I have often wondered about how astrology came to be. Who created this theory and why did they think it was possible to tell the future by looking at the stars and other celestial bodies? More importanly, why did people buy into it?
While I haven't gotten around to finding out how astrology was invented, I had definitely spent some time thinking about how it can be explained. Keep an opened mind here.
Imagine if you are a dog. All your life, you have observed what goes on around you and over time, you realized that you can "tell what's going to happen". How? That strange apparatus high up on the wall with the 2 needles and lots of symbols are key to your observation. Whenever the sky is bright and the shorter needle lines up with the "8" symbol and the longer one touches the "12" symbol, things start to happen. The door to the house opens and you get to run out. While basking in the sun, a man tosses a roll of paper at you. Not long after that, when you decide to return to the house, there are bottles of milk on the porch.
Of course this is just a very simple illustration. To the dog, the newspapers and the milk appears BECAUSE the needles line up. The door opens BECAUSE the needles line up. And if there are forces strong enough to move the needles to where they need to be, those same things will occur. Now imagine time on a much larger scale than "daily". And then imagine the positions of planets and stars as some kind of a cosmic clock. I guess things will begin to make some sense.
Throughout history, man has made observations and, over time, through recordings and documentation of observations handed down through the ages, man concluded that things happen whenever planets align or fit a particular pattern. The cycles may occur over hundreds, even thousands, of years but man realized that some of the predictions based on such observations actually come true.
So does this mean that events and things occur in cycles? Does this mean that everything in life is somewhat routine? Perhaps so. If you look around you, "cycles" are a part of everything, be it natural, man-made or otherwise. From the rotation of the earth to the changing of the seasons to the flow of water and even life itself. We can't really see the cosmic cycle because of how short our time on earth is. But because of the "clock" and what our predecessors have recorded that they have seen, we can paint a picture of what to expect.
Of course, not everything we predict will come true because it might just be random chance that they occured at "8am" previously. But those that do occur in cycles, we might be spot on.
I guess if we look at things this way, it doesn't seem so far fetched any more that astrology might have a somewhat plausible explanation. What do you think?
