Astrology as flotsam of pre-Axial Age
I am going to simply bypass any discussions of astrology. There is no reason for it, and it has done immense harm to the New Age movement. Buddhism, Christianity and Islam were careful to keep the subject away from students and disciples, but now we see that the whole plague of astrological muddle infect the spiritual followers of medium intelligence, corrupting their understanding beyond repair.
So we should be wary of even discussing it: the solution to a vampire is to stop feeding it. Astrology is confusing to many modern seekers because it seems a legitimate object of tradition. But it is not. It is a virus of the mind that arose in the wake of Sumerian civilization, reaching its modern form in the backwater of Chaldean culture. Its sources in Sumer have little to do with the Chaldean superstition and were a still primitive ‘map of reality’ that is described nicely in Nicholas Campion’s The Great Year. The Sumerian original was a transient moment of proto-astrological cultural myth, and innocent enough. Its later pernicious form has no foundation in any real spiritual tradition. It is therefore a tremendous disservice to the less intelligent seekers who fall victim to this set of fallacies and get no real guidance from their peers. It was very different in the phase of the early Axial Age religions which were quite aware of the dangers of this remnant strain of the Sumerian cultural sewer.
Another sad irony is the way that modern skeptics lump everything together, astrology, religion in any form, beliefs in mind beyond neuroscience, anything beyond reductionist science, as ‘superstition’. The result is ironically a way to feed astrology, since people tend to associate the issues with other issues, controversial but not so easily rejected, ending in a validation of all of it. But the different character of astrology as a kind of flotsam of greater antiquity that passed through and survived the Axial Age which never validated any of it requires its dissassociation from more general questions of spirituality.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 