Astrology

Astrology.  Wow, didn't think I would be making a post about this.  But, I met this girl who mentioned it all the time.  I mean, ALL the time, &, well, you know how that goes.  It gets you wondering.

She said I was a Virgo, & that I can agree with even though I never really gave astrology even lip service.  I mean, I'm sort of a skeptic on most things.

Sure, I believe that Allen Dulles had JFK killed, but he was the boogie man anyway & besides, the House Select Committee on Assassinations ruled that Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy, Jim Garrison seemed to make fairly good points, & unless Magneto shot from the book depository that whole "Magic Bullet" theory sounds like, well, magic.

I never really believed in magic.  Slight of hand & illusions I totally believe in, but not magic.

That's really about it.  I mean, yeah, I believe in extraterrestrial life, but that's me just playing the odds.  There's a lot of shit out there & to gamble against it seems like I'd be just throwing my money away...long after I'm dead.

The long after I'm dead is sort of important to.  My belief in Little Green Men only goes so far.  Area 51?  Yeah, I believe that it is a secret military base, but that's about it.  Do I believe in the Area 51 Roswell Aliens?  Of course not.  But that's the playing the odds as well.

The 9-11 Conspiracy?  Not a chance.  What you are asking me there is to believe that the thousands of people that had to be involved to pull it off didn't leak a Goddamned thing to the press, to Wikileaks, to the American public.

Sorry, I'm not about to believe that.  Unless E. Howard Hunt comes out on his death bed & says he was one of the thousands of hobos that wired one of the twin towers with explosives without anyone noticing I'm going to continue to play the Bull Shit card on that one.

This is Hunt by the way.

And this is a book he wrote about spies, neat, huh?

I'm thinking that he was really this guy:

You know, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Cancer Man.

I'm not a Cancer.

I'm a Virgo.

My Zodiac sign is a Virgo & this girl I met said I was a "total Virgo."

I never believed that crap.  But she said that I was a Virgo because I was neat, analytical, & skeptical.  We all know I'm not any of those things. 

My mother would NEVER call me neat...but then she sort of wanted her house to be like a museum & even measured the inches of trinkets she put on the mantel to make sure they were all even.  She wanted the beds made with a military tuck & wanted the lines on the carpet from the vacuum cleaner to be straight as an arrow.

Mom would NEVER call me neat...normal people might.  At least if they saw where I lived.  If they saw the inside of my car on the other hand....

Skeptical?  OK, maybe there is a point there.  I might be a little skeptical & a little analytical, a little over-analytical.

I might be over-analytical enough to have met a woman that constantly referenced Astrology & felt the need to take the time to read about it & over-analyze it.

But hey, that's what this blog is all about, right?  I mean you are reading it because I over-analyze history, with a skeptical eye, try to bring it back to the present, or just rip the shit out of it & turn it into a joke.

Not that many people today understand the concept of "Joke."

Especially when it's political.

And we have Laura to thank for that, you know, the woman that said "write a blog about history for people that don't like history."

The blog thing, not the joke thing.  Well, not the "I don't understand humor thing" &...fuck it...moving on.

So, what the fuck is astrology, what the fuck is the zodiac & why the fuck does it matter?

Well, it matters because I listened to Shantel & thought "you might have a point; that does seem to match my personality."  Unless she, you know, talked to my parents.

And, if you are like me, you think of Astrology as that little section of the news paper, well, if you are like me, you think of it as the little section on The Onion & really not much more...until now.

So, you know, let's learn some shit!

What is astrology?  It's essentially divination, you know, that class that Harry Potter hated & no one took seriously despite the fact that the Professor was really sort of right most of the time.

Harry Potter really is a good place to start, because that shit was taken seriously in politics & Academia up to the Age of Enlightenment.

So you know, you could go to fucking Oxford & actually walk out with a degree in Astrology & people would legitimately take it seriously.

"Wait, you're an astrologist? You must be a learned man."

There was an actual market for it to.  There were jobs in the Astrology field.  Back in the day it was serious shit.  You could make a living off of Astrology, up until the 17th century & people would respect you.

It's not like, you know, education & political science is today.  It wasn't a major that people laughed at.  It wasn't a major you would NEVER find a job in.

"Wait, you have a masters in secondary education?    What are you going to do with that?  Go to a school?  Teach history to kids?  Good luck with that, idiot, you should have majored in something useful, like Astrology."

The Indians (dots not feathers), the Chinese, the Mayans, & yes, the Europeans all had their own take on Astrology & all took it deadly seriously.  Deadly seriously.  They took it business degree seriously, not education degree seriously.

It started in Mesopotamia, which looked exactly like this:

That is, unless you believe in Indian, Mayan, or Chinese Astrology, then it was still the meaning of celestial bodies but, you know, completely different.

If you were an Indian Astrologist you thought Babylonian astrology was utter bullshit.

But in any case, it goes back 25,000 years to the cavemen.  They actually painted that shit on walls.  They carved it into bones.  They kept track of the movements in the sky.

They aren't keeping track of the night sky in this image, they are just making a fire...but I figured you needed another picture.

But it wasn't consistent.  The cult of the Cave Bear thought that what the Flintstones were tracking in the night sky was absolutely meaningless.

And the Zodiacs were totally different too.

NO THEY WEREN'T, I'M A LIBERTARIAN AND I SAW ZEITGEIST & THAT SHIT IS TOTALLY 100% ACCURATE!  THEY ALL USED EXACTLY THE SAME SIGNS & THERE WERE ONLY ALWAYS 12!!!!!

