To me, the determination of anyone’s character according to scientifically baseless, literal transposition of symbolism is as bad as any other form of racial profiling. People invoking a bastardisation of many ancient belief systems and projecting their own anthropomorphisation of animals and events, derived from myths and legends that haven’t been properly understood for millennia, is meaningless. Seriously, people should think they have the characteristics of what someone thinks are the “personality” traits of a goat, a ram or “fish”? Which fish? Poor Peter Benchley discovered that mistake with “Jaws”. That aspect aside, the movie was nevertheless excellent and we are capable of correcting the harm done to sharks by the traits assigned to great whites and the otherwise well-meaning aspects of the book and movie. So, surely, in a world that denounces certain practices as out-dated, primitive and cruel, such as bull-fighting, we can do that with a concept as daft as astrology.

The issue is that science knowledge in the general public right now is so bad, that many people, through no fault of their own, really do not know the difference between astronomy and astrology. Astronomy is the scientific observation of the skies and the Earth’s place in it, whereas astrology attempts to read personalities, character traits and worldy events into whatver any one person thinks is happening in the skies at any time and according to how they see the world. Astronomers obtain detailed information as to how the material universe works based on scientific observation. They do not presume the character and personality of others, let alone people they have never met and know nothing about. Astronomers tell you what the tides will be doing according to the Moon’s movements and when there will be an eclipse. They don’t get paid for telling people who to like or dislike, how to act towards each other or what to do on any given day according to their “personality”. If you really want to know whether to go fishing one day, I strongly advise you look up the tides and not your horoscope. I really do not understand why anyone would depend on, literally, invisible, unidentifiable sources for information about anyone or anything. If anyone has good things to say of me, I’d prefer to think it’s for my achievements and good deeds than what stars happened to be in the sky millennia before the coincidental date of my birth in modern times. Conversely, no-one should be socially engineered into doing or not doing anything in life merely because of the random impositions of a stranger’s personal inclinations, impositions they attempt to assign divine or cosmic authority to, but which are, in reality and obviously, of the very Earthly origin of these supposed “soothsayers’ ” imaginations. Moreover, superficially asserting personality according to what constellations were in the sky during the time of other particular religious, cultural, social and political settings and contexts has no scientific basis and merely reflects lack of comprehension of the significance of such practices in their own time. This is especially so considering the constellations are random groupings of objects in the sky, determined by people of a time projecting their interpretations of the world onto the heavens as they see fit, not the other way around, and the constellations themselves change relative position in the sky over time.

As importantly, trivialising the knowledge and practices of earlier or other cultures into trinketry is a disservice both to them, the cultural evolution of our species and victims of modern exploitation. Rituals and practices enacted by people living hundreds or thousands of years ago served purpose in their own context, in their own time. Reducing that to the xenophobic enlargements or reductions of modern-day prejudices, with empty, ritual repetition long after the original purpose has been forgotten, destroyed, altered, contorted or in whatever way lost to history, diverts from the original knowledge these practices represented. Whatever possibly, sensible, practical purpose or interpretation these practices served in a time is lost to the presumptions of another. The thinkers of the past were as intelligent as we are, the same species, with the same mental capacities. As the technologies of recording knowledge emerged and advanced, according to whatever means were available, from rock paintings and pictographic monuments to cuneiform on clay tablets and, ultimately, writing, they recorded the acquisition of knowledge in all fields from agriculture to medicine, with that knowledge expanding and evolving over time. The sedentary lifestyle and organised co-operation that came with the transition from nomadism to the establishment of city states, made possible due to the domestication of plants and animals, facilitated the veneration and celebration of knowledge and the recording of it, as people moved from being part of the environment to controllers of it. No longer at the mercy of the elements, people now had the knowledge and technologies by which to craft the environment to human survival. With that, of course, came all the pitfalls, wrong turns and mistakes as, like Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, people learned to God, making the recording of acquired knowledge and experience all the more important. Of course, there were also explanations that made sense to people in a time, which we now know to have been incorrect or the original meaning of which has probably been lost in translation through many millennia. In all times, as knowledge improved, the wrong or incomplete gave way to the more true.

However, greater assemblage of people requires greater organisation and control, inevitably politically, and inevitably with control of knowledge. As populations grew and new societies emerged and merged, so too, beliefs systems were merged, modified and adapted for purposes of continuity. Often, for political, rather than practical reasons, earlier rituals continued to be practised long after their original purpose had been forgotten and they had become empty repetition of rites that no longer served any meaning other than to preserve the status quo of a new time. Throughout history, much original knowledge was also lost intentionally. For example, Mesopotamian, Babylonian and Greek astronomy was destroyed when it acted against Ptolemaic geocentric systems and Church power, including with the destruction of the libraries of Alexandria and others and continuing into the Inquisition, when people were, literally, burned alive for speaking the scientific truth of the helicoentric system, knowledge that was certainly known to the ancient Babylonian and early Greek scholars. In 1543, Copernicus invoked the much earlier Greek scientist, Aristarchus, whose work on heliocentric astronomy from the third century, BCE, was among that destroyed. Following from Copernicus’ work, in 1633, Galileo was tried by the Inqusition, forced to recant for stating that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. It seems ridiculous to us that uttering this now accepted truth was sufficient to be violently burned at the stake. However, we only need to see what’s happening in our world today to see how easily that can happen and that was the very fate of many, including Giordano Bruno in Rome in 1600, making Galileo’s choice to recant somewhat understandable.

The improvement and dissemination of knowledge is a long, winding and, at times, literally, tortuous business. Much of what we believe today will be overturned tomorrow. But truth is hierarchical. Not every thought on a topic is correct and, in a truly free society, what is wrong, gives way to what isn’t. Even Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists of all time, practised a form of alchemy, an ancient belief from which the true science of chemistry emerged. However, we don’t teach his alchemy in school, we teach the laws of motion, gravity and optics. Newton, note, was not hounded to his death for his alchemy. We merely teach his good science, while making no mention of the bad.

Like the skies and the Earth, belief systems are neither fixed nor unevolving; as noted by many scholars and philosophers, like any other food, the bread of a religion that has gone stale is unfit for consumption. To remain relevant, systems need to change with knowledge. My aim is never to deprive people of whatever brings them solace or gets them through the night, merely to address the means by which unscrupulous or indifferent actors attempt to do so. My aim is merely to illuminate and place control of peoples’ lives into their own hands, instead of those who aim to control by fear or profit from it or any superstition. With that in mind, people should know that the public’s knowledge of the skies needs an update. In short, astrology is bunk. Astronomy, the factually correct, scientific observation of the skies, reveals no link between the movements of the stars and planets and anyone’s personality. The only Earthly effect it has is to make certain people rich at the expense of others.