the twelve
signs of the Chinese zodiac and divided the sky into twenty-eight Mansions
of the Moon. The Chinese zodiac differs from the zodiac of the West. There
are twelve years, and each year is represented by a different animal. This
twelve-year cycle is sometimes called the Yellow Road of the Sun. The
twelve animals are the rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, ram,
monkey, cock, dog, and boar. Legend tells us that when Buddha lay on his
deathbed, he asked the animals of the forest to come and bid him farewell.
These twelve were the first to arrive. The cat, as the story goes, is not
among the animals because it was napping and couldn’t be bothered to make
the journey. There are also five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and
water). A Chinese horoscope is divided into interlocking sets of the
numbers ten and twelve (e.g., ten Celestial Stem signs and twelve
Terrestrial Branch signs). In addition, the ancient principle of Yin and
Yang (negative and positive forces) is very much involved in charting a
horoscope.
In truth, our astrological lore can be traced back to the Sumerians and
to the fascinating fragments of documents that contain the astrological
predictions of Sargon the Ancient, who ruled around 2800 B.C. in a city
known as Babylon.
BABYLONIAN (4000 b.c.–125 b.c.): In a fertile plain in the Middle
East, bordered by the Tigris nd Euphrates Rivers, lies a region that was
once known as Mesopotamia. The southern part was called Babylonia; the
north was called Assyria. The Sumerians were the first people to settle in
the area, sometime around 4000–3500 B.C. They were mostly shepherds and
farmers, who apparently spent a great deal of time looking up at the sky.
Based on such observations, the Sumerians began to worship three
all-important gods: Sin the Moon god, who travelled in a crescent boat and
was the most powerful; Shamash the Sun goddess; and Ishtar the goddess of
fertility, whose home was the bright star of Venus. As in most early
cultures, the astrologers were the priests, and the priests were not only
religious leaders but leaders of government as well. Each priest ruled his
separate province (called city-states) and dispensed divine wisdom to his
followers. Large observatories or watchtowers (called ziggurats) were built
for the priests to study the movement of the stars and planets. The
ziggurats in the cities of Ur, Yuruk, and Babylon were almost 300 feet
high. We can still visit a ziggurat built by King U-Name, who founded the
Third Sumerian Dynasty (2079–1960 B.C.). By the time the Babylonian
culture was in full flower (between 2800 and 500 B.C.), astrology had
become more sophisticated. Besides the Sun, Moon, and Venus, four other
planets had been discovered (Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). The
planets were given individual characteristics and properties, and a god was
assigned to each. For example, Mars, reddish in colour, became identified
with the fiery god of war. Venus, seen early in the morning, was in a sense
giving birth to the day; she was therefore a feminine planet, associated
with love and fertility. It was the early Babylonian priest-astrologers who
set down the basic principles of astrology that have remained almost
unchanged until today. They divided the sky into twelve equal parts,
through which the Sun and Moon travelled. One theory is that they patterned
the twelve divisions after the twelve months in the Babylonian year, one
month for each lunar cycle. The sky was thought of as a circle of 360
degrees with each division being 30 degrees. This is the way astrologers
measure the sky today. The twelve sky divisions, or signs as we call them,
were given names: Aries, Pleiades, Gemini, Presepe, Leo, Spica, Libra,
Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces. The Greeks later
changed Pleiades to Taurus, Presepe to Cancer, and Spica to Virgo. These
are the names we still use for the twelve signs of the zodiac. { KR: How
the west believes ahead of India is a sample} The Babylonians also named
twelve Houses. These are divisions of the zodiac that govern various areas
of life. The Babylonian Houses were 1) Life; 2) Riches and Poverty; 3)
Brothers; 4) Parents; 5) Children; 6) Health and Illness; 7) Wife and
Husband; 8) Death; 9) Religion 10) Dignities; 11) Friendship; 12) Enmity.
With some exceptions, these are more or less what the Houses in modern
astrology govern. There is a Babylonian horoscope dated 409 B.C. that is
still in existence.
GREEK (900 b.c.–a.d. 150); Not until the ninth century B.C. did the
Grecian astrologers learn to differentiate between the stars and the
planets. When they did discover there were five planets, they gave them
names based on their appearance: Venus was the Herald of the Dawn because
it appeared in the morning. (The Greeks did not yet realize that at times
Venus also appeared in the evening. They thought that was a different
planet, which they named Vespertine.) Mercury was the Twinkling Star. Mars
was the Fiery Star. Jupiter was the Luminous Star, and Saturn the Brilliant
Star. In the sixth century B.C. the philosopher Pythagoras wrote his famous
Harmony of the Spheres. He said that the universe was a giant sphere that
contained the earth and the air around it. His thoughts on the subject are
poetic: The Sun, Moon, and planets revolve in concentric circles, each
fastened to a sphere or wheel. The swift revolution of each of these bodies
causes a swish, or musical hum, in the air. Two hundred years after
Pythagoras, in the fourth century B.C., a Greek astronomer and
mathematician named Eudoxos introduced a calendar, based on the Babylonian
one. Eudoxos also divided the sky into twelve equal signs. He was the first
Greek astronomer to explain the movements of the planets in scientific
terms. (Our word planet, incidentally, comes from the Greek planets,
meaning “wanderer. “While the stars remain fixed in their positions in the
firmament, the planets move in their orbits, so they were thought of as
travelers who crossed the sky and collected souls.) Eudoxos’s theory was
that the planets were held in place by spherical shells that kept them in
their paths. Ptolemy’s teachings remained unchanged for the next 1,400
years. It was not until 1543, when Nicolaus Copernicus published his
treatise, that Ptolemy’s vision of the earth as the center of the universe
was seriously challenged.
