Astrology, as many of you will know, is the study of the motion and correspondence of the heavenly bodies (i.e. the planets, exoplanets and stars) with the human condition. For us to state with confidence that astrology originates — as academics believe — from the Babylonians, Chaldeans or Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in c. 3000 BC would likely be naive. Why? Because we’re still discovering new things from old stuff that completely changes academics previously stated (with confidence!) ‘truths’. For example, the “world’s oldest temple”, Gobekli Tepe, which archaeologists have excavated less than 5% of at the time of writing (2024), is believed to have been built between 9,600 BC and 8,200 BC. Megaliths predating Stonehenge by some 6,000 years! Why do I bring Gobekli Tepe into this? Because this large Neolithic site in the Germuş mountains of south-eastern Anatolia, Turkey, believed to have been built some 7000 years before academics believe astrology originated, contains carved depictions of astronomical and zodiacal symbols. My point is that we really have no idea when, where and from whom astrology originated from. Whether that’s Mesopotamia in the third millennia BC, Turkey in the tenth millennia BC or even from a lost ancient civilisation, as Graham Hancock famously (thanks to Netflix) believes.

Alas, Astrology has allured academic minds, from Rhetorius of ancient Greece to Isaac Newton, for centuries. To understand astrology is to submit to the divine metaphysics that underpins the individual and collective intrapersonal, interpersonal and cosmological context that each of our souls live in. Astrology at no point dismisses the concept of free will. We always have free will as individuals. Astrology is all around us individuals on this floating rock that we call Earth - it’s the context to the material realm that we so easily identify with and spend practically every second of our waking consciousness within. Context acts as a mere container for the sentient contents within that can do as it pleases. Whether you feel called to understand the context of your container and whether you act on it or not is the free will that has brought you here today, not Mars or Jupiter. Why do people feel drawn to context? Perhaps it’s related to the innate human need to fit in. Does that, then, make understanding astrology one of the many ways that one can align their free will to be in a state of harmony with the universe? Yes, I believe it does.

So, we now understand that astrology transcends the definition of ancient, but what about astrology in the modern day? There are two main astrological systems that astrologers in the modern day work with that both originate from Hellenistic astrology — attributed to Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer and astrologer living in Alexandria, Egypt — which we can thank the cross-pollination of cultures from the Mesopotamians to the Greeks for. The modern methods of astrology take into account more planetary bodies and celestial objects than astrology of the past did, such as planets that they couldn’t see with their naked eye, dwarf planets and even asteroids. The two main aforementioned astrological systems are the tropical system and the sidereal system. The tropical system orients itself toward the four seasons a.k.a. the equinoxes (the Point of Aries and Point of Libra) and solstices (the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn). Zodiac charts based on the tropical system are drawn per the sun’s reference to the horizon as seen from Earth. On the other hand, the sidereal system orients itself toward the positioning of the stars with its zodiac charts based on the sun’s reference to the constellations and its movement across the landscape of constellations. The latter system reflects what you see when you physically look up at the skies at a given point in time from a given geographic location. The tropical system is used in modern western astrology and the sidereal system is used in eastern (Vedic) astrology.