Astrology

• 1. Introduction

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  Astrology is a practice old enough that its origins predate written history. Markings on bones and cave walls show that human beings were tracking lunar cycles as far back as 25,000 years ago. By the 3rd millennium BCE, entire civilisations had built a sophisticated awareness of celestial cycles, and may have oriented their temples in alignment with the rising of the stars. So when we talk about astrology, we are not talking about a fringe curiosity. We are talking about one of the oldest and most persistent systems of thought in human experience.

  Yet since the 18th century, astrology has been classified as a pseudoscience. Its claims have been tested under controlled conditions, and again and again, researchers have found no scientific validity, no explanatory power, no proposed mechanism that does not contradict basic principles of biology and physics. A landmark study published in Nature in 1985 concluded that predictions based on natal astrology were no better than chance.

  How did something so ancient, so woven into the fabric of learned culture, lose the standing it once held? And why, despite that fall, did it see a resurgence starting in the 1960s, with astrology apps drawing millions of dollars in Silicon Valley venture capital in the late 2010s? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. Roots in the Ancient World

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  The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa is thought to have been compiled in Babylon around 1700 BCE, and it stands as one of the oldest surviving astrological records. The oldest undisputed evidence of astrology as a fully integrated system of knowledge, however, belongs to the first dynasty of Babylon, which ran from 1950 to 1651 BCE. That Babylonian system already contained features that would echo down through millennia: the zodiac, the trine aspect, planetary exaltations, and the twelve divisions of 30 degrees each known as the dodekatemoria.

  The Babylonians understood celestial events as possible signs, not as physical causes. This distinction mattered. A comet was not an agent of disaster; it was a signal that disaster might come. This interpretive posture gave astrology enormous flexibility, since a sign that goes unread cannot be falsified.

  Around 280 BCE, a priest of Bel named Berossus left Babylon and settled on the Greek island of Kos, where he taught Babylonian astrology and culture to the Greeks. Alexander the Great's conquest of Asia had already opened channels between Greece and the ideas of Syria, Persia, and Babylon. When Alexandria was founded after Alexander's conquest of Egypt in 332 BCE, it became the crucible in which Babylonian astrology was fused with Egyptian Decanic astrology to produce what we now call horoscopic astrology. This hybrid system incorporated the Egyptian practice of dividing the zodiac into thirty-six decans of ten degrees each, alongside the Greek framework of planetary gods and four elements.

  The astronomer and astrologer Ptolemy lived in Alexandria. His work the Tetrabiblos formed the foundation of Western astrology, and, in the words passed down about it, it "enjoyed almost the authority of a Bible among the astrological writers of a thousand years or more."

• 3. Critics Across Centuries

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  Carneades, the Greek philosopher of skepticism, attacked astrology on logical grounds, arguing that people born at different times can all die in the same accident or battle, and that if the stars exert uniform influence, the diversity of human cultures makes no sense. His critique was one of the earliest, and it established a line of argument that would run through Western intellectual life for two thousand years.

  Cicero, in his work De Divinatione, leveled a critique that the philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci, building on the work of historian Damian Fernandez-Beanato, calls the first working definition of pseudoscience. Cicero raised what became known as the twins objection: people born at nearly identical moments can lead very different lives, which undermines any claim that birth positions of planets determine individual fate. He also pointed out that if astrology explains all outcomes, it wrongly ignores visible influences such as inherited ability, parenting, medicine, and weather.

  Sextus Empiricus wrote an entire book titled Against the Astrologers, which formed the fifth section of a larger work arguing against philosophical and scientific inquiry in general. Plotinus, a neoplatonist who took a lasting interest in astrology, turned the logic of astrologers against them. He observed that from the Moon's own point of view, half of its surface is always in sunlight; the notion that its conjunction with a planet is good when the Moon is full but bad when waning is, he argued, simply incoherent from the planet's perspective.

  Augustine, writing in the 4th and 5th centuries, took the twins objection further, grounding his opposition in Christian doctrine: the determinism of astrology conflicted with both human free will and the idea that God is not the cause of evil. His analysis shaped theological objections that would persist into the medieval period and beyond.

• 4. Astrology at the Height of Learning

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  Johannes Kepler served as court astrologer to the Habsburgs. Tycho Brahe held the same role in the royal court of Denmark. Galileo Galilei worked as astrologer to the Medici. These were not minor figures moonlighting in superstition; they were among the leading astronomers of their age, and for much of history, astrology and astronomy were so entangled that separating them was nearly impossible. Kepler himself was driven by a belief in harmonies between earthly and celestial affairs, yet he privately disparaged most astrologers, describing their activities in strikingly blunt terms as "evil-smelling dung."

  The second Abbasid caliph, Al Mansur, who reigned from 754 to 775, founded the city of Baghdad as a centre of learning. He included within its design a library and translation centre known as Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, which became the conduit for Hellenistic astrological texts into Arabic and Persian. The early translators working there included Mashallah, who helped elect the very moment for the founding of Baghdad itself, and Sahl ibn Bishr, whose writings would directly influence European astrologers as late as the 17th century.

  In the 12th century, those Arabic texts began flowing into Europe through Latin translations. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos was translated into Latin by Plato of Tivoli in 1138. The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas attempted to reconcile astrology with Christianity by proposing that the stars ruled the body, while God ruled the soul. The mathematician Campanus of Novara in the 13th century is credited with devising a system of astrological houses that divides the sky into twelve sections of equal 30-degree arcs.

