The Catholic church and I agree on one thing -- and possibly ONLY one thing, given their current PRO child molestation policies -- and that is this: Divination is a bad thing.
The Catholic church has pronounced astrology "the work of the devil" based on the above idea -- that divination/prophecy are a bad thing -- an idea I agree with but which doesn't actually apply to MOST of astrology. Unfortunately, it's what astrology has a reputation for and most likely the folks running the Catholic church who do not seem to really know their own history[1] have banned astrology because of the deficiencies of canned astrology without understanding that this is not the full story on astrology.
As noted previously on this blog, in my youth I had a set of Tarot cards. I also had some other set of cards for "predicting the future" based on the I-Ching, probably a very watered-down version of it. At some point, I gave up both of them though my interest in astrology persisted.
Like anyone, I have my bad days when I want SOMETHING -- ANYTHING -- to tell me "The Sun will come out tomorrow..." and give me some hope I can survive another month and things will be okay and yadda. I am prone to reading popular astrological bullshit at such times, while rolling my eyes the entire time and wishing it weren't SUCH GARBAGE.
I'm usually trying to figure out what major influences are shaping my day TODAY and coming up SOON. I tend to NOT care what happened LAST WEEK. I read such sites looking for influences for the next few WEEKS and the IMMEDIATE FUTURE.
And poplular astrology sites make it PAINFULLY hard to find the info I REALLY want, such as the EXACT DEGREE of x thing. They are too busy blowing smoke about how this MEANS "...one twelfth of the human race, even those under six months of age, will TOTALLY win the lottery today without having bought a ticket -- TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY. YOU -- yes, YOU -- born under the sign of BLAH will strike it rich while sitting on your deluded, lazy butt on your nasty couch doing NOTHING to make good fortune happen because THE STARS SAY SO."
Um, yeah, no.
That's just not how life works. Please step away from the hookah.
And this is the reason I decided one day in my twenties to quit doing Tarot and some watered down version of the I-Ching: Because I was a young military wife with a small child and I was looking to the cards to TELL ME everything will be FINE while not really doing anything about my problems. It was a form of thumb-sucking, basically.
So I decided one day to STOP playing the helpless damsel in distress WAITING for some RANDOM EVENT to make everything okay in my life. I decided "There's your problem, Doreen." and I decided to start spending that time -- the time I previously spent pointlessly laying out Tarot cards and the like -- checking books out of the library, reading useful info, learning how to make plans and make them happen instead of engaging in a pointless practice to reassure myself "Everything will be OKAY!!" while doing NOTHING to make sure things worked out.
So I began reading books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and The Peter Principle and books on how to PLAN effectively (tip: start at the end and work your way BACKWARDS) instead of laying out cards over and over and over and trying to convince myself my shitty life would someday, somehow not be shitty and I would somehow stop being terrified of the future and I would stop feeling helpless and like a victim of an inescapable curse a la some Greek Tragedy.
Most likely, astrology began as literal weather prediction and it wasn't divination per se. It was NOT a means to say "Everyone will win the mataphorical lottery, though no one bought a ticket."
Most likely, it began as signs and portents.
Let me update that language for you to modern vernacular: It began as a means to identify necessary but insufficient conditions.
They weren't going "The moon is in blah sign, so there WILL BE a GOOD CROP and everyone WILL HAVE a bountiful harvest." No, it was more like "You can expect more rain/hot weather/cold weather/whatever, so the conditions are right for having a good harvest, ASSUMING YOU DO THE WORK."
Astrology is also the predecessor to psychology and it's actually got a very RICH history in that regard, so an astrological chart is BETTER THAN Meyers-Briggs for trying to understand YOURSELF and your interactions with OTHER people.
A lot of modern psychology is also GARBAGE. Freud was shooting up drugs and saying girls whose dad's molested them had "An Electra Complex" -- aka had the HOTS for their (RAPIST) fathers -- to AVOID dealing with the uncomfortable reality that men were molesting their daughters and an awful lot of psychology studies are just badly designed, useless junk.
Some are good, but a lot are fundamentally broken crapola.
Modern psychology has the virtue of TRYING to actually understand people instead of being higher than a kite on BS about "THE STARS TELL ME." as a means to wash their hands of responsibility and yadda.
An astrological natal chart is a very complex "personality profile" to help you find a path forward in life and try to understand to some degree how you interact with people around you. Thanks to its rich and long history, it is more complex than any psychology-based personality profile currently available.
THAT's a good use for astrology -- that and "signs and portents."
Prophecy though: It's a bad thing.
The stars are incapable of telling us what WILL happen with regards to coming into money or falling in love and anytime you confidently predict some future that is in any way influenced by human choice, you are manipulating people in a way that makes some aspect of that prediction MORE LIKELY but may simultaneously undermine the potential optimal outcome.
As noted previously on this site, I think Jesus was basically brainwashed and bullied his whole life by everyone expecting great things from him and giving him no breathing room to find his own path forward. If he was "destined for greatness," I like to think he could have offered us something more than dying gruesomely on a cross as some bizarre advertising campaign for a religion that did not yet exist.
I don't think astrology per se is a bad thing, though I do have a beef with current policies of the Catholic church that aid and abet the abuse of children and also harm the rights of the LGBTQ community.
