Astrology

There's a certain amount of misunderstanding associated with astrology versus astronomy, and the "signs of the zodiac." It's a little bit annoying, truth be told, so I guess I'll rant about astrology for a little bit.

Astrology, according to Merriam-Webster, is "the divination of the supposed influences of the stars and planets on human affairs and terrestrial events by their positions and aspects." Astronomy, meanwhile, is science. People seem to get a little bit confused about what the zodiac actually are (is? I think zodiac is plural. But if so, I'm not sure what the singular form is. Maybe it is singular). The zodiac are actually just the regions of the sky where the sun passes throughout the year.

At some point in our history, people decided it would be convenient to name regions of the sky, so that we could point out things more easily. This makes a great deal of sense. It's rather similar to dividing the US into states, in some respects (except that constellations don't argue with each other about whether two stars can marry each other). At this point in time that is all the constellations are. They are chunks of they sky that we have labelled with ancient greek names, so that we can point things out more easily.

Have you ever actually looked at the so-called symbols in the sky? I'm honestly not sure how someone looked at Ursa Major and thought "that looks just like a bear." And Leo honestly looks rather more like the Lochness Monster than a lion, to me. Here's the thing: the stars that make up these constellations are not connected in any way. They are simply clusters of stars, which appear to be close together when viewed from earth. They're not related, they're not close together, they didn't form all at once, they're not magical, and they definitely do not predict the future. Here's what they actually do: they burn.

Why is it that we feel that stars themselves are so boring that we need to force them into animal shapes and give them cute little names and pretend they predict the future? Isn't it enough that each of those stars is farther away than we can even conceive, that they're burning off hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrogen every day, and that they still have enough mass to hold entire systems of planets in place?

References:
Beau Peep Comics by Roger Kettle and Andrew Christine