  Gerolamo Cardano cast the horoscope of King Edward VI of England. John Dee served as personal astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. Catherine de Medici paid Michael Nostradamus in 1566 to verify a prediction made by her astrologer Lucus Gauricus about the death of her husband, King Henry II of France. Astrology was not a pastime for the credulous; it was a tool of statecraft and high medicine.

• 5. The Scientific Reckoning

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  By the end of the 17th century, new scientific concepts in astronomy and physics, heliocentrism and Newtonian mechanics chief among them, had begun to pull the ground from beneath astrology. The yearly French publication La Connoissance des temps dropped astrology as a legitimate topic by 1679. In England, one almanac compiler named Richard Saunders printed a derisive essay titled Discourse on the Invalidity of Astrology. In France, Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire of 1697 described the subject as puerile.

  Formal scientific testing came later and was methodically damaging. A study published in Nature in 1985 asked 28 astrologers to match over a hundred natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Psychological Inventory questionnaire. The double-blind protocol was agreed upon by physicists and astrologers alike, with the National Council for Geocosmic Research nominating the participating astrologers. The study found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better than chance, and the testing, as the researchers phrased it, "clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis."

  In 1955, the astrologer and psychologist Michel Gauquelin reported a finding he called the Mars effect: a positive correlation between the position of Mars at birth and success in athletic careers. When seven French scientists attempted to replicate it, they found no statistical evidence and attributed the original result to selective bias on Gauquelin's part. Geoffrey Dean, a scientist and former astrologer, later conducted a large-scale test involving more than a hundred cognitive, behavioural, physical, and other variables, and found no support for astrology. A meta-analysis pooling 40 studies that involved 700 astrologers and over 1,000 birth charts also found no significant result when date and other obvious clues were removed from the charts.

  Philosophers of science have debated what exactly makes astrology pseudoscientific. Karl Popper called it "pseudo-empirical," noting that it appeals to observation and experiment but does not come up to scientific standards. Thomas Kuhn argued the issue was not falsifiability but the absence of a research tradition: an astrologer could only explain away failures, not revise the hypothesis. Paul Thagard pointed out that astrology has changed little in nearly 2,000 years, failing the criterion that legitimate science must progress by explaining new phenomena and solving existing problems.

• 6. Belief, Revival, and Modern Reach

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  A 2005 Gallup poll and a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center each found that 25% of US adults believed in astrology. A 2024 Pew survey raised that figure to 27%. The National Science Foundation's 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators study found that in 2012, slightly more than half of Americans said astrology was "not at all scientific," the lowest share to give that answer since 1983.

  The sociologist Marcello Truzzi, studying the late-1960s boom in astrological interest, identified three tiers of believers. Those at the first level knew next to nothing about astrology's inner workings; they read newspaper columns and gained what Truzzi described as "tension-management of anxieties" and a belief-system that felt larger than science. Those at the second level were younger, had their horoscopes cast, and valued the sense of belonging to a coherent and exclusive community. Only the third group engaged deeply, often casting horoscopes for themselves and treating astrology as something close to a complete worldview. In Peter L. Berger's phrase, it served as a "sacred canopy" for this minority.

  In 1953, the sociologist Theodor W. Adorno studied the astrology column of a Los Angeles newspaper and concluded that astrology in mass culture functions by encouraging conformity, steering readers through flattery and vague generalisations to feel personally addressed. He drew a parallel with Karl Marx's phrase about the opium of the people, writing that "occultism is the metaphysic of the dopes."

  British intelligence agency MI5 employed Louis de Wohl as an astrologer after reports that Adolf Hitler consulted astrology to time his actions. The War Office wanted to know what Hitler's astrologers would be telling him week by week. De Wohl's predictions proved so inaccurate that he was labelled a "complete charlatan," and later evidence showed that Hitler himself considered astrology "complete nonsense." After the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Nancy Reagan commissioned astrologer Joan Quigley to serve as a secret White House astrologer. Quigley's role ended in 1988 when it was disclosed in the memoirs of former chief of staff Donald Regan.

• 7. Astrology in Literature and Music

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  William Shakespeare was familiar with astrology and drew on it in nearly every play he wrote, assuming his commercial audience shared a basic knowledge of the subject. His attitude was not straightforward; King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Richard II all contain contradictory references to astrological ideas.

  Christopher Marlowe made astrological references in both Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, both written around 1590. Lope de Vega, who had a detailed knowledge of astronomy, took the opposite approach in 17th-century Spain: his pastoral romance La Arcadia of 1598 uses astrology to lead to absurdity, and in his 1624 novela Guzman el Bravo he concluded that the stars were made for man, not man for the stars. Calderón de la Barca wrote a comedy in 1641 called Astrologo Fingido, which the French playwright Thomas Corneille borrowed for his own 1651 comedy Feint Astrologue.

  The most widely performed musical work inspired by astrology is the orchestral suite The Planets, written by the British composer Gustav Holst, who lived from 1874 to 1934. Each of the suite's seven movements is based on the astrological symbolism of a different planet, though not in the order of those planets from the Sun. The suite was first performed in 1918. Because Pluto had not yet been discovered when Holst composed it, the British composer Colin Matthews wrote an eighth movement entitled Pluto, the Renewer, which received its first performance in 2000.

  Eleanor Catton's novel The Luminaries, which drew strongly on astrology, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, a reminder that the symbolic framework of astrological thinking has continued to find serious literary uses long after astrology's scientific standing collapsed.