MYTH OF ASTROLOGY
A REMARKABLE EXPERIENCE OF CREATIVITY AND POETRY.
PHOTO BY A JOHNSON
ASTROLOGY
I grew up listening to Greek mythology, and when I was ten, I was gifted a book, “Man and his symbols”, by Carl Jung. At sixteen, I was reading “An Essay on Freedom of Will” by Arthur Schopenhauer. Then, as I studied Economics and got into Public Health Sciences, I was searching for explanations beyond scientific knowledge, beyond what our scientific knowledge can elucidate. That is when, as a hobby, I came across Astrology. It was a Saturday morning, while I was a Professor at McMaster University, 23 years ago. I went to a talk, “Animus: Friend or Foe?” by a Jungian analyst. She introduced me to Astrology as a way in which our societies from the Palaeolithic era of hunters and gatherers (20,000 years ago BCE) have been tracking events over time. We have relied on observing the planets through time, before we humans could write or relied on electricity. There is evidence of this from cultures inscribing drawings on caves (e.g., evidence from excavated caves in Lascaux, Dordogne, southwestern France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux).
The transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, and increased interactions between humans and animals, as well as travel, have resulted in various endemics, outbreaks, pandemics over time. Similarly, some of these patterns have been recorded over time, depicting commensurate planetary constellations through observing the skies, since 3000 BCE in ancient Egypt (https://www.britannica.com/topic/astrology).
The moon influences the ocean tides. We are made primarily of water (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9879/) and of the same particles as the planets from 13-14 billion years ago, as a result of the Big Bang (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/) . Therefore, there may be a relationship between us and our planetary systems.
The modern version of astrology is based on the notion that from each of our perspectives, when we are born, it appears that the planets revolve around our standpoint (a concept akin to prior to Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543 (https://www.britannica.com/science/Copernican-system), indicating that the planets revolve around the sun). The twelve zodiac signs stem from Greek civilization, with each of the signs being depicted as a pattern of stars in the sky (for example, the Cancer constellation shows a crab).