Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
Gordon Fisher
Contents
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"It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians
can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He
tolerates their existence.”
14. One motive for wanting to predict the future is the removal of
anxiety, temporary though it may be. It can be very consoling to decide
one knows in advance what an outcome will be. Even if the decision
proves to have been wrong, the previous peace of mind will not be taken
away. Nancy Reagan, wife of the former U.S. president Ronald Reagan,
says in her memoirs, regarding her use of astrology to make schedules for
the president: "Astrology was simply one of the ways I coped with the
fear I felt after my husband almost died" (referring to the assassination
attempt of March 30, 1981). Speaking of an astrologer she consulted,
Joan Quigley, Nancy says: "Joan's recommendations had nothing to do
with policy or politics—ever. Her advice was confined to timing -- to
Ronnie's schedule, and to what days were good or bad, especially with
regard to his out-of-town trips." (Of course, timing is a part of politics.)
"While I was never certain," says Nancy, "that Joan's astrological advice
was helping to protect Ronnie, the fact is that nothing like March 30 ever
happened again. Was astrology one of the reasons? I don't really believe
it was, but I don't really believe it wasn't. But I do know this: it didn't
hurt, and I'm not sorry I did it." (Nancy Reagan, with William Novak, My
Turn, The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan, 1989, p. 44, 47, 49.)
15. One can, of course, have faith in signs of this sort without
attributing religious significance to them. But, as Walter Burkert tells us,
in ancient cultures signs about the future—omens—were often considered
to come from gods. The gods use signs, clear or cryptic, to give orders
and guidance to men. Among the classical Greeks and Romans, who had
no written scriptures, signs were a principal way for gods to communicate
with men. Thus among the Greeks, someone who doubted theefficacy of
divination was liable to be suspected of impiety or godlessness. All of the
Greek gods dispense signs, and especially the king of them all, Zeus. The
ability to interpret divine signs requires special inspiration, and this ability
is dispensed by Apollo, the son of Zeus.
21. For some, the age of Biblical prophecy did not end with the
prophets of the Old Testament and apostles of the New Testament. For
example, there was Nostradamus (1503-1566), who has played an
extraordinary role in people's attempts to know the future. Richard Popkin
reports that Nostradamus first asserted that he was a prophet in the
Biblical sense, and that God had revealed future events to him, despite the
fact that the prevailing view of the Church was that prophecy of this kind
terminated with the death of the apostles. Nostradamus told King Henri II
of France that he was a member of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the
Issachar, which had been given the gift of prophecy. (Richard Popkin,
31. The first extant horoscope is said to date from 410 B.C.
However personal and judicial astrology, requiring the casting of
individual horoscopes, developed later than omen astrology, the prediction
of events involving kings and kingdoms on the basis of planetary positions
and appearances, and on various meteorlogical phencomena. Personal
astrology was based on investigation of planetary positions (including the
sun and moon) at the time of birth or conception, and seems to have been
founded on a thoroughly deterministic conception of the cosmos. Side by
side with it flourished catarchic astrology, which only assumed non-
fatalistic influences on mundane enterprises like travel, marriage and
business. Some have suggested that the two kinds of astrology, fatalistic
and non-fatalistic, have conflicting bases. Either stars exert an immutable
or merely an avoidable influence on affairs, although this distinction might
not have been clearly made by individual users of astrology. However, it
41. One of the other heads of the Stoa, Cleanthes, held a similar
view, although he seems to have spoken of "vital heat" rather than fire as
the substance that holds together the cosmos. (Hahm, l.c., p. 142). Hahm
comments that "the most striking thing about the three functions of heat in
Cleanthes is that they correspond exactly to the three functions of soul in
Aristotle"—the nutritive, perceptive and rational faculties of the soul.
(Hahm, l.c., p. 146-7.) What for Aristotle is caused by soul, for Cleanthes
is caused by the vital heat. Finally, Chrysippus, the third of the heads of
the Stoa, held the theory of pneuma which Sambursky refers to. The
pneuma according to Chrysippus is a kind of mixture of fire and air, and it
is what the "world-soul" is made out of—for the Stoics believed that the
universe has a soul, albeit a material one. In Chrysippus' view, it is this
pneuma which holds everything together. (Hahm, ibid., p. 158, 165.)
43. Aristotle thought there were two kinds of physics, one for the
sublunary world, and one for the heavens. Some hold that the Stoics, in a
manner of speaking, invented astrophysics, because they believed that the
same physical laws apply throughout the universe. They believed that
such laws determine everything that happens. Nevertheless, they
maintained we are still free in the sense that we can always choose to
accept what is going to happen as Fate and Nature decree, or not. This
consitutes living according to nature. Whether or not we do live according
to Nature makes no difference to what happens. What is bound to happen
will happen anyway. But how we choose makes a great difference to the
quality of our lives. We can act in conflict with Nature, and suffer
disappointment and pain and grief. Or we can walk with Fate, and achieve
peace. Furthermore, according to the Stoics, since all things are
constituted of one and the same stuff, and subject in every respect to the
same laws, there is a kind of universal "cosmic sympathy" among things,
which is what makes divination and astrology work. (cf. Jim Tester, A
History of Western Astrology, 1987, p. 30, 32, 68-69).
44. H. Rackham says: "The Stoics ... held that the universe is
controlled by God, and in the last resort is God. The sole ultimate reality
is the divine Mind, which expresses itself in the world-process. But only
matter exists, for only matter can act and be acted upon; mind therefore is
matter in its subtlest form, Fire or Breath or Aether. The primal fiery
Spirit creates out of itself the world that we know, persists in it as its heat
or soul or 'tension,' is the cause of all movement and all life, and
ultimately by a universal conflagration will reabsorb the world into itself.
But there will be no pause: at once the process will begin again, unity will
again pluralize itself, and all will repeat the same course as before.
Existence goes on for ever in endlessly recurring cycles, following a fixed
law or formula (logos); this law is Fate or Providence, ordained by God:
the Stoics even said that the 'Logos' is God. And the universe is perfectly
good: badness is only apparent, evil only means the necessary
52. Tamsyn Barton says that "It is striking that astrology in any
form was marginal to Roman elite politics until the late Republic." (ibid.,
p. 33) . Barton is especially concerned with relations of astrologers and
astrological practices (as well as physiognomy and medicine) to political
power. It seems incontestable that knowledge of the future is often related
to desire for or use of power, from, in some instances, political power on a
53. A reverent attitude toward the stars was not universal in the
Hellenistic era. For the Stoics, the starry sky is the "purest embodiment of
reason in the cosmic hierarchy, the paradigm of intelligibility, and
therefore of the divine aspect of the sensible realm." So says Hans Jonas
in The Gnostic Religion (2nd edition, 1963, p. 254).
54. Marcus Aurelius tells us that we should watch the stars in their
courses as if we were running along with them, and that we should
continually think about how the elements change into one another, for
such thoughts wash away the foulness of life on earth (Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations, VII.47). But this view of the world was turned upside down
by the Gnostics. Gnosticism, as the term is used by the Church Fathers,
covers certain variant forms of Christianity, such as that of Origen (c. 185-
255 A.D.).
55. "On the other hand," E. R. Dodds says, "some modern scholars
apply the term to any system which preaches a way of escape from the
world by means of a special enlightenment not available to all, and not
dependent on reason." Dodds calls St. Paul a Gnostic in this latter sense,
citing Corinthians 1:2.14-15, and observes that the Hermetica, the liturgy
of the Mithraists and the obscure Chaldean Oracles have been called
"pagan gnosis." (E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety,
Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to
Constantine, 1968, p. 18.)
59. "We can imagine," Jonas says, "with what feelings gnostic
men must have looked up to the starry sky. How evil its brilliance must
have looked to them, how alarming its vastness and the rigid immutability
of its courses, how cruel its muteness! The music of the spheres was no
longer heard, and the admiration for the perfect spherical form gave place
to the terror of so much perfection directed at the enslavement of man ....
Here we can discern the profound connection which exists between the
discovery of the self, the despiritualizing of the world, and the positing of
the transcendental God." (Jonas, l.c., p. 261, 263.)
(ibid., p. 63).
73. Grant goes on: "Millions, too, including some of the best
educated people of the day, accepted an even more lamentable doctrine:
belief in the power of the sun, moon and stars. For the movements of such
celestial forces, it seemed overwhelmingly certain, must affect the lives
and deaths, fates and fortunes of humankind. The foundation for this
belief was a widespread, profound conviction that some kind of harmony
exists between the earth and these heavenly bodies—some cosmic
'sympathy' which meant that the earth and all the orbs seen shining in the
sky must possess the same laws and behaviour in common. People felt
sure—and philosophers encouraged them—that the cosmos is a unit,
whose parts are interdependent: that is to say, behind the huge and
spectacular processions of the sun, moon and stars, like the marchings of
the Homeric armies before the walls of Troy, some underlying solidarity
and order has to exist—an order which must correspondingly prevail on
earth as well. For it was believed that the heavenly bodies were nourished
by emanations or effluvia from their counterpart the earth, and it therefore
seemed only sensible to conclude that emanations also proceeded in the
opposite direction, too, and influenced the earth and the human beings
who dwelt on its surface."
74. "A clear proof that what happens above affects what happens
below seemed to be provided by the visible influence that the heavenly
bodies exert on the world: the sun makes the vegetation grow and die, and
causes animals to sleep and go on heat; storms and floods come and go
according to the rise and fall of constellations; and the moon appears to
control the tides like a magnet—the laws of tide-generating gravitation
being unknown, this relationship (in so far as it interested the dwellers
round an almost tideless sea) was explained by cosmic sympathy between
a supposedly watery planet and the element of water in earth. So the
whole doctrine seemed to hang together neatly, completely, and rationally,
in coherence with the sciences. Yet it is based on a complete fallacy. The
generalization that links all human activities, as well as the physical
properties of the earth, to the heavenly bodies is quite without foundation.
The pedigree of this set of beliefs had been antique and complex. The
Greek tragic poets described sun, moon and stars as deities, and Plato
accepted this belief, weaving an elaborate astral theology into the fabric of
his ideal state. Aristotle, too, far from hostile to a relationship between
86. It appears, then, that ideas of time have been intimately related
to ideas about celestial motions, and hence to views of determinism.
There were various ideas about time in the ancient world. The ancient
Jews tended to concentrate on a future which would bring new things.
This may be taken to imply a time line, rather than a time circle of the sort
87. This looking into the future by the Jewish prophets is quite
unlike the astrological prediction which grew up in Babylonia and other
nearby cultures. In astronomy, the future is calculated, or based on
calculations, as when an equinox or eclipse or sunrise or tide is predicted.
In astrology, predictions of the future are based on astronomical
calculations. But in biblical prophecy, the future is beheld, proclaimed,
believed in. Furthermore, the prophets looked forward in a kind of linear
time. The tacit use of a linear rather than a circular time generated a
looking backward as well as forward, to see when it all began. Certain
ancient Jews settled on the date October 7, 3761 B.C. of the Christian
calendar for the beginning of the world. The official calendar of present-
day Israel is built around this date. Today's scientific cosmologists put the
date of creation (the so-called "big bang") earlier, at around 15 thousand
million years ago. The time intervals are different, but the principle is the
same.
95. For many years, astrology and astral religions, as well as other
studies such as alchemy and theology, were entangled with astronomy.
This is the major reason I felt obliged to take astrology and star worship as
seriously as I take astronomy and mathematics. There are, of course,
many who feel that a study of the history of astrology is a waste of time
(as well as many who do not). However, I agree with Patrick Curry who,
in his study of astrology in 17th and 18th century England, rejects the idea
of considering astrology to be "simply one of history's 'losers' ". (Patrick
Curry, Prophecy and Power, Astrology in Early Modern England, 1989, p.
3). In my view, we distort history if we separate the star worship and
astrology of the past from the history of astronomy as presently practiced.
102. Jacques Halbronn has advanced the idea that astronomers are
not, by virtue of their profession, entitled to pronounce on the validity or
invalidity of astrology. "If man is related to the stars," he says, "this is not
the fault of the stars, it is the fault of man .... It is a neurophysiological
problem more than a cosmobiological or astrophysical problem. It is not a
question of asking if the stars emit but if men receive ....." It is one thing,
103. While this may be true for astrology and astronomy as these
terms are now generally understood, the fact remains that the two
disciplines were in most people's minds linked together for much of their
history, for several thousand years or more, until they began to separate
about three or four hundred years ago. This interrelationship has left
traces on both the astronomy and astrology of today. Astrologers, for
example, often take into account new discoveries of astronomers, such as
the new planets discovered since antiquity, including the asteroids. Some
astrologers, more conservative, maintain that for astrological purposes one
can consider the sun and moon as planets, along with the five other planets
known to the ancients, and that the new planets are irrelevant. Such
astrologers only use old astronomy.
104. Astronomers, on the other hand, often feel it their duty to try
to prove there is nothing worthwhile in astrology. To that extent at least
astronomers are still concerned with astrology. More generally, while
astronomers may become enthusiastic about the wonders of heaven and
earth as explained by their theories and tested by their observations, they
are usually constrained in their professional work to express this wonder
in non-religious as well as non-astrological ways. Individual astronomers
may write articles and books connecting or disconnecting their
professional beliefs from religious beliefs. But this is not considered as
part of their astronomy. It is something added on, dispensable as far as the
practice of their profession is concerned.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
7. "The 'star gods' of ancient China were not mere ensouled stars," says
Schafer, "except, perhaps, to the vulgar. They were inconceivable beings
whose masks and costumes were always hanging in the Vestry or Green
Room of the sky, ready for occasional use when the formless powers who
owned them chose to show themselves more closely to advanced students of
the Highest Clarity than they ever did to mortals whose vision was more
clouded by the obsessive fogs of ordinary careers and mundane
preoccupations..... The beginnings of official Chinese worship and
propitiation of these remote and sublime intelligences are lost in the roots of
Chinese history. In Han times [25-220 A.D.], however, when we begin to
have some clear idea of official cult practices and beliefs, star-worship was
already firmly established. A prominent place was given to it in the state
rituals connected with the worship of heaven carried out in the capital city.
An example, under the date of A.D. 26, was the great imperial sacrifice to
10. Apparently not long before the beginning of the Han dynasty, the
body of lore associated with such startling phenomena acquired a theoretical
11. Among the earliest of the Chinese philosophical skeptics was Wang
Chhung [27-97 A.D.], said by Joseph Needham and Wang Ling to have been
"one of the greatest men of his nation in any age ..." They say: "[He] made a
frontal attack upon the Chinese State 'religion' by an uncompromising
resistance to anthropocentrism of any kind. Again and again he returns to
the charge that man lives on the earth's surface like lice in the folds of a
garment. At the same time, he admits that among the 300 (or 360) naked
creatures, man is the noblest and most intelligent. But if fleas, he said,
desirous of learning man's opinions, emitted sounds close to his ear, he would
not even hear them; how absurd then it is to imagine that Heaven and Earth
could understand the words of Man or acquaint themselves with his wishes.
This position once gained, the whole weight of Wang Chhung's attack on
superstition was deployed. Heaven, being incorporeal, and Earth inert, can
on no account be said to speak or act; they cannot be affected by anything
man does; they do not listen to prayers; they do not reply to questions."
(Joseph Needham and Wang Ling, Science andCivilisation in China, v. 2,
"History of Scientific Thought, 1969, p. 368, 374-375.)
13. The Chinese astral religion did not contain horoscopic astrology
until relatively late. This shows, on the one hand, how astral religion in
general may be separate from astrology and in particular from horoscopic
astrology, and on the other hand, how astral religion may be an important
ingredient in a religion as a whole. Charles Dupuis (1742-1809) went so far
as to claim that all religions have grown out of astral religions. Dupuis was a
scholar who became a member of the revolutionary government in France in
1792, and also served briefly in Napoleon's government. However, he soon
retired from politics, and devoted the rest of his life to his studies. In 1795 he
14. Few believe at present that all religion originated in Upper Egypt,
or that all religion grew out of worship of celestial objects. However, that
astrolatry had a considerable influence on the development of many religions
is undeniable, as shown by Dupuis's own impressive scholarship which covers
a multitude of times and places and peoples. He begins by asserting that in
the beginning all religion was pantheistic. Of the early idea of God, he says:
"When man began to reason upon the causes of his existence and
preservation, also upon those of the multiplied effects, which are born and die
around him, where else but in this vast and admirable Whole could he have
placed at first that sovereignly powerful cause, which brings forth everything,
and in the bosom of which all reenters, in order to issue again by a succession
of new generations and under different forms. This power being that of the
World itself, it was therefore the World, which was considered as God, or as
the supreme and universal cause of all the effects produced by it, of which
mankind forms a part. This is that great God, the first or rather the only
God, who has manifested himself to man through the veil of the matter which
he animates and which forms the immensity of the Deity." (Charles Dupuis,
The Origin of all Religious Worship, 1871, p. 15-16, anonymous translation of
material from Dupuis' work. It is difficult to trace the exact provenance of
the material. Dupuis's work of 1795 was revised by P. R. Auguis and
published in 1822, 10th edition, 1835-1836. An abridgement by Count M. de
Tracy was published in 1804. While the content, roughly speaking, of the
anonymous translation into English can be found in the edition of 1835-1836,
the semantically equivalent passages are quite different linguistically.)
15. Dupuis goes on: "Although this God was everywhere and was all,
which bears a character of grandeur and perpetuity in this eternal World, yet
did man prefer to look for him in those elevated regions, where that mighty
and radiant luminary seems to travel through space, overflowing the
Universe with the waves of its light, and through which the most beautiful as
well as the most beneficent action of the Deity is enacted on Earth. It would
seem as if the Almighty had established his throne above that splendid azure
vault, sown with brilliant lights, that from the summit of the heavens he held
the reins of the World, that he directed the movements of its vast body, and
contemplated himself in forms as varied as they are admirable, wherein he
modifies himself incessantly." Dupuis quotes Pliny the Elder (Natural
History, II.1): "The World, says Pliny, or what we otherwise call Heaven,
which comprises in its immensity the whole creation, is an eternal, an
infinite God, which has never been created, and which shall never come to an
end. To look for something else beyond it, is useless labor for man, and out of
his reach. Behold that truly sacred Being, eternal and immense, which
includes within itself everything; it is All in All, or rather itself is All. It is
the work of Nature, and itself is Nature." (Dupuis, ibid., p. 16.)
20. Lum relates that in the myths of Britain, the constellation of the
Great Bear (Ursa Major, the Big Dipper) is interwoven with the story of King
Arthur and the Round Table. His name was alleged to have come from the
words "Arth" and "Uthyr", meaning "bear" and "wonderful". Some of his
followers are said to have claimed that he was an incarnation of the spirit of
the Great Bear. The Round Table may have referred to the circle made by
the swinging of the Great Bear's tail each night when it swept the northern
sky. "Fiona Macleod tells an old story," Lum says, "of how Arthur once fell
asleep on the seashore, long before he had any thought of being king, and in
his sleep a spirit came to him and guided him far up to the north where the
stars of the Great Bear were bright. There he found the knights of heaven
seated at a great circular table, resplendent as the shining stars, and they
spoke to him and gave him wise counsel. They told him that his name should
be Arthur, that he would be king, and that he must pattern his life and the
rule of his kingdom on that of the kingdom of heaven." (Lum, ibid., p. 38-39.)
21. Gene Weltfish tells how some Native Americans who lived along the
Missouri River saw the connection of the heavens with the affairs of men:
"The Pawnees had many tasks to accomplish in the early spring before the
time of planting. Some of them were practical and some ceremonial, but to
the Pawnees who believed that nothing on earth could move without the
heavens, no practical task could be undertaken unless the appropriate
ceremony had preceded it..... The round of spring renewal ceremonies was
heralded by the appearance of two small twinkling stars known as the
Swimming Ducks in the northeastern horizon near the Milky Way. They
notified the animals that they must awaken from their winter sleep, break
through the ice, and come out into the world again." (Gene Weltfish, The Lost
Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, 1965, p. 79.) And Ray Williamson
22. The Oglala Dakota, a branch of the Sioux Indians, were among
those who defeated Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. (Cf. Evan
S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 1984) Their chief god, great spirit,
creator and chief executive was (is?) Wakan Tanka, who is sixteen
individuals in one, each of the four categories containing four individuals. As
great spirit, he is sky. Paul Radin says of this religion: "The sky is an
immaterial god whose substance is never visible. His titles given by the
people are taku skan-skan and nagi tanka or the great spirit, and those given
by the priests are skan and to, blue. The concept expressed by the term taka-
skan-skan is that which gives motion to anything that moves. That
expressed by the shamans by the word skan is a vague concept of force or
energy and by the word to is the immaterial blue of the sky, which symbolizes
the presence of the great spirit. His domain is all above the world, beginning
at the ground. He is the source of all power and motion and is the patron of
directions and trails and of encampment. He imparts to each of mankind at
birth a spirit, a ghost, and a sicun [an invisible god] and at the death of each
of mankind he hears the testimony of the ghost and adjudges the spirit. His
word is unalterable except by himself. He alone can undo that which is done.
His people are the stars and the feminine is his daughter." (Paul Radin,
Primitive Man as Philosopher, English translation 1927, p. 329-332, quoting
James Walker, "The Sun Dance of the Oglala Divison of the Dakota,"
Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, XVI,
Part II, p. 72-92.)
23. Plato speaks in many places of the workings of the stars. For
example, there is the myth of Er in the 10th book of Plato's meditation on the
nature of justice, the Republic. Er, the son of Armenius, is killed in battle,
but comes to life again just before he is to be burnt on a funeral pyre. He
describes what he has seen in the other world. This includes a vision of the
structure of the universe, described like this by Francis Cornford in his
translation of the Republic: "What the souls actually see in their vision is not
the universe itself, but a model, a primitive orrery in a form roughly
resembling a spindle, with its shaft round which at the lower end is fastened
a solid hemispherical whorl. In the orrery the shaft represents the axis of the
universe and the whorl consists of 8 hollow concentric hemispheres, fitted
into one another 'like a nest of bowls,' and capable of moving separately. It is
as if the upper halves of 8 concentric spheres had been cut away so that the
internal 'works' might be seen. The rims of the bowls appear as forming a
continuous flat surface; they represent the equator of the sphere of fixed stars
and, inside that, the orbits of the 7 planets. The souls see the Spindle resting
on the knees of Necessity. The whole mechanism is turned by the Fates,
Clotho (the Spinner), Lachesis (She who allots), and Atropos (the Inflexible).
Sirens sing eight notes on consonant intervals forming the structure of a
24. "All this imagery," Cornford concludes, "is, of course, mythical and
symbolic. The underlying doctrine is that in human life there is an element
of necessity or chance, but also an element of free choice, which makes us,
and not Heaven, responsible for the good and evil in our lives." In the myth,
after the souls have completed their journey to the Spindle resting on the
knees of Necessity (probably the Milky Way) Lachesis, daughter of Necessity,
distributor of human fates, says: "Souls of a day, here shall begin a new
round of earthly life, to end in death. No guardian spirit will cast lots for you,
but you shall choose your own destiny." (Cornford's translation, p. 355). The
dead souls are shown a large number of sample lives to choose from. The
man who had drawn the first lot chose, in thoughtless greed, to be reborn as a
tyrant. He did not see the many evils this life contained, and that he was
fated to devour his own children. Plato attributes his choice to innocence and
ignorance: "He was once of those," Plato says, "who had come down from
heaven, having spent his former life in a well-ordered commonwealth and
become virtuous from habit without pursuing wisdom. It might indeed be
said that not the least part of those who were caught in this way were of the
company which had come from heaven, because they were not disciplined by
suffering; whereas most of those who had come up out of earth, having
suffered themselves and seen others suffer, were not hasty in making their
choice." (ibid., p. 357). Cornford draws attention to Plato's intention that
such stories be taken as myth. By this means Plato synthesizes older
speculative interpretations in the manner of Pythagoreans with newer ideas
of rational philosophy.
25. Plato's visions still exerted great cultural force near the close of the
16th century, just before the advent of new cosmologies based on the works of
such people as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes, unified by Newton
in his system of the world. At Florence, in 1589, an elaborate theatrical
production known as the intermezzi was presented at the Medici court in
honor of the marriage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Here is the opening
scene, as described by Roy Strong: "On May 2nd 1589 the front curtain on
the Teatro Mediceo parted to reveal a Doric temple and above it a cloud,
surrounded by rays of light, which slowly descended to the ground. On this
rode the Doric Harmony, singing of her descent to mortals..... The initial
statement of the Doric Harmony was carried to fruition in the first
intermezzo which took the form of a representation of the Harmony of the
Spheres according to Plato's cosmology, and in particular as described in the
tenth book of Plato's Republic. The prospettiva [a view of the city of Pisa in
perspective] was suddenly covered with star-spangled clouds. Eight Platonic
sirens plus two more of the ninth and tenth sphere sat on clouds telling how
they had forsaken the heavens to sing the praises of the bride. On a central
cloud sat Necessity on a throne with a diamond spindle of the cosmos
between her knees. She was attended by the three Parcae or Fates and they
in turn were flanked by clouds bearing the seven planets and Astraea, whose
advent on earth signalled the return of the Golden Age..... Above were twelve
heroes and heroines, each pair embodying virtues attributed to the onlooking
couple [the Duke and his bride]. Both the sirens and the planets joined in a
dialogue describing the joy of the cosmos at so auspicious an alliance and as
the clouds arose from the lower part of the stage sunlight streamed in, while
26. The Renaissance court festival, says Roy Strong, "unlike its
medieval forebearers, stemmed from a philosophy which believed that truth
could be apprehended in images..... Our guide to it is a vast tract of
literature, books of emblems and imprese and mythological manuals. These
compilations were an extension and elaboration, under the impact of
Florentine Neoplatonism, of the inherited tradition of hidden meanings .....
Although these texts were known to the middle ages, they were studied with
renewed fervour during the renaissance, when scholars examined them to
recover a lost history or secret wisdom, pre-dating the Christian revelation,
that was passed down through Moses and the Egyptian priests by way of
Hermes Trismegistus to the Greeks..... The acceptance of a pagan theology
that descended from Zoroaster through Hermes Trismegistus to Orpheus,
Pythagoras and Plato enabled Renaissance man to assimilate the whole
heritage of classical mythology and history." (Roy Strong, ibid.; we will talk
about Hermes Trismegistus in a moment.)
(From "Urworte, Orphisch", German text taken from German Poetry from
1750-1900, 1984, edited by Robert Browning, p. 66, 68, my translation.)
