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Ancient Wisdom vs. Science

I'm not readily finding a citation to back this up, but my understanding is that some physician had an astonishing track record of referring patients for testing for a specific STD (I think syphilis) before they were showing known symptoms. His patients were getting correctly identified as infected earlier than average. 

Rather than decide he's magic, they put two other physicians in the room with him to observe him and try to figure out what he was picking up on though he couldn't tell you himself what that was.  And they eventually identified a new symptom that shows up early: An eye flutter.

I've written multiple pieces here giving my opinion that astrology was a cover story for learned commoners trying to make a buck advising kings of old. So astrology did the opposite of the above story and doubled down on conning people and using "The stars say..." rather than "It's my opinion" and asking people "But WHY do you think that?" and that took astrology into weird places.

Astrology began before we had substantial light pollution, so people saw the phases of the moon or whatever and observed associations and most likely the predictive parts of astrology began as weather prediction and we have historical evidence of it being used that way. In fact, to this day, the Farmer's Almanac lists moon phases and predicts planting related stuff based on that.

There are different forms of astrology.  Chinese astrology focuses on what year you were born to determine your "sign" rather than what month. Arabic astrology does complex mathematics that add and subtract the positions of different things in the chart to get important points, which I don't clearly remember details about.

So astrology is mental mapping of observed wisdom and different cultures came up with different mental maps. It's like a several thousand year old Rorschach test with levels of complexity that far exceed modern personality tests.

And it's a misnomer that it's "the study of the STARS," which is what the word means. Historically, planets visible to the naked eye without a telescope were called wandering stars.

So it's more like the study of gravitational influences of different bodies within our solar system. And all the stuff visible to the eye has thousands of years of recorded observed associations.

Then it gets real flakey when we invent telescopes and start seeing other stuff and try to tack that on, minus the thousands of years of observed associations.


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