The Catholic church has pronounced astrology "the work of the devil" based on the above idea -- that divination/prophecy are a bad thing -- an idea I agree with but which doesn't actually apply to MOST of astrology. Unfortunately, it's what astrology has a reputation for and most likely the folks running the Catholic church who do not seem to really know their own history[1] have banned astrology because of the deficiencies of canned astrology without understanding that this is not the full story on astrology.
As noted previously on this blog, in my youth I had a set of Tarot cards. I also had some other set of cards for "predicting the future" based on the I-Ching, probably a very watered-down version of it. At some point, I gave up both of them though my interest in astrology persisted.
Like anyone, I have my bad days when I want SOMETHING -- ANYTHING -- to tell me "The Sun will come out tomorrow..." and give me some hope I can survive another month and things will be okay and yadda. I am prone to reading popular astrological bullshit at such times, while rolling my eyes the entire time and wishing it weren't SUCH GARBAGE.
I'm usually trying to figure out what major influences are shaping my day TODAY and coming up SOON. I tend to NOT care what happened LAST WEEK. I read such sites looking for influences for the next few WEEKS and the IMMEDIATE FUTURE.
And poplular astrology sites make it PAINFULLY hard to find the info I REALLY want, such as the EXACT DEGREE of x thing. They are too busy blowing smoke about how this MEANS "...one twelfth of the human race, even those under six months of age, will TOTALLY win the lottery today without having bought a ticket -- TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY. YOU -- yes, YOU -- born under the sign of BLAH will strike it rich while sitting on your deluded, lazy butt on your nasty couch doing NOTHING to make good fortune happen because THE STARS SAY SO."
Um, yeah, no.
That's just not how life works. Please step away from the hookah.
And this is the reason I decided one day in my twenties to quit doing Tarot and some watered down version of the I-Ching: Because I was a young military wife with a small child and I was looking to the cards to TELL ME everything will be FINE while not really doing anything about my problems. It was a form of thumb-sucking, basically.
So I decided one day to STOP playing the helpless damsel in distress WAITING for some RANDOM EVENT to make everything okay in my life. I decided "There's your problem, Doreen." and I decided to start spending that time -- the time I previously spent pointlessly laying out Tarot cards and the like -- checking books out of the library, reading useful info, learning how to make plans and make them happen instead of engaging in a pointless practice to reassure myself "Everything will be OKAY!!" while doing NOTHING to make sure things worked out.
So I began reading books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and The Peter Principle and books on how to PLAN effectively (tip: start at the end and work your way BACKWARDS) instead of laying out cards over and over and over and trying to convince myself my shitty life would someday, somehow not be shitty and I would somehow stop being terrified of the future and I would stop feeling helpless and like a victim of an inescapable curse a la some Greek Tragedy.
Most likely, astrology began as literal weather prediction and it wasn't divination per se. It was NOT a means to say "Everyone will win the mataphorical lottery, though no one bought a ticket."
Most likely, it began as signs and portents.
Let me update that language for you to modern vernacular: It began as a means to identify necessary but insufficient conditions.
They weren't going "The moon is in blah sign, so there WILL BE a GOOD CROP and everyone WILL HAVE a bountiful harvest." No, it was more like "You can expect more rain/hot weather/cold weather/whatever, so the conditions are right for having a good harvest, ASSUMING YOU DO THE WORK."
Astrology is also the predecessor to psychology and it's actually got a very RICH history in that regard, so an astrological chart is BETTER THAN Meyers-Briggs for trying to understand YOURSELF and your interactions with OTHER people.
A lot of modern psychology is also GARBAGE. Freud was shooting up drugs and saying girls whose dad's molested them had "An Electra Complex" -- aka had the HOTS for their (RAPIST) fathers -- to AVOID dealing with the uncomfortable reality that men were molesting their daughters and an awful lot of psychology studies are just badly designed, useless junk.
Some are good, but a lot are fundamentally broken crapola.
Modern psychology has the virtue of TRYING to actually understand people instead of being higher than a kite on BS about "THE STARS TELL ME." as a means to wash their hands of responsibility and yadda.
An astrological natal chart is a very complex "personality profile" to help you find a path forward in life and try to understand to some degree how you interact with people around you. Thanks to its rich and long history, it is more complex than any psychology-based personality profile currently available.
THAT's a good use for astrology -- that and "signs and portents."
Prophecy though: It's a bad thing.
The stars are incapable of telling us what WILL happen with regards to coming into money or falling in love and anytime you confidently predict some future that is in any way influenced by human choice, you are manipulating people in a way that makes some aspect of that prediction MORE LIKELY but may simultaneously undermine the potential optimal outcome.
As noted previously on this site, I think Jesus was basically brainwashed and bullied his whole life by everyone expecting great things from him and giving him no breathing room to find his own path forward. If he was "destined for greatness," I like to think he could have offered us something more than dying gruesomely on a cross as some bizarre advertising campaign for a religion that did not yet exist.
Footnotes
[1] Ironically, the Catholic church has missed the fact that their religion is founded on a belief in astrology and ALSO on prophecy, so according to their own views, their religion is a bad thing and they should not practice it.I don't think astrology per se is a bad thing, though I do have a beef with current policies of the Catholic church that aid and abet the abuse of children and also harm the rights of the LGBTQ community.