31. The Hermeticist Joannes Stobaeus (c. 500 A.D.), says: "For the
stars are the instrument of destiny; in acccordance with this they bring to
pass all things for nature and for men." (in Hermetica, edited by Walter
Scott, 1924, v. 1, p. 434). Scott translates a passage from the Latin Hermetic
work known as the Asclepius as follows:
34. In her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and
subsequent works, Frances Yates tried to show that Hermeticism was a
major influence on the development of modern science. "The Renaissance
magus," she says, "was the immediate ancestor of the seventeenth century
scientist." (Frances Yates, "The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science",
in Art, Science and History in the Renaissance, 1968, edited by C. S.
Singleton, p. 258.) Karin Johannisson summarizes this point of view. The
Hermetic tradition in the Renaissance, she says, started in the 15th century
with the translation of Neoplatonic writings by Marsilio Ficino and his circle
in Florence, Italy. This included the Corpus Hermeticum. "Here," says
Johannisson, "the proud notion of a pristine knowledge was depicted, a gift
from God to Adam and an exhortation to Man to complete the work of
creation by unlocking it and decoding its underlying structure ... Nature has
its own language, and the means of interpreting it was a secret alphabet,
derived from Greek number mysticism and the cabala, accessible only to the
chosen." This Hermetic tradition was carried further by Paracelsus and his
followers, and such people as Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), John Dee (1527-
1608) and Robert Fludd (1574-1637). These traditions, according to
Johannisson, were transformed into a concrete program in two renowned
Rosicrucian manifestos, the Fama fraternitas (1614) and the Confessio
36. Johannisson asserts that a 16th and 17th magus considered himself
to be a natural philosopher in the same way, say, as Kepler, Galileo and
Newton were natural philosophers. (The terms "scientist" and "physicist"
were not yet in common use.) "The magus," she says, "understands nature as
an animate and active network of ultimately spiritual forces, the scientists
sees it as a "machine," a manifestation of the universal laws of nature." Thus
Johannisson regards laws of nature as antithetical to spirituality, rather
than as rules complementary to spirituality, or perhaps rules which even
spirits must obey. "The magus believes that because nature is animate -- not
completed and finished -- he can enter into it, operate on it, and manipulate
it."
37. But a magus is himself a part of nature, and had no choice about
entering it. And to say that nature is not complete is not to say that it
doesn't obey natural laws, be they only laws of probability. Johannisson says:
"The scientist on the other hand would not attempt to exceed nature; his task
is to understand and to describe it, to come as close as possible to its
unassailable mechanism; for him the laws of nature are inexorable and
unbreakable, absolute criteria for what is natural and supernatural. For the
magus, the supernatural simply coincides with the unusual, the marvelous,
the artificial; the laws of nature are not regarded as absolute and can be
exceeded by art..... Magic and science work with different methods. Whereas
science is based on the conviction that experience and reason are valid
instruments of knowledge, magic is based on the conviction that such values
cannot be fixed, and the aim is continually set far beyond the boundaries of
what is empirically and rationally verifiable. The theories of science are
dictated by logic, those of magic by analogy. In opposition to rationality and
understanding (episteme) stand irrational hope and use (techne). At its most
general, then, magic can be characterized as the utilization of art in order to
attain specific desired ends, not in order to attain knowledge and
understanding..... Magic strove to transcend the laws of nature, science to
decode them, but also to accept subordination to them." (Johannisson, ibid.)
38. But there isn't, and never has been, a clear demarcation between
science as knowledge and understanding, and technology as use of science
52. In ancient Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, numerals are letters of the
alphabet, though perhaps specially marked in some way. It appears to have
been this that gave rise to the view that hidden meanings and
correspondences of written words can be found by adding together the
numerical values of their letters. Among the Jewish cabalists, this was
known as gematria, among the Greeks isopsephia, among the Muslims, hisab
al-jumal. (Cf. George Ifrah, From One to Zero, A Universal History of
Numbers. 1985, translation by Lowell Bair of Histoire Universelle de Chiffres,
1981, Part IV, Ch. 16-21.) Various Christian writers also use the technique.
Such techniques are still practiced today, here and there. Idries Shah gives a
number of examples in one of his works on the Sufi mysticism of the
Muslims, which began to spread with the advent of Islam in the 7th century
of the Christian calendar, and which still lives today. Shah regards the Sufis
to have means of contacting the underlying wisdom of humanity, and to
54. Gershom Scholem describes a short Jewish work called the Sefer
Yesirah or Book of Creation which seems to date from the 2nd or 3rd century
A.D. It circulated widely in many lands during the European Middle Ages,
and is found today even outside of academies, especially among occultists.
Scholem considers that it probably originated from neo-Pythagorean sources
such as the writings of Nichomachus of Gerasa (c. 140 A.D.), together with
the idea of "letters by means of which heaven and earth were created" which
may have come from within Judaism. 55. The basic thesis of the work,
accoording to Scholem, is that: "All reality is consituted in the three levels of
the cosmos -- the world, time, and the human body, which are the
fundamental realm of all being -- and comes into existence through the
combination of the twenty-two consonants [of the Hebrew alphabet], and
especially by way of the '231' gates, that is, the combinations of the letters
into groups of two (the author apparently held the view that the root of
Hebrew were based not on three but on two consonants)." The 22 consonants
are divided into 3 groups according to a peculiar phonetic system. The groups
contain 3, 7 and 12 letters. The group of three consists of "matrices"
(sometimes translated "mothers"), corresponding to ether (or spirit), water
and fire. From these everything else came into being, and correspond also to
the 3 seasons of the year (3 rather than 4 was an ancient Greek partitioning),
and the 3 parts of the body: head, torso and stomach. The letters in the
group of 7 correspond especially to the 7 planets, 7 heavens, t days of the
week and 7 orifices of the body. They also represent 7 fundamental
opposites: life and death, peace and disaster, wisdom and folly, wealth and
poverty, charm (or beauty) and ugliness, sowing (or fruitfulness) and
devastation, domination and servitude. And they correspond to the six
directions of heaven: above (or height), below (or depth), east, west, north and
south [presumably the 7th is earth, or an observer?] The 12 remaining
consonants correspond to the 12 principal activities of man, the 12 signs of
56. There have been numerous other species of number magic and
mysticism. Examples are beliefs in special values of certain numbers, such
as a belief that 7 must be especially significant since in Genesis God is said to
have created the universe in 7 days, and there are many other places in the
Bible where the number 7 appears. The connection with the Bible is stressed
in an unusually elaborate and worked out treatment of the religious
significance of small integers in two volumes by the Christian writer Paul
Lacuria (Les Harmonies de l'être, exprimée par les nombres, 1899. The
number 7 is especially considered in Chapters XV-XVIII. Sample: the 7 divine
attributes Life, Liberty, Light, Holiness, Wisdom-Justice (linked) and
Eternity correspond (in these orders) to the colors red, orange, yellow, green,
blue-indigo and violet, to the musical notes do, re, mi, fa, sol-la (linked), ti (v.
1, p. 196-197), and the integers 1 through 7. Of course there are also 7 days
in a week, according to the ancients 7 "planets" (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), etc.
57. Henry Corbin describes the "science of the balance" ('ilm al-Mîzân)
associated with the Muslim writer Jâbir ibn Hayyân, as described by the Muslim Shî-ite
writer Haydar Amli (8th century A.D., 14th century A.H.), and said by him to have been
originated by Pythagoras. Haydar Amôli explains that 1 is the cause of number, 2
is the number of the First Intelligence as second existence; 3 is the number of
the universal Soul; 4 is the number of nature; 5 of "prime matter"; 6 of space
("corporeal volume"); 7 of the celestial Sphere; 8 of the Elements; 9 of the 3
natural kingdoms, mineral corresponding to 10's, vegetable corresponding to
100's, animal corresponding to 1000's. "Each number carries by itself an
esoteric secret which is not found in any other number."
64. It appears to have been Kepler's harmony theory which led to the
controversy with Fludd, who also had propounded a theory of musical
correspondences in his Utriusque Cosmi ... historia (1617-1618). In Kepler's
appendix to his Harmonice mundi (1619 -- sometimes called Harmonices
mundi), Kepler compares his own work with that of Ptolemy in the 3rd book
of Ptolemy's Harmonica, and also with the work of Fludd. As to Fludd,
Kepler objects that whereas he (Kepler) develops musical theory in
considerable detail and then demonstrates a celestial counterpart, Fludd
gives a condensed version of a textbook for musicians, and then deals with
practical matters of music-making. Kepler says: "... he differs from me as a
practitioner from a theoretician. For while he considers [musical]
instruments themselves, I investigate causes or consonances in nature, and
when he teaches how one can compose a tune with many voices, I produce
instead many mathematical demonstrations, that are in songs formed by
nature as well as choral pieces." (Johannes Kepler, Harmonice mundi, 1619,
vol. 6 of Gesammelte Werke, p. 374; cf. the translation into German by Max
Caspar, Weltharmonik, 1939, reprinted 1971, which has something like this,
translated into English (p. 362): "For while he [Fludd] considers the
instruments, I investigate the causes of nature or consonances, and when he
teaches how one composes a song with many voices, I produce instead of this
mathematical proofs for very many laws that are valid for choral as well as
the many-voiced singing out of nature."
76. Pauli commented on the difference between people like Kepler, who
are concerned with the quantitative relations between parts of things, and
people like Fludd, who are concerned with qualitative visibility of wholes of
things. There are other contrasts between the viewpoints of Fludd and
Kepler. One lies in the use of language. In Chapter V of his work De stella
nova (On the new star) (1606), Kepler argues at some length that the names
of the signs of the zodiac are arbitrary, and don't have any occult significance.
Gérard Simon observes that these pages are characteristic of Kepler's
attitude, and show that Kepler grasped the fact that traditional judicial
astrology is based on a lack of distinction between the thing and the symbol,
between the symbol and the name, between the name and the meaning. "It is
a question," Simon says, "of knowing if words conform to things." (Gérard
Simon, ibid., p. 102.)
78. In the De stella nova, Kepler ridicules the cabalists for regarding
language as a direct gift of God, and for extracting extravagant hidden
meanings from words and phrases by transposing their characters. It must
be remembered, though, that on the basis of the book of Genesis, the cabalists
believed, as do many others, that God spoke the world into existence. And, as
Robert Westman brings out, Fludd's major works are of the genre of
commentaries on Genesis, and while "Fludd had a strong interest in the
created world of nature -- perhaps much more so than preceding
commentators on Genesis -- his ultimate concern was still with Genesis
itself." (Robert Westman, "Nature, Art and Psyche" in Occult and Scientific
Mentalities in the Renaissance, 1984, p. 125-229, especially p. 191-200;
84. In fact, the 3rd verse of the first book of Genesis reads in the
Revised Standard Version: "God said let there be light." --"God said let
there be light." A little later, in Genesis 2.19-20, it is said of the first man
Adam: "So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and
every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call
them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every
beast of the field..... " In the Christian Gospel of John, we have "in the
beginning was the Word" and "the Word was God" and "the Word made
flesh". Here "Word" is a translation of logos, whose meaning is rather elastic,
but which many agree in _this_ context refers to the "word of God" as
understood in the Old Testament. Perhaps John also intended the word to
carry its connotation of reason, and of order, as opposed to chaos. In any
case, a great many Jewish, Muslim and Christian commentators stress the
fact that God created by speaking. Occasionally, a commentator will say that
it is as if God created by commanding orally, so creation would be analogous
to language acts. But many hold that God's acts of creation, as described in
Genesis, were language acts. As a consequence, they regard language as a
most powerful and holy instrument. God gave this gift to Adam and, it is
said, when God let Adam name the creatures, he gave them dominion --
power -- over them.
86. The limits of language are under constant review. Suffice it here to
quote two opposed points of view. "Learning to speak," says Han-Georg
88. Kepler made the point that naming a sign of the zodiac Scorpio
after a tenuous resemblance of a constellation to a scorpion does not give the
sign, or planets in the sign, any capacity to instill in humans any of the
characteristics of scorpions. This is a false conclusion based on an invalid
analogy. But Kepler didn't reject the usefulness of analogy in general.
Alexandre Koyré observes that in Kepler's Astronomia nova, when Kepler
was concerned with the nature of the force which causes the planets to
revolve around the sun, he says we can only proceed by analogy with other
more usual, better known emanations, notably light and magnetic force.
Kepler commented that if we proceed in this way, our knowledge of the
motive force of the sun will be vague and incomplete. But it gives some idea
of the kind of reality we are dealing with. (Koyré, ibid, p. 199.)
91. As for Kepler, he realized in the long run that his lovely model with
inscriptions and circumscriptions of the regular solids in the planetary
spheres didn't match reality, and that not even the introduction of the star-
shaped semi-regular polyhedra would give an exact model. But the model
served to guide him to the discovery of his three planetary laws, which have
endured. They too, however, apply only to idealized systems, such as the pair
consisting of one planet and the sun, with the sun fixed, in which the effects
of other planets and objects are ignored. And even here one often considers
the planet and the sun as mere points, rather than extended bodies. Thus
the laws yield only good approximations to certain behavior of planets. It
isn't too easy to give a precise meaning to the "good" in "good
approximations", but it is clear to many who compare the predictions of the
laws with actual measurements that the approximations given by the laws
are not subjective assignments of numbers to the phenomena: the laws can be
used to estimate something which is happening outside their users.
92. We have seen something of the gulf between number mysticism and
applied mathematics. Johannisson's assertion that the Hermetic tradition
stressed "rationality in a mathematical sense" must not be taken as support
for the contention that natural philosophers were led by Hermeticists to
realize the place or importance of mathematics in such sciences as astronomy
and physics. People applying mathematics to nature on the whole have had
to struggle against the influence of Hermeticists. This judgement is not a
new one. For example, Robert Westman concludes in a study of the supposed
contributions of Hermeticism to the Scientific Revolution: "Kepler and
Galileo provide specific criteria for allowing us to weight one theory above
another in terms of their mathematical intelligibility and their empirical
adequacy. This the Hermeticists failed to do because they either separated
mathematics from natural philosophy or could not see how they were
connected or totally subordinated mathematical statements to physical
ones..... What significant physical and mathematical insights Bruno and
other alleged Hermeticists arrived at came from their individual, creative
intuitions, often under the influence of doctrines first formulated in medieval
natural philosophy, and in spite of their adherence to Hermetic doctrines."
(Robert Westman, "Magical Reform and Astronomical Reform: The Yates
Thesis Reconsidered", in Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution, 1977, p.
71, his italics.)
98. During the late 16th and early 17th century in Europe there was a
kind of flowering of alchemy, analogous to the flowering of astrology in that
period. Dobbs says: "In their rejection of the pagan accounts of natural
phenomena offered by Aristotle and Galen, Renaissance Hermeticists had
come to emphasize anew the importance of the first chapter of the book of
Genesis. In Genesis was a divine account of the creation of the world, one
which could not be disputed, and one which could lend itself to interpretation
as a divine chemical separation. If the act of creation itself was to be
understood chemically, then all of nature was to be understood similarly. In
short, chemistry was the key to all nature, the key to all the macrocosmic-
microcosmic relationships sought by Robert Fludd and others. A study of
chemistry was a study of God as He had Himself written out His word in the
Book of Nature. Such a study could only lead one closer to God and was
conceived as having moral value as well as contributing to the better grasp of
the workings of nature and to the providing of better medicines for the relief
of man's illnesses." (Dobbs, loc. cit., 1975, p. 61.)
101. On the other hand, Richard Westfall argues: "I am seeking the
source of the Newtonian concept of forces of attraction and repulsion between
particles of matter, the concept that fundamentally altered the prevailing
philosophy of nature and ushered in the intellectual world of modern science,
I am offering the argument that alchemy, Newton's involvement in which a
vast corpus of papers establishes, offered him a stimulus to consider concepts
beyond the bare ontology of the mechanical philosophy. It appears to me that
the Newtonian concept of force embodies the enduring influence of alchemy
upon his scientific thought." (Richard Westfall, "Newton and alchemy", p.
330, in Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, 1984, p. 315-335.)
Westfall says he sees no necessary opposition between his views and
McGuire's. He takes McGuire to have shown that the Platonism of Newton's
teachers at Cambridge, in which one finds a concept of "active principles",
influenced Newton's conception of force. Westfall agrees, and says that
alchemy influenced Newton's conception of force, too. He observes that: "...
for every page in Newton's papers of direct reference to [the Cambridge
Platonists] More and Cudworth there are well over a hundred on alchemy. I
cannot make those papers disappear." (Westfall, ibid., p. 331.)
102. Dobbs, Westfall and others, have said that Newton's concept of
force, one of the central and more mysterious concepts in Newton's mechanics
(his theory of how pieces of matter behave), descended at least partly from his
alchemical ideas. There has been an enormous debate over the ontological
status of Newton's forces. Newton himself indicates at the beginning of his
Principia that there are three kinds of forces: resistive force, or inertia;
impressed force, which tends to change the state of a body from rest or
uniform (constant velocity) motion, and of which he mentions the three kinds,
from percussion, from pressure and centripetal; and attracting force, such as
gravity (repelling force is not mentioned here, although presumably a
centripetal force might be interpreted as repelling -- Newton does speak of
repelling forces elsewhere in the Principia.) (Isaac Newton, Philosophiae
naturalis principia mathematica (MathematicalPrinciples of Natural
Philosophy), familiarly known as the Principia, 1687, Motte's translation
revised by Cajori, 1934, p. 2.) Procedures for quantitatively measuring forces
are provided by Newton's three laws of motion (ibid., p. 13; see Appendix to
this chapter), especially the second law which, in our terms, asserts that a
force on body is to be measured by the rate of change in momentum of the
body it produces, where the momentum of a body is to be found by measuring
the mass and velocity of the body, and multiplying these together (Newton's
definition, ibid., p. 1). Thus, in the case of a mass constant in time, a
quantity of force acting on a body is proportional to the acceleration of the
body, the rate at which its velocity changes.
103. The question has often been asked, do Newton's definitions and
axioms constitute a definition of force? Is "force" just a word we use for rates
of changes of momentum, or is there something in addition to this which
constitutes the force, a "power" or "cause" or "activity"? (See, for example,
Ernst Nagel, The Structure of Science, 1961, Chapter 7, esp. p. 186-192.) A
number of physicists and philosophers have taken the attitude that Newton's
statements should be interpreted as defining the word "force", and felt that to
105. Descartes's views were not wholly agreeable to Newton and some
of his teachers and followers for a number of both physical and theological
reasons, and a considerable debate grew up around this question. One of the
reasons Newton wrote the Principia was to make a contribution to the
overthrow of certain aspects of the Cartesian philosophy, as Euclid's motive
in the Elements may have been to introduce people to the theory of regular
polyhedra -- both works turned out to be monumentally more applicable.
Part of the continuing debate hinged on whether or not there are spiritual
components of forces. Questions like these were asked: are the planets held
in their courses by continual divine action, or were they set in motion by
divine action and left to run on their own, or were they set in motion by
purely physical actions, or have they simply been running forever?
107. The physicist Paul Davies starts his book The Forces of Nature,
1986: "In daily life we see the activity of forces all around us. The force of
gravity guides the planets in their motion and raises the ocean tides.
Electrical forces display themselves in thunderstorms. Mechanical forces
drive our machines and our own bodies. Everywhere we look, matter is
subjected to forces of some sort, arising from a multitude of agencies ..... The
world is full of objects -- people, planets, clouds, atoms, flowers -- and full of
motion. Things happen when moving objects act collectively. How do objects
know about each other? How do they respond to the presence and activities
of other objects? ..... Although uniform motion is natural and needs no
explanation, changes in motion require the action of some external agency.
Because the state of uniform motion is regarded as natural, we say that when
a body is disturbed from this state it is being forced. The agencies which
produce forced motion are called forces. It is the action of forces which
enriches the activity of our universe, and which enables different parts of the
world to be aware of each other's existence. Without forces, nothing could act
on or influence anything else, and all the matter in the universe would
disintegrate into its elementary constituents, each subatomic particle moving
independently of all the others." (Paul Davies, The Forces of Nature, 2nd
edition, 1986, p. 1-2.)
108. Just so: agencies, actions, influences. Davies goes on: "The effect
of a force on a material body is to bring about an acceleration. This is
described by Newton's second law..... To determine how a body responds to a
given force F, which may be varying from time to time and place to place in
both magnitude and direction, it is necessary to solve [ F = ma ] for the
position of the body." (ibid., p. 3.) The force is there before the acceleration,
and before the equation, and it takes a brave philosopher to maintain this is
only manner of speaking.
109. The physicist James Trefil remarks that the Nobel laureate
physicist Richard Feynman once said, in the witty way he had, that in pre-
Newtonian theories of planetary motion, "you have to have angels following
the planets along, flapping their wings to move them." He added that in
Newton's explanation, "the angels flapped their wings to push each planet
toward the sun, rather than along its orbit." (James Trefil, Reading the Mind
of God, 1989, p. 8.) I don't know if this was a pure joke, or if Feynman was
revealing a knowledge of how theories of planetary motion actually
developed. We will see later that the theory that angels control the planets
was a popular one in the middle ages. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas held
a version of it.
111. Newton goes so far as to ask: "Are not gross Bodies and Light
convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their
Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?" (ibid., p.
374.) There is considerable speculation in the Queries on the nature of
chemical interactions, based on a corpuscular theory of matter. And in the
very last sentence of the Opticks, he takes a swipe at astral religion: "And no
doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had not blinded the Heathen, their moral
philosophy would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal Virtues; and
instead of teaching the Transmigration of Souls and to worship the Sun and
Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have taught us to worship our true
Author and Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the Government of Noah
and his Sons before they corrupted themselves." (ibid., p. 406.)
112. While Newton failed to make his unified aether theory work in
general, he certainly made his theory of forces work in the domains to which
he applied them. In Dobb's words: "The universe lived again as Newton's
thoughts swung on toward the Principia in the 1680's, for forces and active
principles were everywhere. Not only was there the attractive force of
gravity binding the planets into a vibrant whole, there was also activity in
the sub-structure of matter. Gone, in Newton's mind, were the inert particles
of Cartesian matter resting quiescently together between impacts. In their
place were structured corpuscles of increasing complexity, held together upon
occasion by attractive forces of their own, but also capable upon other
occasions of repelling each other. Change was the order of the day in the
little world and matter matured and decayed and was constantly replenished
by active principles." (Dobbs, ibid., p. 212.) Newton's universe did not run
like a clock. An untellable number of writers have referred to Newton's
system of the world as a clockwork or machine-like universe, but as far as
Newton himself is concerned -- aside from various of his followers -- the
accusation is not just. It might be better attributed to Descartes or even
Leibniz, with whom Newton was frequently at odds.
114. Paul Davies wrote a second version of his The Forces of Nature, he
says, to take account of new theories that there is a single "superforce" in
which all forces have their origin. (Davies, ibid., p. vii.) There has been great
hope among certain physicists that a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) of this
kind will be generally accepted in the near future. But even if this doesn't
come to pass, the success that Newton had with his forces remains, suitably
altered to meet the demands of relativity and
quantum theory.
115. James Trefil begins his book Reading the Mind of God "This book
is about an idea, one of the most astonishing and least appreciated ideas in
modern science. I call it the principle of universality. It says that the laws of
nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in
the universe and have been in force for all time." (James Trefil, Reading the
Mind of God, 1989, p. 1.) Trefil goes on to say that has found in lecturing to a
wide variety of audiences that those not made up of university scientists give
evidence of not knowing about this kind of universality. His explanation is:
"The principle of universality is so important that it is never explicitly
taught. We [scientists] learn about it almost by osmosis. It pervades our
work, particularly in fields like astronomy, but is seldom explicitly stated."
(ibid., p. 2.) If Trefil is right, many people even today assume unless taught
otherwise that celestial objects play according to different rules than material
things on earth.
Appendix to Chapter 2
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A1. In the latter part of the 17th century, Isaac Newton, building on the
work of many predecessors, formulated a small number of laws from which
quantitative predictions about the movements of objects in the heavens can
be made. It was soon realized that some movements of terrestrial objects
could also be predicted with Newton's laws. While celestial objects are
nowadays seen to change, and even in a certain sense to be born, live and die,
the Newtonian laws according to which they change seem to be permanent,
although they have been extended in various ways. Newton's laws and the
myriad of consequences which have been drawn from them make up classical
or Newtonian mechanics, sometimes called rational or analytical mechanics.
The part of classical mechanics which applies to the motions of objects in the
heavens is commonly called celestial mechanics.
Uniform motion of a body is motion with a constant velocity, that is, with
unchanging speed and direction. A right line is what we now call a straight
line.
Newton's Second Law is the most dominant of the three laws of motion
since it gives a recipe for forming differential equations. These are
statements made using concepts of calculus. In many cases they can be
solved using methods of calculus, in one or another sense of the word solved
(including approximate solutions), to give quantitative descriptions of the
behavior of a great number of physical, chemical, biological, geological,
statistical, and other kinds of systems. It can be shown that the first law can
be derived as the special case of the second law in which the magnitude of the
impressed forces is zero.
Newton's Third Law. "To every action there is always opposed an equal
reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always
equal and directed to contrary parts."
This should not be taken to mean that objects never move. If I push on you,
thus exerting a force, and you move backwards, an explanation according to
Newton’s Third Law is that your reaction push was at the instant of contact
equal in magnitude to my push, though in the opposite direction (along a
straight line). This diminished the magnitude of my push in an amount equal
to the magnitude of the push you exerted. However, although my push was
weakened, there was still some more of my push it left over, so to speak, so
you were subjected to an acceleration in the direction of my push –-- and you
moved.
Thus the force of gravity exerted by one particle on another particle can be
measured by finding numbers measuring their masses in some way, and
multiplying these together; then finding the distance between the particles in
some way and squaring it and dividing the result into the product of the
masses; and finally, multiplying by a fixed number determined by the units of
measurement being used. (Laurence G. Taff, Celestial Mechanics, A
Computational Guide for the Practitioner, 1985, p. 1-2; Taff's quotations from
Newton's Principia are from the translation by Florian Cajori, 1934, p. 13-14,
and Newton's definitions of motion, mass (or quantity of matter and vis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
9. There is more. But this should be enough to show how complex and
intricate a discipline astrology can be. The assignment of positions of planets
and houses and aspects in horoscopes is a kind of applied observational
astronomy, in the modern sense of the word "astronomy". An interpretation
of these positions is the special province of astrology. A basic assumption of
astrologers is that the planets exert influences on characters and fates of
individuals. The positions of the sun, moon and other planets at birth
indicate determining influences. Each of the houses in a person's horoscope
is taken to govern some department of life. The various dignities and virtues
and powers of the planets are taken into consideration. The aspects are good
or bad indicators, depending on which approximate angle and which planets
are involved.
