Message #33851

[Bianca]

What then comes of all this with regard to the nature of astrology? It is not a science, because it is not subject to the principle of empirical proof; its models are not susceptible to "falsification" [41], although they are so to a greater degree than that given in empiricist literature à la Popper. Astrology is not a religion, because it propounds no revealed doctrine nor indeed any specific body of belief, and requires neither clergy, temple nor ritual.

Neither is it a philosophy, i.e. a conceptualization of reality, which relativizes the value of a rationality for which the ultimate criterion of validity is physical evidence.

But at the same time, astrology is indeed a type of science, religion and philosophy; i.e., a conceptualization of reality which requires techniques of analysis borrowed from astronomy and which assumes a conviction of the existence of resonance and response between the rhythms of the geosolar environment and the psyche.

Astrology is a specific form of rationality which admits as a condition a priori the structural differentiation of an archetypal matrix. It has recourse neither to experimental reason, nor to faith, nor to discursive reason, but rather to matrix-based reason.

    It may occur to some that astrology seems like a religion, that it manifests as a kind of metaphysics, or might perhaps be a critical science in its essence, a "quasi-science." These perceptions arise by reason of astrology's triple nature [42] and because it has been thought of as a rival to philosophy, Christianity and science, for which reason it has been attacked successively by the Greek Skeptics, the Fathers of the Church, and by modern rationalism.

Indeed, the epistemological status of astrology has changed according to the standpoint of those who oppose it. For the Skeptics Carneades and Sextus Empiricus, astrology merits attack within a general critique of consciousness and knowledge, while the Christian apologists Tatian and Tertullian abominate it equally with Greek philosophy as polytheistic paganism.

The mechanist philosopher Pierre Gassendi, the Jesuits Jacques de Billy and Jean François, the Gassendist François Bernier, the historian Jean-Baptiste Thiers, the skeptic Pierre Bayle, or the Abbé Laurent Bordelon, who represent modern anti-astrological rationalism in France, all assign astrology to the domain of the irrational and the superstitious. [43]

The rise of mechanist monism marks the beginning of the development of modern rationality, an ideological conglomeration including emerging science, materialist philosophy and Christian religion, which is pursued even in contemporary historical exegesis. [44]

The verdict without trial passed on astrology occurs naturally and conjointly with the decline of metaphysics and spirituality under rationalist "enlightenment" and positivist obscurantism, or the grey dullness of thought particular to the 20th century.

In the span of four centuries, the perception of astrology's status has changed in step with transformations in consensus thought and ideological bents -- no longer error, but rather illusion in the 18th century, idiocy in the 19th, absurdity in the 20th.