marginalization of astrology [View all]
During the seventeenth century astrology became disreputable. It ceased to be studied in the universities. The upper classes came to despise it. I've often wondered how this came about. It certainly had something to do with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. To those who agreed that the earth orbits the sun and revolves on its axis in 24 hours, there was no longer any need for a crystalline sphere to carry the fixed stars. Those stars had fixed positions and could be at various distances from us. The stars in any particular constellation are not physically close to each other. The idea that a constellation exerts any influence on people is not even plausible. Thus astrology deserved the disrepute into which it had fallen by the time of Newton.
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