5 posts
Victor asked: is the apparent match between zodiac sign and personality purely physiological illusion, or are there real environmental mechanisms astrology might be unintentionally tracking? The literature has a precise answer. The mechanisms are real. The archetypes are not.
Babylonian astrology was about the king. The personal horoscope — the natal chart, the moment-of-birth claim — is a Hellenistic invention of the late second or early first century BCE. This post is about why then, why there, and why the shift is bigger than it looks.
Victor asked: people validate astrology empirically, the moon moves the seas, why not the planets? Two arguments. The empirical validation is real but explained. The moon-planets analogy doesn't survive the math. The reformulation he offered — not who you are, but how your personality weights in — is the version worth keeping.
When you read your horoscope as Aries, the Sun was almost certainly in the constellation Pisces when you were born. The Western zodiac stopped pointing at the stars it was named for two thousand years ago. Ptolemy made the choice.
The zodiac you check today is older than the Bible, older than Greek philosophy, older than the alphabet. A chronology of how a Mesopotamian coordinate system survived every empire that carried it.