A sceptical look at Astrology

I find it very difficult to take the claims of astrology seriously. On the face of it, the idea that the relative positions of the stars and planets can have the remotest effect on human life – except on the rare occasion when a lump of rock hits us or there is an eclipse that robs us daylight for a short period – seems absurd to me. However, I think it is worthwhile to analyse exactly what I believe astrology to be, so that I can assure myself that I am being entirely rational and not making unwarranted assumptions.

My intellectual background

I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent and well-educated person. I did well enough at school to get to a middle-ranking University (Bangor, then part of the University of Wales), although I did not come away with a particularly high grade of degree.

I took a joint honours degree in English and Philosophy. The study of English Literature inevitably brings one into contact with Astrology, because many writers of literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare and right down to J K Rowling, have included astrologers among their characters, and many have believed in what astrologers have said, to a greater or lesser degree.

However, Philosophy is all about examining theories and assumptions and subjecting them to rigorous analysis. Throughout the ages, people have come up with systematic ideas to explain the way the world is and suggest ways in which people could lead better lives. Some of those ideas have proved to be highly influential, but it is the job of Philosophy to point to the weaknesses (should they exist) of schemes of thought that might well be capable of leading us (as mankind) down paths that we really should not be going.

Although my University course in Philosophy did not tackle the subject of Astrology, it is just the sort of belief that could be subjected to philosophical tools and techniques, and it is with the mindset that my course inculcated in me that I want to look at Astrology now.

What Astrology is not

It is very easy to criticise something when one has a totally false notion of what that something is. Politicians do this all the time when they lambast their opponents for holding views that they have never advocated, or distort what has been said and then attack the distorted version rather than the real one.

I therefore want to state at the outset that I do not equate Astrology with Fortune-Telling. That is a mistake that is often made, based on the natural human desire to want to know what is going to happen to them and the dishonest practices of some people who use the Astrology umbrella to provide such a “service”.

“Real” astrologers do not predict the future. It should not take long to see why this is the case, namely that they would soon be discredited if their predictions failed to come true. Instead, they attempt to relate the relative positions of stars and planets to make statements about individual human beings in terms of their personality and potential.

There is a very crude form of astrology that divides the whole human race into twelve groups, based on their date of birth, and then tells each group what their strengths and weaknesses are in terms of their personality, the assumption being that, for example, an “Aquarius” is fated to be a different sort of person from a “Leo”. Advice is then given, for example, on whether it is a good or bad idea for a Pisces man to marry a Capricorn woman.

Leading on from this is the notion that one’s “stars” can determine what sort of day one is likely to have and whether one should or should not leave certain decisions to another day when the stars are likely to be more propitious. This sort of astrology was taken very seriously in past centuries, when monarchs would decide whether or not to go to battle based on what their court astrologer told them. Today, we get “What your stars say” in popular daily newspapers, and there are people who take these statements just as seriously as any medieval warlord.

However, as I said above, I do want to criticise Astrology based on the versions mentioned in the previous two paragraphs. I am perfectly willing to accept these as distorted versions of Astrology that are not worth the effort of trying to refute – although it does worry me that there are many people who cannot see through their nonsense.

So what is Astrology then?

My understanding of Astrology, based on what astrologers themselves say, is that it sees significance in the pattern of the heavens at the exact time that an individual human being is born. Modern astrologers are careful to avoid the suggestion that stars and planets have any sort of direct physical influence on the new-born child – it is not a question of gravitational pulls coming into play, given that those of a doctor’s forceps are far more likely to outweigh anything exerted by Mars or Saturn – no, it is a lot more mystical than that.

What astrologers appear to claim is that the pattern of the planets at someone’s birth (and the moon and the sun counts as planets for this purpose), particularly when seen against the background of the stars, represents a mirroring of the potential personality of that person. What they are therefore doing when creating a person’s astral birth chart is re-creating that mirror and reading what is reflected in it.

The elements of that re-creation include certain characteristics that belong to the individual planets – for example, Mercury influences the way you learn and handle information, and a strong showing for Jupiter in one’s chart is indicative of a an optimist.

Another interesting aspect of the claims of astrology is that the birth chart does not predestine the individual to be any specific sort of person – as I said before, astrologers are not fortune-tellers. All it does is indicate potential strengths and weaknesses and it is up to the person to forge their own path through life, but with the knowledge that they should find themselves more naturally inclined to go into some directions than in others.

