Astrology as Religion

Though I lay deep in my underground ivory tower, I know that astrology is slighted as a religion. In a sense these skeptics are right. Astrology has the same amount of membership as many religions do which unite people in a shared worldview. But of course astrology is more than religion (and no, I'm not trying to start a cult, so stop asking). Atheism and astrology are not incompatible. There is an equal balance between the stars and planets wandering our sky and the infintisemal atoms ricocheting in all space...

Even today we 'westerners' tend to summon, above all others, the main monotheisms to mind when we think of Religion. Even though Buddhism is indeed a major religion, and, well, I really haven't studied much about Hinduism (isn't it just a kind of polytheist monotheism???), and despite a kind of New age paganist/pantheist resurgence - nonetheless the Christian element dominates religious thinking, even amongst astrology adherents.

I came upon an interesting realization today considering the most powerful pull Christianity &c. present to us, wielding a fatal spell over our minds: basically, apocalyptic vision - which would in modern psychological parlance be labeled wingnut at best and schizo at worst. Though of course humanly manufactured apocalypse is a definite, and these days, an increasingly inevitable thing.

Forgive me for rambling again.

There is nothing normal or abnormal about apocalyptic vision - or is there? Is there a historical situation which makes millenarial apocalypism more corrosive within the collective psyche? This was my thought, because the Book of Revelations, our Western prototype of apocalpyticism , as far as I know, was written during a decadent Roman imperial rule which bespoke not just of the more coming to power solstice of Christianity, but the absolute morbidity of a hopelessly decadent civilization. And so, given the social position of Christianity (and also the lowest classes which filled its ranks, thanks Nietzsche), the metaphysics of cultural and social disintegration were completely fused with the metaphysics of cosmological eschatology (that is, the disintegration of the Empire became an archetypal situation for a mythical Final Hour).

I apologize for this digression, but the point - WHICH, I ASK MYSELF?? - the cybernetics of metaphysics in the fabric of history?? Religious minds kill slowly and poison the water. I suppose I am to blame for being a communist too... but humanity is not my creation! Thank you for being absurd and joyous with me.