Astrology News Service » precession Tue, 10 Mar 2015 20:15:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Eight Things Skeptics of Astrology Don’t Get Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:31:55 +0000 Astrology is an incredibly ancient art, but there is at least one method of seeking The Truth that is older: doubting things. As long as there has been astrology, there have been those who didn’t (or didn’t want to) believe that it works, or could work, or could in fact have any usefulness whatsoever. For about that same amount of time, astrologers have faced most of the same objections repackaged into different forms.

If you are a person who uses astrology to make your life a better, happier, and more meaningful place… or even if you’re just open to the idea… take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the most common arguments skeptics use when they try to poke holes in it. Then, next time someone tries to make you feel foolish about it; you’ll be able to provoke some real thought.



When astrologers refer to “Signs,” they are actually referring to a system that divides the sky into 12 equal sections that do in fact roughly correspond with 12 constellations, which is where those Signs get their names. But the Signs are not entirely dependent on those constellations. If that were the case, “Pisces” would take up a much larger chunk of the calendar than “Cancer,” which (visually) is a much smaller constellation. This also covers the whole argument about how The Signs keep moving over time against the backdrop of the stars — which is called “precession” — thus if you’re a Taurus you’re “really” an Aries.

THE RESPONSE: “Take a pill.”


THE OBJECTION: “How can 1/12th of the people on Earth all be having exactly the same kind of day?
THE RESPONSE: “Obviously, they aren’t.”

“Sun Signs” are the great double-edged sword of modern astrology. On the one hand, everyone knows their birthday and can look up their “Sign,” and can see certain personality traits of that Sign that line up with their own. Astrology, like humans, is a lot more complex than just that. Most people get into astrology because a birthday is easy to look up… but how many people know how to find their Moon Sign or Mars Sign or Jupiter Sign, which all have a bearing on your life and personality too?

If your parents were alcoholics, that doesn’t mean you automatically become one too. If your first business went bankrupt, it doesn’t mean subsequent ventures will fail too. And if you’re a Scorpio, no… you’re not always seeking revenge against someone.

THE OBJECTION: “Astrologers are just making money off of the gullible!”
THE RESPONSE: “Got any stock tips?”

The argument that something is a scam just because someone makes money off of it is an interesting one. In fact it can be used to dismiss the validity of pretty much anything a person can make a living at. “Drugs don’t work — pharmaceutical companies are just exploiting the fears of the sick!” “I’m still depressed — psychiatry is a scam!” “It rained at the company picnic… meteorology is a fraud!” and “I pay my investment adviser plenty, and I’m STILL not a billionaire!” all come immediately to mind.

Okay: maybe there’s some validity to that last argument. Long term stock predictions have been demonstrated time and again to usually be about as accurate as throwing darts at the Stock market page and choosing your investments that way. Also: believe me, there are a LOT of ways to make a living that pay better than being an astrologer… like being an investment adviser, for example.

THE OBJECTION: “Other planets have been discovered since Astrology began, so how can that old Astrology still be accurate?”
THE RESPONSE: “I have a bone to pick with you.”

This is one of my favorite objections to Astrology, because it’s one of the most fun to pick apart. Long before medicine determined how cells differentiate into different body parts, medicine still managed to figure out that there are different body parts. Yes, (shockingly!) thousands of years ago healers could tell the difference between a broken fibula and an infected wound, and they knew which one to put in a splint and which one to plaster herbs on. This, despite not having college dark degrees. Likewise, the roles of the Sun and the Moon in the birth chart remain the same, even though we now have Uranus and Neptune to work with.

THE OBJECTION: “Where’s your proof that Astrology works?”

Astrology has been used successfully for thousands of years, and it’s only relatively recently that it has fallen so out of favor with the intelligentsia. Of course, science is an incredibly good and useful thing… but it’s not every idea that gets sufficient funding to properly test and experiment upon. Also: a lot of ideas that mainstream science “believes” in have not been demonstrated properly yet anyway. Billions of dollars in research salaries and scientific instruments have gone into finding out what “dark matter” is — the mysterious force/substance that explains how much of the Universe appears to work — and yet so far we haven’t found any. That doesn’t mean the Physics Department of your local University is filled with con artists.

THE OBJECTION: “Isn’t Astrology just another form of bigotry?”
THE RESPONSE: “Sure… if you’re a bigot.”

Yes, there are people out there who will say things like “don’t date him, he’s an Aquarius and they’re unfaithful” or “I’d never hire a Gemini because they’re too scattered” or “don’t get a dog unless it’s a Virgo, otherwise it’ll be too messy” and so on. That sort of thing isn’t astrology’s fault… it’s how people use it to back up their own biases. The same impulses that make people look down their nose at others based on ethnicity or religion or handedness or belief in astrology or whatever can just as easily be twisted around into astrological terms. Having said that: Yes, Virgo dogs are usually fairly easy to housebreak, in my experience.

