That said, I'm a true sceptic and critical thinker and I'm not dogmatic. Where evidence presents itself, I'm happy to acknowledge that I might be wrong.
My problem with astrology is the lack of any evidence.
Take zodiacal constellations as an example. The very idea of a constellation is entirely arbitrary. It’s simple pattern-forming using bright stars and, in non-Western cultures, they have very different interpretations from ours. The Plough, for example, is also known as the Great Bear (Ursa Major) or the Big Dipper (and yes, I know that it's technically an asterism rather than a constellation). Other cultures call it the Saucepan (la Casserole in France), Charles's Wain, the Caribou, the Big Rudder, the Ladle, the Big Wagon, the Bucket, Pucwan Tārā (the crustaceans), the Wheels of Perkūnas or Fávdna's bow.
The other thing is that those seven stars are too distant from us - and from each other - to possibly affect us in any way.
I'm a Leo.
The brightest star in Leo is Regulus, which is 77.5 light-years from Earth (and it’s a binary-star). The second brightest is Denebola, which is 36 light-years from Earth. Third is Algieba, another binary star 126 light-years from Earth, and the fourth is Zosma, which is 58 light-years from Earth. The light, and any energy, from those stars takes a long time to get here. Algeiba is furthest out so we are seeing it as it was 126 years ago – it’s taken that long for the light to reach us, even though it is travelling at 186,000 miles per second. When we look at the night sky, we are looking into the past. Algeiba could have been destroyed 100 years ago but we won’t see it happen until 26 years from now. So how could a star that distant possibly impact upon life on Earth? The 'closest' Leo star to it is Denebola but it would still take 90 years for light from Algeiba to reach there.
The other big question is ... what are all the other stars doing? When we look into a clear sky, we can see around 3000 stars with the naked eye. But there are around 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. And there are 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. Why don’t all of them have the same effect upon us as those in the constellations are supposed to do?
Now, I appreciate that horoscopy and astrology is more about the passage of bodies in our solar system as they move through the various constellations. So it's the position of the planets when we are born that supposedly dicatate what sort of person we'll be. And astrologers ascribe certain personality traits to the influence of those planets and stars.
As a Leo I’m apparently a little bit vain, have a big personality and want to stand out in a crowd. I am interested in luxury and exude warmth and creativity. The ideal careers for me are singer, B-list actor, motivational speaker, autobiographical author, or style icon. Famous Leos include Usain Bolt, Coco Chanel, Kate Bush, Whitney Houston and Marcel Duchamp.
It would be easy for me to say that this is accurate because I am a bit of an extrovert and yes, I sing, write and am regularly engaged as a speaker. However, that’s simple cherry-picking. Style icon? I’m a scruffy and oddly-shaped 61 year old with a dated wardrobe and absolutely zero interest in fashion. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who share my birthsign that don't want to stand out in the crowd. Kate Bush is notoriously private and rarely gives interviews.
Meanwhile, if I had born just a few days later I’d have been a Virgo. Virgos are described as judgmental, but with good intentions. They need to feel useful, have a quick fix for everything, have exceptional spatial awareness and have lots of ideas. Ideal careers are librarian, walking encyclopaedia (is that a job?), or any job where they will feel as if they have worth. Famous Virgos include Agatha Christie, Mary Shelley, and D H Lawrence.
Actually that’s a pretty good description of me too. Walking encyclopaedia? I got selected to be a researcher and writer for the TV show QI because I know so many facts.
And as for personal charts ...
In 1979 French psychologist and writer Dr Michel Gauquelin asked an astrologer to create a chart for him based on his place and time of birth. The chart he received was very flattering, pointing out that he was a Virgo with ‘instinctive warmth allied with intellect and wit’ and that he was, ‘endowed with a moral sense which is comforting - that of a worthy, right-thinking citizen ... [whose] life finds expression in total devotion to others ...’ However, the data Gauquelin had supplied was not his own but that of Marcel Petiot, a notorious doctor who robbed and killed 27 people as they sought shelter from the Nazis during the war. Gauquelin then went one step further. He placed an advertisement in the Ici-Paris newspaper offering free personal horoscopes. The successful applicants sent him their date, time and place of birth and he sent them back a personalised astrological chart in return. When he then asked for feedback, 94% of the respondents rated their charts as accurate. Unfortunately, the horoscope they’d been sent was the same one that Gauquelin had received – that of the mass murdering Dr Petiot.
However, I do accept that the nearer planetary bodies may exert some influence on us. In 2007, scientists involved in the Ulysses space probe programme announced that sounds are generated deep deep inside the Sun that cause the Earth to shake and vibrate in sympathy. They have found that these distinct, isolated tones,can be found everywhere - Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere, and even voltages induced on ocean cables, are all taking part in this cosmic sing-along. The motions of the geomagnetic field produce small, but easily detectable, responses as Earth, with many of its technological systems, moves to the rhythm of the Sun.
