Astrology for Skeptics

Correlation is not necessarily causation. It’s a phrase I learned in college physics classes, and I often hear it from scientist friends today. It means events can be related, but one didn’t necessarily cause another to happen. For instance, on a windy day, trees sway, ripples form on a pond, dust and leaves are swirled about, and clouds move across the sky. It would be silly to say that the swaying trees caused ripples in the pond, or that the movement of clouds caused the movement of dust on the sidewalk. But there’s no doubt that these events are related, that these objects are all moved by the same invisible force: wind.

Astrology works on a similar principle. A lot of people talk about the position of the stars or planets causing things to happen here on Earth, which is ridiculous. But, it was observed thousands of years ago that when the stars and planets were in certain positions, certain things were more likely to happen. Everything in the universe is affected by the same forces – you can call it spiritual energy, quantum mechanics, fractals, whatever you like. The planets’ movements don’t cause human events, but they very often correlate with them because they’re moved by the same invisible forces. Human events and planetary movements are like the behavior of swaying trees and moving clouds, occurring simultaneously in an invisible wind.

Millennia ago, the people observing these connections came up with ways to remember them by associating constellations and planets with deities and mythological figures. Each culture had a different set of characters, but modern Western astrology usually focuses on the Roman pantheon, whose names we still associate with the planets. One example is Mercury. According to the Romans, the planet closest to the sun seemed to correlate with communication and matters of the mind, so it was named for the messenger god of intellect. Four times a year, Mercury reaches a point in its elliptical orbit – called a retrograde – where it appears to be moving backwards. During this time, there is often a greater amount of misunderstanding and miscommunication than usual. Even in today’s world, it has been observed that cell phones, computers, and radios don’t function quite as well during a Mercury retrograde. Mercury’s seemingly backwards motion doesn’t cause confusion or clumsiness – but watching the position of Mercury is a good way to predict the “weather” of human communications and avoid making important decisions during that time.

What about birth charts and personal horoscopes? How can the position of the planets affect someone’s personality? Again, the relationship is not one of cause-and-effect, but one of correlation. A newborn baby is affected by the same “winds” as the planets moving above it, and astrology is a convenient shorthand to draw connections. Not only the sun, but all the planets and the angles they make with each other form a good indication of that child’s personality. Knowing whether someone is a Scorpio or a Sagittarius doesn’t actually tell you very much, until you know about the other planets in their chart.

A birth chart also shows what a person starts out with – not necessarily how they will express those tendencies or what they will become. If someone is born when Mercury is in a very creative, emotional sign like Pisces, they are likely to be an imaginative, feeling-oriented thinker. But if they are raised in an environment which does not nourish this tendency, it might be expressed in another way, such as being emotionally attached to logical thought and ideas. Birth charts can be helpful at pointing out personality elements that are dormant and waiting to be developed, or understanding the nature of problems that can be worked on.

Obviously, astrology is not a fail-safe way of “predicting the future” – nothing is. Astrology describes general trends and tendencies, like a weather report. A birth chart might predict certain personality features, but it takes thoughtful interaction to get to know someone and see how those features are expressed. In a more general sense, a Mercury retrograde tells us that communications will be strained: this could mean crackly cell phone reception, or a major misunderstanding with an authority figure. Astrology is not a substitute for life, nor a hard-and-fast guidebook, but a tool for understanding human interactions on a different level. To understand the ripples on the pond more deeply, one might look at the way the leaves are moving, or the dust is swirling. By observing astrology and its connections with modern life, we can gain a valuable insight into the forces which move everything in the universe.