Food for Thought:- What makes astrology work?

There are at least two schools of thought on why astrology works. One common explanation is synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle proposed by Carl Gustov Jung. The general idea is that events on earth of a certain nature coincide in time with astronomical events of a similar nature (according to the symbolic significance of the planets and their relations in the heavens). Although synchronicity operates throughout the Universe, the planets might have special significance because they are part of collective experience (that is, we can all see them or know about them) and so they can take on a collective meaning -- they can speak to the "collective unconscious." But Jung's synchronicity principle is still hypothetical and still not well understood.

Jung's idea is similar to the ancient hermetic idea of resonant bonds of sympathy between "similars" (which share a common essential design) in the microcosm and macrocosm. The famous axiom -"As Above; So Below", so often quoted from the Emerald Tablet, was the ancient explanation for the correspondence between cosmic and mundane events.

A less popular explanation is that there are unknown and currently undetected forces or energies emanating from the planets that affect life on earth, perhaps something akin to Rupert Sheldrake's "morphic fields." (This type of explanation is unpopular among those physicists who believe that all the forces in the Universe are already known.) Biological evidence showing a harmony between celestial rhythms and biological rhythms suggests that known or unknown planetary forces operate on organisms at a material level, sometimes through changes in the pattern of solar radiation. Such biological effects might alter psychological processing and thus human action and the events that arise from it.

An interesting point to note is that a type of astrological phenomenon that has been observed in hundreds of experiments involves a change in the behaviour of metal ions when an aspect forms in the sky between planets associated with the metals involved. (Did the ancients possess this knowledge as suggested by the Doctrine of Correspondences? How?)

Whatever explanation is offered, it is the ‘evidence’ of observation from experience and research that convinces people that astrology does indeed work. The rich symbolism and descriptive theory that has evolved over thousands of years provides for a deep understanding of human nature and the capacity for prediction of the type of circumstances that will prevail during specific time periods.

A question that often arises with regard to whatever forces are actually exerted by the Cosmos is how could these planetary forces act upon an infant when it is outside the mother, (ie. At the moment of Birth, or the first independent breath) but not when it is a fetus in the womb?

Given that we do not yet have an explanation for causality of astrological phenomena, we cannot assume that astrological correspondences are due to some "force" (e.g., gravity) that can travel through a mother’s body as easily as it can through the walls of the hospital.

One research finding that might be relevant to this question is the tireless work of statistician Michel Gauquelin and his wife Francsoise, that has been a foundation of astrology’s small but growing rehabilitation as a ‘legitimate’ field of enquiry. The Gauquelins found that one of their results in the studies, - the "inheritance" of angularity for specific planets (i.e., the child of a parent with an angular planet tends to have the same planet angular), was only present when the birth was 'natural'.

This finding suggests that it is not exposure to air per se that ‘produces’ the astrological effect. Rather, the baby is "destined" (for unknown reasons) to be born at a certain time, and to retain the astrological character of that time. 'Unnatural' births (for want of a better term - i.e., Caesarian-section, or drug-induced labour, as in the doctor has a game of golf impending, as opposed to genuinely premature births) appear to prevent birth at the "correct" time, and so the child fails to "inherit" its parent’s planetary angularity in its own chart.

No studies have been done to my knowledge, looking at the effect of the type of birth on any factors in actual chart interpretation, although it is generally acknowledged that a ‘forced’ birth child will think differently to it’s parents as the tie of the similar heredity pattern is lost. By the same token, it has been observed that an adopted child will have close ties astrologically speaking, to the adopting parents. In circumstances such as these I believe, synchronicity makes its greatest case.

So, the Gauquelins’ finding does not speak to the issue of astrological charts in general. If future research fails to find an effect of the circumstances of birth on the validity of the birth chart, then the reason for the child’s absorption of the character of the time of birth will not be able to be accounted for by destiny.

A misconception of many non-astrologers (those ignorant of the precepts of astrology) is that the principles of astrology can’t be validated because we view the chart in geocentric fashion. This is an argument that never seems to have occurred to poor old Copernicus, who ardently practiced astrology. Heliocentric versus geocentric is simply a method of calculation, and it is easy to postulate astral forces indifferent to the current interpretation of orbital mechanics.

A force exerts the same influence whether the position of the body exerting it was calculated using Ptolemaic, Copernican, Keplerian, Newtonian or Einsteinian orbital mechanics. And, of course, astrology was originally practiced using observation, before astronomy was sufficiently advanced to allow highly accurate prediction of the positions of the planets. So the ancient theories about the relation of Earth to other bodies in the solar system had no effect on the estimates of bodily positions used by the astrologers of the time.

Regardless of what one views as the "centre of the Universe," the positions of celestial bodies relative to a person are obviously the only positions relevant when considering any possible effects of those bodies on the person (e.g., any influences that might pertain to astrological phenomena).

