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Astrology is a pseudoscience that claims to be able to divine information about human lives and world events by studying the movements and positions of celestial objects such as stars and planets. It originated in ancient Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and was also practiced in other ancient cultures like India, China, and Mesoamerica. While astrology was once considered an academic discipline, modern scientific understanding has found it has no validity or explanatory power, and it is now recognized as a pseudoscience.

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50 views1 page

As 1

Astrology is a pseudoscience that claims to be able to divine information about human lives and world events by studying the movements and positions of celestial objects such as stars and planets. It originated in ancient Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and was also practiced in other ancient cultures like India, China, and Mesoamerica. While astrology was once considered an academic discipline, modern scientific understanding has found it has no validity or explanatory power, and it is now recognized as a pseudoscience.

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ammu
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Astrology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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This article is about the pseudoscience associated with celestial objects. For
other uses, see Astrology (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with astronomy, the scientific study of celestial objects.
Astrology is a pseudoscience that claims to divine information about human
affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions
of celestial objects.[1][2][3][4] Astrology has been dated to at least the 2nd
millennium BCE, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict
seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine
communications.[5] Many cultures have attached importance to astronomical
events, and some—such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya—developed
elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial
observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in
use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it
spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Arab world and
eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is
often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a
person's personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the
positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on
such systems.[6]:83
Throughout most of its history, astrology was considered a scholarly tradition
and was common in academic circles, often in close relation
with astronomy, alchemy, meteorology, and medicine.[7] It was present in
political circles and is mentioned in various works of literature, from Dante
Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega,
and Calderón de la Barca. Following the end of the 19th century and the wide-
scale adoption of the scientific method, researchers have successfully
challenged astrology on both theoretical[8]:249;[9] and experimental grounds,[10]
[11]
 and have shown it to have no scientific validity or explanatory power.
[6]
 Astrology thus lost its academic and theoretical standing, and common belief
in it has largely declined.[12] While polls have demonstrated that approximately
one quarter of American, British, and Canadian people say they continue to
believe that star- and planet-positions affect their lives,[13] astrology is now
recognized as a pseudoscience[14][15] — a belief which its advocates incorrectly
present as scientific.[4][16][17][18]

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