The Story of Astrology
As a child, looking up on a clear evening at a vast, endless sky twinkling with points of light, did you make a wish on the “first star I see tonight”? You were doing what men and women have done since they first turned their eyes skyward. People have always scrutinized the heavens, looking for guidance, omens, and meanings.
The study of the Sun, the Moon, stars, eclipses, day and night, began well before recorded history. There are reindeer bones and tusks of mammoths from the Ice Age that have notches carved on them picturing the phases of the Moon. These bones and tusks are dated between 25,000 and 10,000 b.c., and some scientists place them as long ago as 32,000 b.c.!
The path of the stars was recorded 6,000 years before Christ was born. As early as 2767 b.c., a horoscope was cast in Egypt by Imhotep, the architect of the great Step pyramid in Saqqarah. That horoscope still exists!
Ancient astrologers charted the movement of planets and stars, and made predictions about eclipses, upheavals, famine, and fortune. They developed calendars for marking and measuring the passage of time. You can still read star charts that were made by Egyptian astrologers in 4200 b.c.
In ancient societies, astrology and religion were inextricably linked. The astrologers were mainly priests. In fact, the Sumerian symbol for divinity was a star. Even the patterns that the stars form in the heavens were given names and worshipped as gods.
Not too surprisingly, the Sun was the most powerful god. The Sun gave warmth and light, nourished plant life, and made crops grow. Druids, Egyptians, Incas, and Hindus were all sun worshippers. In the ancient Hindu religion, Vishnu is the embodiment of the Sun, the symbol for life itself.
We can still visit some of the early observatories that primitive people built to study the skies. The fabled Pyramids at Giza in Egypt, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, are elaborate tombs for dead royalty. They are also giant compasses, whose triangular sides directly face the points of a compass and can still be used to take sightings. In the old Mayan city of Chichen Itza there stands a pre-Columbian stone structure that some-what resembles our Capitol building. It is called the Caracol observatory. Inside, a spiral staircase leads to various windows from which the positions of the planets can be observed as they shift throughout the year.
If you should find yourself in Brittany, the seaside resort in northwest France, visit the Menhirs (great stones) of Carnac. These are huge upright granite blocks ranging from sixteen to twenty feet high. They were built by sun worshippers (many historians believe they were Druids), and used for astrological calculation.
In the south of England there stands the magnificent structure known as Stonehenge. Stonehenge consists of a series of stones, some as high as twelve feet, placed in a circular pattern. Outside the stones is a circle of holes or pits. In 1961 Professor Gerald S. Hawkins, an astronomer from Boston University, submitted the pattern of Stonehenge to analysis by an IBM computer. He discovered that these strange stones and holes can be used to record the positions of the Sun and Moon, and that virtually every eclipse of the Sun and Moon can be predicted from them. Obviously, the people who built Stonehenge in 2500 B.C. were not just barbarians who painted themselves blue with woad. They built what is, in effect, a sophisticated astronomical observatory!
In the United States a structure called Casa Grande, built by Hohokam Indians in Arizona around A.D. 1300, has eight openings that are aligned with the risings and settings of the Sun at both solstices and both equinoxes—the four cardinal points of the zodiac.
Clearly, there are no new ideas; there are new people discovering old ideas. Here is a brief look at the earliest astrological lore in more or less chronological order.