11. Judicial astrology is used not only to predict the future, but also to
read character. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, speaking from the standpoint of
modern Islam, says: "Human types can also be divided astrologically, here
astrology being understood in its cosmological and symbolic rather than its
predictive sense. Astrological classifications, which are in fact related to
traditional medical and physical typologies, concern the cosmic
correspondences of the various aspects of the human soul and unveil the
refraction of the archetype of man in the cosmic mirror in such a way as to
bring out the diversity of this refraction with reference to the qualities
associated with the zodiacal signs and the planets. Traditional astrology, in a
sense, concerns man on the angelic level of his being but also unveils, if
understood in its symbolic significance, a typology of man which reveals yet
another facet of the differentiation of the human species. The correspondence
between various parts of the body as well as man's mental powers to
astrological signs and the intricate rapport created between the motion of the
heavens, various "aspects" and relations between planets and human activity
are also a means of portraying the inward link that binds man as the
microcosm to the cosmos." (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred,
1981, p. 178-179.)
13. I have two pieces of now quite antiquated computer software called
LodeStar and HoroScopics, put out for astronomical hobbyists by a company
called Zephyr Services. The Lodestar program will show a diagram of the sky
for any date from 9999 BC to 9999 AD, giving the locations of over 9000 stars,
planets and galaxies, and the sun and moon. The HoroScopics program will
give a birth horoscope, with houses and aspects. I don't have the source code
for these programs, but it appears that the HoroScopics program consists
basically of part of the computer code for the LodeStar program extended by
some code which graphs a horoscope instead of a diagram of the sky, and
which assigns interpretations to classes of positions of the basic planets of
astrology (including the sun and moon). Naturally, only a part of the code for
LodeStar is needed for HoroScopics, since the influence of only a few celestial
objects are needed for casting horoscopes. This illustrates rather vividly how
astronomy, as we now understand it, is fundamental to astrology, but is
nowadays quite sharply separable from it.
17. How could the discovery of precession have had such a powerful
effect? As viewed from earth, regarded as fixed by most ancient astronomers,
the precession of the equinoxes can be taken as evidence for a gradual
rotation of the entire heavens, as the equinoctial points slowly move along
the celestial equator. Only a very powerful god could move the entire
heavens. Ulansey says: "I have argued that Mithraic iconography was a
cosmological code created by a circle of religious-minded philosophers and
scientists to symbolize their possession of secret knowledge: namely, the
knowledge of a newly discovered god so powerful that the entire cosmos was
completely under his control. It is not difficult to understand how such
knowledge could have come to form the core of an authentic religious
movement. For the possession of carefully guarded secret knowledge
concerning such a mighty divinity would naturally have been experienced as
assuring privileged access to the favors which this god could grant, such as
deliverance from the forces of fate residing in the stars and protection for the
soul after death during its journey through the planetary spheres. If we
understand salvation to be a divinely bestowed promise of safety in the
deepest sense, both during life and after death, then the god whose presence
we have discerned beneath the veils of Mithraic iconography was well suited
to perform the role of savior." (David Ulansey, The Origins of theMithraic
Mysteries, Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, 1989, p. 125.)
From this beginning, Mithraism evolved into a religion based on an ideology
of power and hierarchy, especially attractive to the military and militant.
21. Dick notes that the doctrines of the two branches of astrology
overlapped, and that it is not always easy to draw a line of demarcation
between them, yet he says that to men of the time the dichotomy was
apparent. This may be so, but the distinction needn't have been of much help
in deciding what should part of astrology should be rejected. It wasn't
possible to simply accept all natural astrology and reject all judicial astrology.
For example, according to the doctrines of natural astrology, the heavenly
bodies exercise certain powers on the earth and its inhabitants. These
included the sun's heating and the moon's action on bodies of water, along
with influences we now longer allow, such as certain actions on the human
body which physicians had to take into account. Now, to say that the sun
heats us seems unobjectionable by any criterion. Can we make reliable
predictions about the sun's heating? Yes, we can. Not as reliable as we
would like, but predictions of temperature changes and precipitation as made
in today's weather reports are a useful guide. Physicists and cosmologists
also make long range predictions about the sun's heating, on the basis of
thermodynamics and the evolution of stars. As to the moon's influence,
predictions of low and high tides can be found today in newspapers and
television weather reports.
22. In these two prototypical cases, the natural and judicial components
are intertwined, and both can claim successes. We no longer say that
weather and tide predictions are applications of astrology, but this is what
they were taken to be by most people during the Renaissance. Alleged
planetary influences on the fates and fortunes of individuals, and the special
branch of judicial astrology concerned with the casting of horoscopes, have
not been verified in this way. This seems to be true even in the case of the
reformed astrology based on planetary aspects, as recommended by Kepler,
although, as we said earlier, the results of Michel Gauquelin in relatively
recent years have raised some questions about the total failure of this kind of
astrology. In this case, the underlying planetary influence, the natural
astrology component, has not been found, nor have the predictions, the
27. Ernst Cassirer describes the work of Pietro Pomponazzi on fate, free
will and predestination, De fato, libero arbitrio et praedestinatione (1520):
[For Pomponazzi] divine foreknowledge does not necessarily conflict with the
freedom of human action .... Man grasps the past and present according to
its 'that', but grasps the future only according to his knowledge of the 'why',
because the future is not immediately given to him, but is rather only
deducible through its causes. But this difference between an immediate and
mediate, between given and deduced knowledge, is not valid for divine
knowledge. For in divine knowledge all temporal differences, so necessary for
our conception of the world, disappear. To know the future divine knowledge
needs no mediation, no discursive succession of the conditions by virtue of
which the future comes to be."
29. Eugenio Garin says that Pomponazzi had "no doubts concerning the
celestial connection, and therefore the determination on the part of the stars,
of all human events." Pompanazzi believed that the whole world rises and
falls in successive cycles. Pomponazzi says in De fato: "And as we see that
the earth which is now fertile will be barren, and the great and the rich will
become humble and wretched, so the course of history is determined. We
have seen the Greeks dominate the Barbarians, now the Barbarians
dominate the Greeks, and so everything goes on and changes. So it is
probable that he who is now a king will one day be a slave, and vice versa.....
If then someone asks you, what kind of game is this? You would be well
advised to reply that it is the game of God." Garin says: "Having established
this eternal and universal vicissitude of things, this perennial cycle of ascent
and descent, the revival of astrology with all its great themes follows logically
from it." But Pomponazzi separated astrology and magic from the
supernatural. "What matters to Pomponazzi," Garin says, is to bring every
apparently abnormal phenomenon back into the sphere of rational
interpretation and natural causes. Not demons nor miracles, but nervous
tension, force of the imagination, powers and qualities which are occult not
because they are supernatural but because they have not yet been
understood: these are the causes of miraculous events." (Pietro Pomponazzi,
quoted by Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance, 1983, p. 98-101,
translation of Lo Zodiaco della Vita, 1976.)
37. However, Thorndike says of Pico that his work against astrology on
the whole "is rambling and ineffective as far as orderly presentation and
cumulative argument are concerned." Furthermore, Thorndike says of the
first part: "This effort to give the impression that most of the great minds of
the past have condemned astrology is weak and unconvincing to anyone at all
acquainted with the past history of the subject. Pico selects only those
persons and data that support his contention, suppressing the evidence to the
contrary, or misrepresents the attitude of other personages ..... On the whole,
his citations are about as unconvincing as those of the astrologers in favor of
their art. He had a wide, if not exhaustive, acquaintance with the past
literature germane to his theme, but the use he makes of it is that of the
advocate and dialectical disputant, almost at times that of invective, rather
than that of the impartial historian of ideas." In general, according to
Thorndike, "One cannot but feel that the importance of Pico della Mirandola
in the history of thought has often been grossly exaggerated." (Lynn
Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 1923-1958, v. IV,
1934, p. 532, 529-530, 485.)
38. Still, the historian Jacob Burckhardt called Pico's piece Oratio de
hominis dignitate one of the noblest bequests of the Renaissance. Here Pico
speaks on the question of free will. Of God, he says: "He formed man
according to a general image that contained no particularities, and, setting
him in the centre of the world, said to him: 'We have given you, Adam, no
definite place, no form proper only to you, no special inheritance, so that you
may have as your own whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you
may choose, according to your wish and your judgment. All other beings have
received a rigidly determined nature, and will be compelled by us to follow
strictly determined laws. You alone are bound by no limit, unless it be one
prescribed by your will, which I have given you. I have placed you at the
centre of the world, so that you may more easily look around you and see
everything that is in it. I created you as a being neither heavenly nor
earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you may freely make and
master yourself, and take on any form you choose for yourself. You can
degenerate to animality or be reborn towards divinity..... Animals bring forth
... from the bodies of their mothers everything they ought to have. The
higher spirits are, from the beginning or soon afterwards, everything they
will be for eternity. But on man, the Father conferred, at the moment of
birth, the seeds and germ of every form of life. Those which he cultivates will
grow in him and bear fruit. If they are the plant seeds, he will vegetate; if he
follows the senses, he will become an animal; if he cultivates the power of
reason within him, he will become a celestial creature; if he follows
intelligence, he will become an angel and a son of God.'" (Pico della
39. Here Pico attributes magical powers to man. Only man has no
strictly determined nature and is subject to no strictly deterministic laws,
contrary to what some Stoics and astrologers have claimed. A person can do
anything he or she wants to. This illustrates a fundamental distinction
between astrology and magic, or astrology and other kinds of magic. Magic,
generally speaking, concentrates on giving power and understanding to
people, aims which magic shares with science. Astrology seeks to understand
certain powers of nature over people, so they can accommodate to it, or take
steps to deal with it. No astrologer or astronomer undertakes to change the
stars.
40. Despite the refutations of Pico della Mirandola and others, people
continued to put stock in astrology. Shumaker quotes Paul Kocher (Science
and Religion in Elizabethan England, 1953) who observed that "of the six
full-scale polemics published in England against astrology in the Elizabethan
age, five -- those by William Fulke, John Calvin, William Perkins, John
Chamber, and George Carleton -- came from ecclesiastics." (Kocher, p.202;
the work by Carleton is called Astrologomania: The Madnesse of Astrologers,
1624.) In addition to these, Dick lists Thomas Cranmer, James Pilkington,
Roger Hutchinson, and Andrew Willett and remarks that he could give many
more. (Dick, loc. cit., p. 23-25.) Furthermore, the State issued various
proclamations and statutes against sorcery, taken to include astrological
prediction. It was recognized that such prognostications could be a cause of
disorder in the Commonwealth. In the same treatise in which he revealed his
belief in witches, his Daemonolgies in Forme of a Dialogue (1597), King
James attacked judicial astrology.
41. But after discussing opposition to astrology, Kocher goes on: "And
who, on the other side, spoke up for astrology? To the bewilderment of the
modern analyst, chiefly the foremost scientific men of the age ... an almost
solid front of physicians, astronomers, and other natural philosophers,
renowned for their achievements." This seems to be overstated, since many
of the natural philosophers were skeptical about various kinds of astrology,
and tended only to think there was something in it. This too is
understandable, since scientists took it that there are laws which are
independent of human will, and of chance. "Were a choice necessary,"
Shumaker says, "causation might, after all, be better laid to physical rays
emanating from planets and stars, which at least were subject to observation,
than to mystical numbers, cabalistic verbal formulas, and devils." (l.c., p. 54.)
Physicians in those days were especially prone to accept astrological theories.
They were a part of their standard repertoire.
42. Keith Thomas discusses the practice, role and relations with
religion of astrology in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. In connection
with religion, he says: "Committed to the belief that the will was necessarily
free, the clergy therefore reasoned that it was impossible to predict future
human behaviour. If the astrologers did so, it could only mean that they
were in league with the Devil. Charms and spells, said Bishop Carleton [in
1624], were the Devil's rudiments, but judicial astrology was the Devil's
university. Astrologers in tacit league with Satan deserved the fate
45. Our fortune comes from the stars, but reason and prudence are
sometimes useful in perfecting fortune. Allen says: "The arch stone of
Pontano's theory is his notion of the fortunate. Nature, he says, begets
certain men who are the children of fortune and others who are not. The
fortunate man, unlike the virtuous man, does not need to follow a code of
conduct; he has only to follow his natural impulses, and he will be carried to
the highest goals. Pontano admits that he does not know why this is so;
reason can no more explain it than it can explain why one man wins at dice
and another man loses. The fortunate are like prophets, sybils, and poets;
they are agitated by a divine power. Reason and study have nothing to do
with their successful careers; in fact, the fortunate often lose their occult
These lines, says Parker, have often been misunderstood. The meaning
is that there are times when men are best able to master their fates -- which
a competent astrologer could calculate for them -- and that a man is an
underling if he doesn't act at a moment when the planetary positions are
propitious for him. To say that the fault is not in the stars of the conspirators
is to say that the planetary positions are propitious for the assassination of
Caesar. There is something compelling about this interpretation, given the
context of the whole play, and it indicates a faith in astrology, together with a
view that the stars incline but do not compel. (Derek Parker, Familiar to All,
William Lilly and Astrology in the Seventeenth Century, 1975, p. 47-54.)
Numerous other passages from Shakespeare's writings show a similar
attitude toward astrology. Prospero, in The Tempest, says in the manner of
Cassius:
"... by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If I now court not but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop."
One may take it that Shakespeare could expect such beliefs to be common in
his audiences.
Parker says: "The astrological theory fitted soundly into the Elizabethan's
general conception of the universe, with its great emphasis on order -- an
emphasis which stressed, certainly, the necessity for oder within the State,
an inflexible social order; but which reached out beyond man's life, or rather
through it, to the easily discernible order within the observable universe: the
order of the moving planets and the fixed stars, impressive by the fact that it
seemed to regulate what otherwise would easily become a chaos, but also
because it provided a paradigm by which man could learn about his place in
the natural, universal order of things..... Astrology had too long been
regarded as an immutable law for any but the strongest mind to ignore the
fact. It would have taken as much single-minded courage for an Elizabethan
positively to deny the planets their effect on man's life as for an early
Victorian to deny God his influence." (Parker, l.c., p. 53-55.)
50. Dick also calls attention to the character of the general run of
astrologers in Renaissance England: "For men in touch with the future, they
were a ragged, rascally lot, as the satirists never failed to remark. The
account of his own life by that gifted opportunist William Lilly introduces us
to a notable set of rogues who professed astrology dyuring the early years of
the seventeenth century: Simon Forman, purveyor of aphrodisiacs to the
Countess of Essex; one Evans, a Welsh clergyman who had fled his cure of
souls to live in drunken squalor in Gunpowder Alley .....; William Hodges, the
Staffordshire crystal-gazer; Alexander Hart, an ex-soldier, who professed to
discover the proper times for gamblers to play dice; Geoffrey Neve, once
storekeeper and quack doctor; Richard Delahay, alias Dr. Ardee, a disbarred
attorney; Captain Bubb, a convicted thief; and William Poole, gardener,
bricklayer, pickpocket, and judicial astrologer. Men of this order had
obviously sunk even beneath hypocrisy. ..... Those who respected astrology
could look only with grief and anger on the rising tide of quackery. As Elias
Ashmole wrote: 'Yet of this sort at present are start up divers Illiterate
Professors (and Women are of the Number) who even make Astrologie the
Bawd and Pander to all manner of Iniquity, prostituting Chast Urania to be
abus'd by every adulterate interest. And what will be the issue (I wish it may
prove no Prophesie ere long Astrologie shall be cried down as an Impostor,
because it is made use of as a Stale to all bad Practices, and a laudable
Faculty to bolster up the legerdimane of a Cheate.'" (Dick, loc. cit., p. 36-37;
the quotation by Ashmole is from Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchemy ...
with annotations by Elias Ashmole, ed. E. J, Holmyard, 1931, p. 123.)
51. Dick concludes that for educated men in the early 17th century,
mistrust of astrology was widespread. Christian doctrine of the time opposed
it. The State passed laws against it. The spread of literacy told against it.
Philosophers wrote treatises against it. The unreliability of the astrologers
became notorious. Many astrologers were palpably rogues and charlatans.
Satirists wrote popular plays and essays ridiculing it.
52. The opinion of Hardin Craig lies somewhere between those of Derek
Parker and Hugh Dick (their dates of publication are: Craig, 1935; Dick,
1944; Parker, 1975). In the Enchanted Glass Craig says: "We may ask to
53. Craig discusses the poet Sir Philip Sidney and the mathematician
Robert Recorde as representative of learned and accomplished men who
looked favorably on astrology. He also speaks of the scorn of learned people,
believers in astrology or not, for ignorant and dishonest practitioners of the
art. A number of very popular superficial works on astrology attest to what
was considered abuse of astrology, especially by medical men for whom
astrology was a part of their professional technique. There was, for example,
The Shepherds Kalendar, possibly Alexander Barclay's translation of
Kalendrier des Bergers (Paris, 1503). A translation by R. Copland published
first in 1508 ran through 15 editions by 1631. There was The Compost of
Ptholomeus (first published by R. Wyer between about 1532 and 1540), "a
wretched English translation of what seems to have been a poor French
version of the Centiloquium, or hundred aphorisms, based on the Tetrabiblos
of Ptolemy and supposed to give the 'Fruit' of the Ptolemaic teachings as
applied to astrological ends." (ibid., p. 38.) There were numerous other items
of this inferior nature, including "one of the most celebrated books of
quackery in the world, the Secreta Secretorum". (ibid., p. 39.)
54. Craig concludes: "This ground is familiar, but the reader should
remember a distinction probably worth making in connexion with it,--that
between the honest, well-informed, and sincere practitioners of a false science
and the dishonest, ignorant, and pretentious quacks from whose knavery the
profession suffered disgrace. The matter was relative at any given time in
the sixteenth century. It was not only relative but changing rapidly. Many
works which were adequate expressions of the best learning of say 1550 had
become the vulgar knowledge of 1580 and 1590; truer learning had
meanwhile risen to higher planes. Quackery too underwent its changes. It
grew more mystical and bombastic; but the ancient cheap stuff, much of
which had troubled the Middle Ages, also lived on as it lives now more
remotely. Let it not be thought that quackery was then or is now usually
insincere; its insincerity was and is a variable factor. Dr. John Dee was a
frank thinker and something of a scholar; he was much misled. Dr. Robert
Fludd was one of the most learned, most sincere, most bombastic imposters
that ever lived. He fooled himself far more than Dr. Dee was fooled by
others." (ibid., p. 40.)
56. Well into the 17th century, the learned Robert Burton, whose
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-1638) can be considered a kind of medical
treatise in literary form on what we today call depression, says about
astrology: "Natural causes are either primary and universal, or secondary
and more particular. Primary causes are the heavens, planets, stars, etc., by
their influence (as our astrologers hold) producing this and such-like effects.
I will not here stand to discuss obiter, whether stars be causes, or signs; or to
apologize for judicial astrology. If either Sextus Empiricus, Picus Mirandula,
Sextus ab Hemings, Pererius, Erastus, Chambers, etc., have so far prevailed
with any man, that he will attribute no virtue at all to the heavens, or to sun,
or moon, more than he doth to their signs at an innkeeper's post, or
tradesman's shop, or generally condemn all such astrological aphorisms
approved by experience: I refer him to Bellantius, Pirovanus, Marascallerus,
Goclenius, Sir Christopher Heydon, etc. If thou shalt ask me what I think, I
must answer, nam et doctis hisce erroribus versatus sum [for I too am
conversant with these learned errors], they do incline, but not compel; no
necessity at all, agunt non cogunt [they impel but do not compel]: and so
gently incline, that a wise man may resist them; sapiens dominabitur astris
[a wise man will rule the stars]; they rule us, but God rules them."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
12. "Horoscopic astrology, the 12 signs of the zodiac, and the doctrine of
the hypsomata were a still later development. The earliest horoscope (now in
Oxford) dates from 410 BC. Two astrological manuals show drawings of the
hypsomata, or positions of greatest astrological influence: the moon in
Taurus, Jupiter in Cancer, Mercury in Virgo. They date from the Seleucid
period (after 300 BC). The texts attached to these drawings have by now
reached the refinement of dividing each sign of the zodiac into twelve
'microzodiacs' of 2 1/2 days each. This sophisticated astrology, for which the
'Chaldeans' were renowned in the Roman world, was only developed after the
fall of Babylon to the Persians in 539 BC." (O. R. Gurney, in Oracles and
Divination, 1981, edited by Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker, p. 160-162.)
13. Samuel Angus makes the claim that astrology made the Greek and
Roman methods of inquiry into the future antiquated. Augury and haruspicy
were practically abandoned. Official oracles, like the one at Delphi, though
revived under the empire, had stiff competition, he says, from the Chaldaei
and mathematici, as well as from Christian and Gnostic apocalypses.
(Samuel Angus, The Mystery-Religions and Christianity, A Study in the
Religious Background of Early Christianity, 1925, p. 167.)
15. These beliefs fit easily into Stoic doctrines, and the Stoics
maintained astrological doctrines from early on. It was, as we said earlier,
an understandable outgrowth of dismay at a world which seemed to be rules
by chance and fickle fortune. One of the leaders of the Stoic school, Diogenes
'the Babylonian' from Seleucia on the Tigris (d. 152 B.C.), maintained that
the souls of men and women contain a spark of the power that rules the
heavens. Grant says of this Diogenes: "Building on his forerunner
Cleanthes' veneration of the sun and the celestial bodies, [he] became the
traitor withing the gates who welcomed astrology for its apparently
convincing proof of this 'Sympathy of all Creation'." Another Stoic, Panaetius
of Rhodes (c. 185-109 B.C.) rejected the idea that the sun, moon and stars
causally affect the affairs of the world, although he was willing to accept the
validity of divination. But soon afterwards an influential Stoic, Posidonius of
Apamea in Syria (c. 135-50 B.C.), welcomed the basic astrological principles
as keys to the harmony of the universe.
16. Some believers in such principles allowed a limited scope for free
will, but nevertheless considered themselves to be ruled by the unchanging
and inescapable heavenly spheres, which predestine all that happens.
Others revolted against a pitiless mechanical inevitability and sought means
to circumvent or reduce the oppressiveness of the astral powers. This
required finding out what the powers had in store, and how to arrange one's
activities to avoid their most hostile intentions. For this, experts were
needed: professional astrologer/astronomers. These became an influential
group, who provided numberless believers with a principal interest,
consolation and excitement. They cast horoscopes, in which the future
destiny of a person was worked out from the positions of heavenly bodies at
the time of his or her birth. The astrologer/ astronomers not only prophesied
future destinies, but also counseled people on how to outwit what had been
destined. They mixed a kind of science with a kind of magic.
18. The Babylonians were known to the Greeks and Romans not only as
astrologers, astronomers and magicians, but as diviners by other methods.
Writing about 161 or 162 A.D., the satirist Lucian tells how Menippus makes
19. "Anyhow, after the incantation he would spit in my face thrice and
then go back again without looking at anyone whom he met. We ate nuts,
drank milk, mead, and the water of the Coaspes, and slept out of doors on the
grass. When he considered the preliminary course of dieting satisfactory,
taking me to the Tigris river at midnight he purged me, cleansed me, and
consecrated me with torches and squills and many other things, murmuring
his incantation as he did so. Then after he had be charmed me from head to
foot and walked all about me, that I might not be harmed by phantoms, he
took me home again, just as I was, walking backward. After that, we made
ready for the journey. He himself put on a magician's gown very like the
Median dress, and speedily costumed me in these things which you see -- the
cap, the lion's skin, and the lyre besides; and he urged me, if anyone should
ask my name, not to say Menippus, but Heracles or Odysseus or Orpheus."
(Lucian, Lucian, v. 4, "Menippus", translated by A. M. Harmon, 1925, p. 83-
87.)
20. The ancient Chinese, on the whole, seem not to have become as
secular-minded as the Babylonians about the stars. Edward Schafer says
that for most early Chinese, even for the most advanced authorities,
astronomy was indistinguishable from astrology. As understanding of stellar
motions was refined, and more and more aspects of the starry firmament
were removed from the realm of conjecture, doubt and fear into the realm of
the known and predictable, this identification remained. Comets, meteors
and supernovae remained terrible signals from the powers in space, and it
would be wrong to suppose that the inclusion of quite reliable ephemerides in
a medieval Chinese almanac means that movements of celestial objects had
become accepted as merely physical transits of the sky. Schafer says: "There
were certainly skeptics, but it appears that most men, even well-educated
men, continued to believe that a predictable Jupiter remained an awful
Jupiter." Moreover, the Chinese devoted little energy to making geometrical
models of the physical universe which would account for their observations
and arithmetical calculations. "Indeed," says Schafer, "cosmology languished
close to the borderlands of mythology, and for many, perhaps most people,
the two were identical." The obliquity of the ecliptic, the precession of the
25. Cicero reports that the Stoic Cleanthes (c. 300-220 B.C.) gave four
reasons to account for the formation in men's minds of their ideas of gods:
"He put first the argument ... arising from our foreknowledge of future
events; second, the one drawn from the magnitude of the benefits we derive
from our temperate climate, from the earth's fertility, and from a vast
abundance of other blessings; third, the awe inspired by lightning, storms,
rain, snow, hail, floods, pestilences, earthquakes, and occasionally
subterranean rumblings, showers of stones and raindrops the colour of blood,
also landslips and chasms suddenly opening in the ground, also unnatural
monstrosities human and animal, and also the appearance of meteoric lights
and what are called by the Greeks 'comets,' and in our language 'long-haired
stars,'..... all of which alarming portents have suggested to mankind the idea
of the existence of some celestial and divine power. And the fourth and most
potent cause of the belief he said was the uniform motion and revolution of
the heavens, and the varied groupings and ordered beauty of the sun, moon
and stars, the very sight of which was in itself enough to prove that these
things are not the mere effect of chance. When a man goes into a house, a
wrestling-school or a public assembly and observes in all that goes on
arrangement, regularity and system, he cannot possibly suppose that these
things come about without a cause: he realizes that there is someone who
presides and controls. Far more therefore with the vast movements and
phases of the heavenly bodies, and these ordered processes of a multitude of
enormous masses of matter, which throughout the countless ages of the
infinite past have never in the smallest degree played false, is he compelled
to infer that these mighty world-motions are regulated by some Mind."
(Cicero, De natura deorum, translated by H. Rackham, 1933, p. 137-139.)
26. It is, then, small wonder that celestial objects came to be regarded
as having power over our affairs. In omen or portent astrology, attempts are
made to use such objects to predict events of importance to a country and its
rulers. Omen astrology seems to have been indigenous to Babylonia,
although the Chinese may have developed their own version independently.
Bartel van der Waerden assigns the beginning of omen astrology to before the
reign of Hammurabi in Babylonia (about 1800 B.C.), and perhaps much
earlier. (Bartel van der Waerden, Science Awakening II, The Birth of
Astronomy, 1974, p. 49.)
28. Although there may have been secular attitudes among Chaldean
diviners, we may suppose they were to some degree influenced by the
prevailing religion. In ancient Babylonia, the sun deity Marduk, the greatest
of the Babylonian gods and successor to the moon deity of the Sumerians, set
the celestial beings to moving and determined their courses. Marduk
articulated time into units, and the regularity of celestial motions became a
model for the life of men in society, and a powerful force on the development
of their government, work and cities. The highest duty of the highest officials
of Babylon, the priests, was to observe and interpret the movements of the
sun, moon and other celestial objects. (Babylon, in the time of
Nebuchadnezzar (died 562 B.C.), was probably the greatest and most well
organized city in the world, estimated to support between 250,000 and
300,000 inhabitants. It was Nebuchadnezzar who is reputed to have built the
"tower of Babel", and to have destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. In
Greece, this was about the time of Anaximander, one of the pre-Socratic
philosophers, perhaps the first person to ever make a geometric model of the
universe, or at any rate this appears to be the earliest we know about.)
29. At the head of the Babylonian and Assyrian panoply of gods is Anu.
"Anu," we are told, "was the son of Anshar and Kishar. His name signified
'sky' and he reigned over the heavens... Aided by his companion, the goddess
Antu, he presided from above over the fates of the universe and hardly
occupied himself with human affairs. Thus, although he never ceased to be
universally venerated, other gods finally supplanted him and took over
certain of his prerogatives. But the great god's prestige remained such that
the power of these usurper gods was never firmly established until they, too,
assumed the name Anu..... The entire course of human life was ... regulated
by the sovereign will of the gods, whose chief attribute was deciding the fates
of men. We have already seen how highly the gods valued this privilege
which fell successively to Anu, Enlil, Ea and Marduk. Although it was the
supreme god who made the final decision, all could discuss it. At the
beginning of every year, while on earth the festival of Zagmuk was being
celebrated, the gods assembled in the Upshukina, the Sanctuary of Fates.
The king of the gods in the later Babylonian period, Bêl-Marduk, took his
place on the throne. The other gods knelt with fear and respect before him.
Removing from his bosom the Tablet of Fates, Bêl-Marduk confided it to his
son Nabu, who wrote down on it what the gods had decided. Thus the fate of
30. If Anu is the chief god, what was the status of his parents Anshar
and Kishar? The Larousse has it that Apsu (sweet water) and Tiamat (salt
water) were the fount of all things. The first offspring of these were Lakhmu
and Lakhamu, "rather vague gods" who "seem to be a pair of monstrous
serpents. They gave birth to Anshar, the male principle, and to Kishar, the
female principle, who represented respectively, so some think, the celestial
and terrestrial worlds. In the same way the Greek gods were born of the
union of Uranus, the sky, and Gaea, the earth. But while in Greek
mythology Gaea played an important role, Kishar does not appear again in
the story." (ibid, p. 49-50.)
31. Thorkild Jacobsen tells the same story like this, based on Old
Babylonian copies of Sumerian texts from the third millenium B.C. "An
ranked highest among the gods. His name, borrowed by the Akkadians as
Anum, is the Sumerian word for "sky" and inherently An is the numinous
power in the sky, the source of rain and the basis for the calendar since it
heralds through its changing constellations the times of the year with their
different works and celebrations..... An's spouse was the earth, Ki, on whom
he engendered trees, reeds, and all other vegetation ..... There also seems to
have been a tradition that saw the power in the sky as both male and female
and distinguished the god An (Akkadian Anum) from the goddess An
(Akkadian Antum) to whom he
was married. According to that view the rains flowed from the sky goddess'
breasts, or (since she was usually envisaged in cow shape) her udder -- that is
from the clouds..... An had not only engendered vegetation, he was the father
and ancestor of all of the gods, and he likewise fathered innumerable demons
and evil spirits. Frequently he was envisaged as a huge bull..... The view of
An as a major source of fertility, the "father who makes the seed sprout,"
engenderer of vegetation, demons, and all the gods, led naturally to the
attribution of paternal authority to him..... With the developing of social
differentiation and the attitudes of growing respect and awe before the ruler,
a new sensitivity to the potential in the vast sky for inducing feelings of
numinous awe seems to have come into being. The sky can, at moments
when man is in a religiously receptive mood, act as vehicle for a profound
experience of numinous awe, as may be instanced in our own culture."
33. Jacobsen continues: "To the ancient Mesopotamians what the sky
might reveal was An, its own inner essence of absolute authority and majesty
-- might reveal, but would not necessarily reveal, for in everyday moods the
sky would be experienced apart from the numinous power in it and would
34. Since the seasons and other important events are to some degree
related to movements of the moon, sun and stars, it's reasonable to try to
correlate as many events as we can with these movements. For example, the
approximate time for the flooding of the Nile in ancient Egypt was correlated
with movements of the sun and stars. Certain kinds of weather are
correlated with the appearances of constellations, including not only their
positions but also atmospheric effects. Martin Nilsson says that the most
widely read of all Hellenistic poems was the Phainomena of Aratus, which
was a book containing rules for predicting the weather in this way. (Martin
Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion, 1950, v. 2, p. 56.)
39. The point is that myths which superficially are about incest, rape,
arduous and dangerous journeys, people turning into birds or other creatures,
and the like, may turn out to be descriptions of astronomical and associated
seasonal phenomena. However, in the view of Lévi-Strauss: "In granting
that myths have an astronomical significance, I do not propose to revert in
any way to the mistaken ideas characteristic of the solar mythography of the
nineteenth century. In my view, the astronomical context does not provide
any absolute point of reference; we cannot claim to have interpreted the
myths simply by relating them to this context. The truth of the myth does
not lie in any special content. It consists in logical relations which are devoid
of content or, more precisely, whose invariant properties exhaust their
operative value, since comparable relations can be established among the
elements of a large number of different contents."
42. "Starting from the problem of the mythic origin of cooking," says
Lévi-Strauss, "I have been led to verify my interpretation of domestic fire as a
mediatory agent between sky and earth by reference to the myth describing
incest between blood relatives as the origin of the eclipse...... A myth about
the origin of storms and rain [the one Lévi-Strauss started with] led me to
myths about the origin of fire and the cooking of foodstuffs... I was able to
establish that all these myths belong to one and the same set ....." (p. 298,
300.) Which explains which? Do analogous actions of sun, moon and other
stars explain or describe the origin of cooking fires? Or does the analogy of
the origin of cooking fires explain or describe actions of the sun, moon and
stars? Are these interchangeable? If not, which takes precedence? Recall
Seneca on the Etruscans: "Since they attribute everything to divine agency,
they are of the opinion that things do not reveal the future because they have
occurred, but that they occur because they are meant to reveal the future."
43. Besides some roughly correct season and even (at times) weather
forecasting, there were no doubt successes in predicting such events as
attacks by enemies, since, for example, rulers probably tended to attack after
46. By about 300 B.C., the Babylonians had constructed tables, based
on centuries of observations, with which they could successfully predict lunar
eclipses, and with which they could at times rule out solar eclipses. A basic
underlying problem they were trying to solve is a form of one which haunts
mathematical astronomy to this day. From one point of view, this is the
problem of predicting the day on which a new moon will occur. The days are
determined by the movement of Earth with respect to the sun (or vice versa),
while new moons are determined by the movement of the moon with respect
to Earth. Thus the combined motions of sun, moon, and Earth are involved.
The problem of predicting the movements of the sun, moon and Earth with
respect to one another, starting from Newton's laws of mechanics and
gravitation, is known today as the 3-body problem. In some important
respects, the 3-body problem is still unsolved, although a great deal is known
about some basic special cases, and there are elaborate techniques for
approximating solutions. The Babylonian methods were a kind of
approximation technique, based on interpolation, inserting calculated values
between observed values in systematic ways. As far as seems to be known at
present, the first attempts to use geometry to model the movements of
celestial objects and relations between them were made by the ancient
Greeks in the 6th century B.C. The Babylonians seem not to have made
geometrical models for this purpose, or at least none have been found.
50. The Elements of Euclid was (or were) the principal introduction to
geometry for over 2000 years, and the geometry it contained has had, and
continues to have, many terrestrial as well as celestial applications. More
than that, the Elements has served as a model of a kind of attainment of
certainty -–given the initial assumptions, the axioms and postulates -- which
people have often tried to extend to other domains besides geometry. Euclid's
method, commonly known today as the axiomatic method, was described, in
one form, by Aristotle in his works on logic, especially in the Posterior
Analytics. It appears that Eudoxus originated the self-conscious and explicit
use of this method, and so was one of the founders of a philosophical tradition
of thinking about thinking, and reasoning about reasoning. The science of
deductive logic founded by Plato, and even more Aristotle, was based in
important respects on extrapolation from this method of the
mathematicians.
"AWFUL CATASTROPHE
PERPENDICULAR FALLS HEADLONG
ON A GIVEN POINT
The Line at C said to be completely bisected
President of the Line makes Statement
etc., etc., etc."
(W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance, 1880, Act 1.)
To see one way conic sections could have been used by the ancient Greeks,
consider a person looking with one eye at the sun (but only very briefly). A
cone can be formed with its apex at the person's eye, using as generators rays
from the eye to points on the circumference of a circular disk representing the
sun. An imaginary plane through this part of the cone, which meets all thexd
generators of the cone, but doesn't go through the eye, will have an ellipse in
common with the cone. Here one should take ellipse to mean a curve, like the
boundary of the flashlight spot. If one takes the generators to be rays from an
eye to all the points on the circumference and inside of a circular disk
reprenting the sun, then one would get an ellipse in the sense of a flat region,
like the entire flashlight spot. If the plane is imagined to contain the center
of the moon, we have the beginning of a mathematical model for representing
a lunar eclipse. It is likely that a primary motive and use for study of conic
sections by the ancient Greeks was to provide models for such astronomical
phenomena as eclipses.
56. Kepler, in developing his cosmology of the solar system in the late
1500's and early 1600's, used the mathematics of conic sections as developed
by Apollonius in deriving his three planetary laws, which became part of the
basis for Newton's law of gravity and its application to our solar system.
Newton, in the latter 1600's, showed that if two bodies in the universe are
sufficiently isolated from other bodies, then the paths they will follow because
of the gravitational attraction between them will be conic sections. The
simplest case is when one body is much smaller than the other, e.g. a comet
moving around the sun. The theory of Newton predicts that if we ignore the
influence of the moon, other planets, etc., and regard the sun as fixed, then
the orbit of the earth around the sun is an ellipse with the sun at one focus.
This had already been projected and verified by Kepler for Mars and the sun,
as the simplest curve consistent with the observations of Tycho Brahe and
Kepler's own planetary laws. Thus an essential part of our modern view of
the solar system rests, by way of Kepler, on the regular solids, discovered
some 2400 or 2500 years ago by members of a tradition of mathematics
founded by the classical Greeks, and on the geometry subsequently developed
or formulated by such mathematicians and astronomers as Eudoxus, Euclid,
and Apollonius.
59. Another great Greek astronomer was Hipparchus, who lived in the
2nd century B.C. Building on the earlier work of Eudoxus and other
astronomers, he developed an elaborate cosmology using spheres moving on
spheres, but the system of Hipparchus was simpler and at the same time
more comprehensive than the one which had grown out of the work of
Eudoxus. Hipparchus also accumulated quite accurate observations of the
relative positions and motions of the main celestial objects visible without
magnification. By virtue of some tables of ratios which he used in his work,
he is often regarded as the originator of trigonometry. He also extended the
work of Aristarchus on calculating the distances of our moon and sun from
Earth.
60. Even before the decline of Greek political power in the 3rd century
B.C., a school of Greek astronomers had arisen in Alexandria, Egypt, in the
midst of a culture much older than that of the Greeks. It was in Alexandria,
about 140 A.D., that Ptolemy wrote his Megale mathematike syntaxis or
"Great mathematical treatise", later known as the Almagest, from an Arabic
form of a Greek word meaning "the greatest". This work was a synthesis and
extension of the whole astronomical tradition which had been initiated by the
Greeks some 750 years before, and the Babylonians even earlier than that.
To feel how long 750 years is, we have 2000 - 750 = 1250, so working
backward about 750 years from our own time, we come to the year 1250,
62. According to Ptolemy, the moon, sun and then-known planets are
observed to revolve about Earth in the order Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun,
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The stars are taken to be at a great distance from
Earth -- even at an "infinite distance" from Earth, whatever that might be
taken to mean. Still, Ptolemy held that they revolved around Earth every
day. They certainly appear to do this. Most of Ptolemy's treatise, about 600
of the approximately 650 pages in the translation by Toomer, is dedicated to
elaborate mathematical procedures, calculations and tables which made it
possible to predict, at any time, the future positions of the sun, moon and
planets relative to Earth and the stars. On the whole, the accuracy was
within the limits imposed by using measurements made with human eyes
alone. Ptolemy started with relatively crude approximations using
periodically repeating motions. Then he improved on the approximations by
"perturbing" the basic motions with corrective periodic motions of greater and
greater frequency, successively added to the basic motion. Modern
63. Ptolemy argues "that the earth has the ratio of a point to the
heavens" (ibid., p. 43). The most telling argument here is that "the sizes and
distances of of the stars, at any given time, appear equal and the same from
all parts of the earth everywhere, as observations of the same [celestial]
objects from different latitudes are found to have not the least discrepancy
from each other" (ibid.). In modern terms, no stellar parallax is observed.
Indeed, this is impossible except with very refined instruments, and Ptolemy
was relying on naked eye observations. Ptolemy uses this property of Earth,
that it is a mere point as compared to the heavens, to explain why the great
weight of the earth doesn't cause it to move, even though it isn't supported by
anything. "For when one looks at it that way, it will seem quite possible that
that which is relatively smallest should be overpowered and pressed in
equally from all directions to a position of equilibrium by that which is the
greatest of all and of uniform nature." (ibid., p. 44) Ptolemy gave a program
for predicting the future, based on observational astronomy. Given initial
positions at some time, it became possible to say where the sun, moon and
planets would be for times in the future, very nearly. And it became possible
to say where these bodies were at times past. Ptolemy's methods and results
were not improved on in essentials for some 14 centuries.
65. White continues: "In attendance upon the Divine Majesty, thus
enthroned, are vast hosts of angels, who are divided into three hierarchies,
one serving in the empyrean, one in the heavens, between the empyrean and
the earth, and one on the earth. Each of these hierarchies is divided into
three choirs, or orders; the first, into the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, and
Thrones; and the main occupation of these is to chant incessantly -- to
'continually cry' the divine praises. The order of Thrones conveys God's will
to the second hierarchy, which serves in the movable heavens. This second
hierarchy is also made up of three orders. The first of these, the order of
66. "Below the earth is hell. This is tenanted by the angels who
rebelled under the lead of Lucifer, prince of seraphim -- the former favourite
of the Trinity; but, of these rebellious angels, some still rove among the
planetary spheres, and give trouble to the good angels; others pervade the
atmosphere about the earth, carrying lightning, storm, drought, and hail;
others infest earthly society, tempting men to sin; but Peter Lombard and St.
Thomas Aquinas take pains to show that the work of these devils is, after all,
but to discipline man or to mete out deserved punishment. All this vast
scheme had been so riveted into the Ptolemaic view by use of biblical texts
and theological reasonings that the resultant system of the universe was
considered impregnable and final. To attack it was blasphemy. It stood for
centuries. Great theological men of science, like Vincent of Beauvais and
Cardinal d'Ailly, devoted themselves to showing not only that it was
supported by Scripture, but that it supported Scripture. Thus was the
geocentric theory embedded in the beliefs and aspirations, in the hopes and
fears, of Christendom down to the middle of the sixteenth century." (White,
ibid.)
68. "In contrast with the heavens, where the only activity was the
uniform, circular motion of the spheres, the terrestrial region, lying below the
concavity of the lunar sphere and descending to the geometric centre of the
universe, was characterized by incessant change as the bodies within it came
into being and passed away. These terrestrial bodies were compounded of
four elements, earth, water, air and fire, each of which had its own natural
place and the innate capacity for natural motion toward that place. The
69. Grant observes: "The basic, skeletal frame described here was
probably instrumental in the longevity of the Aristotelian world view [in the
Middle Ages]. In the judgment of C. S. Lewis, 'The human imagination has
seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos.'
By the magnificent simplicity of its fundamental structure, it satisfied the
European mind, psychologically and intellectually, for some 450 years. It
was this physical frame on which, and in which, the Christian God of the
Middle Ages had exercised His wisdom and distributed angels and powers."
(Grant, ibid., p. 95.)
71. "And what of the relationship between these orbs? Were they
contiguous -- that is, distinct and separate, as indicated by their diverse and
contrary motions -- as MIchael Scot and Albert of Saxony gelieved; or did
they form a continuous whole, sharing common surfaces by virtue of their
identical, homogeneous composition, as Thomas Aquinas and others believed?
What, or who, could be identified as the movers of celestial spheres? Angels,
intelligences, souls, natural inclinations, and impressed forces were all
suggested and partisans for each could be found. And what about
relationships between celestial motions? Were they commensurable or
incommensurable? Although all were agreed that no material body existed
75. "Copernicus," said Kepler, "ignorant of his own riches, took it upon
himself for the most part to represent Ptolemy, not nature, to which he had
nevertheless come the closest of all." This is cited by Smerdlow and
Neugebauer as a famous and just assessment of Copernicus (ibid., p. 483.)
76. It has often been said that the Copernican heliocentric theory was
superior to the Ptolemaic theory because it was simpler. However, Smerdlow
and Neugebauer observe: "Anyone who thinks that Copernican theory is
"simpler" than Ptolemaic theory has never looked at Book III of De
revolutionibus. In a geocentric system the earth is at rest -- as indeed it
appears to be -- and any apparent motions in the heavens that we know to
result from its motions are distributed among a number of objects, i.e. the
sun, the individual planets, the sphere of the fixed stars, everything in its
proper place as it actually appears. But when Copernicus worked through
the consequences of his own theory, he had to attribute to the earth no less
than three fundamental motions and a number of secondary motions. That
all these compounded motions forced upon a single and, to all appearances,
quiescent body seemed implausible to his contemporaries is not to be
wondered at, especially because the end result was nothing other than
reproducing the same apparent motions in the heavens that had been
accounted for all along (and without making assumptions that contradicted
contemporary natural philosophy, common sense, and the most casual or
most meticulous observations then possible of the behavior of the earth and
of objects on or near its surface)." (Smerdlow and Neugebauer, ibid., p. 127.)
77. Copernicus's belief in the superiority of his own theory was based
on such facts as these: In his system, the order and distances of the planets
could be unambiguously determined, and shown to form a single harmonious
whole. In the geocentric theory, only relative radii of eccentrics and epicycles
were known, and for one planet at a time -- there were no relations between
radii for different planets. Using the heliocentric theory, it was possible to
explain a number of other puzzling features of the Ptolemaic theory, such as
why the centers of the epicycles of the inferior planets (Mercury and Venus)
lie in the direction of the sun, why the radii of the epicycles of the superior
planets (the other known planets) stay parallel to the direction from the
earth to the sun, and so on.
82. For example, it is often said that one effect of the placing of the sun
at the center of the solar system by Copernicus in the 16th century caused
men to stop thinking of themselves as being the most important of creatures
since they no longer could think of themselves as the center of the universe.
However, while Ptolemy placed Earth at the center of the universe, he made
Earth a mere point at the center, in comparison with the immensity of the
heavens. This, together with widespread beliefs about the corruptibility of
"... some have thought yt euery starre a worlde we well may call, _
The earth they count a darkened starre, whereas the least of all."_
85. The view of Earth as infinitesimal and wretched (so different from
the view from the moon relayed by astronauts) continued to be a
commonplace in the Renaissance. It was solemnly cited by the English
educator Robert Recorde, in his address in 1556 to students encouraging
them to be diligent. For Recorde, Henninger says, the study of cosmography -
- which Recorde took to include astronomy, astrology and geography -- is a
kind of moral choice. "We may grovel as groundlings among the brutes, or we
may turn our attention up the scale of being and aspire after angels in the
empyrean." (S. K. Henninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass, Renaissance
Diagrams of the Universe, 1977, p. 11-12.)
87. Montaigne goes on: "Now, our human reasonings and arguments
are [like] lumpish and sterile matter; the grace of God is [what fashions
them]; it is that which gives them shape and value..... Let us, then, consider
now man by himself, without external aid, armed only with his own weapons,
and deprived of divine favour and recognition..... Let us see how much
support he has in that fine equipment..... What has made him believe that
the wonderful motions of the celestial vault, the eternal light of those
luminaries revolving so proudly above his head, and the terrifying motions of
the infinite sea were established and continued for many ages for his
pleasure and for his service? Is it possible to imagine any thing so ridiculous
as this wretched, paltry creature, who, being not even his own master,
exposed to the offences of all things, declares himself master and ruler of the
universe of which it is not in his power to understand the smallest fragment,
far less to govern it? And this prerogative that he attributes to himself, of
being the only creature in this great structure who has the ability to
recognize beauty and its part, the only one who can render thanks to the
architect, and keep account of the income and outlay of the world -- who has
set the seal of this prerogative upon him?." (Montaigne, Ives's translation,
loc. cit., p. 592, 595-6.)
90. In the face of views like those reflected in the works of Palingenius
and Montaigne, it appears that the more likely effect of Copernicanism on
some was not to make men humble because they had been displaced from the
center of the universe, but to make them proud that Copernicus and his
adherents -- Kepler, Galileo, and the rest -- had revealed a part of God's
handiwork, and proud of the handiwork itself. Too proud says Montaigne.
But why not a little pride? Speaking of his system, Copernicus himself said:
"So we find in this admirable arrangement a harmony of the Universe, as
well as a certain relationship between the motion and the size of the spheres,
91. Koyré comments that the great advantage of the system from the
point of view of Copernicus lies in its revelation of the systematic structure of
the Universe, and not in its providing the best agreement with observational
data and ease of computation. "History has proved him to be right", says
Koyré. (Koyré. ibid., p. 108.)
97. The story has been exhaustively studied on all sides ever since, but
the essence of it has remained the same. Galileo was forced by the
Inquisition to publicly renounce, on his knees, his opinions on the validity
and superiority of the Copernican system. The official sentence reads: "We
say, pronounce, sentence, declare that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the
matters adduced in trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered
yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy,
namely of having believed and held the doctrine -- which is false and contrary
to the sacred and divine Scriptures -- that the Sun is the center of the world
and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the
center of the world; and that an opinion may be held and defended as
probable after it has been declared and defined to be contrary to Holy
Scripture; and that consequently you have incurred all the censures and
penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other
constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. From which
we are content that you be absolved, provided that first, with a sincere heart,
and unfeigned faith, you abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and
heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and
Apostolic Roman Church in the form to be prescribed by us." (quoted by
Giorgio de Santillana on p. xlvii-xlviii of the preface to his version, Dialogue
on the Great World Systems, 1953, of the Thomas Salusbury translation
98. White says: "Doubtless many will exclaim against the Roman
Catholic Church for this: but the simple truth is that Protestantism was no
less zealous against the new scientific doctrine. All branches of the
Protestant Church -- Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican -- vied with each other in
denouncing the Copernican doctrine as contrary to Scripture; and, at a later
period, the Puritans showed the same tendency. Said Martin Luther [for
example]: "People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that
the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon.
Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all
systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire
science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded
the sun to stand still, and not the earth." (White, ibid., p. 126.)
100.Ptolemy, who believed that the earth stands still at the center of
the universe on physical rather than theological grounds, wrote on geography
as well as astronomy. His Geographia was very influential in antiquity.
Ptolemy also wrote on astrology. In the European Middle Ages, Ptolemy was
perhaps most widely known for his work on astrology called Mathematikes
tetrabiblou syntaxeos, or simply the Tetrabiblos or Quadripartitum; that is,
The four-book mathematical treatise, or The Four Books. In Book II, Ptolemy
says that astronomical prediction (meaning what we would call astrological
prediction) is divided into two great parts, and: "... since the first and more
universal is that which relates to whole races, countries, and cities, which is
called general, and the second is that which relates to individual men, which
is called genethlialogical, we believe it fitting to treat first of the general
102. On the question of free will, Ptolemy says: "... we should not
believe that separate events attend mankind as the result of the heavenly
cause as if they had been originally ordained for each person by some
irrevocable divine command and destined to take place by necessity without
the possibility of any other cause whatever interfering. Rather is it true that
the movement of the heavenly bodies, to be sure, is eternally performed in
accordance with divine, unchangeable destiny, while the change of earthly
things is subject to a natural and mutable fate, and in drawing its first
causes from above it is governed by chance and natural sequence." (ibid., p.
23.) Lynn Thorndike, evidently commenting on this passage, observes that
for Ptolemy, "not all predictions are inevitable and immutable; this is true
only of the motion of the sky itself and events in which it is exclusively
concerned." (Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science,
1923-1958, v. 1, 1923, p. 112.) Ptolemy is quite precise about it: what is
strictly deterministic in astrology is the motions of celestial objects.
Predictions about anything else are not infallibly correct, but nevertheless
may be very useful. He says: "I think, just as with prognostication, even if it
be not entirely infallible, at least its possibilities have appeared worthy of the
highest regard, so too in the case of defensive practice [acts meant to
contravene predictions], even though it does not furnish a remedy for
everything, its authority in some instances at least, however few or
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Even Kepler, who lived from 1571 to 1630, and indisputably was one
of the founders of modern astronomy and physics, even he cast horoscopes,
although he was opposed to much of the astrology of his time. He called
popular astrology "a dreadful superstition" and "a sortilegous monkey-play".
(Sortilege is prophesying by randomly casting or drawing "lots", using
pebbles, dice, etc., and interpreting the results.) Many have tried to apologize
for Kepler's astrology. For example, Arthur Koestler, the novelist and
essayist, claims that Kepler "started his career with the publication of
astrological calendars and ended it as Court Astrologer to the Duke of
Wallenstein. He did it for a living, with his tongue in his cheek." "In a
typical outburst," Koestler says, "he wrote: 'A mind accustomed to
mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations [of
astrology] resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by
4. Kepler holds that it is the light which comes from the other planets
which produce certain effects in our souls, and therefore in our bodies. (The
doctrine that light is a kind of force is an old idea, found, for example, among
the neo-Platonists of antiquity.) Furthermore, the earth itself has a soul, and
the planets act on this soul as well. The earth, for Kepler, is a living thing.
Pauli describes Kepler's analogies: "As living bodies have hair, so does the
earth have grass and trees, the cicadas being its dandruff; as living creatures
secrete urine in a bladder, so do the mountains make springs; sulphur and
volcanic products correspond to excrement, metals and rainwater to blood
and sweat; the sea water is the earth's nourishment ... At the same time the
anima terrae [soul of the earth] is also a formative power (facultas formatrix)
5. Field reports that Kepler believed that the theory that the weather
was affected by planetary aspects was amply confirmed by observation. He
himself made many observations to this effect. Field says: "Kepler's success
in obtaining observational confirmation of his belief in the efficacy of Aspects
may be partly due to the subjectivity of the data, but another explanation
also presents itself: Aspects are so numerous that for any given change one
could almost certainly find an appropriate recent Aspect. This objection in
fact occurred to one of Kepler's regular correspondents, the physician Johann
Georg Brengger, who mentioned it in a letter to Kepler dated 7 March 1608."
(J. V. Field, Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology, 1988, p. 128-129.)
6. As Pauli says, Kepler offers light as a physical cause for the effects of
the planets on human beings, and indeed on other living creatures.
Furthermore, he argues that properly speaking we should not say that the
planets cause the effects they have on us, but rather that it is the
constitution of our souls, in their ability to respond to the planetary light,
which causes these effects. Pauli notices a serious objection to Kepler's
astrological theory, that artificial light ought to produce astrological effects.
(Pauli, ibid., p. 190.) But of course one can think up reasons for
distinguishing between artificial and planetary light. Or maybe artificial
light can produce astrological effects.
9. In his work on the "new star" of 1604, De stella nova (1606), Kepler
speculates on whether or not the occurrence of a new star can be assigned to
chance. Furthermore, in the same year, there was a "fiery trigon", that is, a
conjunction of the three superior planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Was it
also a matter of chance that the new star appeared in the same year as this
"grand conjunction"? For those of an Epicurean turn of mind, this was so. It
was like a throw of two dice, one of which had the aggregation of the atoms of
the new star on a face, and the other of which had the grand conjunction on a
face. Throw the dice enough times, and this pair of faces will come up. The
Aristotelians had a similar view. The formation of the atoms into a new star
was not a matter of chance for them, but the causes of the star and the causes
of the grand conjunction had no connection with each other. The two causal
series leading to these events were considered to be independent. But then
they coincided by chance. Kepler opposed both of these views. He argues
that neither the individual events nor their coincidence were the result of
chance. This would be unworthy of God. (Simon, ibid., p. 52-80.)
10. Kepler could not abide chance events. He says: "What then is
chance? It is the most detestable idol, which is nothing else than mistrust of
the supreme and omnipotent God, and also of what he has created, the
absolutely perfect World, in which in place of a soul one takes a blind and
unconsidered motion, and in place of a body an infinite chaos. It is impious to
attribute to chance what belongs to God." (Johannes Kepler, De stella nova,
quoted by Simon, ibid., p. 62.) Kepler will not admit a cosmology founded on
chance, in which the creation would have no goal or beauty, and would lose
all meaning. Here is a source of Kepler's concern for astrology. To radically
separate what happens in the heavens from what happens on earth is to
forget the perfection of the work of God and his solicitude for people. It is to
make the world silent, and to prevent us from witnessing its source. (Simon,
ibid., p. 61-63.)
11. Kepler never stopped believing that the Earth has a Soul. Still,
Ernst Cassirer recalls Kepler's debate with Patrizzi over the motions of the
planets: "[Patrizzi] declared that any attempt on the part of mathematical
astronomy to determine the course of the planets by interlocking orbits,
15. "Thus the heavens," Simon continues, "by the equilibrium of their
proportions and the harmony of their motions, write a revelation as
important and as worthy of confidence as that of the Bible. God speaks there
his own language rather than putting himself within reach of man; and
whoever knows how to understand it, has no need of any interpretation or
any tradition to penetrate their [the heavens'] secret perfection. Far from
being a profane curiosity, the desire to probe the Mystery of the World arises
from religious concern and religious quest; and when little by little its secrets
reveal themselves, the meditation which they inspire led to prayer and the
actions of grace. Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Kepler than to place,
as we do today, astronomy among the positive sciences stripped of all
mystical connotation; on the contrary, it is for him a science of the sacred."
18. Kepler never gave up hope that astrology could be reformed and
made into a genuine science. "No man," he says, "should hold it to be
incredible that out of the astrologers' foolishness and blasphemies some
useful and sacred knowledge may come, that out of the unclean slime may
come a little snail or mussel or oyster or eel, all useful nourishments; that out
of a big heap of lowly worms may come a silk worm, and lastly that in the
evil-smelling dung, a busy hen may find a decent corn, nay, a pearl or a
golden corn, if she but searches and scratches long enough." (quoted by
Koestler, ibid., p. 245.)
20. The less mystical Francis Bacon also thought that astrology was
reclaimable. In the De augmentis scientarum (The Advancement of Learning)
(1623), he says: "As for Astrology, it is so full of superstition, that scarce
anything sound can be discovered in it. Notwithstanding, I would rather
have it purified than altogether rejected." He goes on to speak of a "Sane
Astrology", with which one will be able to predict with a great degree of
accuracy "floods, droughts, heats, frosts, earthquakes, irruptions of water,
eruptions of fire, great winds and rains, the various seasons of the year,
plagues, epidemics, diseases, plenty and dearth of grain, wars, seditions,
schisms, transmigrations of peoples, and in short of all commotions or
greater revolutions of things, natural as well as evil." (quoted from Bacon's
De augmentis scientarum, 1623, by Don Allen Cameron in The Star-Crossed
Renaissance, 1941, p. 152.) Cameron goes on to observe that Bacon
announces that once the foundations of "Sane Astrology" are established, one
will be able to predict such things as what seasons will be especially
dangerous for monks and courtiers, or more ominous for scholars than
soldiers. The idea of reforming astrology is not new: "So it is with all
astrologers (says the Talmud): they see something but do not understand
what they see." (Rashi, Commentaries on the Pentateuch, Numbers, quoted in
Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations, 1971, p. 106.)
21. The physicist Paul Davies says (1980): "Practical science proceeds
apace, on the basis that the influence of, say, Jupiter on the motion of a motor
car is less than any instrument could conceivably measure. However, when it
comes to making observations, it is precisely these minute forces which play
the vital role. If it were not for the fact that some influence from Jupiter had
a detectable effect we could never know of its existence. The inescapable
conclusion is that all observation requires interaction, of some sort. When we
see Jupiter, photons of sunlight reflected from atoms in the Jovian
atmosphere traverse the Earth's atmosphere and impinge on cells in the
retina where they dislodge electrons from the atoms therein. This merest
brush of a disturbance sets up a tiny electric signal which, when amplified
and propagated to the brain, delivers the sensation 'Jupiter'. It follows that,
through this chain, our brain cells are linked by electromagnetic forces to the
atmosphere of Jupiter. If the chain of interaction is extended by
incorporating telescopes, our brains can couple to the surfaces of stars
billions of light years away." Interactions are not one-way.
23. But what about Kepler's belief that the planets (including the sun
and moon) have souls? This too is ancient idea, as is the idea that the
universe itself has a soul. In the third section of the second of his Enneads,
the philosopher Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) begins by ridiculing the idea that the
stars _cause_ events to come to pass. Countless myriads of living beings
continue to be born, he says. How can one think that the stars can minister
to every single one of these people -- to make them famous or obscure, rich or
poor, lascivious or chaste? "What kind of life is this for the stars," he says,
"how could they possibly handle a task so huge?"
24. Still, Plotinus says, stars do announce the future, evidently taking
this to be a fact attested to by experience. How can this happen? Plotinus's
answer is that the stars are signs, by virtue of the fact that everything is
related to everything else. He says: "We may think of the stars as letters
perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet
moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main
tasks will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying
any living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for
example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by
indications in the eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us
are members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies. All
teems with symbol; the wise man is the one who in any one thing can read
another, a process familiar to all of us in not a few examples of everyday
experience. But what is the comprehensive principle of co-ordination?
Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not only by
stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive guidance in
our varied concerns." (Plotinus, The Six Enneads, translated by Stephen
MacKenna, 1921-1930, reprinted 1952, p. 44.)
27. Earlier than Plotinus, Plato had said in his Timaeus: "All this, then,
was the plan of the god who is for ever [the Demiurge, the Creator] for the
god who was sometime to be [the Universe]. According to this plan he made
it smooth and uniform, everywhere equidistant from its centre, a body whole
and complete, with complete bodies for its parts. And in the centre he set a
soul and caused it to extend throughout the whole and further wrapped the
body round with soul on the outseide; and so he established one world alone,
round and revolving in a circle, solitary but able by means of reason of its
excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend but
sufficient to itself. On all these accounts the world which he brought into
being was a blessed god." (Plato, Timaeus, translated by Francis Cornford in
Plato's Cosmology, 1937, p. 58 of reprint of 1957.)
28. On the basis of the Timaeus, the Laws and other writings of Plato,
Cornford comments: "The visible universe is a living creature, having soul
(psyche) in body and reason (nous) in soul. It is called a god in the same
sense in which the term is applied to the stars, planets, and Earth -- the
'heavenly gods'. All these gods are everlasting, coeval with time itself; though
theoretically dissoluble, because composite of reason, soul, and body, they will
never actually be dissolved. Man is also composed of reason, soul, and body;
but his soul will be dissolved back into the elements, and the two lower parts
of his soul are also mortal. Only the divine reason in him is imperishable.
29. Thus according to Plato, not only is the whole universe alive, but so
are Earth, Sun, Moon and the other planets. However, this doctrine is also
older than Plato, probably much older. Still, according to Pliny, "Hipparchus
can never be sufficiently praised for having better than anyone else proved
the kinship of the stars with man and that our souls are part of the heavens."
Hipparchus flourished about 160-125 B.C. He was one of the great
astronomers of antiquity. He is credited, among other things, with having
discovered the precession of the equinoxes; with having compiled the first
catalog of stars using a system of coordinates; with having compiled a table of
chords of circles (not the musical kind), thus advancing trigonometry; and
with having established a system of latitude and longitude for locating
positions on earth.
30. The Stoics too believed that the universe is a living being. They
extrapolated their biological theories to the whole cosmos. David Hahm
comments: "This procedure rests on the deep conviction that the cosmos is a
living animal. This idea cannot be traced to a specific philosophical
predecessor, but was a conviction rooted in the consciousness of the Greek
people, as well as of other ancient peoples. Though philosophy, especially in
the late fourth century, shunned this idea in its literal sense, it could not, or
would not, uproot this fundamental outlook from the Greek mind." (David
Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology, 1977, p. 210.) Plato develops the
idea in the Timaeus, but treats it as an explanatory myth rather than a
scientific theory in the sense, say, of Aristotle. Aristotle himself treats such
ideas as kinds of analogy, or metaphor. Some of the Stoics, it appears, took
the conception for literal truth: the universe is alive, sensitive, intelligent,
and has a material soul.
31. Samuel Angus says: "Because [for Stoics] one spirit pulsated in the
whole life of the universe there obtained a mysterious 'sympatheia of the
whole,' by means of which man could enter into fellowship with the cosmic
process. The soul was a fragment of the celestial fires with which it
maintained its kinship and to which it would return. Men are not merely
members of one another, but of the whole cosmic order. The world is the
image of God and man the image of the world. Man as part of the cosmos is
sympathetic with it as a whole..... This cosmic harmony and universal
sympathy were dear to the adherents of astral religion..... It takes an effort
of the imagination fully to realize how this science-religion evoked such
exalted feeling and moulded to virtue and beauty the lives of its adherents ....
Cosmic emotion was not a torrent picturesquely rolling over precipices of
ecstasy and exaltation: it was harnessed to moral life. 'The love of heaven
makes us heavenly,' was its credo." (Samuel Angus, The Religious Quests of
the Graeco-Roman World, A Study in the Historical Background of Early
Christianity, 1929, p. 263-264, 270.)
33. Cicero presents arguments of the Stoics for the divinity of the
universe, hence for the universe being alive and having a rational soul. This
divinity is extended to the stars. Cicero says: "Having thus perceived the
divinity of the world, we must also assign the same divinity to the stars,
which are formed from the most mobile and the purest part of the aether, and
are not compounded of any other element besides; they are of a fiery heat and
translucent throughout. Hence they too have the fullest right to be
pronounced to be living beings endowed with sensation and intelligence ....
Again the consciousness and intelligence of the stars is most clearly evinced
by their order and regularity; for regular and rhythmic motion is impossible
without design, which contains no trace of causal or accidental variation; now
the order and eternal regularity of the constellations indicates neither a
process of nature, for it is highly rational, nor chance, for chance loves
variation and abhors regularity; it follows therefore that the stars move of
their own free-will and because of their intelligence and divinity .... The
regularity therefore in the stars, this exact punctuality throughout all
eternity notwithstanding the great variety of their courses, is to me
incomprehensible without rational intelligence and purpose. And if we
observe these attributes in the planets, we cannot fail to enroll even them
among the number of gods." (Cicero, De natura deorum, translated by H.
Rackham, 1933, p. 161, 163, 175.)
34. Earlier, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) put it this way: "On all these
grounds, therefore, we may infer with confidence that there is something
beyond the bodies that are about us on this earth, different and separate from
them; and that the superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance
from this world of ours..... The reasons why the primary body is eternal and
not subject to increase or diminution, but unaging and unalterable and
unmodified, will be clear from what has been said to any one who believes in
our assumptions. Our theory seems to confirm the phenomena and to be
confirmed by them. For all men have some conception of the nature of the
gods, and all who believe in the existence of gods at all, whether barbarian or
Greek, agree in allotting the highest place to the deity, surely because they
suppose that immortal is linked with immortal and regard any other
supposition as impossible. If then there is, as there certainly is, anything
divine, what we have just said about the primary bodily substance was well
35. Richard Lemay tells us: "The notion that the whole Universe was
one single body animated with a living soul was an essential part of the
Platonic tradition of early medieval times, and still received much attention
during William of Conches' lifetime." (Richard Lemay, Abu Ma'shar and
Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century, The Recovery of Aristotle's
Natural Philosophy through Arabic Astrology, 1962, p. 188.) Among the 12th
century writers who accepted this theory in some form, besides William of
Conches, were Adelard of Bath, Ablard, Thierry of Chartres, Bernard
Silvester amd Raymond of Marseilles. Some went so far as to identify the
World-Soul with the Holy Ghost. This was one of the opinions which Adelard
and William of Conches were forced to recant, as being sacrilegious and
heretical, although evidently Raymond of Marseilles and Bernard Silvester
held the view unscathed. "Theologians and mystics," Lemay says, are always
opposed in principle to any non-theological or non-mystical Weltanschauung",
and William of Thierry's attacks on William of Conches are said by Lemay to
have "opened an important phase of the conflict of Natural Philosophy
against Theology which raged during the entire course of Scholasticism in the
next three or four centuries." (Lemay, l.c., p. 193-194.) Lemay recommends
for a good account of this conflict the work of Andrew D. White, _A History of
the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896, whom we quoted
earlier.
37. Such ideas were also prevalent among certain writers during the
European Renaissance, who had been inspired by the works of Plato, the
Stoics, Plotinus, the Hermeticists, the Kabbalists, and such medieval writers
as Abu Ma'shar and Raymond of Marseilles. For example, speaking of the De
vita coelitus comparanda (Guiding One's Life by the Stars, or perhaps On
Obtaining Life from the Heavens) (1489) by Marsilio Ficino, Wayne Shumaker
says that for Ficino, "the whole world is in fact alive and filled with soul."
Also, the Hermeticists tell us again and again that the whole world is alive.
From the Hermetic work Asclepius: "If therefore the world is always a living
animal -- was, and is, and will be -- nothing in the world is mortal. Since
every single part, such as it is, is always living and is in a world which is
always one and always a living animal, there is no place in the world for
death." (Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance, A Study
in Intellectual Patterns, 1972, p. 122 and 225.)
43. Part of the force behind astrology stems from the astral religion
which developed in antiquity, especially on the basis of works of Plato.
Walter Burkert maintains that in Plato's later work, after the Republic, a
double change can be detected. There is a strain of logical self-criticism
which shakes the foundations of the theory of ideas. There is also a turning
toward nature and natural philosophy. From this change there developed a
formative force in the history of religion. The religion of transcendence finds
a complement in the perceivable world, in visible gods. This holds for the
cosmos as a whole, and especially for the stars. The cosmos, according to the
later Plato, obeys unchangeable intelligible laws that are mathematically
formulated.
44. Two bold conclusions resulted, says Burkert. First, the cosmos is
eternal, since in many centuries of observation no change has been detected.
Nor do the mathematical laws admit change. The old cosmogonic hypothesis
that the cosmos arose at some time and will decay at some time in the future
must be false. Secondly, mathematically exact movements are rational,
hence the cosmos is rational. In the _Laws_ the Athenian who speaks for
Plato himself asserts that he learned this "not as a young man nor a long
time ago." Plato had earlier criticized the system of Anaxagoras on the
grounds that although Anaxagoras introduced nous intelligence) as an agent
which moves the cosmos, he embraced a mindless materialism in all the
details. But later natural philosophy gained an intellectual, mathematical
dimension in Plato's work. Thus natural philosophy enters into a surprising
alliance with piety. The concept of the soul which had previously been
confined to the individual, as the subject of knowledge and moral decisions,
received a new, cosmic status. The movement of the cosmos became of a
psychic nature. Soul is defined in a general way as that which moves itself.
45. Plato in the Laws repeatedly emphasizes this important turn in the
history of philosophy, says Burkert. Plato says: "The situation has been
entirely reversed since the days when thinkers thought of the stars as
without souls. Wonder, though, was awakened even then, and what now
really holds was suspected by those who embarked on exactness: that in no
way could the stars as soulless things keep so precisely to marvellous
calculations, if they did not possess intelligence. Some even then were bold
enough to venture this very proposition and they said that it was nous that
had ordained everything in the sky. But these very men were deceived about
the nature of the soul, namely that it is older than the bodies; they imagined
it as younger and thus so to speak ruined everything, nay even more
themselves. But now, as we have said, the situation is entirely reversed. It
is no longer possible that any single mortal man will be god-fearing for long if
he has not grasped these two principles mentioned, that the soul is the oldest
of everything which participates in coming-to-be (and that it is immortal, and
that it rules over all bodies), and moreover (secondly) he must grasp, as has
now been said many times, the intelligence of being which is in the stars, as
mentioned, and in addition also the necessary preliminary mathematical
sciences."
48. Franz Strunz has written eloquently of the place of astrology and
alchemy in human culture. Their activities are grounded in a religiously
mystic attitude, and in them are hidden "the desire for a better world and the
child's dream of the happiness of all mankind." (Franz Strunz, Astrologie,
Alchemie, Mystik, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1928,
p. 11.) In former times, especially in the Hellenistic era, astrology was astral
or cosmic religion, and it encompassed what we now call astronomy,
astrophysics, meteorology and geophysics. "It rules astronomy, it is not its
maidservant." (ibid., p. 21.) It permeated the forerunners of anthropology,
medicine and chemistry, as well as many religious views. In those times,
Strunk maintains, astrology, alchemy and mysticism were bound together
and can only be understood as an organic whole. "Empirical astrology and
alchemy are mysticism become practice and technology, although each
imagines for itself world pictures or philosophical myths... " (ibid., p. 12.)
50. The historian Franz Cumont states beautifully how astrology came
to enchant so many people in later antiquity: "Astral divination was often a
visionary's discipline. The theology on which it rests has as a fundamental
doctrine the idea of a kinship of a soul which warms and vivifies our mortal
bodies with the eternal fires which illuminate the heavens. This conception,
which, in all probability, was already held by the "Chaldeans," became that of
their successors and, in the 2nd century B.C., found in Hipparchus a
convinced defender. Only this affinity with the stars permits the human
spirit, an ignited essence descended from the ether, to know the nature of the
radiant beings from which he has issued. The contemplation of the heavens
becomes therefore a communion. Leaving its material envelope, reason
raises itself to the choir of the sidereal gods and receives from them a
revelation of their character and the causes of their harmonious movements.
It becomes the confidant of the stellar powers, who teach him the cosmic
phenomena, the course and duration of their revolutions, which rule with
numbers endowed with a suitable power .... But, above all, these mystics of
the astral religion, who have divined the secrets of the celestial spheres,
acquire the power to dissipate the obscurity of the future; they arrive at "the
science of future things," they prophesy events to come, as if they were gods.
Astrology flatters itself that it can foresee the phenomena of nature and the
careers of humans with the same certainty as the recurrence of eclipses. This
learned divination is for its adepts the queen of the sciences ....." (Franz
Cumont, L'Égypt des Astrologues, 1937, p.156-8.)
51. This doesn't mean that Cumont thinks that the astrologers' theories
were verified, or verifiable. In another of his books, he says: "There is
something tragic in this ceaseless attempt of man to penetrate the mysteries
of the future, in this obstinate struggle of his faculties to lay hold on
knowledge which evades his probe, and to satisfy his insatiable desire to
foresee his destiny. The birth and evolution of astrology, that desperate error
on which the intellectual labors of countless generations were spent, seems
like the bitterest of disillusions. By establishing the unchangeable character
of the celestial revolutions the Chaldeans imagined that they understood the
mechanism of the universe, and had discovered the actual laws of life. The
ancient beliefs in the influence of the stars upon the earth were concentrated
into dogmas of absolute rigidity. But these dogmas were frequently
contradicted by experience, which ought to have confirmed them. Unable to
bring themselves to deny the influence of the divine stars on the affairs of
this world, they invented new methods for the better determination of this
influence, they complicated by irrelevant data the problem, of which the
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2. And where did the angels come from? In the New Bible Dictionary
(1982, edited by J. D. Douglas et al), under the entry "Angel" we find the
blunt statement that man's early thinking associated angels with stars. St.
Thomas Aquinas dealt at length with doctrines about the motions and nature
of the planets, and "throughout his many writings on these topics (Litt gives
more than a hundred and thirty passages on celestial influence alone) his
angelology is there, waiting in the wings, directing his thoughts, it seems to
me." (J. D. North, "Medieval Concepts of Celestial Influence: A Survey", in
Astrology, Science and Society, Historical Essays, 1987, edited by Patrick
Curry, p. 13; the work by T. Litt is Les Corps célestes dans l'univers de
Thomas d'Aquin (1963).) North remarks that while Aquinas's theories were
rational and systematic, they were not, to some, in the best tradition of
natural philosophy. "But this," North says, "is just another way of saying
that one prefers light rays to angels." (North, ibid., p. 14.)
3. The notion of angels was for some associated with the idea that all
stars are of the same kind, and for some Jews and Christians, the stars are
"angels of light" (Lichtengel), or, if the stars are not themselves angels, they
are governed by angels. (Gundel, ibid., p. 48.). Angels appear in the vision of
Enoch, in which Enoch sees "the sons of angels step into flames of fire", their
robes white and shining like snow. We read in the New Bible Dictionary that
Enoch was the son of Jared and father of Methuselah, and a man of
outstanding sanctity who enjoyed close fellowship with God. He became a
popular figure in the period between the end of Old Testament prophecy and
the coming of Jesus. It appears that the legend of Enoch was elaborated in
the Babylonian diaspora as a counterpart to the antediluvian sages of
Mesopotamian legend. "So Enoch became the initiator of the art of writing
[why is writing so often associated with the stars in ancient times?], and the
first wise man, who received heavenly revelations of the secrets of the
universe and transmitted them in writing to later generations. In the earlier
6. Gundel observes that prayers to the sun, moon and stars are found in
the pyramid texts of the 3rd millenium before Christ, and are found in coffin
and temple texts through the following millenia up to the end of antiquity.
(Gundel, ibid., p. 55.) Probably prayers to heaven -- physical heaven, to start
with -- were among the earliest of prayers, and they are, of course, still to be
found among Christians, as well as the members of many other religions.
Moreover, the boundary between prayers and appeals for intercession to
deities, on the one hand, and magical charms or incantations to spirits, on
the other, is sometimes indistinct.
10. The reason given for not worshiping the stars in Deuteronomy 4.19
is that they aren't particular enough. One must worship the god of Israel,
and not objects which belong to everyone. The next verse in Deuteronomy
11. In 2 Kings 21:1-3, we are told about a phase in the struggle of the
Jews to replace earlier religions and to resist imposition of alien religions.
Manasseh became king of Judah when he was 12 and reigned for 55 years:
"And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to the
abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the
people of Israel. For he rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father
had destroyed; and he erected altars for Ba'al, and made an Asherah, as
Ahab king of Israel had done, and worshiped all the host of heaven, and
served them." At which the Lord said by way of his prophets: "I am bringing
upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of every one who hears of
it will tingle ... and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and
turning it upside down." (2 Kings 21:12-13). 2 Chronicles 33:12-13 adds that
Manasseh prayed to the Lord, "and humbled himself greatly before the God of
his fathers." God received his plea, and restored him to Jerusalem after a
captivity in Babylon. "Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God." But
Amon, the son of Manasseh, did the same as his father, and was killed by his
servants. (2 Kings 21:19-26, 22:1-22; Chronicles 33:21-25, 34:1-2). The
people of Judah killed the conspirators, and made Josiah, the son of Amon,
king. Josiah "did what was right in the eyes of the Lord", and turned back to
Yahweh.
12. In 2 Kings 23.4-5, we read that Josiah burned "all the vessels made
for Ba'al, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven" and "deposed the
idolatrous priests "who burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon,
and the constellations, and all the host of heavens." Jeremiah 8.1-2 has: "At
that time, says the Lord, the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of its
princes, the bones of the priests, the bones of the prophets, and the bones of
the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs; and they
shall be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which
they have loved and served, which they have gone after, and they have
sought and worshiped; and they shall not be gathered or buried; they shall be
as dung on the surface of the ground." In the book of the prophet
_Zephaniah_, doom is proclaimed for Judah, and in _Zephaniah_ 1.2,5, we
read: "I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth," says
the Lord", and among the priests to be destroyed are "those who bow down on
the roofs to the host of the heavens." These condemnations of astral religion
seem to be made chiefly on behalf of eliminating competing gods, or at any
rate competing priests and kings.
14. "The evidence goes to prove," says James Montgomery, "that the
ruling classes which made the South-Arabian civilization came from the
north. There the Semitic genius produced in a land of unique natural
possibilities an artificial civilization that compares with the civilization of
Babylonia, only far more wholly Semitic, for in Babylonia the Semites built
upon the alien Sumerian civilization." The religion of this pre-Islamic culture
was polytheistic. The gods, or els, were similar to the baals of Canaan. Pre-
eminent among the gods was "a definite astral triad of highest deities",
consisting of "Moon, Sun, and Morning (or Evening) Star, a family group of
Father, Mother, and Son corresponding to the Babylonian trinity, Shamash,
Sin, Ishtar." (James Montgomery, Arabia and the Bible, 1934, p. 151-2.)
15. What this "pure" Semitic religion of southern Arabia has do with
religions further north is hard to say. There has been much progress in
archeological research in this region since Montgomery wrote in 1934, but
this hasn't resulted in much light being shed on the religious practices of this
culture. The southern religion may have been related to that of the
Canaanites of the Bible, who preceded the Israelites in Palestine. It may be
that in some ways the Canaanite religion was a forerunner of the Hebrew
religion. John Romer observes: "Just as the faith of biblical Israel was
housed inside the traditional architecture of [Bronze Age] Canaan so some of
the Old Testaments's oldest passages, its liturgy and Psalms are also rooted
in Canaanite literature." (John Romer, Testament, 1988, p. 78.) We may
speculate that the astral component of Canaanite religion to which the
Hebrews were so opposed was similar to that of the Semites of southern
Arabia. Again, the correspondence of the the south Arabian trinity with that
of the Babylonians suggests a link with ancient Mesopotamian religions. For
our purposes, we need not involve ourselves in the intricate and frustrating
history and pre-history of Palestine and Arabia. It is sufficient to know that
there was a potent astral religion throughout the "Old Testament"regions
before Israel became a nation.
18. Tamsyn Barton in her description of the the position of Origen says:
"Origen (185/86 – 254/55), who remained immensely influential despite his
later condemnation, illustrates the nature of the struggle between the
astrologers and the church in his Commentary on Genesis. In his uneasy
compromises he shows that astrology was a serious rival. Origen
summarizes his arguments as follows: '1) How our freedom is safeguarded
when God knows in advance for all eternity the acts that each man is judged
to have accomplished. 2) How the stars are not agents, but signs. 3) That
humans cannot have accurate knowledge of these signs, but that they are
revealed for the sake of powers greater than humans. 4) The reason for
which God has created these signs is in order to obtain knowledge for the
powers will be examined. ' (23.6.20-30) He elaborates a Christian version of
astral fatalism with his notion of the divine writing. This moving writing,
formed of letters and characters traced by God’s hand in the sky so that the
dynameis theiae (divine powers) can read them, prefigures all cosmic events
from creation to consummation. This is done to instruct the celestial powers
and make them happy, in uncovering for them all dicine mysteries and all
kind of knowledge and in some cases to intimate to them their precise orders
for the missions entrusted to them (20.29-39). Interestingly, he also allows
evil powers access to this knowledge, remarking explicitly that, if demons
execute actions prefigured by the stars, they do not do so because they read
the 'writing' to discover the will of God but only because they act maliciously
of their own volition, as the good powers act freely when they follow orders
(21.1-12). He also seems to admit that stars are not inert objects
manipulated by the divine but, rather, animated, intelligent entities. Saint
19. Among the ancient Greeks, Carneades (c. 213-129 B.C.), founder of a
school of philosophy called the New Academy, argued against fatalistic
astrology on a number of grounds. Although Carneades, like Socrates, wrote
nothing, his oral arguments have been preserved by others. He used the
familiar argument that twins, although born under the same signs, need not
have the same destiny. It was noted early that the stars move very quickly
around the earth, and twins are not in fact born under quite the same
planetary influences. Howe ver, Carneades might have replied to this with
another of his criticisms, that it is humanly impossible to fix the exact time of
birth or conception. Carneades' argument based on the destruction of
morality had an especially forceful and lasting influence on neo-Platonists
and Christian theologians. He held that astrological fatalism must be wrong,
since if it were right, it would be the ruin of morality and piety, of
responsibility as well as irresponsibility, of laws and justice and punishment,
of virtue as well as vice, of praise as well as blame, of modesty as well as
shame. Since these exist, fatalism fails. One might reply to this with the
argument of Zeno the Stoic: moral as well as immoral acts are preordained,
and so are responsibility and irresponsibility, the passing and obeying and
breaking of laws, justice and punishment, virtue and vice, praise and blame,
modesty and shame. Nevertheless, Carneades' arguments against astrology
were repeated by a legion of Christian theologians, as has been traced by
David Amand (David Amand, _Fatalisme et libert dans l'antiquit grecque,
Recherches sur la survivance de l'argumentation morale antifataliste de
Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatres
premiers siêcles, 1945).
20. In the early centuries of the Christian era, Amand says, following
the blossoming of Stoicism, the heart-breaking nightmare of the heimarmene
-- the absolutely necessary and indissoluble succession of causes and effects
in the past, present and future -- terrified masses of people devoted to the
official polytheistic cults, and led them to seek deliverance in the mystery
religions, and it terrified innumerable Christians who in the secrecy of their
consciences were led to doubt their redemption by Christ. Many philosophers
and theologians of antiquity, other than Stoics, were deeply committed to
proving that our wills are free, and to refuting the demoralizing theory of
sidereal fatalism. Christian doctors, in particular, defended with great vigor
human freedom of choice as a most excellent -- but most perilous -- gift of
God. "The cultural history of antiquity in its decline would be incomplete,"
says Amand, "without a chapter entitled: 'The bad dream of the astrological
heimarmene and the battle for moral freedom.'" (Amand, ibid., p. 587-588
and p. 7.) For Christians, the problem was complicated by the doctrine that
while men may not know the future, God does.
21. St. Augustine, for example, says that when ordinary men hear the
word 'fate' "ordinary usage leads them to think of nothing but the influence of
the position of the stars at the moment when a child is born, or conceived."
Augustine continues: "Those, however, who believe that the stars, apart from
the will of God, determine what we do, what goods we have, or what evils we
suffer, must be thrown out of court, not only by adherents of the true religion,
but also by those who choose to worship gods of any sort, false gods though
22. The limits of free will must be carefully observed, says Augustine.
He writes in a letter to Hilarius: "... our free will is able to perform good
works if it is helped from above, which happens as a result of humble petition
and confession; whereas, if it is deprived of divine help, it may excel in
knowledge of the Law, but it will have no solid foundation of justice, and will
be puffed up with impious pride and deadly vanity..... This free will will be
free in proportion as it is sound, and sound in proportion as it is submissive
to divine mercy and grace. Therefore, it prays with faith and says: 'Direct
my paths according to thy word, and let no iniquity have dominion over me.'
It prays, it does not promise; it confesses, it does not declare itself; it begs for
the fullest liberty, it does not boast of its own power." (Augustine, Letters,
translated by Sister Wilfrid Parsons, 1953, v. 3, p. 321, 323-324.)
23. Mircea Eliade says: "Of course, astrology, the hope that one can
know the future, has always been popular with the rich and powerful -- with
kings, princes, popes, etc. -- particularly from the Renaissance on. One may
add that the belief in the determination of destiny by the position of the
planets illustrates, in the last analysis, another defeat of Christianity.
Indeed, the Christian Fathers fiercely attacked the astrological fatalism
dominant during the last centuries of the Roman Empire. 'We are above
Fate,' wrote Tatian; 'the Sun and the Moon are made for us!' In spite of this
theology of human freedom, astrology has never been extirpated in the
Christian world. But never in the past did it reach the proportions and
prestige it enjoys in our times." (Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and
Cultural Fashions, 1976, p. 59.) It is doubtful that astrology, and astral
24. Eliade speculates on reasons for the popularity of astrology: "... the
discovery that your life is related to astral phenomena does confer a new
meanng on your existence. You are no longer merely the anonymous
individual described by Heidegger and Sartre, a stranger thrown into an
absurd and meaningless world, condemned to be free, as Sartre used to say,
with a freedom confined to your situation and conditioned by your historical
moment. Rather, the horoscope reveals to you a new dignity: it shows how
intimately you are related to the entire universe. It is true that your life is
determined by the movements of the stars, but at least this determinant has
an incomparable grandeur. Although, in the last analysis, a puppet pulled by
invisible ropes and strings, you are nevertheless a part of the heavenly world.
Besides, this cosmic predetermination of your existence constitutes a
mystery: it means that the universe moves on according to a preestablished
plan; that human life and history itself follow a pattern and advance
progressively toward a goal. This ultimate goal is secret or beyond human
understanding; but at least it gives meaning to a cosmos regarded by most
scientists as the result of blind hazard, and it gives sense to the human
existence declared by Sartre to be de trop. This parareligious dimension of
astrology is even considered superior to the existing religions, because it does
not imply any of the difficult theological problems: the existence of a personal
or transpersonal God, the enigma of Creation, the origin of evil, and so on.
Following the instructions of your horoscope, you feel in harmony with the
universe and do not have to bother with hard, tragic, or insoluble problems,
At the same time, you admit, consciously or unconsciously, that a grand,
through incomprehensible, cosmic drama displays itself and that you are a
part of it; accordingly, you are not de trop." (Eliade, ibid., p. 61.) One may
wonder to what extent resistance to notions or the existence of free will and
indeterminism, especially in human affairs, is motivated by yearnings for
security, or for being a part of an astral divine plan.
28. In this last formulation, the First Cause and creative cause are
allowed for, and a mechanism for turning the possible into the necessary is
furnished, but the underlying intent to show that everything has a cause
(First Cause excepted) resembles that of Bonatti. Furthermore: "Like
Peripatetism [Aristotelianism], like Stoicisn, like Hellenic Neoplatonism, the
Arabic Neoplatonism makes all of its metaphysics lead to the justification of
the principle which the astrologers claim for themselves. With what rigor
Avicenna develops it! With what care he submits to it everything which
happens in the world, even what seems to happen by chance, even the
decisions of our wills." The principle, in brief, is that everything for which
existence has been preceded by non-existence, including voluntary decisions,
has a cause; and that terrestrial events arise from celestial ones, which in
turn proceed in a necessary manner from the necessity of the divine will.
(Duhem, ibid., p. 493-494.)
34. Richard Lemay has argued that a work of Albumasar, whose name
more accurately and completely was Abu Ma'shar Ja'far ben Muhammad ben
'Umar al-Balkhi, was very likely the single most important original source of
Aristotle's theories of nature for European scholars, starting a little before
the middle of the 12th century. (Richard Lemay, Abu Ma'shar and Latin
Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century, The Recovery of Aristotle's Natural
Philosophy through Arabic Astrology, 1962.) It was not until later in the 12th
century that the original books of Aristotle on nature began to become
available in Latin. The works of Aristotle on logic had been known earlier,
and Aristotle was generally recognized as "the master of logic". But during
the course of the 12th century, Aristotle was transformed into the "master of
those who know", and in particular a master of natural philosophy, or the
scientific theory of natural things. It is especially interesting that the work of
Abu Ma'shar in question is a treatise on astrology. Its Latin title is
Introductorium in Astronmiam, a translation of the Arabic Kitab al-mudkhal
al-kabir ila 'ilm ahkam an-nujjum, written in Baghdad in the year 848 A.D.
It was translated into Latin first by John of Seville in 1133, and again, less
literally and abridged, by Hermann of Carinthia in 1140 A.D.
36. During the course of the 12th century, most of the translations into
Latin from Arabic made by European scholars were of astrological material.
As a result, says Lemay: "Astrology became a superior branch of physics, a
37. It appears, then, that the partisans of natural science in the 12th
century, Christians included, were saturated with astrology. Lemay says:
"The names of Adelard of Bath, John of Seville, Hermann of Carinthia,
William of Conches, Bernard Silvester, Roger of Hereford, Daniel of Morley,
Raymond of Marseilles, Robert of Chester, Alfred of Sareshel, Alanus de
Insulis and Raoul of Longchamp. are all associated one way or another with
the rising interest in the natural Aristotle; all were firm believers as well in
the validity of astrological science. Twelfth century scholars have long been
studied with the conviction that they were entirely absorbed in logical
disputes, or bent on finding in nature a preordained imitation of biblical or
theological concepts. Dispassionate examination of the rich manuscript
materials remaining from this period has resulted in nothing less than a re-
discovery of some major aspects of twelfth century intellectual life. Whether
in astrology or alchemy, in medicine or mathematics, in geometry, botany or
mineralogy, etc., the intellectual pursuits of twelfth century scholars appear
to have ranged well beyond the pale of religious thought; theirs were the
permanent interests which men of all times have shown in the physical laws
of their natural habitat. The dedication of astrologers to their discipline
represented a far more serious preoccupation than the mere mention of their
science would incline modern historians to imagine. It has always been a
great mistake of historians of medieval thought to minimize or totally to
overlook this field of inquiry as of nor importance or having negligible
bearing upon the intellectual outlook of the time." (Lemay, ibid., p. xxiv-xxv.)
49. Wedel argues that the most decisive factor in the development of the
doctrines on astrology of many university scholars -- scholastics -- was the
works of Aristotle, whose complete canon had been made accessible in Latin
translations in the first quarter of the 13th century. In his De generatione et
corruptione (On growth and decay), Aristotle had taught that the processes of
earthly growth and change depend on the stellar spheres. These were the
"crystalline" spheres in which the stars and planets were said to be
embedded, a theory proposed, it seems, by Eudoxus, presumably to explain
why these objects had such regular motions. Wedel says: "And astrological
theory had, since the days of Ptolemy, become so inseparable a part of
Aristotelian cosmology that the Christian theologians, in welcoming the one,
were inevitably compelled to offer a favorable reception to the other. A
modification of such importance in the traditional doctrine of the Church
could not take place without a struggle..... In effecting a compromise between
the verdict of the early Church and the new astrology, Albert the Great and
Thomas Aquinas faced a problem of no slight difficulty." (Wedel, ibid., p. 64.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2. Is it false that the sun goes around the earth? Albert Einstein and
Leopold Infeld say in their The Evolution of Physics 1938, p 212): "Can we
formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems],
not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily,
relative to each other? If this can be done, our troubles will be over. We shall
then be able to apply the laws of nature to any CS. The struggle, so violent in
the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would
then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification.
5. It is one thing to say the heavens can be read like a book of words,
and another to say that they can be comprehended with geometry. Marsilio
Ficino wrote in his Theologia platonica (late 15th century): "The notions of
divine beings are made clear by the disposition of the heavens, as if through
letters." (Quoted by Eugenio Garin in Astrology in the Renaissance (1983, o.
69), translation of Lo Zodiaco della Vita (1976).) Earlier still there is the
statement of Bernard Silvester in his De mundi universitate (12th century),
as reported by Thorndike: "Nous or Intelligence says to Nature, 'I would have
you behold the sky, inscribed with a multiform variety of images, which, like
a book with open pages, containing the future in cryptic letters, I have
revealed to the eyes of the more learned.'" (Lynn Thorndike, A History of
Magic and Experimental Science, 1923-1958, v. 2, p. 105.) Ficino and
Silvester were talking about astrology.
"1473. Astrology and astronomy are much the same subject, and most of
those who study the stars are interested primarily in astrology.
1573. The situation is not very different, despite Copernicus. There had
always been theological reservations about astrology, mainly on the score of
an implied fatalism, and these had been increased by the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation. But still astrology was generally accepted as a
reasonable hypothesis, and in the next generation Kepler was an energetic
caster of horoscopes.
1673. This is the age of the Royal Society, and by now most of the star-
gazers are interested only in astronomy.....
13. Bernard Capp concludes from his study of English almanacs that,
like astrology itself, they were at their peak in the Elizabethan and Stuart
periods, and showed decay by the 18th century, at any rate among the
educated. The decay was gradual. There was a lively debate on the validity
of astrology in the mid 16th century. A similar debate in France at that time
proved to be a decisive turning point for astrology there, leading to its
devaluation. The English episode was less decisive. In the second half of the
16th century, no major scientist seriously devoted his efforts to astrology, and
the Royal Society, the universities and the College of Physicians often
displayed hostility toward it. Yet starting from the 1640's, interest in a
reformed astrology increased dramatically. In the 17th century, belief in
astrology was never extinguished, even in the upper classes of society, but
scientists increasingly turned away from it. (Bernard Capp, English
Almanacs, 1500-1800, Astrology and the Popular Press, 1979, p. 276-278.)
14. Morris Jastrow asserts (in 1911) that in England, Jonathan Swift
can fairly claim credit for having given the death-blow to astrology with his
famous squib, the Prediction for the Year 1708, by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.
15. Jacques Halbronn comments that in the late 17th and early18th
century attacks on astrology often had a forbidding character which failed to
undermine its appeal for large sectors of the population. Laughter, as
prescribed by Swift, was often a more effective medicine. However, Halbronn
notes that Swift had been preceded in this genre by, among others, Franois
Rabelais. The latter's Pantagruline Prognostication was a sort of
prognostication "for all years", which revealed the truisms and banalities of
this kind of astrological discourse. (Jacques Halbronn, "The Revealing
Process of Translation and Criticism", in Astrology, Science and Society, 1987,
edited by Patrick Curry, p. 212.)
16. Among reasons long put forward for the decline in the hold of
astrology over the educated classes, there are the discoveries of astronomers,
with the telescope or otherwise, that the heavens are not perfect or
unchanging (novae, sun spots, mountains on the moon), the discovery of new
"planets" (which is what Galileo called the moons of Jupiter he had
discovered with his telescope), and the realization that stellar distances are
much greater than had been believed. Perhaps also involved was the
transition from a belief in an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe of finite extent
to a belief in a decentralized universe of infinite extent, as described by
Alexander Koyré (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 1957).
(Most cosmologists today believe the universe to be of finite extent, but
expanding -- the old finite universe was of fixed size.) There was also a
change in attitudes of churchmen toward astrology.
17. Capp says: "Robert Boyle and others were convinced that science
could strengthen Christianity. From the harmony and splendour of the
universe they felt able to prove the existence of a divine Creator. They
depicted a universe which was regular and ordered, shaped by the hand of
God but run according to the constant laws he had created..... In this current
18. Patrick Curry says: "Often people wanted more specific and
personal advice, on urgent matters, than was available from a book or
almanac. Then they had recourse to the local 'wise' or 'cunning' man, or
woman. While it is impossible to estimate numbers, it seems that this figure
too had disappeared more from 'Books and Talk' than from 'the World'."
(Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power, Astrology in Early Modern England,
1989, p. 102.) (Curry is referring to a remark made by Mrs. Hester Thrale in
1790: "Superstition is said to be driven out of the World -- no such Thing, it is
only driven out of Books and Talk.") Such so-called cunning persons, Curry
says, remained a recognized influence well into the nineteenth century,
combining -- for the poor -- services of medicine, divination and magical
protection, all with a strong though primitive astrological component. Of
course, we still have our local fortune tellers in the United States today.
20. Nearly a century and a half later, Tobias Smollett, in his novel The
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), gives a similar description of
such a person, an astrologer consulted by Timothy Crabshaw, groom and
squire to Sir Launcelot: "He was dragged upstairs like a bear to the stake,
not without reluctance and terror, which did not at all abate at sight of the
conjurer, with whom he was immediately shut up by his conductress, after
she had told him in a whisper that he must deposit a shilling in a little black
coffin, supported by a human skull and thigh-bones crossed, on a stoll covered
21. "[The conjurer] exhorted him to sit down and compose himself till
he should cast a figure; then he scrawled the paper, and waving his wand,
repeated abundance of gibberish concerning the number, the names, the
houses, and revolutions of the planets, with their conjunctions, oppositions,
signs, circles, cycles, trines, and trigons. When he perceived that this artifice
had its proper effect in disturbing the brain of Crabshaw, he proceeded ... "
The astrologer tells Crabshaw some things that Crabshaw had already told
him, although Crabshaw seems to have forgotten this. Crabshaw is
"thunderstruck to find the conjurer acquainted with all these circumstances,"
and wants to know if he can ask a question or two about his fortune, "The
astrologer pointing to the little coffin, our squire understood the hint, and
deposited another shilling. The sage had recourse to his book, erected
another scheme, performed once more his airy evolutions with the wand, and
having recited another mystical preamble, expounded the book of fate in
these words: "You shall neither die by war nor water, by hunger or by thirst,
nor be brought to the grave by an old age of distemper; but, let me see -- ay,
the stars will have it so -- you shall be -- exalted -- hah! -- ay, that is --
hanged, for horse-stealing." --"Oh, good my lord conjurer!" roared the squire,
“I'd as lief give forty shillings as be hanged." --"Peace, sirrah!" cried the other;
"would you contradict or reverse the immutable decrees of fate? Hanging is
your destiny, and hanged you shall be -- and comfort yourself with the
rejection, that as you are not the first, so neither will you be the last to swing
on Tyburn tree." This comfortable assurance composed the mind of Timothy,
and in a great measure reconciled him to the prediction." (Tobias Smollett,
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, 1762, Hutchinson edition of 1905,
bound with Adventures of an Atom, p. 215-217.)
22. Jacques Halbronn gives some details about the decline of astrology
in France. The primary goal of the work of Abbé Pluche, especially the
Histoire du Ciel (1739) was to undermine the foundations of astrology by
reawakening the world of gods and heroes that had been pushed aside. "The
history of the birth of this supposed science," he wrote, "is its refutation, for
all Astrology is no more than a false interpretation of certain signs that have
been misunderstood." One of Pluche's major concerns was to distinguish
sharply between astronomy and astrology, and Halbronn observes that "in
this he was followed by all the historians of the Revolutionary period, from
Bailly to La Lande and Delambre. Astronomers to some extent felt affected
by the disfavor attached to astrology, and since approximately the time of
Pluche, astronomers have been prime opponents of astrology. Historians of
23. The effect on astrology of the transition from the Ptolemaic to the
Copernican view of the world has often been mis-evaluated. As many
astrologers realized, Copernicanism and astrology are as consistent as
Ptolemaicism and astrology, just as navigation by the stars as viewed from
earth is consistent with navigation by the stars as viewed from the sun.
Whatever influence the earth and sun have on one another doesn't depend
which body is taken as a reference point. As far as positions of celestial
objects are concerned, aside from the forces they exert on one another, it's
just a matter of one's point of view. Given the general relativity of Einstein,
this is so even taking forces into account. It's comparatively simple to
transform positions with respect to our earth into positions with respect to
our sun, and vice versa. Relating forces in the two systems is more difficult,
but possible. Furthermore, while the effect of placing the sun rather than the
earth at the center of the universe no doubt made some people feel less
central (!), I suggest that a decline in belief in the power of magic, and in the
power to predict personal and political matters by means of interpreting the
stars, contributed more than the advent of Copernicanism to feelings that the
universe was not made especially for us. This was perceived as a loss of
power, or potential power, rather than of position.
29. It has been stated at times that a crucial blow to the validity of
associating influences of celestial objects with human affairs was dealt when
Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley discovered the regular orbits of comets. In
this view, it was the unpredictability of comets that made them seem
ominous, and when the unpredictability was removed, so was the
ominousness. However, Simon Schaffer has argued that the work of Newton,
Halley and some of their contemporaries on comets was part of a natural
philosophy which still dealt with prophetic aspects of astronomical signs. In
particular, Newton suggested that comets might be used by God to replenish
materials on Earth, or, more ominously, to terminate life on Earth by
crashing into the sun and defeating the stability of the solar system. At the
same time, it follows from Schaffer's work that Newton attacked a basic tenet
of astral religion, the divinity of celestial objects. Newton took this doctrine
to be a form of idolatry, and also as the basis of astrology. Thus the work of
Newton on comets, and work related to it, contained an attack on astrology.
Schaffer's analysis of Newton's cometography (as Schaffer calls it, perhaps
after a work Cometographia of 1668 by Seth Ward which Schaffer cites, in
which Ward asserted that comets move in circles) can be used not only to
reveal Newton's argument against astrology, but also to show a part of what
we now call astronomy emerging from the astronomy/astrology which
preceded it. (Simon Schaffer, "Newton's Comets and the Transformation of
Astrology", in Astrology, Science and Society,1987, edited by Patrick Curry, p.
219-243.)
33. In the early 1670's, Newton had written in a manuscript called "Of
natures obvious laws & processes in vegetation" that "this Earth resembles a
great animall or rather inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereall breath for
its dayly refreshment & vitall ferment & transpires again the grosse
exhalations". (Quoted by Schaffer, ibid., p. 235.) These ideas were made a
part of his cometography after 1687, and amplified in the final queries in his
Optics of 1706. Thus comets served a divine office -- the restoration of
vegetative life.
34. Newton seems not to have been much attached to the idea that
celestial objects are alive. The Earth, he says, resembles a large animal, or
rather an "inanimate vegetable" (whatever that might be). Robert Westfall
calls attention to an alchemical paper of Newton's which probes the
distinction between vegetation and mechanical changes. Newton sometimes
referred to a principle of vegetable action as a spirit, or "Powerfull agent".
Sometimes he referred to it with a plural such as seeds or seminal virtues,
which are nature's "only agents, her fire, her soule, her life." Westfall
concludes: "That is, what he found in the world of alchemy was the
conviction that nature cannot be reduced to the arrangement of inert
particles of matter. Nature contains foci of activity, agents whose
spontaneous working produces results that cannot be accounted for by the
mechanical philosophy's only category of explanation: particles of matter in
motion." (Robert S. Westfall, ”Newton and Alchemy” in Occult and scientific
mentalities in the Renaissance, 1984, edited by Brian Vickers, p. 315-335.)
36. By 1698, Newton had concluded that the comet of 1680 was
periodic, and in the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Principia (1713, 1726) said:
"The comet which appeared in the year 1680 was in its perihelion less distant
from the sun than by a sixth part of the sun's diameter; and because of its
37. Newton never made public the fact that his own work involved
correlation between divine functions of comets and ancient prophecy.
However, he drafted arguments in his System of the World in 1685 that a
true system of the world had been known in ancient times, and later
corrupted. A version of this appeared in English in 1728: "It was the ancient
opinion of not a few, in the earliest ages of philosophy, that the fixed stars
stood immovable in the highest parts of the world; that under the fixed stars
the planets were carried about the sun; that the earth, as one of the planets,
described an annual course about the sun, while by a diurnal motion it was in
the meantime revolved about its own axis; and that the sun, as the common
fire which served to warm the whole, was fixed in the centre of the universe.
This was the philosophy taught of old by Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos,
Plato in his riper years, and the whole sect of the Pythagoreans; and this was
the judgment of Anaximander, more ancient still; and of that wise king of the
Romans, Numa Pompilius, who, as a symbol of the figure of the world with
the sun in the centre, erected a round temple in honor of Vesta, and ordained
perpetual fire to be kept in the middle of it."
38. "The Egyptians were early observers of the heavens; and from them,
probably, this philosophy was spread abroad among other nations; for from
them it was, and the nations about them, that the Greeks, a people more
addicted to the study of philology than of Nature, derived their first, as well
as soundest, notions of philosophy; and in the Vestal ceremonies we may yet
trace the ancient spirit of the Egyptians; for it was their way to deliver their
mysteries, that is, their philosophy of things above the common way of
thinking, under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols. It is not
to be denied that Anaxagoras, Democritus, and others, did now and then start
up, who would have it that the earth possessed the centre of the world, and
that the stars were revolved towards the west about the earth quiescent in
the centre, some at a swifter, others at a slower rate. However, it was agreed
on both sides that the motions of the celestial bodies were performed in
spaces altogether free and void of resistance. The whim of solid orbs was of a
later date, introduced by Eudoxus, Calippus, and Aristotle, when the ancient
philosophy began to decline, and to give place to the new prevailing fictions of
the Greeks. But, above all things, the phenomena of comets can by no means
tolerate the idea of solid orbits. The Chaldeans, the most learned
39. In the years in which Newton was forming his theory of comets, he
was also composing a fundamental study of ancient theology and natural
philosophy, the Philosophical origins of gentile theology (begun 1683-1684;
reworked 1694 and after). Here he linked idolatry and false cometography.
False cometography, he said, suffered from the worship of planetary souls as
real divinities identified with temporal kings and heroes. In the mid 1680's,
Newton argued that the natural philosophers of the ancients had been their
priests. The Chaldeans in Babylon were an example. In the Philosophical
origins, he explained that when "the stars were declared to move in their
courses in the heavens by the force of their souls and seemed to all men to be
heavenly deities", then "gentile Astrology and Theology were introduced by
cunning Priests to promote the study of stars and the growth of the
priesthood and at length spread through the world." (Quoted by Schaffer, l.c.,
p. 242; "gentile" is used here with the obsolete meaning of "heathen" or
"pagan".). Newton singled out Cabbalists, Gnostics and neo-Platonists as
sharing a common idolatry and a common error which concealed the true
system of the world. Thus around 1685, Newton had composed a treatise on
ancient philosophy in which he charged that false worship of elements of
what had been proper natural philosophy had destroyed a correct theory of
comets, already known to certain ancient astronomers, and which he was
undertaking to restore.
45. "In the heavens, the Sun and Moon are, by interpreters of dreams,
put for the persons of Kings and Queens; but in sacred Prophecy, which
regards not single persons, the Sun is put for the whole species and race of
Kings, in the kingdom or kingdoms of the world politic, shining with regal
48. Pierre Duhem remarked that modern science was born on the day
someone proclaimed the truth that the same mechanics and the same
physical laws rule celestial and sublunary motions, the sun, the flow and ebb
of the tides, the fall of bodies. This pertains to the universality I spoke of
earlier. For such a thought to become possible, Duhem says, it was necessary
that the stars fall from the divine rank in which antiquity had placed them,
and for this it was necessary for a theological revolution to occur. This
revolution, Duhem believed, was the the work of Christian theologians.
(Pierre Duhem, Le Système du Monde, 1913, v. 2, p. 453.) The path to
Duhem's conclusion is not clear, since denial of the divinity of celestial objects
occurred in pre-Christian antiquity, and seems then and later to have had
several sources. For example, we noted that Deuteronomy 4.19 forbids the
worship of celestial objects, so it appears Jews began or continued the
theological revolution (if it can be called this) before Christ appeared. Again,
with Galileo and after, telescopes revealed irregular features of our moon,
sun and some planets, some of which had counterparts on earth (mountains
on the moon), and this made it difficult to believe any longer in the perfection
and distinctiveness usually required of divine objects. But it would be
characteristic of Newton to include a theological motive among the reasons he
rejected the divinity of celestial objects.
52. Newton said in the passage I quoted earlier that the book of Daniel
must be made the key to all the other prophecies about the end of time, which
express what God will bring to pass, and from all he says in the first few
pages of this work, we might expect that Biblical prophecy will enable to
predict when the world will end. But this later passage is a kind of
admission of defeat. We cannot securely extract prophecies from the
Scriptures, he is saying -- we can only understand fully what the words mean
retrospectively, and then see that the prophecies have been fulfilled.
53. So Newton's method for reading Biblical prophecy appears from his
description, I suggest, as a kind of "purified" omen astrology, of the general
sort Kepler envisioned, along with some purified divination of other kinds.
Of course, Kepler influenced Newton in numerous other ways, amd in any
case, as we have seen, astrology and astral worship in various forms were
still intertwined with astronomy in the Europe of Newton’s time. We can say,
I suggest, that in the Principia, with his celestial mechanics, Newton
presented what can be, and may well have been taken in his time, to be a
kind of purified astrology -- a mathematically based system with which one
can in many cases predict with great accuracy the motions of natural objects
when one knows mathematical expressions for the forces -- or influences --
acting on them. This can be described as a kind of natural astrology, a term
which was used in Newton's time, cf. Natural Magic. There is a common
objective underlying both of these works: to be able to predict the course of
things. In interpreting Biblical prophecy for this purpose, Newton found the
canonical scriptures too obscure, an obscurity which he attributed to God's
design. In applying his laws of motion and gravitation, and their
mathematical development, for this purpose, he may have taken himself to
have had greater success in developing this objective.
55. It may be that Westfall is right about the nature of Newton's genius,
but I suggest that feelings of Newton's "otherness" may be alleviated to some
extent by admitting Newton's attachment to, or obsession with, knowing the
course of things as broadly as possible, together with the fact that he was a
firm believer in the truth of Biblical prophecy, and was in some degree
dedicated to the aims of omen or natural astrology, although not to the
methods. This means that a certain distortion of Newton may be introduced
by making too central in one’s interpretation of Newton’s life and works that
part of Newton's work most people would nowadays characterize as
“scientific”, and separating this from his interests in what we now call
alchemy, to be distinguished from “genuine” chemistry, and astrology, to be
distinguished from “genuine” astronomy. For example, Westfall says (on the
next page of his preface): "Newton holds our attention only because he is a
scientist of transcendant importance. Hence I tend to think of my work as a
scientific biography, that is, a biography in which Newton's scientific career
furnishes the central theme." (Westfall, ibid., p. x.)
56. We should allow for what Newton took to be scientific methods and
subject matter, or rather what he took to be methods and subject matter of
natural philosophy, since the term “scientific” was not used in his day in the
ways we use it today (in English). He appears, for example, to have believed
that determining the chronology of the world, and interpreting Biblical
prophecy to predict the end of the world, were enterprises which could be
undertaken scientifically. Newton wanted to find out about the course of
things any way he could – using mathematics, alchemy, scriptures, whatever
offered some prospect of working. This aim underlies both his scientific (in
our sense) and religious works. Given a tolerant enough view of the
intellectual, religious and political environment of his time, his interests and
methods seem quite understandable. His speed, depth and scope of
penetration are awesome -- but alien? I think they need not be.
59. E.C. Krupp suggests that what takes place in the sky assists our
brains in organizing its perceptions of the world. The idea that order is a
fundamental aspect of the universe may be taken to be an assumption,
having its ultimate origin in the interactions of humans with the skies and
their contents. Without the sky, our brains might have sought symmetry and
order and cyclical phenomena elsewhere -- crystals or flowers, perhaps. But
the sky is an obvious repository of order. Its effects on our brains is shown by
the antiquity of astronomy and the presence of celestial imagery everywhere
in ancient times. "What we see in the lights overhead," Krupp says, "is the
itinerary of cosmic order ... It defines what is sacred and makes the sky the
domain of the gods." (E. C. Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies, The
Astronomy of Lost Civilizations, 1983.)
60. "If we are seeking immortality," Krupp says, "the sky is a good
place to start. We see endless repetition there. Although we know that we
ourselves will die, we see the sun, moon and stars survive night after night,
month after month, year after year. They may disappear, but their absences
are only temporary..... We see a fundamental pattern in the celestial realm
and frame from it what seems to be the cycle of cosmic order and the way of
the world: creation-growth-death-rebirth. We seek our own past, present,
and future in that cycle." Of course we also see the cycle of birth-growth-
death-rebirth in vegetation, but this is seen to follow movements in the sky,
which are more certain and superior. Contemplation and worship of celestial
beings and their actions are an antidote to chaos."
61. "Celestial order," says Krupp, "generally was transfused into human
society in ancient times through the sovereignty of the ruler. The mandate of
heaven sanctified kingship. By invoking the sky, kings and their institutions
gained special authority and meaning." The sky "is the door of perception to
cosmic order." However, its cycles are not simple. This leads to complicated
calendars. Dealing with this complexity was a duty of central authorities.
Ultimate responsibility for the calendar might belong to the pharaoh, the
king, the emperor. His power was thus enhanced because he was in league
with the sky. Celebrations of celestial renewal allowed ancient peoples to
participate in the rhythm of cosmic order, and also to promote terrestrial
renewal and stability. Usually, a king acquired his authority through the
mandate of heaven, the source of order. But the king and his people also had
to re-energize the sky. Their temples were made sacred as metaphors of
cosmic order. Entire cities and ritual centers were astronomically aligned
and organized. Krupp says: "Beijing is the only world capital still laid out
according to a sacred cosmological plan... the cosmological motive behind the
city's layout is known and preserved. Even today, the monuments of the
secular government of the People's Republic of China adhere to the ancient
"Only man stands on a hill with his head raised up, sending his
starry eyes in triumph to the stars, looking more closely at the
heavens, and searching for God. He isn't content with the outward
God, but examines heaven's womb. Following bodies akin to his
own, he looks for himself in the stars ..... consider the power
which reason has and gravity doesn't: reason conquers everything."
63. From the late 20th century A.D.: "All of chemistry, beyond hydrogen
and helium, and therefore, all of life has been formed by stellar evolution. In
other words, with the exception of hydrogen, everything in our bodies and
brains has been produced in the thermonuclear reactions within stars which
later exploded in galactic space." (Benjamin Gal-Or, Cosmology, Physics, and
Philosophy, 1981, p. 352.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
U1. I spoke about Stoics in Chapter 1, Sections 39-50, and in Chapter 5, sections 30-
33. In his book Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer, 1999,
Anthony Grafton contrasts what he takes to be characteristic of Stoic views of our physical
universe with those of many astrologers. He says (p. 201):
Grafton continues: “For Cardano and other astrologers, by contrast, the cosmic
perspective that lent distance had a radically different value. It concentrated their attention
on the local and ephemeral. Examining the staars that shone at a client’s birth, watching
the movements of the planets during an illness, made the contours of the client’s permanent
character, even the minor ones, and the details of his short-term case history, even its
ephermeral fluctuations, stand out with a new clarity. Distance enhanced the astrologers’
promiscuous attention to the kinds of detail philosophers disdained. Their cosmic viewpoint
focused and intensified their intimate contact with the emotional and the corporeal side of
each individual life, as if a viewpoint on the celestial pole or at the mid-heaven actually
magnified the minute details of individual life on earth. In the world of the astrologers,
opposition might not be true friendship, but distance could be true intimacy.” (Grafton refers
in this connection to R. Reisinger, Historische Horoskopie, Wiesbaden, 1997.)
U3. With regard to ancient Mesopotamia, some of whose astral interests I discussed in
Chapter 4, a treatise on the subject was published in 1999 by Hermann Hunger and David
Pingree called Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia. A major part of this work is devoted to
detailed presentations and interpretations of astronomical data as recorded and
mathematically manipulated by ancient Babylonians, based on a large but not exhaustive
quantity of the clay tablets on which the records were inscribed, and which have been
collected by various archeologists and stored in various locations. There is a resumé of what
is known about the beginnings of Babylonian astrology and astronomy which agrees on the
whole with what I presented in Chapter 4. Interest in such matters appears to have been
connected early with interpretations of signs and omens. Hunger and Pingree say (p. 1):
"People in Ancient Mesopotamia believed that the gods would indicate future events to
mankind. These indications were called "signs", in Sumerian (g)iskim, in Akkadian ittu.
Such signs could be of very different kinds. There were to be found in the entrails of
sacrificial animals, in the shapes of oil spreading after being dropped into water, in
phenomena observed in the sky, in strange occurrences in everyday life. We can classify
U4. Hunger and Pingree go on to emphasize that neither of these types of omens
seems to have been interpreted fatalistically. They say (p. 1): "One thing is to be kept in
mind: the gods send the signs, but what these signs announce is not unavoidable fate. A
sign in a Babylonian text is not an absolute cause of a coming event, but a warning. By
appropriate actions one can prevent the predicted event from happening. The idea of
determinism is not inherent in this concept of sign. The knowledge of signs is however based
on experience: once it was observed that a certain sign had been followed by a specific event,
it is considered known that this sign, whenever it is observed again, will indicate the same
future event. So while there is an empirical basis for assuming a connection between sign
and following event, this does not imply a notion of causality."
U5. Eclipses were among the most dangerous omens. Hunger and Pingree describe an
unusual method which was employed to avoid dangerous consequences of certain eclipses.
They say (p. 25): "If an eclipse implied the death of the king of Assyria, some man was
chosen to be put in his place, at least for all appearances. Usually someone whose life was
not considered important, like a condemned criminal, seems to have been used for this
purpose. He was clad like a king and made to sit on the throne, but of course he had no
influence on government. In order to make it clear to everyone who was to suffer the
impending evil, the bad portents were recited to the substitute king. The true king, in the
meantime, had to behave as inconspicuously as possible, avoid being seen outside the palace,
and undergo extensive purifying rites. In letters written to him during such a period, the
king was to be addressed as "farmer" in order to avoid any association with kingship. It was
expected that the dire fate announced by the omen would fall on the substitute king. The
assumed time of validity of such an omen was 100 days. If additional unfavorable portents
were expected (e.g., other eclipses), the substitute would remain enthroned for most of this
time. Otherwise, his "reign" could be rather short; it was neither convenient nor necessary to
extend it. In any case, the substitute king had to die. It is unknown how his death was
brought about, but it was the decision of the true king: in the letters, the advisers ask the
"farmer" on which day the substitute king "should go to his fate". He was then buried and
mourned like a king." The authors cite here S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the
Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, part II, 1983, p. xxii-xxxii. They go on to say that
"According to literary tradition, a substitute king was enthroned during the reign of Erra-
imitti of Isin in the early part of the 2nd millennium [B.C.]; this case was atypical insofar as
the true king died while the substite sat on the throne, and so the reign passed to the latter.
The reference for this is A. K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, 1975, p. 155.
U6. Hunter and Pingree state that "We do not know when this belief in omens
originated; by the time when texts containing these omens are attested, it is already well
established. That is about the last third of the third millennium B.C." (p. 6) They observe
that "In the first millennium B.C., celestial omens are found organized in a series of tablets
called Enuma Anu Enlil ("When Anu (and) Enlil") after the opening words of its mythological
introduction. ... The mythological introduction (lines 1-8) traces the order of heaven and
earth back to the gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea It comes in a Sumerian and an Akkadian version
which are slightly different from each other. The Sumerian version mentions the Moon god,
the Akkadian versian the Sun god, but in different functions." (p. 12, 14)
U8. According to Hunger and Pingree, one category of records pertaining to Babylonian
astral concerns, in addition to the collections known as Enuma Anu Enlil, is called "Letters
and Reports". These were sent to Assyrian kings, notably Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal,
most of them between 677 B.C. and 665 B.C. (p. 23-24). Another category is known as the
"Diaries". These are said to be "records of observations and computations made during each
period of half a year (six or seven months). The oldest so far was inscribed in -651, but the
series probably began in the first year of Nabu-nasir, -746 ... while the latest securely dated
Diary is from -60. This means that the tradition of keeping the Diaries persisted through
seven centuries --- or even eight, if the Diaries continued to be kept till the end of cuneiform
writing in the late first century A.D. During this time-span Babylonia was rules by native
Dynasties, Achaemenid Persians, Hellenized Macedonians, and Parthiana, so it is unlikely
that the supporting institution was the state. There is some evidence, from the late second
century B.C., that the observers for the Diaries were employed by the Temple of Marduk in
Babylon ... The purpose of the compilation of the Diaries has been much debated. Two recent
studies take opposite stands: Swerdlow (N.M. Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the
Planets, 1998) argues that they were intimately connected with the Mesopotamian practice of
reading celestial omens, while Slotsky (A.L. Slotsky,The Bourse of Babylon, 1997), following
a suggestion by Pingree, interprets them as intended, as far as the celestial observations are
concerned, for astronomical purposes." Six reasons supporting the latter hypothesis are
given. They are chiefly based on the notions of periodicity which are evident with regard to
the data given in the Diaries. For example, the majority of the omens given in the Enuma
Anu Enlil, and the Letters and Reports, are in no sense periodic, whereas the Diaries show a
concentration on periodic phenomena. And, it is suggested, "The Diaries treat periodic
phenomena as predictable; this deprives them of their meaning as omens. For omens,
celestial or otherwise, are sent to man as warnings by the gods. They must be seen, not
computed, and they must occur randomly. The scribes of the Diaries certainly continued to
believe in omens since they report some, but they cannot be shown to believe that the
celestial and and terrestrial phenomena they primarily revealed [in the Diaries] were
U9. The degree to which the Slotsky-Pingree evaluation is correct would be very
significant in assigning provenance to the rise of mathematical and observational astronomy
as independent, to some degree, from astrology in the sense of reading omens and, later,
horoscopes from celestial phenomena. In fact, the dates of the earliest known personal
horoscopes, reported above, and the earliest known indications of astronomical studies based
on careful observations and mathematical techniques are roughly in the same periods. This
suggests that the split of what we nowadays think of as astrology (in a broad sense) and
astronomy (in recent senses of the term) began at roughly the same time, and that this was
also perhaps when genethlialogical interpretations of celestial phenomena (i.e., predictions of
the future based on times of birth of persons or data of origin of other entities) began to
separate from the more general judicial astrology in which predictions were made for
kingdoms and their rulers based directly on alignments of planets and stars without
reference to birth dates.
U10. The work Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the
Language of the Stars, 1995, by Ann Geneva, is centered mainly on the astrological of one
man, Lilly, described, as the author says, by Bernard Capp as "the most abused as well as
the most celebrated astrologer of the seventeenth century." (p. 55; the reference is to Capp's
English Almanacs 1500-1800, 1979, p. 57). Geneva interprets astrology as a "symbolic
language system" (e.g., the title of Chapter 9 is "The Decline of Astrology as a Symbolic
Language System.") Her Chapter 6, called " 'Ars Longa, Vita Brevis': The Starry Language
Decoded" discusses Lilly's use of astrological techniques and terminology to "encrypt" his
prognostications, which were generally political in nature, and especially concerned the
struggles between the Parliamentarians and Royalists of the time of Charles I of England.
Lilly was much devoted to the cause of the Parliamentarians. For example, she gives (p. 176)
the following three methods of such "encryptment" by Lilly::
"1. SUBSTITUTION. Predicting the King's death using the individual geniture tradition by
substituting aspects of the King's natal geniture to avoid explicit reference to either his name
or his nativity.
2. CELESTIAL OMENS. The use of an ancient tradition linking naatural phenomena such
as comets and eclipses to sublunar events, and specifically to major upheavals in government
and the death of kings.
If I understand Geneva correctly, she means by calling Lilly's version of astrology a "symbolic
language system" that he used connections between celestial phenomena as parallels to
U11. Geneva proposes (p. 6) that "One need only consult Ptolemy's second century AD
Tetrabiblos to see that astronomy and astrology constituted two quite separate, and often
incompatible pursuits. While to Ptolemy astrology is 'prediction through astronomy', he
makes the clearest possible distinction between the two by publishing his great work on
astronomy, the Almagest, in a separate volume from the Tetrabiblos. Despite this, even the
flap copy of the Loeb edition of the Tetrabiblos insists astrology from Ptolemy's day through
the Renaissance was 'fused as a respectable science with astronomy." To my mind, this is
rather like saying that psychology and biology are two quite separate pursuits, which they
are in some respects. Still, the role of biology in psychology may be likened, in my view, to
the role of astronomy in astrology, and historically psychology and biology (quite modern
terms) were fused integrally for a long time, given due allowance to the fact that psychology
and biology did not become separate, in some respects, from each other and from other kinds
of study until comparatively recently. The extent to which psychology can be "reduced" to
biology (and biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, and even, sometimes, physics to
mathematics) is still a matter of lively debate. There is also the matter of the scope of the
terms corresponding to our "astronomy" and "astrology" (e.g., in Latin, Greek and Akkadian)
in past times, as compared to later usages, as discussed in Chapter I of the present work.
U12. Geneva asks (p. 71) " ... exactly what was Lilly so good at? ... some of his
admirers had studied astrology for as long as Lilly had done. Yet despite their greater ability
in subjects like astronomy, mathematics, Latin, physics, languages, geometry, theology, and
philosophy, Lilly remained their acknowledged superior in judicial astrology. He obviously
had a knack: but for what? If merely a combination of modern intellectual skills, such as
historians often claim of astrology --- part psychology, religion, mathematics, physics,
sociology, journalism, etc. --- had been required then surely others would have triumphed. If
he were alive now, Lilly would be practicing in none of these professions. I finally decided
that this was a genuinely obsolete category. Nothing in the twentieth century is
comparable. The answer then became self-evident: Lilly was a genius in exactly the
category of knowledge which he claimed as his own --- that of judicial astrology. What skills
this comprised when stripped of distorting modern contexts was another matter, one which
the remainder of this study will try to explicate." If I understand this claim correctly,
Geneva is attributing to Lilly possession of a lost art, and one which evidently stands alone,
independent of other kinds of arts and sciences, such as those she listed. Does this mean
U13. I don't find in Geneva's work a study of predictions of Lilly which failed, as
compared to those which succeeded. She does note, however, (p. 184) that "when Lilly found
the astrological tradition wanting, he did not hesitate to develop a new methodology using
existing astrological formulations. He also expressed his intention of passing it on to his
astrological inheritors, an ambition in keeping with his more respectable scientific
contemporaries. And finally, there is Geneva's quotation (p. 281) of a statement by Lilly:
"my arguments are not demonstrative, or can be made so: I acknowledge my Prognosticks to
be only grounded upon conjectural probabilitie, and are not subject to the senses, or
Geometricall demonstrations; thus I speak to avoyd carping."
U15. Geneva proposed a quite radical separation of astronomy and astrology, even
in antiquity, whereas Koch-Westerholz states: "As a rule astronomy and astrology have
always been treated separately, while in fact they were never regarded as separate before
U16. Koch-Westerholz observes that "The provoked omens are signs deliberately
sought to answer specific questions formally addressed to the gods. By their very nature,
such signs are always sent by gods. Unprovoked omens may likewise be regarded as
willed divine communications, or they may be seen as "signs" (ittu) without any sender,
like our black cat crossing the street or what we would call 'symptoms'. This
ambivalence between a theistic and a mechanistic world view permeates much of
Babylonian thought and is duly reflected in the astrological texts. ... the relation between
ominous events and their interpretations could be regarded as part of a purely mechanical
scheme of things." (p. 11-12). Also, it was possible to avert or mitigate a predicted bad
event by means of special rituals, involving prayers and offerings. Koch-Westerholz
says: "In fact, most bad omens could be averted mechanically by performing the
appropriate namburbu [rituals]. This is a far cry from the gods ruling the universe by
their immutable will." (p. 12) This presumably applies to all kinds of Babylonian
divination practices and theories. Thus there appears to have been no commitment, at
least up to the Hellenistic period, to strict determinism or fatalism in connection with the
observation and interpretation of omens.
U19. Later in her work, Koch-Westerholz also speaks in such a way that she
considers the empirical and theoretical to be in continual interaction, although she
attributes a sort of primacy to the theoretical. She is concerned to consider what sorts of
assumptions guided Babylonian astrologers in choosing what to observe and how to
classify their observations. She says: "Babylonian astrology was the result of the
interaction of practical observation and theoretical schematization well known from the
other omen series. The crucial phenomena in divination: heliacal [first appearance just
before sunrise, last setting just after sunset] and acronycial [last rising just after sunset]
risings and settings, stationary points [as when a planet retrogrades], conjunctions [two or
more bodies having the same celestial longitudes, i.e. one just "above" the other] and
other positions in relation to a particular celestial body, eclipses, colours and other optical
phenomena, all derive from actual observations rather than speculations. But it is
obvious that practical experience was subordinate to theory or schematization: in order
to fit the various schemata, also phenomena which never occur in reality were listed in
the series, especially in the eclipse sections ... The schematization included binary
oppositions like: left - right, above - below, in front of - behind, sunrise - sunset, bright -
faint, on time - late/early; and qualifications like: colours: white, black, red and yellow;
direction: the four quarters; time: month, day, watch, duratiion; location: path of Anu,
Enlil or Ea (Footnote: The paths of Enlil, Anu and Ea were probably areas along the
eastern horizon rather than bands in the sky parallel to the celestial equator as previously
supposed ...) Furthermore, these opposites and qualifications do not have the same
meaning in all contexts; astrology is very far from the neat generalizations striven for in
barutu [artificial omens], but there are some tendencies in that direction." (p. 97-98)
Koch-Westerholz gives an interesting example of the application of the "bright - faint"
distinction: "A simple rule that is common to all kinds of Babylonian divination is of
almost mathematical rigour: within the same omen, a good sign with a good sign has a
good prediction; good combined with bad means bad; bad combined with bad means
good. Expressed algebraically, the rule is also familiar to us: ++ = +; +- = -; -- = +. An
often quoted example of this rule is found in the astrological texts: if a well-portending
planet is bright: favourable (++ = +); if it is faint: unfavourable (+- = -); of it is faint:
favourable (- - = +). But the rule might also be illustrated from texts of extispicy or
lecanomancy as early as Old Babylonian." (p. 11)
U20. David Pingree in his work From Astral Omens to Astrology: From Babylon to
Bikaner, 1997, gives numerous details which supplement my discussions of origins of
astrology in Babylonia, Greece, and other parts of the world. In this work, Pingree
doesn't add much to what has already been said here about origins of astrology in
Babylonia itself. There are large gaps in what is known, and much of what is said about
this remains conjectural. Of the origins of what we nowadays often refer to as horoscopic
astrology, Pingree says: "The science of astrology was developed in, most probably the
late 2nd or early 1st century B.C. as a means to predict, from horoscopic themata drawn
up for the moment of an individual's birth (or conception), the fate of that native. This
form of astrology, called genethlialogy, is rooted in Aristotelian physics and Hellenistic
U22. The title of the book by Alan Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars, 1991,
doesn't indicate the scope of this work. The first two-thirds of the work is devoted to
setting the stage for a presentation of Origen's views on astral influences. While Scott is
primarily interested in implications for Christian theology, in my view Scott also sets a
stage for showing influences on and influences of the marriage between astronomy and
astrology as found in Europe and northern Africa and southwestern Asia in classical,
Hellenistic and early medieval times. Scott opens with a consideration of the thought of
pre-Socratic philosophers of classical Greece, and the thought of Plato on the nature of
the stars and planets. He observes: "In contrast to many other pre-industrial societies, a
formal cult of the stars was almost unknown in ancient Greece. Aristophanes, Plato, and
Aristotle regarded their worship as either an archaic or foreign practice, but the
veneration of heavenly bodies, particularly the sun and moon, was not unusual in popular
piety. Common practices always affect intellectual life, and Greece was no exception;
even in the Parthenon, the very symbol of classical Athens, the sun and moon appear as
gods. ... And yet this common supposition tht the heavens were alive was increasingly
examined, questioned, and even rejected as Greek astronomy began its scientific
development on the other side of the Greek-speaking world among the Ionians. As a
reult, belief in the divinity of the stars is conspicuously rare in Greek philosophy between
Alcmaeon and Plato." (p. 3-4) Scott reviews some of the fragments we have left of the
pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Empedocles,
Archelaos, Democritus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, as to speculations about the physical
nature of the heavenly bodies. They were said to be "made of earth and fire", "fiery
bodies", "rocks" or "red hot stones", "full of fire", and so on. Scott says: "The precise
religious beliefs of the Ionian naturalists or of those who accepted their teachings on the
heavens is not clear, but they were perceived as denying the gods, as Aristophanes' play
The Clouds makes clear. ... Plutarch indicates the unpopularity of this naturalism with
respect to the heavens, referring here to the teachings of Anaxagoras: 'It was still not
talked about and spread only among a few, who received it with some caution rather than
giving it much credence. They could not bear the natural philosophers and what were
then called the 'star-gazers', because they frittered away divinity into irrational causes,
unforeseen forces, and necessary occurrences.' " (p. 5-6)
U23. Plato's views about the heavens and stars changed over the course of his
lifetime. He appears to have been more concerned with their roles in the cosmos in his
later life. In the Statesman, one of the later dialogues, he speaks of the planets, taken to
include our sun and moon as well as the five planets (in our present-day sense) which are
visible without instruments. He notes, as Scott puts it, that "in the first era of history God
imparts his own motion to the universe, but that there is another era in which the universe
begins to move in the opposite direction under its own power, since its Maker has made it
U24. In the Statesman, Plato is concerned about how the majority of celestial
objects, the "fixed" stars, revolve every day one way, from East to West, but that a few
prominent "stars", namely the five planets (though not the Sun and Moon), while they
share in this diurnal rotation sometimes go the opposite way with respect to the fixed
stars. Plato has the Stranger say, beginning at section 268, by way of telling a "pleasant
story": "There is an era in which the god himself assists the universe on its way and
helps it in its rotation. There is also an era in which he releases his control. He does this
when its circuits have completed the due limit of the time thereto appointed. Thereupon
it begins to revolve in the contrary sense under its own impulse -- for it is a living
creature and has been endowed with reason by him who framed it in the beginning."