Reasons for scepticism – 1

Modern astrologers do not claim that Astrology is a science, although this was not always the case. They therefore see themselves as being beyond the reach of reasoned scientific argument when it comes to defending their “art”. They see Astrology as having to do with the realms of spiritualism and mysticism which they expect people to accept on trust.

I’m sorry, but for me that is just not good enough. Astrology is in the same bracket as religion, magic and wicca – you can believe in it if you like, but it will never be open to having its claims proved to be true. Belief in Astrology is a matter of faith, with no evidential grounding whatsoever.

Reasons for scepticism – 2

There are many factors that affect someone’s personality, the strongest of these being upbringing, environment, education and life experiences, as well as genetics. There is no reason to give precedence to yet another – in my view highly dubious – factor, namely their birth chart.

Given that astrologers gladly admit that the birth chart does not predestine, it would appear that they recognise that it is the weakest of the factors that I have listed above. That being so, why bother with it at all?

Reasons for scepticism – 3

The qualities that are assigned to the various planets, as having roles to play in the birth chart, are pure inventions. Granted, they are based on ancient beliefs that go back thousands of years, but they are inventions nonetheless. There is not the slightest reason to believe that Mercury is the “information handling” planet – but then reason has nothing to do with it, of course.

It is also interesting to note that ancient astrologers had fewer tools to play with than modern ones, because many more celestial bodies are known about now than was the case before the days of powerful telescopes. I find it fascinating – not to say ridiculous - that newly discovered planets and planetoids seem to have been fitted into the astrological cosmos and appear to have roles to play in birth charts.

Reasons for scepticism – 4

It worries me that some people take the statements made by astrologers far too seriously. I will repeat that I do not hold astrologers guilty of being fortune-tellers, but the same cannot be said of the expectations of some of their customers.

People will pay good money to have a complete birth chart made, and one has to ask why they do so. If you only regard Astrology as being a bit of harmless fun, which makes no difference one way or the other, then fair enough – but there are plenty of much cheaper ways of having harmless fun.

It should come as no surprise that people who have paid good money for a chart should treat it with a good measure of respect and believe what their astrologer says it means. If they then let that meaning rule their lives – for example by basing their relationships with others on its findings – then they are in danger of being guided along paths that might not be in their best interests. They might make life choices that they would not otherwise have done, simply because they had paid for advice that was based on the extremely flimsy evidence (as I would see it) of an astral birth chart.

People who seek advice from others on how they should lead their lives are often emotionally vulnerable and are prime targets for manipulation by people who are stronger than themselves or who appear to have the answers that they cannot discover for themselves. These clients are the sort of people who can end up in weird religious cults or be brainwashed into taking dangerous and/or violent actions. I see Astrology as being another area that offers respite for vulnerable people, and it therefore presents another source of danger.

An experiment?

I know that Astrology sees itself as being outside the realm of science, and so it is not really susceptible to proof by scientific method, but can I suggest an experiment that could produce some revealing results?

If you take two people who were born at exactly the same time and in the same place – such as in different rooms of the same maternity hospital – then the two babies should have had identical astral birth charts. If after, say, thirty or forty years, they were to approach different astrologers and ask to have their birth charts prepared and interpreted, it would be very interesting to see how alike those results were.

It would also be very interesting to see how those two people, as adults, were alike or different in terms of personality. If Astrology is all about determining potential personality traits, should not those two people have exhibited very similar ones during the intervening thirty or forty years?

If this is the case, despite all the other influences that they have been subjected to over the years, then maybe – just maybe – there might be something in it. However, without such evidence I would continue to remain as sceptical as ever!

© John Welford

Titanic and Olympic - were the ships switched?

Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, but did you know that some people believe that it was not the Titanic that hit the iceberg, but her sister ship, the Olympic?

The two great liners

The White Star Line was a large company that excelled in commissioning and running ocean-going liners, particularly to take advantage of the trans-Atlantic trade that grew during the 19^th century as millions of Europeans sought a new life in the Americas.

In 1907 they commissioned two new liners to be built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, to be called Olympic and Titanic – all the ships of the White Star Line had names ending in “ic”. These were each to be twice the size of any ship in the existing fleet run by the company, with Olympic weighing in at 45,000 tons and Titanic at 46,000 tons – although a third ship, the Britannnic which entered service as a wartime hospital ship in 1915, would be even larger at 48,000 tons.

Olympic was the first to be completed – in 1910 – and she entered service in April 1911.

The unfortunate Olympic

Olympic did not have a smooth early life. On 20^th September 1911 she hit a Royal Navy ship, HMS Hawke, in the Solent near Southampton. The damage done to the ship was such that she had no choice but to return to Belfast for repairs, where she sat alongside the nearly complete Titanic (see photo).

