Free Cosmos by Carl Sagan Page B

1632. Among the terrible losses from infant and childhood diseases and such exotic illnesses as “the rising of lights” and “the King’s evil,” we find that, of 9,535 deaths, 13 people succumbed to “planet,” more than died of cancer. I wonder what the symptoms were.
    And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine the New York
Post
and the New York
Daily News
on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra—that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the
Post
, “a compromise will help ease tension”; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the
Daily News
’s astrologer, you must “demand more of yourself,” an admonition that is also vague but also different. These “predictions” are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice—they tell what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sports statistics and stock market reports?
    Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the characterand future of people they know nothing about except their time and place of birth. *
    There is something curious about the national flags of the planet Earth. The flag of the United States has fifty stars; the Soviet Union and Israel, one each; Burma, fourteen; Grenada and Venezuela, seven; China, five; Iraq, three; São Tomé e Príncipe, two; Japan, Uruguay, Malawi, Bangladesh and Taiwan, the Sun; Brazil, a celestial sphere; Australia, Western Samoa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the constellation of the Southern Cross; Bhutan, the dragon pearl, symbol of the Earth; Cambodia, the Angkor Wat astronomical observatory; India, South Korea and the Mongolian Peoples’ Republic, cosmological symbols. Many socialist nations display stars. Many Islamic countries display crescent moons. Almost half of our national flags exhibit astronomical symbols. The phenomenon is transcultural, nonsectarian, worldwide. It is also not restricted to our time: Sumerian cylinder seals from the third millenium B.C . and Taoist flags in prerevolutionary China displayed constellations. Nations, I do not doubt, wish to embrace something of the power and credibility of the heavens. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we
are
connected—not in the personal, small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways, involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the human species, themes to which we will return.
    Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call Ptolemy, although he was unrelated to the kings of the same name. He worked in the Library of Alexandria in the second century. All that arcane business about planets ascendant in this or that solar or lunar “house” or the “Age ofAquarius” comes from Ptolemy, who codified the Babylonian astrological tradition. Here is a typical horoscope from Ptolemy’s time, written in Greek on papyrus, for a little girl born in the year 150: “The birth of Philoe. The 10th year of Antoninus Caesar the lord, Phamenoth 15 to 16, first hour of the night. Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury