Raise your hands if you know what your zodiac sign is, raise your hand if anyone has ever asked you what your zodiac sign is, raise your hand if you know what the zodiac signs are, raise your hand if you believe in the zodiac signs.
Good morning to all the present listeners, and of course to the honorable judges, our names are Juan Manuel Henriquez and Veronica Ortiz, and if you were wondering why we would ask you this questions, the reason is really simple, we will be exposing and explaining a bit about astrology and zodiac signs, we know that for some of you this may sound silly, but I promise you, is worth it if you’re into history.
So, in 1929 the famous astronomer Harlow Sharpley, stated this: “We, organic beings that we call us humans, are made up of the same matter as the stars”.
Throughout our entire history as a species, we were fascinated by the mysterious and infinite painting that has been drawn, after the huge star we call sun hides itself for a relatively short period of time. That obscure but at the time shiny painting, thanks to the light that supplied the death of a star, has been captiving our very primitive hearts since our cold nights as homo sapiens. Throughout the evolution of knowledge we proposed a great variety of theories about the true nature of this infinite mystery. During a large period of time we used to believe that our planet was a flat piece of land, and there was a limit in the sea, in which you would fall into an infinite. Later we used to believe that our planet was the “center” of the universe and everything rotated because of us. In the present time we have confirmed that we are not the center of the universe and we also rotated because of the sun. Leaving our way of life and existence as nothing but comparable to minuscule forms of matter. The solitude we found ourselves in basically forced us to create hope in something or someone out there we could believe in, the so-called destiny, Gods and other forms of adoration all coming from the heavenly skies.
In this past of numerous ways of thinking about the landscape in the sky, we have developed a kind of relationship with it. Now it was more than a bunch of little lights in a giant black. We could speak entire hours about the diversity of these ways to think about it, but we are going to talk specifically about the zodiac signs, and at the end, we will answer if they could really define anyone’s personality.
Now if we want to talk about zodiac signs, we must know about their origin, and what it started. If you research on your phone about this topic, it could be a bit confusing, because many historians say that was during the Egyptian slavery, or even the Chinese monarchy. But we need to go some steps back in history, more specifically during the Babylonian empire. At that time they realized that the stars they saw in the sky had connections that led to forms they could relate with nature. Then the Babylonians passed this knowledge to the Egyptians, who also passed this knowledge to the Greeks.
Now, they were the ones who went deeper in these connections, in fact the word “zodiac” came from the Egyptian “Horo” and “Skopo” from the Greek. They gave them their names, inspired by gods and events that happened in their mythology.To give some examples: Leo, in honor of the Nemean lion that was killed by Hercules, Escorpio, in honor of the scorpion that was sent by the goddess Artemis against Orion. But can we ask ourselves the relationship between these constellations and human personalities? To reach an answer, we must aim in a very unspoken way of talking about zodiac signs. The thing is that nowadays it is seen as something of witchcraft, and fantasy, but today we propose a new view, like an actual religion.
If we see the definition of “religion” in the Cambridge dictionary, we will see that it defines it as: “The belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship”. Taking into account this, we can infer that zodiac signs could also be considered as a religion. But, how does this religion affect the personality? For this question and forward we need you to pay special attention now on, because we're going to explain terms used in areas such as psychology and theology. In the book “God” by Reza Aslan we can see that the author talks about the origin of religion and tries to explain the start of a “religious impulse” and how this was started by 2 mental processes: Theory of mind, and HADD.
The theory of mind talks about the ability to designate thoughts and intentions to other people or even things. And HADD is the mental process in which we detect every human agent,for example, is the reason why we think a noise in the night is made up by another human. Putting this on topic, while the Greeks were approaching the knowledge of constellations by using them as a guide for sailing, other Greeks at some point believed that those lights that they used as a guide had also an influence on them. While sailing that the nights were something that a supernatural or human made up and by using their HADD they designate that these lights were more than just useful, but actually powerful.
This also uses an element that Reza Aslan defines as “essential” in the process of birth of a religion: “A counterintuitive element”. In a short explanation, it refers to something unlogical at first sight, but at the same time useful. In this case are the stars that help them to sail. But now here comes an important question, how do they develop this idea more? If we investigate religions, we can see a pattern. Each has a role known as a “medium”, these people are responsible for spreading the belief and being a bridge between the spiritual and physical world. In the zodiac we have the oracles, who tell the future according to your sign and warn you about it in order to help you “prevent it”.
In conclusion, can we say that the zodiac signs define someone's personality? Our answer is SCIENTIFICALLY NOT POSSIBLE, the clue in this is the word “scientific”. Scientists have proven that zodiac signs don't affect regular humans' personalities. It's not possible to pretend that 8 billion people can be put in 12 categories or signs, define specific traits for them and pretend it to be accurate always. However, we would just be taking into account a really literal point of view, and definitely not a more spiritual way of looking at things, even though you may thing that zodiac signs aren’t that serious, you may be surprised of hearing that there are actually pagan practices that take it as parts of their forms of adoration, and it has become more a thing of respect to every faith, and practices, even if we don’t agree with them, nor believe in their divinities.
Even if you don’t believe in horoscopes or zodiac signs, you cannot deny that there are people out there that seem to be well paired to their corresponding sign, and the truth is, that this event is possible by 2 factors: Luck and faith. The thing with the faith is that is very powerful and thanks to it we could get out of the most obscures situations, called it manifestation, divine intervention, or even just coincidence, and it also has the power to influence people into having some behaviors as we can see in any other religion, people traits being originated by their beliefs, and this is not a bad thing at all, is what make us humans, the necessity to believe in something and at the same time, and make that something connect us all as human kind.
Our final message is for you to believe, in whatever you decide, but to believe, because the world is in a perfect balance of rational and irrational things, and the human heart yearns for bonds with each other.
“The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.”-Umberto Eco
Thank you very much!
By Juan M. Henríquez and
Verónica Ortiz, Step 9
