Reply #70: There might have been plausible reasons for early people to believe in some crude astrology

[struggle4progress]

Of things in the sky, the sun is clearly important. I suspect the influence of the moon on the tides was probably known, at various times, by various people in different places, too, but it may not be entirely obvious -- so, for example, Galileo explicitly lamented the fact that Kepler listened to folk about that. And star positions may correlate with seasons, for example -- a matter that may have some general bearing on the weather. It is not so great a leap of imagination to wonder, then, whether the visible planets have any impact

The pragmatist C. S. Peirce once said that science only appeared in civilizations that had a history of magical thought -- the point being that the effort to understand the world will necessarily pass through phases, but that one cannot gain real knowledge with first having a belief that some arcane secrets can be obtained that will give us greater control

The ancient astrologies may not have had much in common with each other or what some people today call astrology. Opinions were mixed, even in antiquity: it's possible, for example, to find early Christian era writings ridiculing astrology, and Constantine banned it outright. Before the time of inexpensive published ephemera, getting somebody to accurately calculate the positions, of the planets at your birth, would have been a very expensive proposition, though charlatans have always been available. But after Newton, people would be able say "The midwife has a greater gravitational influence on the newborn than any of the planets." So one might expect astrology to have had a limited heyday between the time Ptolemaic astronomy was introduced to medieval Europe and the Newtonian revolution -- that is, between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries -- and the invention of the printing press led promptly to broadside news sheets, which included all manner of material, including astrological predictions, and so perhaps astrology's real resurgence is post-Gutenberg