ROMAN (300 b.c.–a.d. 476) ; Astrology was brought to Rome by Greek
slaves whom the Romans took captive. These early astrologers were sometimes
known as “astrologers of the circus”; By the time of Julius Caesar (102–44
B.C.) just out every important Roman statesman and military man had his
horoscope cast. Life under Tiberius was equally hazardous for astrologers.
If the emperor was presented with a horoscope he didn’t like, he had the
astrologer thrown into the sea. Clearly, Tiberius believed that astrology
should be a science in which never is heard a discouraging word.
MODERN ERA (a.d. 1200–2000): When Christianity became widespread,
astrology was opposed as the work of the devil and its study vigorously
discouraged. St. Augustine (354–430) was one of those in the early Church
who vehemently preached against the practice of astrology. In the Arab
world astrology remained a serious science. One of the great and most
renowned Arab astrologers is Albumassar (805–886), and translations of his
writings found their way into Europe and were influential in turning the
tide back toward astrology. Another influence in turning the tide was the
renowned Church figure St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). He lent legitimacy
to the study of the stars when he declared, “The celestial bodies are the
cause of all that takes place in the sublunar world.” By the time of the
Renaissance, astrology was in full bloom again. The Catholic popes now used
astrology as a matter of course, and Leo X (1475–1521) had many astrologers
on staff at the papal court. The di Medici family, the ruling princes of
Italy from around 1400 to 1600, were great patrons of astrology along with
arts and literature. Catherine di Medici was influenced by Nostradamus, the
famous French astrologer and physician. He correctly predicted the death of
her husband Henry II—and its exact circumstances—four years before it
happened. In the sixteenth century, a lonely and frightened young princess
in prison, facing possible death, had her horoscope read by a Dr. John Dee.
Dee told her that she would live to ascend to the throne. One of the famous
names in astrology at that time is William Lilly (1602–1681), an English
astrologer who accurately predicted the Great Fire of London. As a result,
he was summoned before Parliament and charged with having conspired to set
the fire. He was later acquitted. Toward the end of the seventeenth
century, astrology again fell into disfavor. The succeeding century was
known as the Age of Enlightenment, and astrology was linked with
superstition and occultism. The founding of the Theosophical Society in
1875 by Madame Helena Blavatsky started astrology on the comeback trail.
The aims of the society were to encourage the study of comparative
religions and to investigate unexplained laws of nature. The Theosophical
Society played a large part in the revival of intellectual interest in
astrology, and many prominent astrologers of the day were active in the
society. Alan Leo, a British astrologer, published an influential magazine
called The Astrologer’s Magazine. In 1914 he was taken to court for being a
fortune-teller. The case was dismissed. In 1917 he was prosecuted again,
and this time fined twentyfive pounds. Alan Leo’s magazine, renamed Modern
Astrology, flourished and gained many new converts to astrology. The famed
astrologer Evangeline Adams has been called the First American
Astrologer.Miss Adams’s reputation was established during her first visit
to New York when she said that the hotel in which she was staying “was
under the worst possible combination of planets, bringing conditions
terrifying in their unfriendliness.” That night the hotel burned to the
ground. In 1914 (the same year as Alan Leo’s trial in England), Miss Adams
was also brought to trial in America. She, too, was charged as a
fortune-teller. In court she was given an anonymous horoscope to interpret.
The horoscope was that of the judge’s son. Miss Adams’s reading was so
accurate that the judge congratulated her, remarking that “the defendant
raises astrology to the dignity of an exact science.” He dismissed the
charge against her. By 1930 Evangeline Adams had a very popular radio
program on astrology, which won hundreds of thousands of converts. During
World War Two, Nazi leaders used astrology for propaganda purposes. Joseph
Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, had a number of astrologers on his
staff, among them one Karl Ernst Krafft, who translated and reinterpreted
the predictions of Nostradamus in ways that seemed to favor the Nazi cause.
Krafft fell from grace after Rudolph Hess’s defection to England. House
adviser revealed that First Lady Nancy Reagan, wife of President Ronald
Reagan, regularly consulted a personal astrologer. Mrs. Reagan apparently
used her astrologer’s advice to schedule key events and appointments, both
for herself and her husband. Understandably, this created a great stir in
the media and the general public, who felt that astrology should not be a
controlling factor in national politics. Mrs. Reagan defended herself.
Joan Quigley, the astrologer, became a psychological support for Mrs.
Reagan, an intimate friend who listened sympathetically to her problems and
anxieties. More and more, astrology has entered the mainstream of our
culture.
KR IRS 21121
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