Maimonides anti-astrology stance can be best described in his letter to the learned rabbis of Marseille.
Astrology and Star-worship were found in tandem throughout the ancient worlds. Typically, this took the form of pleasing or appeasing the planetary gods with rituals, sacrifices, and other ‘bribes’. The Sabians were an ancient people that practices this type of star-worship. Maimonides, the foremost rabbinical authority in the last 1000 years, based his anti-astrology stance on Sabian star-worship, and thereby condemning all of astrology as idol-worship, which is, needless to say, antithetical to Torah.
In ancient days, idol-worship was an addiction and its antidote came to the world through the giving of the Torah. The Torah is the One Deity’s wisdom and proverbial dictums for gaining eternal life that when studied and practiced transform a mortal human being into an eternal angelic being. This transformation is a life-long process accompanied by suffering of body and mind, as life-experience begins to prove that the world is the work of the One Deity, The Pre-existent Eternal Creator who has prepared this world as a space to grow towards and thus to merit eternal life, life in an eternal paradise, bestowed upon those worthy of such blessed reward.
