The seductiveness of astrology

In the history of the Babylonic Society, for example, the terrible eighth century B.C., which saw the beginning of the hundred years' war between Babylonia and Assyria, seems also to have seen a sudden great advance in astronomical knowledge. In this age Babylonic men of science discovered that the rhythm of the cyclic recurrence, which had been patent from time immemorial in the alternations of day and night, in the waxing and waning of the Moon, and in the solar cycle of the year, was also discernible on a vaster scale in the motions of the planets. These stars, which were traditionally named 'the wanderers' in allusion to their apparently erratic courses, now proved to be bound by as strict a discipline as the Sun and the Moon and the 'fixed' stars of the firmament in the cosmic cycle of the magnus annus; and this exciting Babylonic discovery had much the same effect as our recent Western scientific discoveries have had upon the discoverers' conception of the Universe. 

The never broken and never varying order that had thus been found to reign in all the known movements of the stellar cosmos was now assumed to govern the Universe as a whole: material and spiritual, inanimate and animate. If an eclipse of the Sun or a transit of Venus could be dated to some precise moment hundreds of years back in the past, or predicted with equal certainty as bound to occur at some precise moment in the equally remote future, then was it not reasonable to assume that human affairs were just as rigidly fixed and just as accurately calculable? And since the cosmic discipline implied that all these members of the Universe that moved in so perfect a unison were 'in sympathy'--en rapport--with each other, was it unreasonable to assume that the newly revealed pattern of the movements of the stars was a key to the riddle of human fortunes, so that the observer who held this astronomical clue in his hands would be able to forecast his neighbor's destinies if once he knew the date and the moment of his births? Reasonable or not, these assumptions were eagerly made, and thus a sensational scientific discovery gave birth to a fallacious philosophy of determinism which has captivated the imagination of one society after another and is not quite discredited yet after a run of nearly 2,700 years. 

The seductiveness of astrology lies in its pretension to combine a theory which explains the whole machina mundi with a practice which will enable Tom, Dick and Harry to spot the Derby winner here and now. Thanks to this twofold attraction, the Babylonic philosophy was able to survive the extinction of the Babylonic Society in the last century before Christ; and the Chaldean mathematicus who imposed it upon a prostrate Hellenic Society was represented until yesterday by the Court Astrologer at Peking and the Munejjim BBashy at Istanbul. (pp. 429-430)

In Arnold Toynbee's 'A study of history, volume 1'