An article in today's paper discussed arguments that certain historical events were greatly affected by the fact they happened on a night that was well-lit, or poorly-lit, by the moon.

Leading to this thought: some of our words trace back to the belief that human behavior is affected, astrologically, by the heavens. For example, lunacy and lunatic derive from the root luna, meaning moon.

What are some further words coming from astrology or astrological beliefs?

[This message was edited by astral on Mon Jul 15th, 2002 at 07:05 AM.]

Disaster is one. Astrolager is another. How about martial, from the Roman god of war, or jovial, from Jove?(Jupiter) Oh, yeah, there's mercurial and plutonic too. Maybe it's a good thing the ancients didn't know about Uranus!

I'm pretty sure that plutonic doesn't come from astrology, since the planet pluto wasn't known to the ancients.

But Asa, you raise a question more interestiong than mine: words with "heavenly" connections, or perhaps I should say heavenly words?

Interesting that though the sun is the most prominant of the heavenly bodies, off the top of my head I can't think of any non-technical, figurative words refering to it by its latin or greek names. The only "sun-word" that comes to mind is is sunny.

Solar
Solarize
Solarium
Sun-lamp
-fish
-dog
-light
-flower
-burst
-dew
-lit...
-Epiphile

I'll believe in astrology when Mercury comes out of Uranus.