Today is a Guest Post by Mary, she has good knowledge about Astrology. Check out the article below written by her. I definitely had to share this with you. Over to you Mary..
Astrology. It’s a word that’s been inspiring excitement and skepticism all over the world for millennia. From the comfort of reading your horoscope over morning coffee to the satisfying dismissal of your coworker’s Sun sign— ugh, what a typically stubborn Taurus!— astrology just might be here to stay.
But where did astrology come from in the first place?
Once upon a time, humankind watched the Sun set and the Moon rise, and became hypnotized each night by the stars. The Moon was particularly magical; it seemed to pull the ocean’s tides, coax women to bleed, and awaken people’s wildness. Then people started to notice a group of fixed stars that seemed to dance along a band in the sky—now known as the ecliptic. What’s more, they noticed that when planets danced along certain sections of this band, certain events seemed more likely, and babies born during these times shared common characteristics. In fact, the word “planet” comes from the Greek for “wanderer”!
Over time, these early stargazers sliced the ecliptic into 12 even sections, each named for the constellation of fixed stars that stood behind it, and by 500 BC, voila— the western Zodiac was born. Because it was first created to measure human ritual through the passage of time, it begins not with January, but at the advent of spring, when the light of the Sun lingers as long as nightfall, and life begins anew on earth. It is the season of Aries—a time of initiation, beginnings, and newfound vitality. The early astrologer Macrobius, in fact, believed Earth itself had an Aries birthday.
Over the next 5,000 years, the great civilizations of Egypt and Greece studied and perfected the relationship between the heavens and the earth. The first version of astrology originated in ancient Babylon in the 2nd millennium BC, and was almost entirely focused on omens. It was generally used for ordinary, everyday things such as weather predictions, farming tips, and political matters, and many thought their behavior during certain celestial patterns could ensure the survival of their children or animals. This came to be known as “mundane astrology,” and is the oldest known form; it later spread to neighboring regions such as Egypt. After Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, a more complex kind of astrology emerged out of the Greek influence. This was eventually dubbed “Hellenistic astrology,” and from it, we received the four elements, the sign rulerships, the assignments of different Greek gods, and other systems that we’re familiar with today.
Astronomer Claudius Ptolemy discovered over 1,000 stars through his telescope, and gave us the earliest known astrological text— the Tetrabiblos, written in the 2nd century. The Tetrabiblos was eventually translated into hundreds of languages, and its influence lasted thousands of years. From this point on, astrology would take off as a popular method to study human behavior and health. But although the next generations of scientists used astrology as a common and respected part of their work, the divide between the scientific and the mystical would continue to grow. The most significant part of this change came after the early 1500s, when Copernicus first theorized that the Sun is the center of the solar system. This threw much of early zodiacal theory completely out of whack, and skeptics began making a case for astrology as a baseless pseudoscience.
Doubt grew even stronger during the Age of Enlightenment, and especially with the discovery of the “forgotten” outer planets— Uranus (1781), Neptune (1846), and Pluto (1930). When astrology became mainstream in the 20th century, it was partially because of new theories on human thoughts and feelings, and, of course, the advent of psychology. Carl Jung, the influential Swiss scholar and psychiatrist, believed that astrology was really the culmination of all ancient understanding of psychological forms and patterns—and developed his theory of “archetypes,” or symbols that represent common feelings, ideas, and experiences.
The zodiac signs, as we think of them now, come from a combination of modern ideas like Jung’s, and ancient ones such as Plato’s, whose early astrological writings are linked to myths, stories, and symbols from places like Mesopotamia (Capricorn, The Goat and Taurus, The Bull), and Egypt (Aries, The Ram). Each sign has thousands of years of associations, events, myths, and superstitions powering it. But the 12 signs weren’t even written about as a group until the 1930s, when astrological writers wanted to engage and entertain more readers. Before this period, the Rising sign was seen as much more important— and it’s a trend that’s been coming back into vogue, especially with the work of popular modern astrologers like Annabel Gat, Chani Nicholas and Jessica Lanyadoo.
In general, the whole of astrology, like its distant cousins numerology and tarot, is an inexact science— like a stock forecast or weather report. It can make suggestions about good timing, and offer solutions to your troubles, but it can’t make predictions set in stone. All of astrology is a potentiality— for success, for love, for health— and it offers this information as tools that we might use to challenge our own fates. In over 5,000 years of human patterns and theories, a system has emerged, and sometimes it’s downright uncanny. We can use astrology as a powerful agent of self-help, or to smooth sharp edges with humor. We might not always know why something happens, but the stars might be able to point us to how. Skeptic or not, you might notice a few things lining up that seem to defy all logic. Why are all your best friends Libras? How come you can’t stand most fire signs? And what’s with your fatal attraction to Scorpios? The stars know, even if you may not.
About Mary Cole –
Mary Cole is a US based tarot reader and astrologer with over twenty years of experience. She learned tarot from her grandmother and at an early age was divinely inspired to pursue it as a life path.
Having done over one thousand readings, Mary remains enthralled by the mystery of tarot and considers her journey through the Arcana ongoing.
You can find her Website here – https://www.7tarot.com/
