Where Do Zodiac Signs Come From? Here's the True History Behind Your Horoscope

While some horoscopes sites may promise predictions based on the “movement” of the stars,  it’s the Earth that’s moving, not the stars. The reason why stars look like they’re moving, both throughout the night and over the course of the year, is because the Earth rotates on its axis and orbits around the Sun. But, before most humans knew that, they spent a lot of time thinking about what was happening up there in the sky.

Looking for answers, signs and predictions in the movements of the celestial bodies —is a longtime fascination of humans looking up at the stars to plan their lives. 

• Although astrology is not itself a science, humans have been looking up at the stars to plan their lives for thousands of years
• Farmers used the skies as a calendar as long as the Ancient Egyptians
• Travellers used them as a compass to find directions

• We don't really know who first came up with the idea of looking at things in nature and divining influences on humans.
• Some form of astrology shows up in various belief systems in ancient cultures.
• In Ancient China, noblemen looked at eclipses or sunspots as portents of good or bad times for their emperor.
• The Sumerians and Babylonians, by the middle of the second millennium BC, appeared to have had many divination practices - they looked at spots on the liver and the entrails of animals.

• These Western, or tropical, zodiac signs were named after constellations and matched with dates based on the apparent relationship between their placement in the sky and the sun.
• The Babylonians had already divided it into 12 equal signs by 1500 BC
• Ptolemy, the author of the Tetrabiblos, helped popularize these 12 signs.
• Now astrologers do their calculations and forecasting based on where the planets and sun are relative to the twelve signs.
• Astrologers say if the sun is in the sign of Sagittarius on the day you were born, then you're a Sagittarius.

• For centuries, astrology (looking for signs based on the movement of the celestial bodies) was considered basically the same thing as astronomy (the scientific study of those objects).
• But its popularity relies on factors that numbers can't compute, and the appeal of looking to the stars for answers has not waned.
• Even if astrology's answers aren't based on scientific study, the reason people keep turning to the sky does come down to the psychological phenomenon he calls the human tendency for "self-selection," the search for interpretations that match what we already hope to be true.