Here's one for you:

What if the break-up of the postulated Saturnian system, of which earth was apparently a part, led to the creation of astrology?

If we assume that we had been part of the previous set-up for all of the preceeding period human evolution then such a cataclyamic event could perhaps lead to increased observation of the newly altered environment, tracking the movements the planets in their new orbits and the effect of this upon human personalities, physiology and society?

Any thoughts?

x

The fear that death and destruction might strike again from the heavens and the observation of patterns that promised prediction would have led to an obsessive study of the motion of the planets and stars. I think the tradition of astrology probably dates from around that time.

Ask someone who doesn't know about the Saturn system break up why we have special names for the planets that are also the names of gods when it takes a half-trained astronomer to spot any of them today and distinguish them from the stars. I'd be interested to know if you ever got a sensible answer.

Velikovsky wrote:Astrology interested itself chiefly with the relative positions of planers and with their conjunctions. Diodorus of Sicily, after recording the Chaldeans assert that planets change their velocities and periods of time, says: “These stars exert the greatest influence for both good and evil upon the nativity of men; and it is chiefly from the nature of these planets and the study of them that they know what is in store for mankind.”(1)

It is perfectly correct to say as Diodorus did because of the great changes which were brought upon mankind and the nature of everything living on this planet by encounters with other planets. But from the truth of this belief of the Chaldeans and to the wrong conclusions was but a short distance. If the planets at their different encounters caused flood, hurricane, or conflagration, destruction of animals, or appearance of new plants, man could easily conclude that this or that consequence is the result of a special character of this or that planet.

http://www.varchive.org/ce/astrology.html

Astrology Website
A good place to find out your own planetary and house nativity patterns for free is at http://alabe.com. Once you find out your planetary aspects and houses, you can do a net search for the specific ones, such as Mars conjunct Mercury, or Moon in the Tenth House. The Alabe site also gives a little bit of info about some of the planets in the signs and houses.

Astrology Science
I heard once that astrology originated about 4,500 years ago. That would be possibly during or just after much of the cataclysmic events of that time among Saturn's planets and moons etc. The Chaldeans or Sumerians may have been among the first to use astrology or something like it. Michel Gauguelin of France was a statistician in the 1970s who intended to use his skills to disprove astrology, but, instead, he tended to confirm the basic idea that the arrangement of planets in the solar system affects humans and probably all life on Earth. For example, he found that people with a specific occupation tended to be born when a certain planet appeared from a perspective on Earth to be on the horizon or at the midheaven or the middle of the sky below one's position on Earth. So something like 50% were born when the planet was at or very near one of those "cardinal" points. He studied thousands of people for each occupation in Europe.

Human Mind Origins
Those who've read Julian Jaynes' book on "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" may understand that humans don't seem to have had the same kinds of minds then that we have today. The modern mind seems to have originated around 500 BC. Before that humans seem not to have acted much on their own volition. Instead, they heard voices in their heads, which were perhaps the voices of their elders and ancestors, and these voices told them what to do. They didn't make their own decisions, but only followed orders from their own memories of the voices of elders. Of course, the elders did the same thing.

Bible Code
The Old and New Testament Bibles both have extraordinary numerical codes within them, and I don't mean Michael Drosnin's claimed code, which is a fraud with political motives. Ivan Panin first discovered the real codes. Another writer (I thought his name was Dale Washburn, but that seems to be not quite right) tried to verify Panin's finding, but wasn't able to, but he did find a similar code, not associated with all of the text, but just with various phrases or names. I think Jesus or Christ was associated with number 8. That means the number of letters in the word or phrase was evenly divisible by 8 and the number of times the word or phrase appears in the Bible was divisible by 8. It was calculated that the odds against such codes appearing in the Bible by human intention were extremely high, because it would have required the ability to make advanced computer calculations with many supercomputers over hundreds of years. 

Group Mind
A related matter that has been discussed on this forum, or on the first incarnation of this forum, is group mind. Some catastrophists, one of the Roger's, I think, i.e. Roger Ashton or Roger Wescott, got the idea from ancient myths that humans and all animals had a group mind in ancient times, similar to telepathy, possibly enhanced by greater electrical charge on the Earth at that time. If that and the Bible code are correct, then the Bible was produced supernaturally, or maybe more likely by a group mind. A group mind may be able to make calculations like many supercomputers and the language itself may even be programmed to be able to do that. Initially, the group mind may have included all humans and animals, but later it may have been limited to those who learned to use certain "spiritual" discipline, like fasting, prayer and meditation etc. If the group mind was intelligent enough to see what was coming in the future, including the decline of the group mind due to catastrophes, it may have determined to find ways to maintain itself via subconsciousness or via biological programming etc. And I guess that means the chaos that civilization seems to be attracted to, or any self-fulfilling doomsday forecasts, may be programmed for ultimate defeat and the triumph of humanity.

sTARBABY by Dennis Rawlins

I think that proponents of the Electric Universe can relate to these underhanded methods.
The irony, as I see it, is that Astrology is extremely easy to test with routine statistical analysis. As an example, following Gauquelin's methodology, let us say that Astrology predicts that professional athletes should have Mars near the Midheaven at birth. Mars is the planet governing athletics and the midheaven is the cusp of the tenth house which governs profession. Allow a 5 degree margin on each side of the midheaven. So Mars should be in a 10 degree section out of 360 possible degreees. Examine a thousand or more horoscopes of professional athletes and compare the number who have Mars in that 10 degree area to what would be a random distribution, which is 1 in 36. That is sort of what Gauquelin did and he came up with significant statistical correlations.
If this was not a taboo subject for mainstream science we could get some interesting results - one way or another. My point is that Astrology is scientifically testable. But woe to any researcher who would dare to take on this task!

"I think that proponents of the Electric Universe can relate to these underhanded methods..(CISCOP)...
The irony, as I see it, is that Astrology is extremely easy to test with routine statistical analysis. ..i.e.. Gauquelin's methodology".

With respect to testing, around the same time Dean produced "Recent Advances in Natal Astrology" which attempted to statistically critically review Astrology including a summary of Gauquelin's work. The book only found interest with stats. minded Astrologers.

However, WD Gann and George Bayer (1940's), claimed that their financial fortunes were due to Astrological interpretation of Stock market conditions. They did not use mainstream astrology methods however. According to Jeanne Long in her book "Universal Clock", WD Gann used a system taken from cuniform script tablets from Sumerian times 2000 + BC which used an harmonic division of the houses and specific degree indexing. (Believed to originate much earlier)

Part of Bayer's system is however more obvious and relates to the planetary motions around the Sun, especially Alphelion and Perihelion positions and their effect on human mass behaviour and hence stock market movement. As Nick states all these things are testable.

Recent research, see (Sciencedaily.com - "Space Climate Forecasting"). states that the planets have an effect on the Sun which causes Space Weather. This would seem logical if plasma envelops everything including human beings. If verified this could be interpreted as repeating cycles and arguably, Astrology has always been about the study of how planetary cycles affect Nations and Kings, humans getting in the way.

What is not clear however is that the cycle is never back to the same point, so only similar conditions exist and to my knowledge equations of planetary motion have never made obvious the Sun's path around the galaxy, producing spirals (Ellipse) not circles of the planets that are not going to repeat for approx 26,000 yrs due to Precession (Sun's galactic Day ). with Sun's Galactic Year approx 240 million yrs; not even the later can be seen as a return to the beginning due to Galactic motion through Universe.

So Astrology could be seen as the study of cycles within cycles and at present we do not have the technology to measure the interactions of plasma and electro-magnetic forces as they apply to the Galaxy/Sun, Sun/Earth or Earth/Life forms to accurately predict Space weather systems, Earth weather systems (Earthquakes/Hurricanes) or human mass behaviour (Stock market / Revolutions). Hope this hasn't strayed too far off thread but if future technological advances validate Cosmic Cycle effects they will be absorbed into relevant diciples i.e. Psychology, Social Systems Economics for human behaviour. Space weather (CMB's). Earth weather (Earthquakes etc).