Astrology was respectable scholarship for millennia before science dismantled it
For most of recorded history, reading the heavens for earthly meaning sat alongside astronomy, medicine and alchemy in learned circles. Its Western form reaches back to Mesopotamia almost four thousand years ago. Only after the Enlightenment did it lose academic standing, and experiments since have found no scientific validity in it.
The word comes via Latin from the Greek for an account of the stars, and for centuries its use overlapped heavily with astronomy. At root, astrology is a search for meaning in the sky. Markings on bones and cave walls suggest people were tracking lunar cycles as long as 25,000 years ago, an early step toward linking celestial rhythms with life on the ground.
Many cultures built elaborate predictive systems, including those of India, China and the Maya. A form of astrology existed in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia around 1800 BCE, and a Babylonian text called the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa probably dates from about 1700 BCE. Chinese astrology took shape under the Zhou dynasty and flourished under the Han, when yin-yang philosophy, the five elements and Confucian ethics were woven together. In pre-Islamic Arabia, a widespread fatalism held the stars responsible for events on Earth and for human destiny.
It always had critics, whose objections were moral, religious, political or empirical. Hellenistic sceptics attacked it, and the arguments of Carneades survive: belief in fate undermines free will and morality, people born at different moments can die together in the same accident or battle, and peoples differ far too much for uniform stellar influence to be real. Cicero, Sextus Empiricus and Plotinus added their own critiques.
The decisive blow came later. Heliocentrism and Newtonian mechanics at the end of the seventeenth century undercut its theoretical footing, and it has been classed as pseudoscience since the eighteenth century. From the late nineteenth century, researchers using the scientific method tested it theoretically and experimentally and found no explanatory power, and belief in it declined in the West.
Source: Astrology
