the-astrology-book

Contemporary Academic Study of Astrology
erick Allen, 1860–1917). It was Leo who, as a professional astrologer, laid the foundations
for the present-day understanding of what he termed the “science of the stars.”
Moreover, he founded the journal Modern Astrology and authored numerous books on
the subject. In the course of the 20th century, through its links with theosophy, astrology
became the lingua franca of the 1960s counterculture as well as many of the New
Age movements that have descended from it. For New Age spirituality, use of the
astronomical phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes has become the seminal
framework within which the New Age of Aquarius has been heralded. While this
detection of the planet’s gyroscopic motion that makes the zodiac appear from the perspective
of the earth to advance incrementally is an astronomical understanding, its
cultural familiarity and historical interpretation have been fostered chiefly by the
legacy of astrology rather than through the findings of empirical science.
It is in fact precisely through the advent of the empirical sciences that astrology
has come to receive increased criticism and skeptical attack. As Michael R. Meyer
(1974) sees it, “The study of astrology was held in the highest respect by most academic
institutions throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa right up until the dawn of
the ‘Age of Reason’—the eighteenth century, when the ‘sciences’ to which astrology
gave birth rationalized that it was invalid.” Much of the modern-day astrophysicist
antagonism to astrology culminated with the Bok “Objections to Astrology” manifesto
that physicists and astronomers were asked to sign in 1975. While a standard
astrological defense is to maintain that the predictive propensities of the system have
themselves been acquired through empirical observation, it could be argued instead
that astrological interpretation derives from religio-culturally established understandings
of archetypal personalities (e.g., mercurial, jovial, and saturnine characteristics)
and numerological symbolism. Already in his third-century C.E. Enneads, Plotinus
agued that the stars are signifiers or symbols of events rather than causes.
If science tends to condemn the a priori as superstition—especially when it
appears unsupported by empirical observation, what becomes of interest to the sociologist
is the very persistence of belief that appears to fly in the face of contemporary
and demonstrable aspects of rationalism. In their turn, New Age spokespeople often
reject the province of science as restricted and narrow and inapplicable to the mystical
“wisdom traditions.” But regardless of alleged outmoded thought forms from the
vantage of New Age culture, there is within the astrological community more broadly
an effort to revalidate the use of nuance, metaphor and interpretation.
But if astrology must face antagonism from the preserve of canonical science, it
must also deal with the antipathy engendered from traditional mainstream western
religions. In particular, the socially accepted forms of established Christianity are not
at all receptive to “astrological magic,” which even if valid or, rather, especially if
valid, is judged to be nefarious work conducted only under the sovereignty of Satan.
One question contemporary researchers must invariably consider is why do people
continue to resort to a form of divination that is not sanctioned by the ecclesiastical
authorities. Sociologically, this opens up to the wider question of dissent and change
that occurs within religion and the shifting boundaries in establishing legitimacy and
permissible determination.
[172] THE ASTROLOGY BOOK