THE OBJECTION: “Astrology is nonsense, and people only believe in it because they want to believe in it.”
THE RESPONSE: “It’s fun to take your dogma for a walk, isn’t it?”

When in doubt, skeptics love to invoke what they call “Confirmation Bias” to dismiss astrology. Confirmation Bias is the idea that you will tend to see things that agree with what you think, and therefore what you think will just be re-enforced, whether it’s correct or not. If you believe that left handed accountants are all crooks, and you read a news story about a left-handed accountant who was convicted of fraud, you’ll say “Aha!” and remember that story for ages. Of course, you won’t particularly notice or remember it when a right-handed accountant is charged with fraud… and more importantly, you probably won’t notice that most accountants (regardless of handedness) are reasonably honest people.

That’s how Confirmation Bias works. In fact, it’s such an easy trap to fall into that many skeptics do that themselves, repeating the same tired and unexamined objections to astrology to themselves and others without ever doing any deeper digging.

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Astrological Historian Assails 2012 Media Hype Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:00:28 +0000 For the past several years legions of self-appointed, non-native Maya prophets have been promoting the idea that the “Mayan Calendar,” a prophetic calendar from ancient Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, points to the Christian year 2012 as a time of reckoning. The assertions of these prophets have gotten media attention and the message is scaring people.

In fact, we’re talking about an onslaught of visionary madness. A search on pulls up over 500 books dealing with 2012, most of them predicting “the transformation of consciousness,” “Earth changes,” arrival of “space brothers” and the start of a New Age. Some compare our time to the last days of Atlantis. Talk show hosts on radio and television, who are mostly ignorant of the subject, assist in the transmission of these idealistic and doomsday messages allowing distorted, incomplete and uninformed ideas to further percolate through our culture.

On the cusp of December 21, 2012, what we’ve got is a prognosticatory free-for-all – an undisciplined, wishful-thinking, fear-driven rant fueling the declining book business and spicing up talk shows. So maybe it’s good for the economy? The truth is, however, Mayan Calendar 2012 subject matter is complicated and few have the patience to wade through it – a recipe for unfounded opinions. If you’ve gotten this far, and you are curious about 2012, get ready to focus your mind on some details.

Here are the Facts…

The name “Mayan Calendar” is popularly used to describe a symbolic time-count developed and employed by the ancient Maya of Mesoamerica.(1) Archaeologists call it the “Long Count.” It is a block of time 5,125 years in length – one end anchored in 3114 B.C.E and the other in 2012 C.E. I have argued in my writings that the Long Count is actually a kind of astrology created roughly 2,000 years ago by the ancient Maya of Mesoamerica.

The Long Count has some important divisions. It is composed of 260 katuns, each of which contain 7,200 days.(2) This length of time, 19.71 years, is very close to the average Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle of 19.86 years. We know from inscriptions on ruins that Maya astronomer/astrologers followed the movements of these planets and appear to have used this information to schedule important cultural and dynastic events. I suspect that the Maya saw the katun as the perfect expression in time of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle – a block of days that was aesthetically and numerologically more balanced than 7,254. Western cultures do the same sort of thing by using 7 days in a week to measure the quarters of the Moon, or 360 degrees to track the Sun’s annual cycle of 365.24 days.

It’s all about Earth cycles. After rotation on its axis, and revolution around the Sun, the Earth’s third fundamental motion is the wobble of its axis called axial precession. The Long Count multiplied by five is very close to the 25,800-year average cycle of precession measured by Western astronomers from the equinoxes. If we then take a modest intuitive leap, we see the Long Count as a calendar of precession, a way of tracking this very, very long Earth cycle. It is a complete block of time in itself, but is also one-fifth of the full cycle. Cycles can’t be relative: they must be anchored to something stable. The starting and ending point of the full precession cycle as measured by the Long Count, appears to be the precession of the winter solstice Sun across the Milky Way – but this crossing takes roughly a thousand years.

To get more precise, this passage of the winter solstice Sun can be more narrowly focused on the crossing of the galactic equator (approximate midpoint) which occurred in 1998, the tangent to the dark rift in the Milky Way (~2012 +/– decades at least) or the transit over the ecliptic position of the galactic center (a couple centuries from now). See how much is uncertain here? I would identify this as a serious, unresolved timing problem, central to the basic thesis of 2012 as an end-date.

