Astrology Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Astrology trivia quiz with answers.

Astrology Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is astrology?
A: Astrology is the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial objects as a means of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events.

Astrology has been dated to when?
A: At least the 2nd millennium BCE, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to where?
A: 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from which it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Arab world and eventually Central and Western Europe.

Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with what?
A: Systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person's personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects.

Throughout most of its history, astrology was considered a what?
A: A scholarly tradition and was common in academic circles.

Following the end of the 19th century and the wide-scale adoption of the scientific method, astrology has been shown to have what?
A: No scientific validity or explanatory power.

Polls have demonstrated that how many American, British, and Canadian people say they continue to believe that star and planet positions affect their lives?
A: Approximately one quarter.

Astrology is now recognized as a what?
A: A pseudoscience—a belief that is incorrectly presented as scientific.

Many cultures have attached importance to astronomical events, and the Indians, Chinese, and Maya developed elaborate systems for predicting what?
A: Terrestrial events from celestial observations.

In the West, astrology most often consists of a system of horoscopes purporting to explain aspects of a person's what?
A: Personality and predict future events in their life based on the positions of the sun, moon, and other celestial objects at the time of their birth.

Astrology has been dated to when?
A: To at least the 2nd millennium BCE, with roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

A form of astrology was practiced in the first dynasty of what?
A: Mesopotamia (1950–1651 BCE).

Chinese astrology was elaborated in what dynasty?
A: The Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE).

Hellenistic astrology after 332 BCE mixed Babylonian astrology with Egyptian Decanic astrology in Alexandria, creating what?
A: Horoscopic astrology.

Alexander the Great's conquest of Asia allowed astrology to spread to where?
A: Ancient Greece and Rome.

In Rome, astrology was associated with what?
A: Chaldean wisdom.

After the conquest of Alexandria in the 7th century, astrology was taken up by Islamic scholars, and Hellenistic texts were translated into what?
A: Arabic and Persian.

In the 12th century, what were imported to Europe and translated into Latin?
A: Arabic texts.

Major astronomers including Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo practiced as what?
A: Court astrologers.

Astrological references appear in literature in the works of poets such whom?
A: Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer, and of playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

Throughout most of its history, astrology was considered a what?
A: A scholarly tradition.

It was accepted in political and academic contexts, and was connected with other studies, such as what?
A: Astronomy, alchemy, meteorology, and medicine.

At the end of the 17th century, new scientific concepts in astronomy and physics (such as heliocentrism and Newtonian mechanics) did what?
A: Called astrology into question.

Astrology thus lost its academic and theoretical standing, and common belief in astrology has what?
A: Largely declined.

Astrology, in its broadest sense, is what?
A: The search for meaning in the sky.

Early evidence for humans making conscious attempts to measure, record, and predict seasonal changes by reference to astronomical cycles, appears as markings on what?
A: Bones and cave walls, which show that lunar cycles were being noted as early as 25,000 years ago.

This was a first step towards recording the Moon's influence upon what?
A: The tides and rivers, and towards organizing a communal calendar.

By the 3rd millennium BCE, civilizations had sophisticated awareness of celestial cycles, and may have done what?
A: Oriented temples in alignment with heliacal risings of the stars.

Scattered evidence suggests that the oldest known astrological references are what?
A: Copies of texts made in the ancient world.

The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa is thought to be compiled in Babylon around when?
A: 1700 BCE.

The oldest undisputed evidence of the use of astrology as an integrated system of knowledge is attributed to the records of the first what?
A: The first dynasty of Mesopotamia (1950–1651 BCE).

The Babylonians viewed celestial events as possible signs rather than as what?
A: Causes of physical events.

What did Cicero state?
A: The twins objection (that with close birth times, personal outcomes can be very different), later developed by Saint Augustine.

He argued that since the other planets are much more distant from the earth than the moon, they could have only very tiny influence compared to what?
A: The moon's.

He also argued that if astrology explains everything about a person's fate, then it wrongly ignores the visible effect of what?
A: Inherited ability and parenting, changes in health worked by medicine, or the effects of the weather on people.

Plotinus argued that since the fixed stars are much more distant than the planets, it is laughable to imagine the planets' effect on human affairs should depend on what?
A: Their position with respect to the zodiac.

Favorinus argued that it was absurd to imagine that stars and planets would affect human bodies in the same way as they affect what?
A: The tides, and equally absurd that small motions in the heavens cause large changes in people's fates.

In 525 BCE, Egypt was conquered by whom?
A: The Persians.

The 1st century BCE Egyptian Dendera Zodiac shares two signs – the Balance and the Scorpion – with what?
A: Mesopotamian astrology.

With the occupation by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, Egypt became what?
A: Hellenistic.

The city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander after the conquest, becoming the place where Babylonian astrology was mixed with what?
A: Egyptian Decanic astrology to create Horoscopic astrology.

This contained the Babylonian what?
A: Zodiac with its system of planetary exaltations, the triplicities of the signs and the importance of eclipses.

The astrologer and astronomer Ptolemy lived where?
A: In Alexandria.

Ptolemy's work the Tetrabiblos formed the basis of what?
A: Western astrology.

The conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great exposed the Greeks to ideas from where?
A: Syria, Babylon, Persia and central Asia.

By the 1st century BCE, there were two varieties of astrology, one using horoscopes to describe the past, present and future; the other, theurgic, emphasising what?
A: The soul's ascent to the stars.

Greek influence played a crucial role in the transmission of astrological theory to where?
A: Rome.

The first definite reference to astrology in Rome comes from whom?
A: The orator Cato, who in 160 BCE warned farm overseers against consulting with Chaldeans.

Cato described the Chaldeans as what?
A: Babylonian 'star-gazers'.

Among both Greeks and Romans, Babylonia (also known as Chaldea) became so identified with astrology that 'Chaldean wisdom' became synonymous with what?
A: Divination using planets and stars.

One of the first astrologers to bring Hermetic astrology to Rome was whom?
A: Thrasyllus, astrologer to the emperor Tiberius, the first emperor to have had a court astrologer.

His predecessor Augustus had used astrology to do what?
A: Help legitimize his Imperial rights.

Astrology was taken up by Islamic scholars following the collapse of what?
A: Alexandria to the Arabs in the 7th century, and the founding of the Abbasid empire in the 8th.

What was the first astrological book published in Europe?
A: It was the Liber Planetis et Mundi Climatibus ("Book of the Planets and Regions of the World"), which appeared between 1010 and 1027 AD, and may have been authored by Gerbert of Aurillac.

Ptolemy's second century AD Tetrabiblos was translated into Latin by whom?
A: Plato of Tivoli in 1138.