What is Astrology? Part One

This is a question which I am happy to be asked by  open-minded people who genuinely wish to find out more about the wonderful body of knowledge which lies behind the popular mask of  Sun Sign astrology.

It’s been asked  so often of late that I thought I would reply  – in a two-part post. I would be interested to have your responses, whether you are an experienced practising astrologer or an enthusiastic beginner.

How do you as a practitioner answer the question “What is Astrology?”

What do you, an interested beginner, think astrology is?

Here, for what it is worth, is my take . I hope you find it of interest!

“Six thousand years ago, when the human mind  was still half asleep, Chaldean priests were standing on their watchtowers, scanning the stars.”

(Arthur Koestler from “The Sleepwalkers”)

The story of humanity is one of an unending attempt to create some recognisable order from the chaos of our earliest origins. In order to survive and evolve as a species, we have  created contexts for ourselves over many millennia from our interpretations of the world around us.

Modern science has shown us that we are part of an interconnected universe of mind-boggling complexity, in its minutest essence a vast energy field, ever moving and changing to the shifting dance of waves and particles – chaos and order forever interweaving, forever returning to and arising from the Quantum Vacuum, or in Buddhist terminology the Void, or in Western spiritual terminology, the Ground of our being.

The vivid quotation from the philosopher Arthur Koestler illustrates the origins of the ancient art and science of astrology – literally ‘the study of the stars’, whose basic precept “as above, so below” demonstrates that our modern understanding that we live in an interconnected cosmos is not a new idea at all.

It has been around ever since we fragile humans, vulnerable to the vagaries of a tempestuous earth with its storms, earthquakes and floods, began to evolve a context of meaning by plotting with increasing sophistication as time went on, the movements of the heavenly bodies in the starry skies above us.

From observing the regular patterns and cycles followed by those heavenly bodies, and recording with care what links there seemed to be between such movements and the ebbs and flows of human life, the early astrologer/priests began to be able to determine (with varying degrees of accuracy – prediction in any field of endeavour has never to this day become an exact science!) the fate of the king and the nation according to the movements of the planets.

Personal horoscopes plotting the patterns of individual life were unheard of until the first century or so AD.

To be continued….

To read Part Two, click HERE.

450 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2013

Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page