1) Aries

2) Ford Taurus

3) Gemini

4) Cancer

5) Leo

6) Virgo

7) Libra

8) Scorpio (of Simpsons fame)

9) Sagittarius

10) Capricorn (The Mini-series)

11) Aquarius

12) Pisces

 

The thing is that, back in the day, back when Astrology was a class & a major offered at predominate educational institutes the world over, there were a fuck-ton more than just 12 signs. 

You could see a fuck-ton more stars then & it was only over the ages & with the dawn of the Enlightenment that the WESTERN Zodiac was limited to only 12 signs, each for the month of the year & published daily in news papers written to be vague so it could apply to everyone.

STOP!

Is it night time?  Walk outside & take a look at the night sky.

If you live where I am, in Chicago, you can see exactly three stars. 

If you live in the country you can see a few thousand more.

Goddamned Light Pollution!

If you are out in the middle of the ocean, in that sweet spot where the curve of the Earth sort of hides all the light, you can see billions.

BILLIONS.  
                 I counted.
                      Took me an entire week of nonstop counting.

Don't forget that the Milky Way was so bright that the ancient people of this world used to build their roads sort of along it so all the stars could light your path at night.

There were that many fucking visible stars before technology.

And you think that there were only 12 Zodiac signs?  Seriously?

The ones that survived the great purge of the Enlightenment are the ones with the best mythology behind them...in the West.

Leo the Lion, for instance, used to be a snake...& a Lion...depending on which Western Mythology you associated with & then the meanings were completely different as well.

In another hundred years, Leo will be a turtle & look exactly like this:

And, after they redefined the constellation boundaries in the 1930s, there became exactly 13 Zodiac signs, according to the modern science of Astrology, but we only name 12 still.

We totally ignore Ophiuchus...because no one can pronounce it.

Fuck you Ptolemy!  We don't want your weird Zodiac sign!  There currently aren't enough months in the year!

Because back in the day, when the Romans were teaching Astrology, December was the 10th month & about 3 months long with its own singular sign.

It's sort of hard to have 12 Zodiac signs, one for each month of the year when the whole 12 month thing is a recent development.

December sort of just meant "winter."  No, actually it meant "ten," but you get the point, the months weren't the same....

And now we live under the whims of a solar calendar & for a long time it was a lunar calendar & are you starting to see the point?

Am I a Virgo?  

Yes, I've been a Virgo since the  Julian & Gregorian Calendars.  Pretty much since 1582 because, sure, September was the 9th month of the Julian calendar, but there were 13 months then...Occasionally, & there were a lot more months with only 29 days &...

                            Mercedonius?

What the fuck is that?

If you are Hindu, sure, with the modern age their astrology shrunk down to 12 as well, but, then, they do this weird thing with the moon & planetary orbits to do the horoscopes in the daily papers & not just the stars & have odd names that are about 10,000 years-old or only 5,000-3,000 years-old depending on which historian you believe.

But, that Libertarian conspiracy theory bull shit movie was right, their 12 signs of the Zodiac are roughly the same as our 12 are...at least they have been since Alexander the Great.

Before that, well, we already talked about how Leo went from a snake to a lion & that's pretty impressive given that one is a reptile & the other is a mammal.  

Mammals have nipples. 

Reptiles might too, I'm not sure.

In Chinese astrology there is wood, fire, earth, metal, & water.

That sort of blows the shit out of the claim that all Astrology is the same & has something to do with Jesus & Isis & a vast inter-governmental conspiracy that goes all the way back to when the Death Star destroyed the Twin Towers when E. Howard Hunt was dressed like a bum.

Full circle...& you thought I was just ranting.  Yeah, I've watched that pseudo-documentary too.

In fact the Chinese also take into account the year you were born in their astrology.

I'm a goat.

When I was a kid my elementary school teacher said the Chinese thought I was a rat.

That really doesn't fit my personality.

BUT NOT A SNITCH!!!!!

I just like to hear Pacino yell...& Sam Jackson.  They are sort of the same actor aren't they, or at least we like them for the same reasons.

Nope, not a snitch.

I can hear something & take it to the grave...unless, you know, unless it's funny.  If it's funny, everyone is hearing that shit.

The Chinese Zodiac ranges from rat to pig & looks exactly like this:

Catholics & Muslims denied the whole astrology thing because they didn't believe that the will of God could be predicted in advance.

John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced it because his ass was certain that everything was per-determined & astrology was sort of the academic proof of that.  But then, he thought you were going to heaven if you were rich because wealth meant that God favored you in the present & that meant that you could do any horrible shit you wanted to, & still go to heaven, because God already determined that he would let you in & made you act like an asshole.

If you were poor you were fucked.

So Astrology sort of had a huge come back when he took off & that's why it's alive again.

Only, by then, well, the calendar changed & we only had 12 to work with.

Even then, however, it was inconsistent.  It is still inconsistent.  Astrologers don't agree with how their science works & one culture still is totally different than the other.  

Chinese, Mayan, Hindu, Western?

Well, we can fuck the Mayans, the Christians sort of destroyed their astronomical Astrological writings & we're still here after the world ended in 2012 aren't we?  Yeah, that's what happens when you judge evidence from only half the text.

So what's the point?

There is no point this time.  

If you want to take something away from all of this it's read the Onion's horoscopes.  Trust in the Onion.  Their Horoscope is ALWAYS 100% accurate,  or, at least, it's as accurate as all the others.  Or maybe as scientific as all the others.

I'll leave you with this: