Astrology is essentially polytheistic; its birth in the lower Mesopotamian Valley likely dates back to shortly after the Flood when men turned away from the pure worship of Jehovah. The name Chaldean in time became practically synonymous with “astrologer.”

“According to Herodotus the magi were a tribe of the Medes [I, 101], who professed to interpret dreams, and had the official charge of sacred rites . . . they were, in short, the learned and priestly class, and having, as was supposed, the skill of deriving from books and the observation of the stars a supernatural insight into coming events . . . Later investigations tend rather to make Babylon than Media and Persia the centre of full-blown magianism. ‘Originally, the Median priests were not called magi . . . From the Chaldeans, however, they received the name of magi for their priestly caste, and it is thus we are to explain what Herodotus says of the magi being a Median tribe’ . . . (J. C. Müller in Herzog’s Encl.).”​—Edited by P. Fairbairn, London, 1874.