Wisconsin Public Television University Place University Place Presents  Peter Sobol Disputing Astrology: 2500 Years and Counting  May 19, 2011 UP591     cc >> Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. Although relatively few of us believe in astrology, it's very likely that almost all of us know our sign, whether it's Scorpio or Sagittarius. And that may be because astrology offers us a personal connection to some kind of system of advice. For example, it can give us guidance in a time of indecision. It can bolster us up in a time when we lack self-confidence or even give us an excuse when we fail. And although astrology has always been on the fringes of science for many years, many leading astronomers were also astrologers, and astrology can tell us a lot about the way we think. Someone who has spent a lot of time taking a good hard look at astrology over the ages is our guest today, historian of science Peter Sobol. Welcome, to University Place Presents. >> Peter Sobol: Thank you, Norman. 

>> There's a long history of astronomy, there's a long history of astrology, were they ever the same thing? >> They were frequently done by the same people. And there was occasionally some overlap in terms of why these things were done. There have been times in places when the reason to look at the  heavens was to try and discern the future of your country or of, later on, of your own person or of members of your family or of your king, but they were always different as well. Astronomy is about where things are in the sky, and astrology is about what it means that those things are where they are. >> And possibly, too, the effect that they have on our daily lives. >> Oh, yeah, that's what I mean. If the moon is here or if Mars is there, what consequence will that have for life here on Earth. >> Well, you can understand why there would be some confusion or overlap. After all, a full moon affects the tides and that affects our daily lives, and certainly the comings and goings of the sun affect our lives. >> Yes, that's right. 

The belief that other celestial bodies had an influence down here on Earth was very likely extrapolated from the visible effects of the sun and the moon. >> So I suppose it wouldn't be too far a leap to say if a full moon can affect the tides, then the alignment of two or three planets might also have some effect, maybe less obvious. >> Yeah, there are special arrangements of things in the sky. If two things are very close, that must have a meaning. If they are 90 degrees apart, that might have a meaning. It has to do, I think, with the cosmos that people lived in back in, say, when Aristotle was alive back in the fourth century BC when the Earth is stationary at the very center and the lights that are moving in the sky seem to be moving because of the Earth. Everything is centered on the Earth and all that motion seems to be for the Earth, for things so that things can happen down here. So it's hard to avoid the idea that everything that happens up there has a consequence down here. There was an old phrase, as above, so below. >> I guess, speaking of such, it seems likely that astrology, like astronomy, would be most fascinating to people who had a lot of clear skies. 

[LAUGHTER] >> Yes, that's probably true. In parts of the world where the sky wasn't easily visible in the deep jungle, I suppose, or at shorelines or near rivers that flooded reliably like the Nile, interest in the celestial bodies wasn't as great, probably because it wasn't as necessary for keeping time. And maybe there were other things more important. In Egypt they had to block out everybody's fields again after the Nile flooded. They got very good at geometry. But they're astrology and astronomy was not nearly as advanced as the Babylonians. >> The Babylonians would be current day Iraq. >> That's right. >> And are those then the first written inklings we have of astrology? >> That's right. As far as I know there are books of predictions that the Babylonians wrote telling what would happen if a certain thing, such as a very bright day or a comet or a full moon or an eclipse, happened on that day. 

And, in fact, I think we have a slide of one of those diagrams. >> Early representations of these scenarios. >> We have a slide of a tablet called the Enuma Anu Elish. Let me see if I remembered that. Enuma Anu Enlil, sorry I'm confusing two of these old Babylonian texts. The Enuma Anu Enlil contains a lot of these sort of general predictions. It's probably about from 1,000 BC. And they're very general. They're all about joy in the land. If they're specific at all they are something about the ruler or the king. 

The king will die. The king will have a child. >> But we don't know when? >> Yeah. It's just sort of that generality. The application of this celestial bodies to predictions about individuals came along with the Greeks. The Greeks learn about this sort of prognostication from the Babylonians, from the Chaldeans, from the remnants of that civilization that are still around when the Greek civilization arises. And they, being democratically-minded, decide that this can be applied to individual people. And that's when you start to get horoscopes. >> We're actually going back that far. >> Looking at the arrangement of the heavens when a person is born will discern their fate. 

