Astrology: It’s An “Academic Study”
11 03 2007Mmm. Discuss.
Unexplained Mysteries :: Astrology: Setting the record straight:
“Astrology is not a belief or a religion, but an academic study, an astrologer at a National Council for Geocosmic Research conference said Thursday.”
While I would agree that astrology can be studied academically I’m not sure if I would go so far as to say that it is actually seen as an academic study by the vast majority of practicing astrologers in the world today. There are a lot of astrologers that want astrology to be accepted by mainstream academia again at some point, but there is still this huge disparity between the actual practice, study and perception of astrology today and where it would need to be in order for that to be anywhere near possible. Some progress is being made at places like Kepler College and Bath Spa, but these fledgling movements towards academia only make up a small portion of the overall community, and the vast majority of astrologers generally seem to be generally uninterested in reforming astrology into more of an academic discipline. Perhaps this will change at some point, but in the meantime it would probably be more proper to say that astrology was a legitimate science at one point in time, and perhaps could still be classified as one depending on your definition, and that it is still worthy of serious academic study.
Chris. Many thanks for your comment. Perhaps astrology suffers at the hands of those who seek to trivialise it in the media. The “Mystic Meg” types, that kind of thing. Furthermore - is it possible for astrologers to prove the correlation between celestial events and earthly events? Surely that is the only way that scientists will come to accept astrology as worthy of serious study?
Yes, it suffers from a wide range of issues including the ‘mystic meg’ types and the general mischaracterization or over simplification of it in the media through the ‘Sun-sign’ columns, but there are a number of other issues as well that come from inside and outside of the astrological community. I do think that it is possible for astrologers to demonstrate that there is some sort of correlation between celestial and earthly events, but I think that the problem that we run into is that the majority of astrologers in the world aren’t necessarily interested in or equipped to go through the necessary steps in order to make astrology scientifically demonstrable, and the small groups of researchers that have had the necessary skills and have made the attempt such as Gauquelin, Ertel and Urban-Lurain have relied too much on applying what may be outmoded statistics models without even necessarily having the theoretical and practical principles of the astrology worked out in the first place. The truth is that astrology has been out of the western universities for a few hundred years now, and we are just now starting starting to catch up with with the intellectual and the academic communities over the past few decades by creating internal structures within the astrological community itself. Its slow going though.