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June 27, 2020 12:29 am GMT

A Scheme of Heaven is a deep investigation of astrology from a scientists perspective

We humans are castaways on an ocean of uncertainty. Since the beginnings of history, our ancestors sought knowledge and understanding about their lives, their relationship with the cosmos, and perhaps take a peek into their future. In such effortlong before the answers of scienceearthlings developed a rich variety of divination practices and systems. Many forms of divination survive to this day, and can't be easily dismissed as irrational nonsense, or mere curiosities of a bygone age. On the contrary, divination seems to be essential to culture.

So much so, that perhaps our modern obsessions with predictive algorithms and numerical forecasts are best understood as a continuation of this ancient divinatory impulse. This is the provocative thesis of Alexander Boxers fascinating new book, A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data.

A Scheme of Heaven

Astrology is indeed the most historically relevant of all divination practices, its aim having been nothing short of a systematic account linking the nature of the heavens to our own human nature. Across civilizations, human beings have proven to be superb stargazers. Entranced by heavenly patterns and periodicitiesthrough sheer naked-eye observationour ancestors were able to crack with uncanny precision the workings of the cosmos. Exact geometric relationships and precise mathematical elegance spoke of divine design and transcendent beauty.

For a long time, astronomy and astrology were one and the same magical enterprise. Alexander Boxer, a data scientist, whose eclectic erudition includes a PhD. in physics from MIT and degrees in the history of science and classics writes:

Astrology was the ancient worlds most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained for centuries by some of historys most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.

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Original Link: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/a-scheme-of-heaven-is-a-deep-i.html

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