Star-signs!

[Thiudareiks Flavius]

In magazines it's just c**p. But the 'real' star signs do have a lot of meaning in your life.

Yeah, well maybe some Babylonian guys 3000 years ago who thought the earth was flat, the sky was a dome and the stars were gods might have stumbled across something that had 'real meaning' despite their primitive ignorance. Or maybe some people like to see 'meaning' that simply isn't there.

It's not widely known that astrology had dwindled to being a highly obscure subject in the West in the Nineteenth Century, to the point that if you asked most people what their star sign was in 1850, they wouldn't have been able to tell you. It was a newspaper editor in the US who almost single-handedly revived modern interest in astrology when he had a spare column to fill and so invented the newpaper astrology column.

Which is why we now have the rather bizarre situation where perfectly rational, well-educated 21st Century adults actually take astrology seriously, though if you suggested them practicing some other form of ancient Babylonian divination based on equally dubiuous and primitive ideas - like sacrificing a goat and looking at its entrails - they'd be disgusted and scornful.

As a science professor I know once said. 'It's not just that astrology is a stupid idea - there are a lot of stupid ideas around. It's more that of all the stupid ideas a person could possibly believe, astrology is one of THE most monumentally stupid.'

Or my nephew put it a little better. When he was about seven he heard a mention of astrology on TV. He turned to me and asked, 'Uncle Tim, what exactly is astrology?' So I gave him a five minute run-down, as neutrally as possible, to see what his reaction would be. He thought about what I'd said for a couple of seconds and said 'That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.'

Out of the mouths of babes ...