>> Is that where then the zodiac comes from and the assignment of a given person to a given part of the zodiac. >> The zodiac had been around since the Babylonians and it has evolved in a way as people decided that there were different parts of the sun's path through the heavens. The sun traces this path. It happens, today we would say the sun actually goes through about 12 of these signs, these constellations. And that's an important distinction, which we may get to later, between signs and constellations. By the time the Greeks are doing this, there are 12 constellations that they understand the sun passes through. And where the sun is when you are born, that's, when people say what's your sign, that's your sun sign. And that's when this becomes important. >> And the Greeks, then were the first to say that you would be a certain kind of person if you're born on such and such a day. >> Yeah. 

>> And those zodiacs or the alignment is still applicable after all these years? >> Well, a lot has changed. Astrology went through a period later on right around the same time as what we call the scientific revolution. Astrology and astronomy are done side by side through all the preceding centuries, but in the 17th century when it was pretty clear that the experimental approach to nature was going to be valuable and the mathematical approach to nature was going to really yield results, the astrologers wanted in on this and there was a huge effort in those days to collect biographies of famous people and compare them with their birth charts and try to empirically extract correlations between aspects of this person's life and aspects in a more astrologically technical sense of their charts. >> You wonder if they ever checked it against, say, some other sign to see if it fit just as well in different ways. >> A lot of them believed that they had located common features between lives and charts, but it doesn't ever really seem to have gone anywhere. That sort of empirical approach didn't really emerge, and it may be one of the reasons that the population of persons who did each of these things began to separate at about that time. Up until the 17th century, an astronomer and an astrologer were likely to be the same person. First of all, you needed astronomical skills in order to draw up a chart, and then you needed whatever sort of predicting skills or familiarity with the books of people who had been doing this. There was a famous and influential book written in the second century AD by Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer and astrologer. It's significant, I've always thought, that he wrote two separate books. 

One that became known as the Almagest from its Arabic title meaning the greatest, it was the greatest book. And another that became known as the Tetrabiblos because it was actually four sort of chapters or chunks. And that was his book on astrology. And that book contains many different kinds of things from the astronomy book. The astronomy book is how do we talk about the motions of celestial bodies, especially the planets which don't just go around once a day, they stop and they go back and they do this retro grade motion. How the heck are you going to explain that? Why do they do that? Especially if you think that circular motion is the perfect motion and that's what must govern how things move in the heavens. >> And then everything, of course, is going around the Earth. >> Right, there's the daily motion. >> How could it go back and forth? >> Right. So you have the diurnal motion once a day and the sun has its motion through the zodiac once a year, and then you've got these other things, the planets, the wanderers who go around a little more slowly or a little more quickly. 

And some of them, two of them, Mars and Venus, never get very far away from the sun, and these other ones, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, stop and go back and go forward again. Why are they doing that and how do you explain that if they can only move in circles? >> Now, this scheme that we have up here, is that an attempt to explain any of that? >> That's Aristotelian cosmology right there. And the funny thing about this is that it's not any good at all for predicting planetary motion. And it also doesn't explain why the planets vary in brightness during the year. If you see that diagram there, the central portion where it's very, sort of, messy, that's where we live. We live in the terrestrial realm where there's the four elements: Earth, air, fire, and water. Things only move rectilinearly. If you drop a heavy thing, it falls to the center. If you let go of a light thing like fire, the element of fire, in the Aristotelian matter theory it wants to flee the center and go out to the edge. So I don't know whether you can make it out in that diagram, but there's flames around the outside of the terrestrial realm. 

Once you get outside of the celestial, everything is nice and clean; it's just these spheres. Now this is Ptolemy's, this diagram that's up there now, that's showing a small circle sort of at like 8:00 there. The smaller circle, the center of which is on a bigger circle. And this was one of the ways that Ptolemy tried to, and succeeded, in generating retro grade motion. If you imagine the planet is sitting on that smaller circle and the smaller circle is turning around while its center is carried around the bigger circle. If you adjust the rates of motion, you can get an apparent motion for an observer at the center of the big circle where the Earth is you can get all different kinds of funny apparent motions using the perfect circular motion that the celestial realm demanded. The odd thing about this is that physically it can't possibly work. Why would one sphere be able to turn intersecting another sphere? But that was okay. The astronomers were okay with that because it obviously, even though in reality, in physical reality it didn't work, in mathematical terms and in its ability to correctly predict what would happen in the heavens it worked fine. So astrologers and astronomers would both use this method for hundreds and hundreds of years. 