It also bathes us in various forms of energy including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light, x-rays, radio waves, microwaves, and various forms of radiation. It is such a massive object that its gravity affects our tides, although not quite as much as our Moon does. We can feel its effects upon us because, in astronomical terms, the Sun is very close to the Earth. It’s only 93 million miles away – a tiny distance in astronomical terms - and all of that energy takes just a few minutes to reach us. Sunlight powers photosynthesis in plants, which creates the oxygen we need to breathe. It also powers trees to release chemicals into the air that help to form the clouds that contribute to our weather and water cycles. Exposure to sunlight helps our bodies to create the chemicals necessary for normal human function, such as the production of Vitamin D and hormones like serotonin, melatonin and beta-endorphins. Over 50 years of data shows that viewing sunlight every day for 10 minutes within a few hours of waking (even through cloud cover), will improve your mood and your sleep patterns. Our eyes are complex structures that contain several different forms of photoreceptor cells. Not all of these are involved in image-forming. Some - believed to be the most ancient photoreceptor types - are involved in setting our circadian rhythms and sleep/wake patterns. The visible part of the spectrum also regulates daily and seasonal rhythms in animals and reproductive cycles.
An interesting experiment conducted in 2017 by Professor Kenneth Wright involved taking a group of students on a camping trip to the Colorado mountains for a week. All of them had been chosen because they had erratic sleep patterns. However, after a couple of days, the students began going to sleep earlier and sleeping longer. Measurements showed they had been exposed to 13 times more sunlight than they usually got during the day at home. The result was that their biological clocks had naturally realigned with the natural cycles of day and night. And the effects stayed with the students long after the week of camping was over. Professor Andrew Huberman from the Stanford University School of Medicine describes this as a ‘zero-cost tool for mental and physical health.’
Therefore, we can categorically state that the Sun does have a direct influence over our lives.
The Moon also exerts influence on our planet and the things that live on it. In Lyle Watson’s influential 1973 book Supernature, he tells the story of researcher Frank Brown who, while studying the behaviour of oysters, noted that they regularly opened just before high tide in order to feed. Then they closed to avoid drying out once the tide had fallen. He took some specimens home with him to a suburb of Chicago for further study and noted that they continued to follow this rhythmic pattern of tidal gaping even when they were in a tank and far away from the sea. However, the time of day that the oysters opened started to get later and later and they eventually settled into a new regular time-slot. A little bit of calculation revealed that the oysters had ‘worked out’ when high tide would be if the sea reached inland as far as Brown’s house, some 1000 miles from the nearest coast and 580 feet above sea level. Following a series of experiments to rule out various possible influences, Brown concluded that the oysters must be sensitive to tiny changes in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon – the same pull that creates the tides.
If the Sun and Moon can affect our planet like this, it’s not impossible that they might exert some influence on us as we are forming in the womb.
However, there are many other things that are far more likely to impact our development. Our mother’s diet for example. A lack of certain minerals during pregnancy will almost certainly have an effect. And women who are carrying during warm summer months often eat a very different diet to those with winter pregnancies. Salads provide a very different mix and concentration of nutrients than found in stews. Then there’s the time of year to consider. My birthday is in the first half of August. Because of the way that school terms are organised in the UK, I was one of the youngest in my year. Some of the kids in my class were very close to a year older than me. It meant that some boys got taller and stronger sooner than I did. It wasn’t my star sign or the movements of stars or planets that gave me that disadvantage - it was simply the school calendar. That said, we should note that school terms were originally arranged to accommodate the harvest and were therefore, in some small way, dictated by the Sun and the seasons.
We can’t deny that the stars did once guide our lives to some degree. They helped us to navigate and, because certain stars and constellations are always in certain positions at particular times of the year, our ancestors could use them as a form of calendar. Many aspects of the natural world are cyclic like this.
Even our lives are cyclic if you view it from the atomic level. All of the atoms in your body were created shortly after the Big Bang or inside the hearts of stars that reached the end of their life cycles and then exploded as violent supernovae - as Carl Sagan once said, ‘We are made of star stuff’. In the billions of years since, they’ve been component parts of many trillions of things. You contain atoms that were once part of a tree, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a lump of granite, a plague virus, a raindrop, or even a creature from another planet. There are so many atoms in your body that at least some of them were exhaled as part of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt’s last breath. It’s true - every breath contains around 25 sextillion (25 followed by 21 zeroes) molecules. Each molecule contains atoms (e.g. one molecule of carbon dioxide contains one carbon and two oxygen atoms). If you divide the (approximate) number of molecules of air in the Earth’s atmosphere - around 1.04 × 1044 - by the number of molecules in one breath, you’ll find that it’s likely that each of us inhales around 40 atoms from Cleopatra’s last gasp with every breath we take.
And, when we die, all of those atoms will be recycled into endless new things. And this will go on and on and on for as long as the universe exists. We’re all part of a grand cosmic cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Meanwhile, the arrangement of atoms that makes you an individual have never, and will never again, be assembled in precisely the same way.
You are utterly unique in the whole of Creation. That makes you incredibly special.
And that’s science fact, not faith or belief.
It’s only been in the last century that we’ve really started to understand how the universe is put together. But humans are smart. Even before real science began we had already figured out the gist of it all. We might have misunderstood the causes of events but we could observe and learn from the effects. And so we invented astrology and horoscopes to explain things.
But we have outgrown them now.
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