The damage was so extensive that the shipbuilders now had a real problem – should they finish work on Titanic or switch their attention to Olympic? The White Star Line would clearly lose a considerable amount of money if the much-vaunted entry into service of Titanic had to be delayed, and the prospect of having neither ship afloat was one that they wanted to avoid if at all possible.

Another problem was that the Navy refused to accept blame for the Olympic’s collision, and the insurers were not willing to meet the costs of the repairs until the matter was settled. The White Star Line could see their profits disappearing fast.

Were the ships switched at Belfast?

This is when the intriguing thought emerges of whether the White Star Line performed a clever trick to get themselves out of trouble. Suppose the Titanic was lost at sea – surely there would be nothing to prevent the insurers paying out on that occasion. But suppose that the ship that was actually lost was in fact the already damaged Olympic? White Star would still have a perfect ship to trade with – namely the Titanic.

The plot – if there was one – was therefore to switch the nameplates of the two ships and make a few cosmetic changes so that people would think that the ship that began its maiden voyage on 10^th April 1912 was the Titanic when in fact it was the partially repaired Olympic.

The idea would have been to stage an emergency in mid-Atlantic, safely offload the passengers, then scuttle the ship. White Star would then claim all the insurance money after this undisputed calamity and have a seaworthy ship – namely the real Titanic masquerading as the Olympic – with the prospect of the even larger Britannic to come along in a few years’ time.

As we all know, things didn’t turn out that way. The ship (whichever it was) sailed off into the Atlantic but encountered a real emergency when it hit an iceberg with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

Could it have happened?

It seems highly unlikely! For one thing, how could the “safe” scuttling of the ship possibly have worked? If the idea was to offload the passengers in mid-ocean, this could only have been done by shuttling them across in lifeboats to rescue ships, given that the lifeboat capacity of the ship was less than half that of the number of people who would have been on board.

There would therefore have had to be other ships reasonably close at hand to accept the offloaded passengers. So would White Star have included other ship’s captains in the plot so that they would have been primed to arrive at a pre-arranged location?

If not, the event would need to have been arranged at a place where there was a reasonable prospect of other shipping being reasonably close by, which presumably must therefore have been further on in the voyage than the point at which the real disaster took place.

 It would also have inadvisable to stage the “accident” at a point where other ships were close enough to witness what was really going on. It would appear that the plotters would really have been trusting to luck to find a suitable spot.

Apart from that, it would not have possible to disguise one ship as another at Belfast without a huge number of people being aware of what was going on. Even years after the disaster, nobody who worked at Belfast ever admitted to being part of a fraud, so the chances are that no fraud took place.

It sounds like an interesting story, but no more than that. Besides, the wreck of the Titanic has since been found on the bed of the Atlantic, and it is abundantly clear that it is the Titanic and not the
Olympic pretending to be the Titanic!

As for the Olympic, she remained in service with White Star until 1935. The ship was already seaworthy before the maiden voyage of Titanic, and was actually making an eastbound crossing at the same time that Titanic was heading west, but the ships were too far apart for Olympic to come to Titanic’s aid.

Had there really been a plot to swindle the insurers, would White Star not have arranged matters so that their two ships, of similar size, were able to keep the whole thing “between themselves”, by “Titanic” coming to “Olympic’s” aid, thus lessening any risk of detection?

In other words, as conspiracy theories go, this one is a non-starter!

© John Welford

P T Barnum and the Feejee Mermaid

P T Barnum was the greatest showman in 19^th century America. His methods of making money were not always “above board” and the episode of the “Feejee Mermaid” is an example of how he could make a fortune by hoaxing the general public.

Dr Griffin arrives in town with a mermaid

The story – insofar as it concerned the American public – began in the summer of 1842 when a British naturalist called Dr J Griffin arrived in New York with what he claimed was a dead mermaid that he had obtained on the Pacific island of Fiji. This was forever after known as the “Feejee Mermaid”.

When the gentlemen of the press arrived at the hotel where Dr Griffin was staying (having been tipped off in advance) he reluctantly showed them the specimen. However, they had no pictorial proof with which to persuade their editors to splash the story.

Enter P T Barnum, who visited every paper in town and produced detailed engravings of a beautiful bare-breasted mermaid – which actually looked very unlike the specimen held by Dr Griffin. The papers printed the story, each having been convinced by Barnum that they were getting an exclusive story.

The mermaid goes on show

It was not long before Dr Griffin was giving lectures about his discovery, after which the mermaid found its way to Barnum’s “American Museum” where it proved to be a huge attraction – aided in no small part by the free publicity that Barnum had been able to engineer.

