Western astrology
The tradition of reading the sky at a person's birth, with twelve zodiac signs, planets and houses.
Also: horoscope, zodiac, sun signs, natal chart
Western astrology took shape in Babylonian omen watching and, in the last centuries BCE, Greek and Egyptian scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria turned it into the personal horoscope, a chart of the sky at birth. It uses twelve signs of 30 degrees each, the planets, the Sun and Moon, and twelve houses. Medieval Islamic and European scholars refined it, and it stood beside astronomy until about 1700. Newspaper sun-sign columns began in Britain in 1930 and made it a mass habit. Astrologers say the sky and human life are linked in pattern. Scientific tests have not found that charts predict personality or events, and astronomers note that precession has shifted the stars from the signs.