The following is an excerpt from the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

It is slightly long but it

gives a possible explanation for the origin of Astrology. Sometimes when in doubt about
believing in certain practices that do not display solid evidences to justify their claims and
hence do not seem to get along well with our common sense (to quote Sagan himself Extra
ordinary claims require extraordinary evidences), it is a good idea to think about how those
practices could have originated in the past, the people who could have made it, the
knowledge they possessed then and the circumstances they lived in. Ancient people might
have been smart, but it might be going a little overboard to say they knew a whole lot more
than us about things which we do not and cannot understand now. (The last statement is
not just limited to astrology)
Here is the excerpt from the book "Why did people all over the world make such an effort to learn astronomy? We hunted
gazelles and antelope and buffalo whose migrations ebbed and flowed with the seasons.
Fruits and nuts were ready to be picked in some times but not in others. When we invented
agriculture, we had to take care to plant and harvest our crops in the right season. Annual
meetings of far-flung nomadic tribes were set for prescribed times. The ability to read the
calendar in the skies was literally a matter of life and death. The reappearance of the
crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse; the rising of
the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around
the world: these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up
there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.
The wind whips through the canyons in the American Southwest, and there is no one to
hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who
preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.
As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the
position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict
when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of
measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and
mathematics and the development of writing.
But then, much later, another rather curious idea arose, an assault by mysticism and
superstition into what had been largely an empirical science. The Sun and stars controlled
the seasons, food, warmth. The Moon controlled the tides, the life cycles of many animals,
and perhaps the human menstrual* period - of central importance for a passionate species
devoted to having children. There was another kind of object in the sky, the wandering or
vagabond stars called planets. Our nomadic ancestors must have felt an affinity for the
planets. Not counting the Sun and the Moon, you could see only five of them. They moved
against the background of more distant stars. If you followed their apparent motion over
many months, they would leave one constellation, enter another, occasionally even do a

kind of slow loop-the-loop in the sky. Everything else in the sky had some real effect on
human life. What must the influence of the planets be?
In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology - at a newsstand, say is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America
has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on
astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At
parties, when I meet people who do not know I am a scientist, I am sometimes asked, Are
you a Gemini? (chances of success, one in twelve), or What sign are you? Much more
rarely am I asked, Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions? or When do
you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?
Astrology contends that which constellation the planets are in at the moment of your
birth profoundly influences your future. A few thousand years ago, the idea developed that
the motions of the planets determined the fates of kings, dynasties, empires. Astrologers
studied the motions of the planets and asked themselves what had happened the last time
that, say, Venus was rising in the Constellation of the Goat; perhaps something similar
would happen this time as well. It was a subtle and risky business. Astrologers came to be
employed only by the State. In many countries it was a capital offense for anyone but the
official astrologer to read the portents in the skies: a good way to overthrow a regime was to
predict its downfall. Chinese court astrologers who made inaccurate predictions were
executed. Others simply doctored the records so that afterwards they were in perfect
conformity with events. Astrology developed into a strange combination of observations,
mathematics and careful record-keeping with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud.
But if the planets could determine the destinies of nations, how could they avoid
influencing what will happen to me tomorrow? The notion of a personal astrology developed
in Alexandrian Egypt and spread through the Greek and Roman worlds about 2,000 years
ago.
We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is
Greek for bad star, influenza, Italian for (astral) influence; mazeltov, Hebrew - and,
ultimately, Babylonian - for good constellation, or the Yiddish word shlamazel, applied to
someone plagued by relentless ill-fortune, which again traces to the Babylonian
astronomical lexicon. According to Pliny, there were Romans considered sideratio,
planetstruck. Planets were widely thought to be a direct cause of death. Or
consider consider: it means with the planets, evidently the prerequisite for serious
reflection. John Graunt compiled the mortality statistics in the City of London in 1632.
Among the terrible losses from infant and childhood diseases and such exotic illnesses as
the rising of the lights and the Kings evil, we find that, of 9,535 deaths, 13 people
succumbed to planet, more than died of cancer. I wonder what the symptoms were.
And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology

columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine the New
York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the
Post, a compromise will help ease tension; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According
to the Daily Newss astrologer, you must demand more of yourself, an admonition that is
also vague but also different. These predictions are not predictions; rather they are pieces
of advice - they tell what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so
generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies.
Why are they published as unapologetically as sports statistics and stock market reports?
Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is
killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to
a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the
other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how
could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers
cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests,
they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about
except their time and place of birth.*
There is something curious about the national flags of the planet Earth. The flag of the
United States has fifty stars; the Soviet Union and Israel, one each; Burma, fourteen;
Grenada and Venezuela, seven; China, five; Iraq, three; So Tom a Prncipe, two; Japan,
Uruguay, Malawi, Bangladesh and Taiwan, the Sun; Brazil, a celestial sphere; Australia,
Western Samoa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the constellation of the Southern
Cross; Bhutan, the dragon pearl, symbol of the Earth; Cambodia, the Angkor Wat
astronomical observatory; India, South Korea and the Mongolian Peoples Republic,
cosmological symbols. Many socialist nations display stars. Many Islamic countries display
crescent moons. Almost half of our national flags exhibit astronomical symbols. The
phenomenon is transcultural, non-sectarian, worldwide. It is also not restricted to our time:
Sumerian cylinder seals from the third millennium B.C. and Taoist flags in prerevolutionary
China displayed constellations. Nations, I do not doubt, wish to embrace something of the
power and credibility of the heavens. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to
count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we are connected - not in the personal,
small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways,
involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the
human species, themes to which we will return.
Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call
Ptolemy, although he was unrelated to the kings of the same name. He worked in the
Library of Alexandria in the second century. All that arcane business about planets
ascendant in this or that solar or lunar house or the Age of Aquarius comes from Ptolemy,
who codified the Babylonian astrological tradition. Here is a typical horoscope from
Ptolemys time, written in Greek on papyrus, for a little girl born in the year 150: The birth

of Philoe. The 10th year of Antoninus Caesar the lord, Phamenoth 15 to 16, first hour of the
night. Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury in Aries, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Leo, Venus
and the Moon in Aquarius, horoscopus Capricorn. The method of enumerating the months
and the years has changed much more over the intervening centuries than have the
astrological niceties. A typical excerpt from Ptolemys astrological book, the Tetrabiblos,
reads: Saturn, if he is in the orient, makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned, robust,
black-haired, curly-haired, hairy-chested, with eyes of moderate size, of middling stature,
and in temperament having an excess of the moist moist and cold. Ptolemy believed not
only that behavior patterns were influenced by the planets and the stars but also that
questions of stature, complexion, national character and even congenital physical
abnormalities were determined by the stars. On this point modern astrologers seem to have
adopted a more cautious position.
But modern astrologers have forgotten about the precession of the equinoxes, which
Ptolemy understood. They ignore atmospheric refraction, about which Ptolemy wrote. They
pay almost no attention to all the moons and planets, asteroids and comets, quasars and
pulsars, exploding galaxies, symbiotic stars, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources that
have been discovered since Ptolemys time. Astronomy is a science - the study of the
universe as it is. Astrology is a pseudoscience - a claim, in the absence of good evidence, that
the other planets affect our everyday lives. In Ptolemys time the distinction between
astronomy and astrology was not clear. Today it is."