These are the core obsessions that drive our newsroom—defining topics of seismic importance to the global economy. Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every morning, afternoon, and weekend. If we can set modern judgments aside and learn the language of the ancient astrologers—a language that is now newly available due to the recent revival of classical texts—we may discover lost insights.
The ancients looked to the sky for clues about why things happened in the material world around them. Astrology had its heyday in the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period, an era that took place between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century CE.
These ancient astrologers based their interpretations on centuries of observations recorded by the Mesopotamians who came before them. They kept careful records of astronomical phenomenon, looking for correlations between what happened in the sky above them and the material world around them. Today, modern psychology has cast astrology as a fantastical way that people of the past project the workings of their minds onto the environment around them.
This interpretation leaves far too much wiggle room for astrology to simply sound like affirmations of what people want to hear about themselves and think about the world. Even worse, the nurturing approach psychologists take has polluted modern astrology with watered-down interpretations that seek to protect their clients.
Where is the trust in that? With the feel-good, pop-psychology variety of astrology growing like fungal spores throughout the millennial covens of the internet, both believers and skeptics are cause for concern. But in the past 20 years, traditional astrological texts have been translated into modern languages for the first time. These texts come from the same scientists who produced the first analog computer and principles of geometry that we still use today. Modern astrology may be overrun with mushy hocus-pocus thanks to conflations with psychology, but newly accessible ancient astrological methods could produce a revival in the power and credibility of the craft.
That might be because sun-signs astrology is a recent creation designed to appeal to mass audiences. Pop astrology was born in the late 19th century during the boom in new-age exploration, and was then fueled by developments in psychology in the 20th century.
The notion that your sun sign indicates your character was popularized by esotericist Alan Leo in England in the s. He was part of a group called the Theosophical Society that scoured spiritual traditions of all sorts looking for wisdom that would help society get to the next stage of development. His writing garnered enough of an audience to provoke several legal battles in the s for unlawfully practicing fortunetelling.
The sun-sign approach to astrology continued to grow in popularity through newspaper columns in the first half of the 20th century and boomed when New Age went mainstream in the s. When modern science was making humanity look smaller and more insignificant than ever, people found it reassuring to think of their personalities as being reflected in the stars. Jung, who created the psychological categories of introversion and extroversion and formed the basis for the popular Myers-Briggs personality test, placed astrology on par with mythology in explaining the workings of the human psyche.
As far as he was concerned, it was all just in our minds. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia. An image of the sun surrounded by a calendar showing seasons and the symbols of the zodiac that appear on the title page of an almanac written by Nathanael Low, M. By Olivia B. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up.
Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Over the past two-and-a-half millennia, this wobble has caused the intersection point between the celestial equator and the ecliptic to move west along the ecliptic by 36 degrees, or almost exactly one-tenth of the way around.
This means that the signs have slipped one-tenth—or almost one whole month—of the way around the sky to the west, relative to the stars beyond. For instance, those born between March 21 and April 19 consider themselves to be Aries. Today, the Sun is no longer within the constellation of Aries during much of that period. From March 11 to April 18, the Sun is actually in the constellation of Pisces!
Figure 2 See also Figure 3 , which demonstrates the precession of the equinoxes from BCE to The table below lists the dates when the Sun is actually within the astronomical constellations of the Zodiac, according to modern constellation boundaries and corrected for precession these dates can vary a day from year to year.
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