The following is excerpted from LDS Living. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
There was an abundance of Church-published material on astrology during the 1970s—likely because the rise of the “New Age” movement helped popularize astrology during that decade. Several Church magazine articles addressed those rising trends directly. A 1972 New Era article titled “What should our attitude be regarding zodiac signs, astrology, and horoscopes?” had this as its first sentence: “Basically our attitude should be the same as it is about fortune-telling, reading tea leaves, crystal ball gazing, or palm reading. To put it bluntly, any trust in such things is sheer superstition.”
The article later suggests why astrology does not align with the gospel principle of agency: “The astrologer, by using a chart of the zodiac and referring to the sign in the ascendant at the time of one’s birth, plots a map of the heavens. This is a horoscope and is supposed to determine one’s temperament, liability to accident, fortune, success, calamity, even susceptibility to disease.
“Our reason tells us that God, who recognized the free will of man as basic to his nature and gave him freedom of agency to manifest it, would not have left man’s destiny bound up and governed by the relationships and movements of astronomical bodies.”
In 1974, the Ensign included an article called “What the Scriptures Say about Astrology, Divination, Spirit Mediums, Magic, Wizardry, and Necromancy.” The article enumerates several examples of when people viewed astrologers and other forms of fortune-telling as superior to true prophets. The article ends with this admonition: “All who are acquainted with the spirit and faith of Jesus Christ will want nothing to do with any form of divination and spiritual wizardry.”
And then in 1979, the Liahona ran an excerpt of an article Elder James E. Talmage had written in 1893 for a magazine called The Contributor. The Liahona article, called “My Study of Astrology,” told how, as a boy, Elder Talmage had believed in astrology. So much so that he challenged the school bully to a fight, confident that we would win based on what he saw in the stars. Unfortunately for young Elder Talmage, he went home bruised and battered from that fight.
“This was convincing. My doubts vanished, and with them all my confidence in the horoscope. I knew that astrology was a fraud,” he wrote.
In addition to those publications, the King James Version of the Bible also has several references to astrology that may be helpful to Latter-day Saints.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
