Astro School: Lesson 1. Introduction to Astrology
What is Astrology?
So, what is astrology? Everybody knows it. Just take any popular newspaper or magazine and you will certainly find some sort of "horoscope" in it. For serious people, it is almost indecent to have any interest in astrology. This kind of stuff is for non-educated and superstitious people who are ready to believe in just anything.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? This sort of opinion is very common in our pragmatic times. But how it could happen then that the greatest minds of the past, whose findings, ideas, illuminations make the foundations of contemporary science, were actually devoted astrologers? They used astrology in their research and many of them have written the whole books on astrology. It wouldn't be possible to list all of them as before the XVII century astrology was an inseparable part of higher education, but here are just a few bright names:
- Ptolemy (2nd century AD) - one of the founders of both astronomy and astrology. He is honored by astronomers for many different things but he is also the author of Tetrabiblos, the first comprehensive astrology manual.
- Al Biruni (10th - 11th centuries) left after him a number of works devoted to medicine, geography, physics, astronomy, but he is also the author of "Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology", which is basically a thorough astrological tutorial.
- Paracelsus (15th - 16th centuries) - a legendary healer who considered astrology an important part of his art. He wrote that a doctor who doesn't know astrology is a "pseudo-medic" and that the remedy is found in the sky.
- Tiho Brahe (16th century) was hailed as "the King of astronomers", while he was at the same time an astrologer and an alchemist. He was able to reach the highest precision in astronomical measurements, but also was writing astrological almanacs for the King of Denmark as well as interpreting natal charts of his children.
- Iohann Kepler (16th - 17th centuries) a great astronomer whose laws are now used to calculate the orbits of spaceships. In his first astrological almanac he predicted an exceptionally cold winter and an invasion of Turks into Austria. When everything happened exactly as he predicted, he's got the reputation of a prophet. He criticized the vulgar astrology, similar to what we can read now in newspapers and magazines, but added new elements to the theory of true astrology.
- Karl Gustav Jung (19th - 20th centuries) a famous psychologist and psychiatrist who seriously studied astrology and used it in his work. One of his astrological experiments became widely known.
Not a bad company, isn't it? Who would dare to say that these people were incompetent and superstitious? So, maybe there is something else in astrology, not just a filling for the ubiquitous "horoscopes"?