>> They weren't quite so concerned about the difference between theory and observation? >> Well, I guess so. I mean, the theory was the Ptolemaic theory worked but observation confirmed the Ptolemaic theory. Maybe I didn't get your point there, but physically this didn't make any sense because of the inter-penetration of the spheres. >> Right. >> And this continues to happen when Copernicus comes along and says, well, it looks to me like the sun is in the center and the Earth goes around the sun. There were people that said the Earth can't possibly move. Certainly the Earth can't be rotating on its axis as you claim. >> Because we would spin off or blow off. >> Right. We would drop things off of towers and they would fall over there because the tower would rotate out from underneath it. 

So there was this sense of physics that governed cosmological thought until physics kind of caught up with it with the work of Kepler and Newton. So the diagram that's up there now, should we talk about that diagram? >> This looks like progress to me. >> All right. Well, there were problems with astrology. Right from the beginning in the Greek world. Right around the time that Ptolemy is writing. And this is because the things that appeared in the sky at certain times of the year when Ptolemy is writing are no longer where they used to be when the Babylonians were writing. >> Right. >> It used to be long ago that at the vernal equinox, that day in the spring when day and night are of equal length, the constellation Aries was on the horizon. But by the time Ptolemy is writing, Aries is still below, Aries hasn't risen yet. 

>> And this is all because the Earth wobbles on its axis. >> That's right. >> And is 26,000-year cycle. >> That's exactly right. The Earth is spinning like a top and that causes the point of the vernal equinox to migrate around. >> Okay, and how did the then the later observers account for that discrepancy. >> Well, they had a choice to make at that point. They could either go with the fact that Aries, the astrological sign Aries, was the stars, the group of stars that it was originally. This diagram is interesting. It's an animated view of where the pole, the north pole that the Earth points to, and that circle that you see there, that's the 26,000-year cycle that you were talking about. 

>> In fact, today if you were to look up at the north star during the course of the night, it would make a circle. >> Well, everything moves around the north star. But if you could stay there and look for 26,000 years you'd see that the place overhead moves away from Polaris and moves around. So back to the difference between a constellation and a sign, which was one of the first important problems that astrologers had to solve. Is Aries the chunk of stars or is Aries whatever piece of sky is on the horizon at the vernal equinox? >> The constant. >> They went with the latter view. They went with that Aries is not any longer associated with the constellation. It is now a sign. It is the place in the sky that is on the horizon at the vernal equinox no matter what else is going on in the heavens. So that's mildly strange if you think the original astrologers probably think that it was the effect that the stars were having. 

>> It does get complicated. But, of course, it's complicated anyway. There is so many different phenomena going on out there. But let me ask you a question about this, Peter, the relative importance of, if we're talking  about destinies determined by the stars, are there, in the realm of astrology, ever conflicts between one destiny and another? In other words, the destiny of historical events versus my personal destiny? And how do you resolve a conflict like that? >> That's a good question. It was a question that was raised for the early astrologers. And you can make a horoscope for any moment in time, really. The Greeks started doing it at what they assumed was the birth time for a particular individual. But you can do that for the birth of a city if you arbitrarily state this is when our city was born or our nation. But it also happens that there are massive events, like floods and famines, that wipe out thousands of people at a time and these people's fate is rarely, if ever, foretold in their birth charts. The image up there now is from Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami that killed perhaps 200,000 people. 

And there's no way that every one of these 200,000 people had a chart that foretold they would die in this natural disaster. And the astrologers, even back in classical day, believed that there was a hierarchy of destinies, that's what they called it, that there were larger forces at work, even then the celestial forces that governed your own personal destiny. Your personal destiny as foretold in your horoscope could be wiped out. >> It could be trumped. >> Yes, exactly right. That's a good way to put it. And it happens more often than we would like to think. >> All right, another question. What if you had twins, of course they have the same sign, they should have the same horoscope, and yet they can have, as we know, very different destinies. >> Yep. 

