Mankind been searching for signs in celestial bodies for millennia, and though astrology is considered a load of old baloney by a good chunk of the population, it informed science right up until the Enlightenment of the 17th century when astrology and astronomy split.
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JAMIE CHRISTIAN DESPLACES
In his book, A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data, Alexander Boxer calls astrology “an undeniable power” that reveals “the surprising ways in which everything, and all of us, are connected to each other across time and space”.
Among the first to marry up the cosmos and the calendar were the farmers of Ancient Egypt who noted that the mid-summer rising of Sirius, the ‘Dog Star’, meant that the River Nile’s annual floods were imminent. And we can thank the Ancient Babylonians for advancing geometry and plotting the stars by way of sophisticated instruments such as the astrolabe which was adopted across classical Asian and European antiquity through to the Middle Ages.
As for projecting animal characteristics upon the stars and the effect they may have upon those born ‘under’ them, well, those origins are a little less clear.
“There’s some indication that cave art shows this idea that animals and things can be imbued with some kind of spirit form that then has an influence on you,” astronomer Sten Odenwald, director of Citizen Science at the NASA Space Science Education Consortium, tells Time. “And if you appease that spirit form, then you will have a successful hunt.”
What is clear is that forms of astrology were adopted across ancient civilisations across continents. Though the Ancient Babylonians had already split the zodiac into 12 equal signs assigned names such as The Lion and The Great Twins, it is the Ancient Greek model that survives today.
While western astrology follows the solar calendar, the Chinese zodiac is based on the lunar cycle, also with 12 animal signs each with their own traits, but with each one representing a year rather than a month.
Step forward primal astrology which merges western and eastern astrology – and the 144 possible personality combinations – into one manageable chart: the primal zodiac whose animals include the orca, the Komodo dragon, and even the tyrannosaurus rex.
It all began with the Primal Astrology website (primalastrology.com), which was founded in 2012 by Catholic school worker, tarot card reader, and self-confessed astrology nerd, ‘Simon Poindexter’ (not his real name), following three “miserable” years of work collating all of those traits and assigning them to what he believed to be the most relevant creatures. What started off as a labour of love with less than 300 total monthly visits, ballooned to 55,658 monthly visits within a year. Now the site gets around 150,000 clicks per month.
“I used to kind of be embarrassed about it,” Simon tells Vice. “… I finally told my old coworkers, and they were all just like, ‘that makes no sense’.” As to why he did it, the astrologer says that he believes that it was simply something “life wanted me to do”: “My number one thing is, always, anything I do, I want it to be timeless. I want everything I do, if I’m putting that much work into it, to be relevant 20 years from now.”
Though many of his friends were bemused by his project, Simon says that the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with people seemingly “seeing themselves” in the descriptions that he has created.
Even though astrology of any kind isn’t based on scientific study, Sten Odenwald argues that the reason it continues to fascinate is because of a psychological phenomenon known as “self-selection” which means people search for interpretations that line up with what we hope to be true. We magnify the positives, and forget about the negatives, he says, because it’s “just how we’re designed”.
It reminds me of a social science experiment we once did at school involving handwriting analyses. We were all asked to write some text to be sent off and the following week we each received our results in individually sealed envelopes. I can still remember the audible astonishment as we each read assessments of our personalities so accurate it was as if the author had climbed inside our heads. As we all looked at each other in wide-eyed wonder, the teacher asked us all to pass our notes to the left.
We’d all been given exactly the same text.
Maybe we’re not so different after all, and there’s something just as magical about that, too.