The whole concept of a centre of the Universe seems meaningless until it is proven that the Universe actually has edges – and current scientific thought is that if it indeed has, it is in fact expanding. And astrologers’ use of geocentric coordinates certainly does not imply that they think the Earth is at the centre of the Universe! But the horoscope is constructed in such a way as to show the planetary energies affecting us as represented by the centre of the chart wheel at any one point in time –i.e. what (whatever ‘it’ is) is focussed on us! By analogy, a physicist can compute the gravitational effect of Earth on our Sun without adopting the belief that the Sun orbits the Earth.

If there ever is a cause advanced for astrological effects, it may well not involve gravity.

All sorts of sciences are based on empirical evidence alone, with no explanatory theories available. Genetics was accepted as part of science before the discovery of DNA, and, even now, the complete mapping from genetic factors to amino acids is far from complete. In psychology, the principles that govern the organisation of vision and audition (i.e., that determine the boundaries and content of separate "figures," "objects," or "streams" of sound) are well established, but researchers have no idea why perceptual processes follow these particular principles.

Vast areas of sciences that do provide causal explanations make specific predictions that cannot be derived directly from the believed cause but are based on empirical evidence and descriptive theories that capture the structures inherent in the data. Tide tables, for example, are calculated empirically. Although physicists know enough about the relevant physical processes to make it plausible that there should be two tides a day, even though the earth revolves only once a day, mathematical formulae directly relating this cause to the observed tides do not exist.

To tread but briefly on philosophical ground, the notion of causality itself is not well grounded, and is considered by many to be a function of human perception rather than a property of the Universe. (See, for example, David Hume in "A Treatise of Human Nature" and Immanuel Kant in "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics").

As the empiricist Hume discovered, humans make an attribution of "causality" when they have certain types of perceptual experience (e.g., when A is perceived to precede B in time, B is always perceived to be preceded by A, and so on, then A is perceived to "cause" B).

This of course is linear thinking. But who says that all forces have to behave in linear motion?. All one needs to do is look at the ideas of the emergent scientific fields of non-linear dynamics, chaos theory and fractal geometry. What a Pandora’s box these principles have opened for physics!! In fact it is here that we find physicists speaking in terms of the Eastern mystics!

The famous psychologist Albert Michotte did many studies in which he examined the factors that give rise to the impression of causality (see "La Perception de la Causalite," 1946, or the English translation, "The Perception of Causality," 1963). He showed, for example, that animated dots on a screen are perceived to be involved in a causal interaction, with one dot "causing" movement in another, when the timing relations of their movements and the relative direction of their movements fall within a certain range. (Of course no "causal relation" was ever actually present, since the movement was due to animation.)

Even so pragmatic a scientist as Sir Isaac Newton (another astrologer) argued that an appeal to cause is unnecessary because the type of laws he discovered, which are purely descriptive in nature (e.g., the relation f=m*a among the theoretical constructs force, mass, and acceleration), are sufficiently powerful to predict events and account for all the available data.

He believed that physical theories are what the physicist Pierre Duhem called "the economic condensation of phenomena" (see "The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory"):

"To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an
occult specific quality by which it acts and produces
manifest effects, is to tell us nothing; but to derive two
or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and
afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all
corporeal things follow from those manifest principles,
would be a very great step in philosophy, though the causes
of those principles were not yet discovered; and therefore I
scruple not to propose the principles of motion above
mentioned, they being of very large extent, and leave their
causes to be found out." (Optics, Query XXXI at the end of the second edition.)

So the descriptive theories of astrology, the relations that have been discovered and exploited over a period of thousands of years, may not lend themselves to an explanation in terms of causes any more than Newton’s laws of motion do. The human mind seeks "causes" (at least in the West), but Nature herself may be indifferent to them. The Eastern and Hermetic visions of a harmonious Universe with all its interconnected parts dancing in unison may be more in line with the reality of the situation.

It is impossible to rule out astrological phenomena on a priori grounds.

Current understanding in scientific circles does not shape the actual structure of the Universe. Science involves research. No mere mortal is omniscient, and so none can predict infallibly which effects would show up in research and which would not. What is currently known is not all that will ever be known. It is a mistake to buy into the current way of thinking as if it was an accurate and complete picture of the Universe.

Dogma as it always has been, is antithetical to true science, which is open minded, questing knowledge.

A priori arguments are not the final word in science, which was designed, after all, as a means of discerning nature’s secrets by actually observing and examining her, as opposed to just thinking about it the way Aristotle and Descartes did.

Astrology is simply the observations of astrologers over the centuries as applied to the celestial relationships or ‘aspects’ as viewed from a particular position on earth at a particular time, and the correlated effects that appear to coincide with these aspects.

We have never pretended to understand the actual forces at work, but it would be nice to know wouldn’t it?.

As with most areas of inquiry, the correct explanatory theory to account for the structure of the descriptive theory of astrology awaits its discoverer.

In the near future it is expected that science will define, validate and dissect the actual forces at work in these observations, but until then we will just continue to observe and refer to them as planetary influences or energies.