And this was of a special interest to Christians who had to grapple with how they were going to deal with astrology. And there's a story from the book of genesis of Jacob and Esau, who are twins, and Jacob is born holding Esau's heel, that's how close in time they were are born, and yet if you read your bible you know they have very different destinies. Jacob's heel, I never thought of it, Jacob treats Esau rather like a heel. Steals his birthright and his father's blessing. This is a painting by Rubens that shows their reconciliation later on in life. But the astrologers, faced with this twin problem, would say, look, you have to imagine that there's a pot on a potter's wheel spinning and spinning, and if you try to tap it twice with a stick while it goes around, you may tap as quickly as you can but if you then stop the pot and look at it you will see that there is some distance between the two marks you made with your stick. And the motion of the heavens is just like that. Enough time can pass between things that look to us like their practically simultaneous that a huge difference can arise. >> All right, another question then. >> Mm-hmm. 

>> If we're talking about a person's destiny as being affected by when they come into existence, are we talking about birth or are we talking about conception? >> Well, and on top of the twin problem this makes a sort of interesting consideration because astrologers would dearly love to know the time of conception. That moment would be when the celestial influentials could really have an impact. But, of course, that can't be known. And when you come right down to it, birth itself is not really a moment. >> It's an event, a continuous event. >> It can be quite lengthy and unpleasant for the people involved. >> And then it raises the whole issue of cesareans, too. >> Yes, there's a famous modern astrologer named Michel Gauquelin, a Frenchman, who continues to try and find out ways to use celestial positions to correctly predict what's going to happen to people, and he advises woman who are about to give birth not to go for cesarean sections if they want to have a chart cast for their newborn child because it won't be reliable. >> Well, if we put these questions aside for the time being and try to determine then, you mentioned earlier, Peter, this relationship between Christianity and astrology, how did that play out as we get into the Middle Ages, for example, which was a time when, of course, Christianity was very much a force in the lives of most people in Europe? >> This was a vexed question for Christians because Christians have to believe that you retain free will because you have to freely decide to accept Jesus as your savior. So any thing that like a very deterministic astrology which might make the claim that because of the position of the Earth and the heavenly bodies when you're born you will have a life like this. 

>> Destiny. >> Everything you will do is determined. Right. Unchangeable destiny. Well, that's unacceptable to a Christian. And so that kind of astrology was banned and at least disapproved of. But there's another kind of astrology where you just say, well these are the material tendencies that you will have during your life. The stars and the planets can't affect your free will but they can affect material things like the body that your soul inhabits right now. And for Christians who are willing to take that point of view, astrology could actually be helpful. It could warn you ahead of time of what your predilections might be. 

If your chart says, well, it says here you're going to become tremendously fat and eat too much. If you know that ahead of time, you can devote your free will to avoiding that pitfall that has been revealed for you by the astrologer. But the other problem with astrology was that if it worked it might be working because demons were helping the astrologer make correct predictions. This was especially problematic for a kind of astrology called elections or interrogations, not just for your birth chart, but suppose you were trying to decide whether to begin a voyage or when would be the most propitious time to begin the voyage. >> Sure. >> You go to the astrologer and you say tell me when I should depart. And he can make a chart or look ahead at what's going to be in the sky and say this looks like the best time for you to go. Those kinds of astrology were especially suspect of being demonically influenced. And the reason was, of course, at least these Christians believed, the demons don't want you to be a Christian, they want you to be very proud and believe that you don't need god. You can conduct your life however you like. 

>> The demons would not like that free will concept. >> Yeah, they don't really care about that. But what they want is for you to deny Christianity and to believe that you don't need God. And so if demons, this comes up in the history of magic as well, if demons can convince you that you are extremely powerful and extremely wise, you may not believe you need to rely on God anymore. So demons will work with astrologers, without the astrologer even knowing it, to make these predictions come true. And that might instill in this astrologer the sin of pride and the belief that he's powerful. And so a lot of Christians wanted to stay away from this. It wasn't that it didn't work for them. It was a matter of the likely demonic influence and the change in attitude and the inherent growth of pride that the astrologer might experience. That was the real problem here. 