Intriguingly, Mesoamerican cosmology talks of five creations, this concept recorded graphically in the Piedra del Sol of the Aztecs which indicates the present creation is the fifth or last section of the full cycle. Using this fact, we could take another leap and say the end of the Long Count could be seen as the end of the precession cycle that began roughly 25,800 years ago. OK, what happened then, the last time the Mayan Calendar came around? I have read that it was around that time that humans used up all the easy-to-catch turtles for food and were forced to work harder for meals. But if that was really the case, it was most certainly something that didn’t happen in one day. All we can say for certain is that one precession cycle ago the Earth was deep in the grip of an 85,000 year long ice age that began to melt 5,000 years later.

Logic Of The Mayan Calendar

The logic of the Mayan Calendar is fairly straightforward in terms of just numbers. What I am adding to this is that the Long Count has both an astronomical and astrological basis. Not only does it appear to offer a figure for the length of the precession cycle, which was barely known in the West at roughly the same time the Maya were solving this problem, but it appears to be constructed from a string of idealized Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions called katuns, and we are now at the very end of the last of these 260 katuns. I want to emphasize that these proposed linkages to the Jupiter/Saturn cycle and precession, which link the calendar to real geocosmic phenomena, are currently academically questionable. I’ve made these leaps because I’ve studied astrology extensively and know it when I see it. Still, most archaeoastronomers haven’t done this yet, at least with any enthusiasm. So take it with a grain of salt.

If you gotten this far you now know that the “end of the Mayan calendar” in 2012 could be seen as both the end point of the current fifth part of the precessional cycle (the Long Count) and the terminal point of the entire precession cycle itself. This end-dating is where that cultural psychosis called millennialism and all the Earth-shaking prophecies come in. But what did the Maya have to say about this? The fact is that Maya prophecies for the end of the Long Count range from non-existent to a shred of pure obscurity. There really are, however, Maya prophecies for a section of the Long Count that is called the Short Count, but these don’t latch onto the year 2012 and they seem to be unknown to nearly all the published prophets.

Here’s all we have. A few years ago a badly weathered inscription was found at a minor Maya archaeological site that appears to link the end of the Long Count with the descent of an obscure Maya deity called Bolon Yokte. But not much more is clear, even who Bolon Yokte is in the Maya pantheon. Still, this minor discovery has been loudly touted as evidence that Maya were at least thinking about 2012 a long time ago.

So in the end, all we have for certain is a calendar end-date that we know with precision to be December 21, 2012. We can surmise that it may be linked to the precession of the winter solstice point through the approximate midpoint crossing of the Milky Way. We don’t know exactly what the Maya were intending in making this calendar, though we know the winter solstice Sun did cross the galactic equator in 1998. Finally, we don’t have much of an authentic Mayan prophecy to interpret so we are left with the creative imaginations of people who are dissatisfied with society and are looking outside of themselves for answers, justice and salvation. Not all writers on 2012 are in this category, but I think most of them are.(3)

Anyone Can Be A Prophet

Anybody paying attention these days can be a prophet. First of all, it’s obvious that humanity is at war with nature. We are fighting over increasingly scarce resources and degrading the Earth to such an extent that we have accelerated the natural cycles of climate change. Worse, many are in denial that humans are causing such problems. But the elephant in the parlor that is conveniently ignored is over-population. It seems people can’t really deal with reproductive issues (birth control, abortion, homosexuality, etc.) without emotional charge because we’re hard-wired like other animals to reach our biotic potential. Reproduction was crucial for 99% of our existence as a species but now it’s making things worse. So we are simultaneously over-consuming, over-populating and soiling our nest and surely we will pay the price over the course of the next century.

Anybody paying attention will also note that changes, both positive and negative, have already begun – at least for some people in some places.(4) It’s not that all of this is unprecedented, there are parallels with past crises – but never before has our planet been loaded up with this many domesticated primates! It just can’t go on for much longer the way it has been, so predicting either a new age or an Atlantis-like destruction is sort of a no-brainer. Predicting such events to occur right on 12.21.2012, which is most likely going to just be another Friday full of last minute Christmas shopping, is desperately audacious, however. Hopefully, enough smart folks will prevail and some kind of realistic accommodation with our Earth will be the outcome over several decades, visible in retrospect a century from now. As for visits from the space brothers, well, that’s a wild card. More likely we’ll find bacteria on Mars or Europa and finally know that we are not alone.


1. It should properly be called the Maya calendar according to convention, but it’s too late to change that now.

2. The Long Count appears to be a large-scale version of the 260-day astrological calendar of ancient Mesoamerica called the tzolkin. If you want to understand Mesoamerican astrology you should begin with the tzolkin.

3. If you wish to dig deeper into this subject in a balanced way, I recommend you consider the writings of both Anthony Aveni and John Major Jenkins.

4. The square of Pluto and Uranus, which has a long history of social disruption, is presently occurring and will be a factor for several years. This aspect, by itself, makes a strong case for major changes in culture and society. This is, of course, Western astrology and the coincidence with the end of the Long Count is just that, coincidence.

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