Astrology

Astrology is a symbolic system that links the positions of the sun, moon, and planets to human character and life events. In most modern practice, an astrologer casts a birth chart, a map of the sky at the moment and place of your birth, and interprets how the signs, planets, and houses relate to themes such as relationships, work, and personal growth. Readings can also look at transits, which compare current planetary movement with your chart, and at compatibility between two people.

It sits apart from astronomy, which studies the physical universe. Astrology is a cultural and interpretive tradition with many schools, including Western tropical, Vedic or Jyotish, and Chinese systems that work differently from one another. Practitioners range from newspaper columnists to full-time consultants, and there is no single governing body, curriculum, or standard of training. Many people enjoy it as a prompt for self-reflection and conversation, much as others use tarot or journaling.

Controlled tests of astrology's claims have not supported its ability to describe personality or predict events, so forecasts of your future or your health are unsupported. Some people find a reading a meaningful prompt for reflection and comfort. Used as a symbolic language for reflection, it is generally low risk. It is not a medical or mental health service, and it should not be used to make health, financial, or legal decisions.

Astrology grew out of the practice of observing the sky for omens. Mesopotamian scribes recorded celestial signs in omen collections for kings, and by the Hellenistic period, in the centuries around the turn of the common era, astrologers in Egypt and the Greek-speaking world had developed the horoscope, a chart personal to one birth. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, written in the second century CE, became a standard reference. The tradition then spread and changed across India, the Islamic world, and medieval Europe, where it was taught and practiced in learned circles.

In the early modern period, astrology reached unprecedented popularity through the printing press, and voyages to new continents challenged some of its foundations, such as the seasonal logic of the zodiac (Campos Ribeiro, 2025). Over the seventeenth century it was gradually pushed out of the learned world. Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583-1656), sometimes called the last official astrologer in France, lost standing in disputes with Pierre Gassendi and his circle, and historians see political and cultural change as part of that decline (Garau, 2024). Twentieth century newspaper sun-sign columns made astrology familiar to a wide public, and psychological and archetypal approaches became popular. In 1985 physicist Shawn Carlson published a double-blind test in Nature, discussed below. Today astrology is practiced by independent astrologers worldwide, with no shared regulation.