>> Does astrology figure at all in the works of Dante, the Divine Comedy? >> Oh, yes. >> He was so concerned with various levels of hell and transgression. >> And who would be punished and how. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, he includes all kind of diviners, including astrologers, in the inferno. They're going to go to the fourth chasm of Malebolge. There's a diagram that may be up now of a sort of cross-section of hell. And about halfway down there's a realm that's designated for perpetrators of simple fraud. And there are simonists and barrators who bring fruitless lawsuits. And somewhere in there there's a row that says diviners, astrologers, and magicians. 

So yeah, it's quite likely that in those days, I think I can safely say just like today, there are a lot of charlatans who enter fields like this, really any sort of field that people go to for, as you said earlier, for an excuse or for some sort of guidance, there will always be a great profession waiting to help them, and a lot of them will be making it up as they go along. And that was probably true then. So I think Dante probably had these people in mind that they were all frauds. It's fraud. That's where they are. They're in the fraud zone. >> Contemporaries of Dante who took a more scientific approach? >> Well, contemporaries of Dante, you say? Yeah, I suppose so. Every once in a while there will be an effort by some group to test astrology. And, of course, people who believe astrology aren't swayed by these results. And if you see tests like this, they routinely show that astrology doesn't really mean anything. 

I, myself, have done this when I have taught a class. I have handed out a sheet that contains descriptions of each of the sun signs but not which sun sign it attaches to. And I have said pick yourself. >> Right, which one describes you. >> And, of course, if you've looked at these things you know they're all very general and they could apply to just about anyone and every time I've done this, the correct answers are no greater than you would expect from chance. There was a careful experiment, I think it was careful, done by Michel Gauquelin, who I mentioned earlier. He believed that there was some core of truth to astrology. You had to get rid of the houses. You had to get rid of all kinds of nonsense. The only thing that was really important as far as he could tell was what planets were on the horizon or in the mid-heaven, directly above you, when you were born. 

And he believed he had shown that there was this thing he called the Mars effect that champion athletes were more likely to have Mars on the horizon in the mid-heaven than average people. >> In classical terms that would make sense. >> Yes. >> Mars, yes, the god of war. >> Yeah. He had some other ones too. He had other effects, but there was a group of skeptics that tried to duplicate this effort, and it was not clear how this came out. I think they may have found that their results were going to confirm Gauquelin results and then rather than look more deeply into what statistical anomalies there may be they just scratched the whole thing. But it's not really gotten us anywhere useful, as far as I can tell, in the meantime. >> Well, if we go from the middle ages into the full renaissance, how does astrology fair? >> Well, there again, the renaissance is a time when really everything was worthy of scrutiny and astrology is certainly very interesting to people. 

There's no decrease in the number of people who believe it, who are willing to pay to have it done for them. Astronomers are still casting charts, either because they believe it or because that's how you can make money. But the skeptics abound as well. And one of them was a sort of intellectual renegade named Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and he began his life being very interested in astrology but later on decided that it was wrong and wrote a big long book, 12 books on disputations against astrology. >> And just for purely scientific reasons? Obviously, he's not doing it for money as other scientists might if he were pleading the case of astrology. >> No. He had family money and he was a man of leisure and could afford to take the time to write a book like this. And each book contains a different argument against astrology being true. It can't possibly be the case, for example, that a body below the horizon could affect you when you're born. He denied that astrologers are any better at predicting the weather than farmers and sailors are, who have to deal with the weather all the time and have learned from trial and error what certain signs in the sky or in the water might mean. 

My favorite argument of Pico's is that there may be other planets beyond Saturn that we don't know about. >> Yes, that would throw the whole system out. >> Yeah, it's hard to imagine what you would say if you had this system that you believed was working that you have taken everything into account and suddenly you find out there's this other influence out there that you had no idea was effecting your system. Anyway, I just want to mention, there was a reply to this objection by Pico. A man named -- said it was ridiculous to propose that there might be more planets. One might as well say that there are more than four elements. >> Well, he's right in the second half of that. >> Yeah. Not the way you want to go down in history I would have thought. >> Astronomy really starts to take off, I think, by the time we get into the 16th century, 17th century. 

