It can be a fun conversation starter, but if you make your life out of that, then it gets ridiculous
Taken more seriously, they have serious social effects. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangala_Dosha
I expect the interest in "new age" religions or quasi-religious practices to go up as traditional religions move out of societies. My experience is that there is a part of the human being that requires religion and spirituality and they will find outlets to satiate their needs.
It should also be seen in context. Certain celestial bodies (moon and the sun) have a massive impact on your life on earth. It is easy to see why people would interpolate this to other celestial bodies.
I mean, yes, that's true.
But IMO it's not really at random. I don't think anyone would dump someone because that person is a Scorpio (unless they're absolute nuts). It's more like a conversation starter to let people open up and talk about their personality traits.
You bring up jokingly "ugh my ex was also a Leo... Leo are so dramatic yada yada" and you go "yeah I get it but I'm actually chill, maybe it's my Sagittarius ascendent" or something.
It sure beats talking about the weather in the small talk scale.
Yep. I'd be surprised if there's any!
Still a fun icebreaker.
I guess it is useful to know when someone can't entertain hypotheticals, make light conversation, lacks sensitivity about other's world view, and is allergic to beliefs which are not promoted by large organizations.
Not much of a model IMHO. You just give ultra general predictions for every sign such that everyone will go “that’s true” or “that actually happened” no matter who they are - unless they are really weird.
"I'm a Gemini which fits because I am X but unlike most Gemini I like Y" tells you X and Y about someone.
Saying "Gemini and Aeries shouldn't date because of..." isn't necessarily a conversation about whether any given individuals should date. It may instead actually be a conversation about whether people who conform to certain sets of traits should date.
Conversely, people who are very outspoken against astrology don't have as varied, dynamic and big social circles. Hence they'd not need a "social map", and they might even lack the social intelligence to realize that other people do.
Cui prodest? = Who profits?
Scams are useful to the person who makes money off them, too.
Don't forget that for some people, astrology has been a profession. In history and today.
I mean, this seems like a weird conclusion. People like believing in stuff, so they believe in stuff; arguably the nature of the stuff is irrelevant. Astrology is just one of thousands of religious/pseudo-religious systems. Romans preferred to do their divination through the study of entrails and birdwatching; must those also have been useful (except in the context of providing belief and ceremony)? (They did eventually kind of adopt astrology, but it was viewed as a suspect foreign practice at least until the early empire).
> Like the “flat earth model” is actually extremely useful if you don’t intend (can’t) travel significant distances - gives you a coordinate system
By the time anyone really had coordinate systems, educated people knew the world wasn't flat. There's this persistent belief that the world not being flat is a relatively new discovery (I think people confuse it with heliocentricity), but this isn't true. Modern flat-earth-ism is a creation of the 19th century, not a continuation of some traditional belief system.
I'll double down. Yes, I think all of these that have been practiced by large groups of people and demographics have had some utility of some kind. Their explanations for why they work may be completely wrong.
> divination through the study of entrails and birdwatching;
Note that this poster argued the value of astrology indirectly. It's not the stars, it's the value of thinking about personality.
One explanation of this is that entrails are a kind of canvas for a Rorschach test that allows the individual to examine their thoughts. Or perhaps just making time to examine the entrails gives them time to ponder in a quiet environment.
I'll give one more example which is divination rods, demonstrated to not be able to find water in controlled experiments. However, the current explanation for their usefulness is that it gives the user an opportunity to observe natural clues that suggest where water is.
Not a lot of people are emotionally invested in divination rods. It's safe to speak poorly of them and just suggest more direction tools. But in cases where many people derive meaning from it, I think it's best not to disparage.
Was newtonian physics a bad model? Yes it was inaccurate but it lead to soo many discoveries.
I kinda got into this rabbit whole of thinking myself when I was practicing some martial arts and the instructor was kinda into eastern spiritualism. Talking about channels and energies and all that kind of nonsense. But at some point I realized that I didn’t need to believe in the model for it to be useful, following the movements, practices and meditation did help me enormously and get me into better shape. And some of the explanations did have predictive power, even if I knew they were totally made up things.
Knowing lorents transformation and quantum mechanics does not invalidate the predictive power of newtonian physics for solving common everyday tasks, you just know that if you want to get deeper, you need a more accurate model.
Same with astrology, its a model, as others have said its value might not stem from its absolute predictive power, but the social interactions it generates.
People want to talk about personalities and astrology does offer a fun and whimsical way if going about it.
I’ve actually listened in to recordings of people going to see astrology “pros” and it’s remarkable how close what they were trying to do was to psychiatrists, just using different tools.
“Oh, you’re a bit self obsessed and have trouble from your childhood interaction with you parents! This is probably because of this planet doing this”
To laypeople who don’t understand psychology that might sound exactly the same as some scientific term / explanation…
Not saying its the same by any means, just that there is “some” value in the exchange for people, and calling things stupid and nonsense knida misses a lot of nuance.
I mean it does have an effect, if you spend the first months of your life outside in the sun, or hidden inside. And the parents also behave different in summer than in winter. But to conclude that every person born in december must be like this and that .. is frustrating to deal with.
How about blood types?
To my amazement, that theory matched extremely well the personalities of all my colleagues from high school and of a few other friends and relatives, whose blood type I knew, unlike the predictions of personality based on astrology, which did not seem to match the known people more often than by random chance.
I have no idea which was the origin of that variant of the "blood type personality theory", but it was something very different from what is described in the Wikipedia article.
For instance people with type B blood were not classified as "spontaneous and creative" as in the Wikipedia page, but IIRC, as people who become mature in thinking at a lower age than the others, who are better at independent work, who may be stubborn and less influenceable by the opinions of others, who may be more trustworthy, but more introverted, and who may be inclined to careers in technical domains or in scientific research, or to military careers.
Yeah that’s how string theory got do popular. It’s usefulness. (Replace string theory with any subject from the entirety of metaphysics pre-scientific revolution)
Snark aside, have you considered that astrology’s “usefulness” that allowed it to propagate was swindling people out of money? There’s a swindler in every main street and in every paper - that’s why it got popular.
I won't defend astrology's usefulness, but there's certainly centuries of subjective feelings about the subject to find in many libraries, if you care to. Usefulness as a subjective quality is orthogonal to any objective criticisms about the usefulness as a model.
Like the “flat earth model” is actually extremely useful if you don’t intend (can’t) travel significant distances - gives you a coordinate system, maps and ways to predict where you’re going to be tomorrow if you travel on foot/horse.
I think astrology used to be a good foundation for people to think about personality types (psychology) in isolation and more importantly how they interact with one another.
By slotting people into 12 “categories” you could start to theorise which personality type “jells well” or “vibes” with which.
The time of birth can also correlate loosely with personality. Like the famous finding that successful atheletes usually have birthdays at the beginning of the year, because of practicalities of how our athletics programs are structured.
Anyway, I don’t disparage people for talking about astrology, liking to ask people what do somebody “is like” if they were born at a different time, leads to some fun discussions.