The Feejee Mermaid went on tour before returning to the Museum. It remained on show for the next 20 years – either at Barnum’s Museum or that of his fellow exhibitor Moses Kimball, who was based in Boston.

It eventually disappeared in the 1860s, possibly as the result of a fire at the American Museum. However, by that time P T Barnum had made a fortune from what was a very clever piece of trickery.

So what was the Feejee Mermaid?

There have been many theories about what “mermaids” are, in terms of what people down the centuries have mistakenly called mermaids. Candidates have included manatees, seals and dolphins. However, it also known that strange “creatures” have been created for religious purposes, in southeast Asia, by joining the body of a primate to that of a large fish. This is almost certainly what the Feejee Mermaid was.

The chain of ownership of the specimen ended with Barnum, who saw a way of cashing in by taking the American public and press for a ride.

“Dr Griffin” was not a naturalist, or British, but a hired associate of Barnum named Levi Lyman. The whole affair was hyped from the start with letters to the papers about the “discovery” and the distribution of engravings of a far more attractive creature than was actually to be seen in Dr Griffin’s care.

Put a fake “mermaid” in the hands of a master publicist with very few (if any) scruples, and the result is bound to be huge sums of money leaving the pockets of a credulous public and entering those of the faker and publicist!

© John Welford

Theatrical superstitions

Actors tend to be a very superstitious lot. This could have much to do with the narrow line they tread between success and disaster when it comes to giving a performance on stage. A forgotten line, a missed cue, or falling over the furniture, could translate a potential triumph into terrible reviews and lost audiences, not to mention the potential for injury or worse if a swordfight or similar action does not go as planned.

That play about some king from north of the border

Most people know that actors have a special horror of quoting William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, or even mentioning it by name, anywhere within a theatre, and some extend that ban to the outside world. The play is therefore referred to as “the Scottish play”. The reason for this ban is not obvious, although all that stage witchcraft might be thought to cast bad omens on the play. Some quite nasty injuries have also been recorded during fight scenes that have gone wrong, although there are many other plays of which the same is true.

Break a leg

Another well-known superstition beloved of actors is that you never wish someone “good luck” because the opposite is bound to come true. Instead, the wish is expressed as “break a leg” – again in the expectation that no such calamity will befall anyone.

Or at least, that is what is generally believed. However, there are other possible derivations of this custom. One is that the stage curtain is sometimes referred to as the “leg”, and the mechanism for raising and lowering it might break if the performance was so well received that a large number of curtain calls was called for at the end of the show!

Another possibility, also related to curtain calls, is that one’s leg needs to bend when taking a bow, so “breaking” it (in the sense that a shotgun is broken when bent to reload it) would be regarded as a good thing.

It has also been suggested that the reference is to the actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) who continued her acting career after her right leg was amputated in 1915 following a stage accident in 1905 (gangrene had set in) and she often refused to wear an artificial one.

A less likely suggestion is that the custom refers to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln while he and his wife were at the theatre. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, broke his leg as he leapt from the theatre box on to the stage. However, the connection between this circumstance and wishing actors good luck is hard to see.

Some other superstitions

Moving on, there is a somewhat annoying tradition, at least from the perspective of a theatrical director, that a good final dress rehearsal is a premonition of a terrible opening night, and vice versa. Far too many members of amateur dramatic societies have used this as an excuse for cheerfully getting it wrong at rehearsal and then airing the view that “it’ll be all right on the night” – an optimistic conviction that is often found to be misplaced!

Whistling or clapping backstage is definitely frowned upon, although there used to be a good reason for this taboo in that the cues that stage crew members used for moving scenery and props were, in the days before radio communication, whistles and claps. If someone whistled or clapped at the wrong time the result could be disastrous.

All theatres traditionally had a cat on the premises, for the purpose of keeping vermin at bay – a rope gnawed by a rat was an accident waiting to happen. It therefore became a good luck charm for an actor to see the cat at the stage door as he or she arrived at the theatre. Knowing that the cat was on duty was clearly going to put him or her in a good frame of mind!

Individual actors are known to acquire all sorts of superstitions in terms of how they prepare for their performance, and theatre managers need to be aware of their particular peccadillos when it comes to preparing their changing rooms. An actor who is out of sorts because his changing room is at one end of the corridor instead of the other, or if there is a broken light bulb on his mirror, is not good news when a perfect performance is called for.

Theatres are superstitious places – often with good reason, but by no means always!

© John Welford