>> That's right. >> And astronomers are increasingly able to observe events or predict events, celestial events, is there still a tendency, though, for astrologers to predict some major cataclysms based on these improved observations? >> Well, they don't ever stop believing that they can do that. There was an interesting case in 1524 where all of the known planets collected in the watery sign of Pisces. >> Sounds like a flood in the works. >> You would think so. And there was a huge bit of debate among astrologers. Some said we're in for a big flood. Others said we don't know, maybe it will just rain a lot. And as it happened, there was no big flood. And there does appear to have been a lot of upset among astrologers over the failure of their predictions about a flood to occur. 

There was argument whether the flood of Noah, was that foretold by all the planets being in Pisces, and if that was the case, then we have every right to expect a new flood. Maybe it wasn't because that was miraculous. God could have just reached in and caused that without dealing with the intervening natural... >> That's the way it's described biblically. It's just going to happen. There's no reason. >> And then of course there's the rainbow which was God's promise there would be no flood like that ever again. So we're safe even though all the planets may again be in Pisces. It's not going to happen. >> Now, how does all of this change? How do astrologers cope with the increasing notion, started most famously by Copernicus, that the Earth is not the center the things? Doesn't that really create the same kind of crisis for astrologers that Darwin would create for creationists later? >> Yes and no. 

In the one sense, the cosmos in which astrology sort of made sense, where the Earth is the center and everything turned apparently focused on the Earth, it was all there for the Earth, that is now pretty much gone. The Earth is demoted, in a sense, to being just a planet. The sun is now at the center. Galileo used a telescope to discover that the moon is very Earth-like, it has mountains. Jupiter has moons going around it. The whole cosmos in which astrology made sense is going away. But if all you're really interested in, as an astrologer, if you're all interested in is the correlation between positions of things in the sky and events here on Earth, then it doesn't matter what kind of cosmos you live in, so long as you can have a reliable correlation, the model of the heavens doesn't matter. >> It's the observation that's important, you're saying. There is this phenomenon out there. We don't really care what the geometry of its origin is, but we can observe these alignments or these phenomena. 

But the trick, of course, always is how to interpret it. >> Yeah, and Gauquelin said it doesn't matter. Here's Mars on the horizon, this person has got a likelihood of being an athlete. It wouldn't really matter to Gauquelin whether the Earth was stationary and Mars was going around the Earth or whether they both were going around the sun. It's that relative position that matters for him. But the old cosmos of the stellar spheres, the unchangeable, except for circular motion, this unchangeable realm is pretty much going away. Tycho Brahe, who was working before the availability of telescopes, is a wealthy man and is able to build very large instruments that you can use with the naked eye, but because they're very large, they can achieve a high precision. And he's able to observe a nova in the constellation Cassiopeia, and night after night it seems not to be moving like some sort of meteorological thing might move down here on Earth. And so he's pretty sure that this is taking place out there in this supposedly unchangeable realm. Later on a few years later, he sees a comet and is able to show that that comet is out there too. 

Not a meteorological phenomena as comets were thought to be by Aristotelians. >> And so does that create a problem for astrologers because suddenly you have new things out there that aren't part of the scheme. How do they come to terms with the meaning or the significance of something like a new star? >> Yeah, I think eventually there are things that they have to come to terms with. And comets, for example, when it turned out that comets were periodic phenomena and it became possible to predict when certain comets would come back, their threat as a portent of doom was greatly diminished. If you know when this thing is coming back, it's obviously not tied to some big celestial machine that's... >> Or a one-time event. >> Yeah. And this one-time event is signaling to you that another bad one-time event is going to happen down here on Earth. The same thing probably happened with eclipses. Their portent of doom value went way down when we could begin to predict them. 

>> Now, you mentioned the moon earlier and Galileo, this would have been 1609 and years following, as discovering that the moon is not perfect. It's quite irregular. Does the fact that these things aren't perfect affect the astrological thinking about them at all? >> No. Like I say, it does mean that the cosmos in which this all was born, the whole idea of celestial influence on the Earth, the cosmos in which that made sense is going away. But now you've got a whole profession of astrology and a deep-seated belief in the effect of the celestial and the terrestrial. And the fact that now the celestial and terrestrial may not be arranged the way we thought they were doesn't really detract from that authority. The arrangement of things in the heavens still does convince people that things down here on Earth will be affected. >> But there seems to be more and more to keep up with. For example, we can see that Jupiter now has moons. Galileo discovered four of them, I think. 

