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My eight year old neice is displeased. Last Christmas I got her a mobil with all nine planets and since then she's found out that Pluto might not be one anymore - and she's not going to stand for it. Of course, that small icy ball out in the middle of nowhere doesn't care at all what we call it. But my question is this: Now that the International Astronomical Association has been debating what's a planet and what's not, how does that affect the practice of astrology?
Not so long ago, I was looking up my daily horoscope on Yahoo. Whoever their astrologer is, he really sucks. This guy gets real technical about which planet is going into which house and really obscure stuff like that and I don't think anybody cares. People just want to know if it's a good day to buy Pizza, or whatever your concern is. Anyways, this guy mentioned that the asteroid Vespa was doing something or other and I thought about that.
The ancients who invented astrology for sure did not know that there was a big hunk of rock out there named Vespa. Neither did they know about Pluto or Neptune of any of the other bodies out there that figure into modern day astrology. Were their astrological readings horribly off because they weren't correctly accounting for these unknown bodies? You'd think they'd have to be, wouldn't you?
The astronomy association is split on what should or should not be a planet. Right now it looks like if it's round, it orbits the sun, and it's not somebody else's moon it's going to be a planet. The problem is that they've since discovered other bodies that fit that definition and we could end up having as many as twelve or more planets. So, what it looks like they're going to do is come up with a category of second class planets which Pluto would be demoted to.
The new class of second class planets would be called Dwarf planets or perhaps planetoids. The term 'Pluton' has already been thrown around, but no astronomer much liked the idea except for the one who came up with it.
One of the new possible planets would be called Xena and is located out in the Oort Cloud and is larger than Pluto and it's moon Charon. I like that name because I really liked the show Xena Warrior Princess. Maybe the astronomer who named it did, too, I'm thinking. It turns out that there may, in fact, be many 'Xena's out there and who knows? There might be ones as big as the Earth or bigger. Why shouldn't there be? There would be no way to know since they'd probably only be affecting the orbits of other invisible planets that we also can't see.
Do astrologers have some similar association as the astronomical association? And how do these organizations affect each other? The astronomers don't believe that astrologers exist even though the astrologers were the orginal astronomers. I think the astronomers want to disassociate themselves from their roots on this one. But quite clearly the astrologers do asknowledge the astronomers as witnessed by my Yahoo astrologer. I think they want to cover themselves as much as possible with the stink of science, if they can.
It's always been a sore point between the two how exactly the planets or planetoids or dwarf planets or asteroids effect our daily lives. It's not gravity or magnetism or anything that's measurable, but nonetheless whether we like it or not, they still might. Just think about centrifugal force. Doesn't that exist because there is something far away and scientists are at a loss to explain that one?
The western practice of astrology posits that since some men way in the past thought that random collections of bright stars sort of looked like something to them, then that should affect your daily life thousands of years later. There are twelve signs that sort of correspond to the months since they weren't so good with calendars back then. So all of our fates are determined by the fact that the ancients were into various animals and obscure Greek mythological figures. Therefore - as an example - since my sign is Taurus the Bull I go around all day chewing my cud and leaving large smelly dumps in the fields that farmers step into. Or something like that.
China has a different set of animals or mythological creatures for their horoscope, but instead of months everybody has an animal assigned to his or her year. It just strikes me that this must be hell on elementary school teachers. Every year pretty much every child they have in their class is going to have the exact same sign and they are going to have a classroom full of rats or pigs and that's got to be a horrible discipline problem for them to deal with. And since the Chinese are living with a different set of astrological rules, how do the stars know whether you're Chinese or not?
See, it's all problematical. On occasion I sort of think it works even thought the reasons why seem to me to just be crap. I suppose, like everybody else, I remember the occasions when my daily horoscope is amazingly accurate and just forget when it's amazingly inaccurate.In the meantime, I'm going to continue to check my daily horoscope, just in case. But not at Yahoo, because that guy sucks. |
