Astrologers and Horoscopes

The process through which astrologers cast charts seems to be a mysterious one -- at least to the lay public. The arcane knowledge and the mathematical calculations required to construct a horoscope have made astrology the field of the professional rather than the amateur.

However, the time has come to divulge a trade secret of astrology: While there is certainly a body of knowledge required to create a horoscope -- and both intuition and intelligence are certainly called for -- the mathematical abilities required to construct a horoscope are in fact relatively minimal. The relative simplicity of the technical skills involved in creating a horoscope, and the benefits of personal, hand mathematical calculations over computer-derived ones have become increasingly important as an issue as more and more computer programs are developed to create horoscopes -- either for the professional astrologer or the lay person (Tanaka, 1995, p. 8).

To create a horoscope, an astrologer needs most importantly to be able to add, subtract, divide and multiply for two and four -- basic arithmetic skills that most of us acquired early in elementary schools.

Astrology also makes use of the constant logarithm, which represents the proportion of time and space a planet travels along its particular orbit. It is perhaps the fact that the word "logarithm" is used in conjunction with astrology that causes panic among astrologers, who are in general inclined toward verbal and away from mathematical skil

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gy and the creation of horoscopes it is useful to compile a brief history of the art form, which is an ancient practice that different civilizations seemed to develop independently. The Chaldeans, who lived in Babylonia, developed one of the original forms of astrology as early as 3000 BC. The Chinese were practicing astrology by 2000 BC. Other varieties formed in ancient India and among the Maya of Central America. These people may have observed that certain astronomical bodies, particularly the sun, affected the change of seasons and the success of crops. Based on such observations, they may have developed a broader system by which the movements of other bodies such as the planets affected or represented additional aspects of life By the 500s BC, astrology had spread to Greece, where such philosophers as Pythagoras and Plato incorporated it into their study of religion and astronomy. Astrology was widely practiced in Europe through the Middle Ages, despite the condemnation of such Christian leaders as Augustine (Geddes, 1980, p. 16). During all of these centuries of astrological work, the lack of computers was never considered to be a drawback, although certainly astrologers in the past relied on computational tables, even as as

Category: Arts - A