And now, of course, it turns out there's 32 or some vast number. >> I think the number keeps going up with the more telescopes we aim at it. He saw those four moons, and again this was more of a sense that the Earth is not unique, the Earth is a planet, the Earth has a moon, and lo and behold Jupiter has moons, too. We all go around the sun. >> Including Venus. >> Venus goes around the sun and Galileo turns his telescope on Venus and notes that it changes in size and has phases like the moon. And the best way to explain that is to propose that when it's small and nearly full it's on the other side of the sun from us, further away, therefore smaller, and its whole face toward us is being illuminated. Whereas, when it's on the same side of the sun as we are, it will be much closer to us but it will not be reflecting very much light to us. It will just be that crescent reflecting light to us, the same thing that happens with the moon. >> So at this point by the time we're well into the 17th century and all of these discoveries and the ability to see much more out in space, is it possible to be both an astrologer and an astronomer still? >> I think Kepler may have been one of the last people to do both. 

Kepler, of course, the astronomer who takes the data that Tycho Brahe had collected and realizes that circular motion is really not what's going on, at least with Mars, to begin with, that if Mars has an elliptical orbit, Tycho's data matches it perfectly. So that must be the case. That was a huge, huge revolution in astronomical thinking. So from about then on, the people that you see, the names that you see attached to astrological texts are not also doing astronomy. And one of the most famous astrologers from the 17th century was an Englishman named William Lilly who wrote a book called Christian Astrology. And this is about why Christians can safely go to an astrologer, because he is one so he wants to encourage clientele, and he's relying on other people to have made the tables that he goes to to consult the birth charts. I may have mentioned this earlier, but the astrologers did think that their profession could be improved in the same way that astronomy and physics had been improved by the work of Kepler and Galileo and Newton. They're sure that somewhere in all the mess that they inherited from their forbearers that there must be something they can salvage, something they can improve on. And there was a huge effort to collect biographies of famous people and compare them with their charts. >> Still working at that. 

>> Still trying. Well, I think they understood that a lot of this stuff was sort of classically motivated. It was what Joseph Jastrow, the psychologist who was one of the founders of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, he would have called that a congenial conclusion. You mentioned before Mars, athletes and Mars, soldiers and Mars, that wasn't derived from any sort of empirical study, that was derived from a gut level feeling that here's this red planet, it's bloody, it must be influencing humans in some bloody, competitive sort of way. >> So we make that little jump of logic, that inference. >> Yeah. It's sort of an a priori thing. It's a congenial. It makes sense. At some gut level it feels right to say that this red planet will affect people that way. 

But in the 17th century astrologers hoped to go along with the new empirical trend and mathematical trend that was being employed with such success in astronomy and physics and do empirical searches through the biographies and birth charts of famous people and look for other correlations that might not have been known thus far. >> I wonder if it was in Herschel's horoscope to discover a new planet. >> That would be a good thing to look for. >> And how did that discovery of Uranus in 1781 affect astrology at this point. We're very deeply now into a lot of astronomical discoveries. >> Yeah, there's a fairly, historically, a fairly quick sequence of the discovery of the outer three planets. Uranus, discovered by Herschel, and then when Uranus' orbit is well-known, some deviations are noticed in that orbit and a few people simultaneously begin to think, well, a body of a certain size a certain distance away might cause that perturbation, let's look there. And sure enough a Frenchman named Le Verrier discovered Neptune there. And this, I think, is one of the interesting differences between astronomy and astrology. Here, at least, you've got a case where using the ideas that you have in astronomy that things have mass and that they're orbiting the sun, they have a velocity around the sun, you can use that to locate things you haven't seen yet. 

