Your Horoscope Started In Ancient Babylon

The Babylonians recorded celestial phenomena from the early second millennium BCE, producing some of the earliest surviving records of astrology. A complete system of omen-based astrology emerged later, yet in every variation, the basic premise was that the movements of the planets and eclipses corresponded to events in human life and natural disasters.

I’ve overheard some discussion about how astrology is totally distinct from religion, and I’ve heard some of my religious friends aren’t super keen on astrology. But Babylonian astrology arose out of religion. In Babylon’s creation epic, the god Marduk, also known as Bel, organizes the heavens and gives the planets their positions. As the patron god of Babylon, Marduk was very significant in Babylonian astral religion.

Since Marduk was the chief god of Babylon, Babylonian astronomers equated the planet Jupiter with Marduk. Since Jupiter was bright enough to be easily seen, the Babylonians closely watched its movements for omens associated with Marduk.

In the late fifth century BCE, which historian Mathieu Ossendrijver has described as the “zodiacal turn”, the Babylonians split up the heavens into twelve sectors of thirty degrees apiece. Each sector was given the name of a constellation that traverses the path of the ecliptic. This was the foundational idea of the zodiac as we know it today.

The 12 signs we know today aren’t the originals. The Babylonians initially counted 17 or 18 constellations in a star list of objects along the moon’s path. By the 5th century BCE, however, they had whittled them down to 12 constellations, which became the standard 12 equal zodiacal signs.

So now I no longer pretend I’m finding star pictures of the zodiac, and I breathed a sigh of relief on learning that zodiacal signs are not mere star constellations. The zodiac is essentially a mathematical construct, historian Mathieu Ossendrijver explains: a calculated strip of the ecliptic that the Babylonians divided into twelve equal parts and then named after visible constellations.

Among the earliest surviving pieces of Babylonian planetary observation is the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, which supposedly records observations from the reign of King Ammisaduqa (conventionally placed in the 17th century BCE). Its date is disputed, but the surviving cuneiform copies were made centuries later, and it remains one of the oldest extant examples of Babylonian planetary omens.

In addition to Jupiter and Marduk, the Babylonians associated additional planets with other deities. Venus was identified with Ishtar, the goddess of love, war, political power, and fertility, who had a close relationship with her Sumerian equivalent, Inanna.

Because it moved very slowly, circling through the zodiac in around 29 and a half years, Babylonian astrologers called Saturn ‘Kayyamanu’, ‘the steady one’. Some texts even linked Saturn with the sun, though why remains unclear.

Mars has fared much worse in reputation than its neighbors. God of War and all that (mostly in the Greco-Roman version). The Babylonian astrologers associated Mars with the god Nergal, king of the underworld and bringer of plagues. In fact, they named Mars “the dark one” and “the rebellious one.” A slight increase in Mars’s brightness was interpreted as a bad omen in certain circumstances, depending on its position and context.

In some Mesopotamian traditions, Sin, the moon god, was actually a higher-ranking deity than Shamash, the sun god. As “lord of wisdom,” Sin acted as a kind of chief advisor among the gods and helped to guide heavenly and earthly affairs in certain traditions. However, Sin’s elevated status was not recognized uniformly across all of Babylonia.

Early Babylonian astrology had little or nothing to do with predicting the fortunes of individuals. Instead, it was the priests who told the future of a nation and a king through the observation of omens. What good was a prediction of war or poor crops to a nobody? Predictions for individuals did not enter the astrological picture until the late Babylonian period, when it became possible to calculate the positions of the planets. This was accomplished by developing the twelve-sign zodiac. The earliest existing horoscope was calculated for a child born in 410 BCE.

Beyond individual omens, the Babylonians also compiled their findings into a single authoritative text: The Enuma Anu Enlil, a collection of some 68 to 70 tablets with thousands of specific omens that were then handed down for generations. Assyrian court astrologers frequently referred to Enuma Anu Enlil when interpreting strange celestial phenomena for kings.

The Egyptians added to the mix even before the Babylonian zodiac, by developing decan stars (groups of stars that mark out the hours of the night) that were found on coffin lids as early as the 21st century BCE. Egyptian customs eventually played a role in blending this system with Babylonian astrology and nascent Greek notions of the universe.

Greek interest in Babylonian astrology took off after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE and entered Babylon in 331 BCE, bringing Greek scholars into direct contact with Mesopotamian cosmological traditions and setting the stage for astrology’s spread into the Hellenistic world.

The Roman writer Vitruvius says that Berossus, a priest of Bel at Babylon, went to the Greek island of Kos to teach astrology. But modern scholars question whether this Berossus was the same person who wrote the Babyloniaca.

There were also some Greek and Roman philosophers who were skeptical of astrology, even if they were proponents of logic. For instance, the Greek philosopher Carneades and others raised some fundamental questions about how astrology worked, such as why humans are subject to planetary forces but other animals aren’t.

In the second century CE, the Alexandrian scholar Claudius Ptolemy penned the Tetrabiblos, a treatise outlining elaborate theories regarding zodiacal and planetary influences. A synthesis of earlier Greek and Babylonian concepts, the Tetrabiblos would dominate Western astrological thought for centuries. Ptolemy also carried forward the work of the Greek astronomer Hipparchus in studying the precession of the equinoxes.

The Dendera Zodiac, a carved relief from the ceiling of a chapel to Osiris in the Hathor temple in Egypt (around 50 BCE), is thought to be one of the first surviving complete examples of the entire twelve-sign classical zodiac. The original is now in the Louvre if you’re interested in seeing it.

It took a long time for astrology to stop being considered a legitimate field of academic study. Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler practiced astronomy alongside astrology, and Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation explained the motion of the planets in physical terms.

This content was created with the help of AI.