>> Sure. >> If astrology were really a science, maybe it could locate a new planet by looking at these very birth charts that they were looking at in the 17th century and saying, you know, there's people here being influenced by a thing that we don't have any basis for. What's going on here? >> That would be a tough assignment. >> I guess it would. What they had to do instead was try to, in some way, and I'm not sure whether they're finished with this job, there's one astrologer from earlier in the 20th century, maybe mid-20th century, who went by the name of Zolar, of course, and he believed that these rulerships, they called them rulerships, what planets are in charge of what parts of the sky or what sorts of influence do they have, these things need to be worked out. And I'm not sure that there's a consensus among astrologers today about what affect Neptune has on people if it's on the horizon when you're born. And I don't know what they're doing about Pluto because Pluto is now no longer a planet. >> Right, discovered in 1930. It was called a planet. It stayed that way for about 70 years, and so the astrologers would have to come to terms with that somehow, at least in some minor way. 

>> And they have. >> And then it was dropped as a planet. >> Astrologers probably don't care about that. >> It may be too minor a thing. But it sounds as if this would get awfully complicated for astrologers to keep up with this. So many influences out there. They keep discovering new influences. >> Well, and there had to be to multiply them even before the discovery of these planets they event these things called houses which are sort of arbitrary divisions of the heavens that have different influences on different parts of your life. There are triplicities and quadruplicities that have different quadrature and trines and all these ways that the planets can be lined up with each other. They want it to be complicated, at least this is how it's always appeared to me, because, putting the best face on it, these are people who become rather like proto-psychologists. 

Certainly, if you look at William Lilly, the reason he's famous is that his case books are all extant, and we can see why people went to him and the questions they asked him. What did they want from him? And really they either wanted exoneration from some terrible mistake they made, they wanted to be told that it was in their stars and not themselves that this happened. Or he will write in his book quid agendum, what is to be done? People have no clue what to do now, tell me what to do. >> And so it goes right back to the roots of astrology in the first place and that is some kind of guidance and some kind of personal relationship between you and the cosmos. >> That's right. And it becomes what psychology and especially humanistic psychology, later on becomes where people go for guidance, where people go to talk out their problems. And I think in the 20th century there was another bifurcation, I don't know how strictly I would want to hold this, but there remain astrologers who continue to do the empirical work. They'll make charts of important events in the history of the western world and pour over positions of heavily bodies and try to find some correlation so that they can make predictions that will come true. >> And has any astrologer actually said this is going to happen, something very much like this is going to happen, some major catastrophe, it happens and then they say, see, I predicted it? >> Yeah, that's happened frequently. Sometimes you want to go back and check just with what precision that prediction was made. 

There used to be an astrologer who worked here in Madison, his name was Neil Marbell. He passed away many years ago, and he believed or he told people after the Challenger explosion that he had predicted that this would happen. But, in fact, what he had predicted was a major disaster in science. And within, I think, a two-week period, and in fact the Challenger disaster didn't occur until a few days later. But he was okay with telling people he had predicted the Challenger disaster even though a major disaster in science, many things could have happened that he could have said fulfilled that prediction. I asked him once why he hadn't predicted that an O-ring would fail, hot gas would escape and ignite the main fuel tank causing a tremendous explosion and loss of mission? And he told me it would have been too much work. And I always think of how much work it required to launch the shuttle in the first place, and I kind of doubt that there's any comparison between the two levels of work each would need. But this will go on of course. Astrology hasn't gone away. It will never go away. 

There are degree-granting institutions. There are professional organizations. I think the same kind of thing has happened to it that has happened to, say, parapsychology. The established academic world doesn't want to have anything to do with them in most places so they have their own schools, they have their own societies and certifying organizations. There's a group called ISAR, the International Society of Astrological Research. And you can be certified by this group. So they're sort of in their own world now working away and not really caring whether astronomy departments want to see what they're doing. >> Well, people will always, as we say, want that connection, that personal connection with the unknown and with that which is greater than themselves. And at the same time, I think they'll always want that sense of the unsolved mystery, too. >> The wonder, yes. 

>> So while these studies may always be at the fringe of science, they will continue to tell us a lot about ourselves and the way we think. >> Yes, indeed. Oh, yes. >> Peter Sobol, it's been a pleasure and we'll look forward to, perhaps, hearing about some of those other disciplines the next time you visit us for University Place Presents. >> I look forward to it. Thank you. >> I'm Norman Gilliland and I hope you can join me for the next episode of University Place Presents.