(translated by J. B. Skemp, 1952, p. 23 ff. of edition of 1957). In Plato's later very
influential dialogue Timaeus, his cosmology is more developed and detailed. In
connection with how Plato's speculations about the natures of celestial bodies influenced
the development and acceptance of astrological doctrines, it is suggestive that he assigns
to stars two kinds of motion, the diurnal revolutions from East to West, and also axial
rotations. In addition, the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, have a
different kind of motion peculiar to them, retrograde motion from West to East with
respect to the fixed stars. The movement from East to West of the fixed stars, shared by
the planets (including the Sun and Moon) is, according to Plato's story, imparted to them
and perhaps maintained by the Demiurge, Plato's name for the deity who creates and
manages the physical universe as based on eternal models or Ideas established and
managed by a superior deity. Thus celestial objects do not maintain this motion from
within themselves, although they are said to be alive and have souls. The axial rotations
of the celestial objects hypothesized by Plato are said to originate and be maintained from
within the bodies, and thus can be said to be powers they themselves possess. In
addition, the retrogradation of the five planets shows that they have an additional power,
as do the annual spiral motions of the sun and moon with respect to the fixed stars. The
upshot of all this, as applied to development of astrology, is that Plato assigns a certain
power to all the stars, and additional powers to the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn. Our Earth is also said to be alive and to have a soul.
U25. Now, by way of relating the stars and their powers to people, Plato says that
with the residue of that which the Demiurge had "mixed and blended the soul of the
universe", a residue which was no longer as pure as it was before, the Demiurge "divided
it into souls equal to number with the stars, and distributed them, each soul to its several
star." (41D-E, translated by F. M. Cornford in his Plato's Cosmology, 1937, p. 142 of the
1957 edition). Plato goes on (42B): "And he who should live well for his due span of
time should journey back to the habitation of his consort star and there live a happy and
congenial life; but failing of this, he should shift at his second birth into a woman' and if
in this condition he still did not cease from wickedness, then according to the character of
U26. Scott says (p. 55, 57-58): "Aside from the Epicureans, all the major
philosophical schools in the Hellenistic era believed in the divinity of the stars. Even the
notorious atheist Euhemerus (fl. 300 BC) acknowledged that they (at least) were gods.
And yet an identificaion was not without its difficulties. A problem particularly vexing
for Platonists was the visibility of the stars (since divinity was thought to be perceptible
to the mind only and not to the senses), and this was a frequent topic of discussion in
Platonic circles. ... One response was to say that in the case of the stars, soul was
perfectly adapted to body and the lower and visible part to a higher intelligible part. The
'secondary' gods exist through the higher invisible gods, depending on them as the star's
radiance depends on the star. In the star the divine soul exercises a perfect supremacy.
Chaeremon does not seem particularly interested in any other gods besides the visible
ones, but such a view was unusual in philosophers of the period, for if the supreme God
is altogether simple and is in no way made of ruler and rules, it is difficult to undersstand
how any visible (and therefore material) body could be truly divine. Recognizing this,
Alexandrian astronomers began to refer to the planets by their appearance rather than
using the names of gods, since the mythological associations of the older practice were
plain to them. ... Philosophers of this period devised a wide variety of ways of referring
to the astral gods which emphasized their intermediate divine nature which was superior
to the human condition but inferior to the supremely divine. Most of these ways of
talking about the heavenly bodies stemmed from Plato and from the Epinomis." The
Epinomis has been and sometimes still is ascribed to Plato, but some later scholars hold
that while the Epinomis has something in common with Plato's later work, especially the
Laws to which it is a kind of sequel, it appears to have been written by a follower of
Plato, perhaps Philipp of Opus (Scott, p. 20). Scott sats (p. 20, 22) that "Emphasis on the
importance of the heavens is carried to its furthest extreme in the Epinomis ... the
Epinomis declares the wise man to be, not the philosopher, but the astronomer". As
discussed in Chapter 1 of the present work, the word translated here as "astronomer" in
previous times customarily denoted a kind of combination of what nowadays we call
"astronomer" and what we call "astrologer".
U27. "One view which was frequent in Stoic and Platonic circles," says Scott,
"was that as the stars were intermediate and subordinate gods, so they regulated an
intermediate and subordinate providence. The idea as we have seen is implicit in Plato,
Aristotle, and the Academy and , despite the ambiguity of the stars' relation to ether or
God in Stoicism, it was taken over by Chrysippus, who believed that stars govern the
world in accordance with providence. ... A common later expression of this is that there
U28. Scott next, on his way to discussing works of Origen, comments on works of
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC - 40 AD), so far as they relate to opinions on the nature of
stars and planets. His conclusion is: "He [Philo] follows the conventions of his day in
honouring the stars but he is both too good a Jew and too good a Platonist to take this to
its logical consequences. For all their glory, the stars are distinctly inferior to God, who
is above heaven. The cosmological inconsistencies which were present individually in
Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoa come to a crescendo in Philo, and this happens in part
because he is not able to criticize and correct his teachers, and because he has sometimes
combined his sources in a clumsy way, but it has also happened because of his
philosophical and religious integrity: he refuses to put anything (even the stars) on the
same level as God. His efforts are of great importance for students of Origen, because
Origen will follow him both in attempting to present a scriptural cosmology, and in
placing strict limitations on the usual pagan religious understanding of heaven. One idea,
however, which Origen adopts and which is not present in Philo or any of the classical
philosophical schools is the recognition of the possibility of evil in heaven. This view,
which is of great importance for Origen in understanding the place of the stars in the
divine economy, gradually developed in Hellenism, and exerted a great influence on early
Christianity. That the heavenly bodies affected the lilfe below was a philosophical
commonplace, but our sources in the early imperil era are sharply divided about the
nature of this influence." ( p. 74-75).
U29. Here are some excerpts from the works of Philo to illustrate his beliefs
about the stars, taken from the elegant Victorian translation of Philo's works by C. D.
Yonge, first published in 1854-1855. First, from a work commonly known as On the
Creation, although Yonge gives its complete title as A Treatise on the Account of the
Creation of the World, as Given by Moses, we have:
"XIX. (58) And they have been created, as Moses tells us, not only that they might send
light upon the earth, but also that they might display signs of future events. For either by
their risings, or their settings, or their eclipses, or again by their appearances and
occultations, or by the other variations observable in their motions, men oftentimes
conjecture what is about to happen, the productiveness or unproductiveness of the crops,
the birth or loss of their cattle, fine weather or cloudy weather, calm and violent storms of
wind, floods in the rivers or droughts, a tranquil state of the sea and heavy waves,
unusual changes in the seasons of the year when either the summer is cold like winter, or
the winter warm, or when the spring assumes the temperature of autumn or the autumn
that of spring. (59) And before now some men have conjecturally predicted disturbances
and commotions of the earth from the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, and
innumerable other events which have turned out most exactly true: so that it is a most
veracious saying that "the stars were created to act as signs, and moreover to mark the
seasons." And by the word seasons the divisions of the year are here intended. And why
may not this be reasonably affirmed? For what other idea of opportunity can there be
except that it is the time for success? And the seasons bring everything to perfection and
set everything right; giving perfection to the sowing and planting of fruits, and to the
birth and growth of animals. (60) They were also created to serve as measure of time; for
it is by the appointed periodical revolutions of the sun and moon and other stars, that days
and months and years are determined. And moreover it is owing to them that the most
useful of all things, the nature of number exists, time having displayed it; for from one
day comes the limit, and from two the number two, and from three, three, and from the
notion of a month is derived the number thirty, and from a year that number which is
U30. On the other hand, Philo maintains elsewhere, in effect, that while the stars
and planets give us signs, they don't cause the events which the signs indicate will or may
happen. In this view, the stars and planets are one way God communicates to humans. In
an appendix to his translation of the works of Philo, Yonge translates a treatise not found
in the now standard Loeb edition of Philo's works, with the title A Treatise Concerning
the World, we read:
"I. There is no existing thing equal in honour to God, but he is the one Ruler, and
Governor, and King, to whom alone it is lawful to govern and regulate everything; for the
verse- "A multitude of masters is not good,
"Let there one sovereign be, one king of all,"{1}{Homer, Iliad: 2.204.}
is not more appropriate to be said with respect to cities and men than to the world and
God, for it follows inevitably that there must be one Creator and Master of one world;
and this position having been laid down and conceded as a preliminary, it is only
consistent with sense to connect with it what follows from it of necessity. Let us now,
therefore, consider what inferences these are. God being one being, has two supreme
powers of the greatest importance. By means of these powers the incorporeal world,
appreciable only by the intellect, was put together, which is the archetypal model of this
world which is visible to us, being formed in such a manner as to be perceptible to our
invisible conceptions just as the other is to our eyes. Therefore some persons, marveling
at the nature of both these worlds, have not only worshipped them in their entirety as
gods, but have also deified the most beautiful parts of them, I mean for instance the sun,
and the moon, and the whole heaven, which, without any fear or reverence, they called
gods. And Moses, perceiving the ideas which they entertained, says, "O Lord, King of all
gods,"{2} [Deuteronomy 10:17.] in order to point out the great superiority of the Ruler to
his subjects. And the original founder of the Jewish nation was a Chaldaean [Babylonian]
by birth, being the son of a father who was much devoted to the study of astronomy, and
being among people who were great studiers of mathematical science, who think the
stars, and the whole heaven, and the whole world gods; and they say that both good and
evil result from their speculations and belief, since they do not believe in anything as a
cause which is apart from those things which are visible to the outward senses. But what
can be worse than this, or more calculated to display the want of true nobility existing in
the soul, than the notion of causes in general being secondary and created causes,
combined with an ignorance of the one first cause, the uncreated God, the Creator of the
U31. So far as astral prediction is concerned, a basic distinction has often been
made, from ancient times to the present, between celestial bodies having various kinds of
powers of their own over human affairs and destinies, and celestial bodies furnishing
signs, presumably related to non-astral powers which affect human affairs and destinies.
Astrologers and astronomers have long been concerning with predicting the future. As I
have argued in this work, and as many others have maintained, often enough in the past
one and the same person who did this, or believed it possible to do this, engaged in or
made use of activities concerned with predicting the future which in today's usual
meanings of the terms astrologer and astronomer would be identified as both an
astronomer and an astrologer. One of the differences today between people who are
classified as an astrologer or as an astronomer lies in how each interprets celestial events
and processes which they both are engaged in interpreting for purposes of predicting
something which will or may happen in the future; another difference concerns which
celestial events and processes exist to be interpreted for such a purpose. A common
example concerns our earth's moon. Astronomers agree that there are techniques for
predicting where the moon will be in the sky in the future of a given time, and what phase
it will be in, with great accuracy. They also agree that the moon has at least one
prominent power of affecting human affairs, namely a still quite mysterious power
known as gravity or gravitation which, for example, exerts influences on the tides of the
oceans which have to be taken into account for various human affairs. Actually, few
astronomers or physicists would use the English term power to refer to gravitation. In
non-relativistic mechanics, the term force is commonly used, and this is closely
associated with what the term energy is used to denote. In relativistic mechanics, the
situation is more complicated, one hears about such things as curvature of space, and the
like. In what is often called classical celestial mechanics, Newton's Law of Gravity and
Laws of Motion, along with an elaborate mathematical apparatus, are taken as the basis
for predicting future positions and phases of the moon, as well as of the sun and other
planets of our solar system, and many other celestial objects, from asteroids and comets
up to constellations and galaxies. Gravitation, non-relativistically and relativistically
interpreted, plays a major role in many other kinds of predictions by astronomers besides
positions and phases of celestial objects, from what will happen tomorrow in connection
with the energy output of our sun, energy which is of vital importance in human affairs,
to what will happen tomorrow if you get too near a so-called black hole, and what will
happen in the future to our solar system or to our universe as a whole which is even of
some importance in connection with human affairs of tomorrow inasmuch as it may
U32. Astrologers, on the other hand, seldom pay attention to forces of gravity or
curvature of space in making their predictions. A common complaint of present-day
astronomers, physicists, cosmologists and the like is that astrologers can demonstrate no
power of celestial objects and their processes which can account for what the astrologers
claim are their influences on terrestrial creatures and their affairs. It is maintained by
most physical scientists of today that gravitation, electromagnetic effects, nuclear forces,
and the like, exerted by celestial objects (presumably other than our earth) have never
been demonstrated to have the kind of influences on terrestrial affairs that present-day
astrologers maintain they have. Astrologers often reply to this by observing that such
influences by powers whose existence is accepted by physical scientists haven't been
shown not to exist, or by observing that there may be or are powers not known to or not
accepted by physical scientists which do have influences on terrestrial affairs of the sort
they deal with. Arguments and disagreements of this sort have gone on since antiquity,
and it doesn't look like they will be settled soon, or indeed ever. A thesis of the present
work has been that in past times, what we now call astronomy and astrology were more
interwoven than they customarily are today, although they still share some basic
assumptions, e.g. about predicting future positions of celestial objects and the like. One
consequence of this thesis, if it be accepted, is that what has happened in the development
of astral prediction over time is a kind of specialization in connection with astral
prediction, an effect which has been dominant in connection with all kinds of human
affairs. Another consequence is that one may expect to see a kind of punctuated
evolution in connection with astral prediction, rather than some kind of revolution in such
matters. This has bearing on a familiar theme in history and philosophy of science, that
of so-called scientific revolutions, and especially alleged "incommensurability" between
theories and interpretations accepted in different eras, to use the term made popular by
Thomas Kuhn. If by "incommensurability", one means existence of basic differences of
the sort common to present-day astronomers and astrologers, one can empirically verify
that such incommensurability exists. If by "incommensurability", one means that the
nature of what is true about our universe between what present-day astronomers and
astrologers hold can't be decided, one can empirically verify that it hasn't yet been
decided. But, as I said near the beginning of this work, I won't be concerned here with
matters of truth and falsity of what astronomers and astrologers say. I have reviewed
here something about the relationship of past and present astronomy and astrology, and
their practitioners and customers, in order to make a setting for the next chapter in the
book by Alan Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars (1991) which I have been
considering, and I will now return to it, and in particular to Chapter 6, "The Heavenly
Powers".
U33. Nowadays, to maintain seriously that what philosophers sometimes call the
"mind-body" problem is closely related to problems of the nature and powers of celestial
bodies would, at least in academic settings, be considered to be a kind of crackpottery.
However, Scott observes that in the Hellenistic era, theories of "astral bodies" served to
make a relationship of this kind. Scott says (p. 77, 78, 79.): " ... the existence of a
U34. Scott goes on to discuss the relationship of such theories of union between
the divine and the human by way of the stars to astrology as it was generally practiced
and theorized about in the Hellenistic era. He says (p. 79): "A particularly important
development in this experiment is the theory of a planetary component in the structure of
the soul. The growth of interest in astrology in the Hellenistic era led to a special
emphasis on the influence of the planets on the soul, since astrology is very much
concerned with the effects of the various planetary positions on all generation." There
was considerable discussion and disagreement among philosophers and theologians who
accepted some version of an astral body theory as to whether or not, or in what cases and
to what extent, the influences of the planets (including the sun and moon) on humans was
benevolent or malevolent, good or evil. Nowadays, some of the terms for various schools
of thought on these issues are gnosticism, hermeticism (as put forth in the Corpus
hermeticum), neo-Platonism or just Platonism, and Mithraism (which Scott describes as a
cross between Platonism and astrology, p. 109).
U35. And now, finally, we come to Origen, Scott's destination. On p. xvi of his
introduction, Scott had said: "The final part [of this book] will investigate astronomy and
astrology, and the ambitious use he made of the concept of living heavenly bodies in his
theology. Specifically, attention will be given to the importance of the stars in
understanding Origen's cosmology, theodicy, doctrine of the Fall, and eschatology." At
this point we pass from so-called pagan or Jewish philosophers of the Hellenistic period
to an early Christian philosopher or theologian, one of the acknowledged Fathers of the
Church. Origen lived 186-232 A.D., and is thus one of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, i.e.
before promulgation in 325 A.D. of the Nicene Creed which affirmed that Jesus Christ is
of the same substance as God, and not, as Arius had claimed, unbegotten and an inferior
deity to God. Origen is known for having attempted to integrate some main doctrines of
U37. Scott concludes (p. 167): "The ancient assumption that the stars are living
beings has now passed away, but just as the sea retains its fascination, even though
Poseidon no longer dwells in it, so too the celestial regions without their ancient gods.
Kant declared his awe at the starry heavens above and the moral law within, recognizing
in each case that we are in the presence of something great. The modern age no longer
believes that the stars have souls, but astronomical progress has not robbed them of their
power. The farthest created things, our own nearest self, these two remain mysteries to
us. Observing both we are indeed on the boundary of another land." One may dispute
Scott's statement, or implication, that there are no people any longer who believe that the
stars in some sense alive and have souls, with "souls" defined suitably, although this is
not so in the standard academies of our present-day world, at least in some regions of the
world. Scott is certainly right to say that the farthest created things, or for that matter
some of the nearer ones, too, remain in many ways mysterious, and that our selves, our
conscious selves, likewise remain in many ways mysterious to all of us who are
sufficiently open to mysteries.
1. Some 1400 years later than Origen, another Christian of rank, wrestled with
astrology in much the same way as Origen (see Chapter 8). This was Pierre d'Ailly, who
lived from 1350 or 1351 to 1420. D'Ailly rose to be a cardinal of the Roman Catholic
Church during the time of the Schism, and the period in which there were two (at one
point three) Popes, at Rome and Avignon, 1378 through 1414. D'Ailly's devotion to
astrology has been investigated by Laura Ackerman Smoller in her work, History,
Prophecy and the Stars (1994). In her introduction, Smoller observes that people who
have studied the roles of astrology and astronomy in medieval times have been concerned
mostly with the prevailing attitudes of people toward such practices and beliefs, and
mostly the attitudes of theologians, rather than with practice of astrology. "While their
studies nicely illuminate the Catholic church's response to astrology, they say little about
the opinions of persons who actually consulted the stars." (p. 5) Smoller observes that
d'Ailly's conversion to astrology late in life, and his extensive writings on the subject,
offers an opportunity to study why and also how a person might become involved with
astrology, and how one might go about such an involvement. "From d'Ailly's example,
then," she says, "astrology emerges as an integral part of the rational view of the world
2. In his later life, Pierre d'Ailly was much concerned with defending
astrology/astronomy from charges that it was inconsistent with Christianity. As a basis,
he took the attitude endorsed long before by Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) that one can
distinguish between natural astrology and superstitious astrology, and that it is the
former which is consistent with Christianity, while the latter is not. Smoller reports that
d'Ailly in his Vigintiloquium or Concordantia astronomie cum theologia (Concordance
of astrology with theology; 1414) listed these components of superstitious or false
astrology: "1. The belief that all future events precede by fatal necessity from the stars;
2. The mingling of superstitious magic arts with astrology; 3. The placing of free will and
matters solely under divine or supernatural control within astrology's power." (p. 37)
Smoller notes that 2. is apparently directed against the practice of engraving stones with
astrological images. We have seen that 1. and 3. were also rejected by Origen, and indeed
this had been the central objection of Augustine to astrology. On the other hand, we have
also seen that at least up to the Hellenistic era, the Babylonian astrologers did not take
astrological omens to be irreversibly deterministic. One of the functions of priests was to
counteract unfavorable omens by means of suitable rituals. In his attempts to reconcile
free will and God's omnipotence with astrological influences, d'Ailly wrote a number of
treatises. To take an example, in one late treatise, the Concordantia astronomie cum
hystorica narratione (Concordance of astrology with historical narration; 1414), he
asserted "God arranged 'to work naturally with causes, except where a miraculous
operation intervenes.' thus astrological causality would apply to all earthly events save
miracles." (Smoller, p. 38) In another treatise of 1414, the Apologetica defensio
astronomice veritatis (Apologetic defense of astrological truth; contained in his Tractatus
de imagine mundi), d'Ailly speculates on the role of the astral influences on the Virgin
Mary as to the development of Christ in utero. Smoller says: "D'Ailly began with the
cautious observation that the Christian faith did not compel one to exclude any stellar
influence in Mary's birth, 'just as it does not compel one to say that the sun did not warm
her.' ... By reserving for God a supernatural causality beyond that of the stars, d'Ailly
3. In Chapter 4 of her book, Smoller has an analysis of how Pierre d'Ailly used
astrology to aid in establishing a chronology consistent with and explanatory of that in
the Bible. An important principle he used for trying to establish the date of the Creation
of the world, the starting point of Biblical chronology, as well as for subsequent events he
took to be of importance, was the fixing of the times of conjunctions of Saturn and
Jupiter. These are described by Smoller as follows (p. 16, 20-23) "The seven planets all
traveled along the path of the zodiac, and the twelve signs which made up that band were
deemed to have their own characteristics. In one division of the zodiac, astrologers
distributed the signs among four triplicities (triplicitates, also sometimes translated as
trigons). The signs of each triplicity all shared the characteristics of one of the four
elements (fire, earth, air, and water). The signs were assigned successively to one of the
four triplicities, so that a planet in its path through the zodiac would pass first through a
fiery sign, then through an earthy sign, then through an airy sign, and finally through a
watery sign. There were three such series in any trip around the zodiac. The fiery
triplicity consisted of the signs Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. It was under the rule of the
sun by day and Jupiter by night. The earthly triplicity contained Taurus, Virgo, and
Capricorn, under the rulership of Venus and the moon. Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius
made up the airy triplicity, under Saturn and Mercury. Finally, the watery triplicity
comprised Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces, with Mars ruling both day and night. [Thus the
progression counterclockwise through the zodiac, taking into account the alternation of
the kinds of elements, can be represented on the circumference of a circle as Aries,
Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Pisces, and
back to Aries again.] ... As did his astrological sources, d'Ailly gave the greatest
consideration to those conjunctions of the two superior [outermost] planets, Saturn and
Jupiter. Their exalted positions and slow motions meant that their conjunctions were of
more universal and enduring significance than those of the other planets. Astrologers
classified these conjunctions according to the signs and triplicities in which they
occurred. Saturn completes its course through the zodiac in roughly 30 years, and Jupiter
takes around twelve years to make the same circuit. Hence, the time between any two
conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter will be approximately twenty years, during which time
Saturn will have traveled a little more than two-thirds of the way through the zodiac.
Thus, in the astrologers' customary example, if the first conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter
occurs in Aries, the second will be in Sagittarius, the third in Leo, and the fourth in Aries
again. But, because the two planets do not complete their course through the zodiac in
exactly thirty or twelve years, they do not return to the same precise point in Aries for
their fourth conjunction. Rather, they are joined some 2º25' from the point of the initial
conjunction, to take Albumasar's figyre. Hence a series of conjunctions of Saturn and
Jupiter will show a gradual progression like that in figure 3. Eventually, a conjunction
will happen in Taurus,, the neighboring sign to Aries. Then the succession will begin
again in another set of three signs. [Albumasar, also transliterated Abu-Ma'shar, was an
Arabian astrologer of the 9th century A.D.] In all, d'Ailly delineated four types of
Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions: the conjunctio maxima [greatest conjunction, occurring
after four changes of triplicity, so the starting point is repeated, customarily taken to be
4. This brings to mind work of Isaac Newton which I discussed in Chapter 7 of the
present work. I repeat here Sections 44-47 of that chapter:
45. "In the heavens, the Sun and Moon are, by interpreters of dreams,
put for the persons of Kings and Queens; but in sacred Prophecy, which
regards not single persons, the Sun is put for the whole species and race of
Kings, in the kingdom or kingdoms of the world politic, shining with regal
power and glory; the Moon for the body of the common people, considered as
the King's wife; the Stars for subordinate Princes and great men, or for
Bishops and Rulers of the people of God, when the sun is Christ; light for the
glory, truth, and knowledge, wherewith great and good men shine and
illuminate others; darkness for obscurity of condition, and for error, blindness
and ignorance; darkning, smiting, or setting of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, for
the ceasing of a kingdom, or for the desolation thereof, proportional to the
darkness; darkning the Sun, turning the Moon into blood, and falling of the
Stars, for the same; new Moons, for the return of a dispersed people into a
body politic or ecclesiastic." (Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and
the Apocalypse of St. John (1733), p. 16-23.) After this, Newton gives
interpretations of fire in various forms, various movements of clouds, winds,
thunder, lighting, water in various forms, geological formations, animals,
vegetables and plants, and so on.
6. In her Chapter 5, Smoller discusses d'Ailly's concern for the advent of the
apocalypse, as predicted in the Revelations of St. John. She says (p. 85): "With the
outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378, Pierre d'Ailly and many of his contemporaries
assumed that the apocalypse was at hand. They based this dismal conclusion both on
their reading of Scripture and on a long medieval tradition of speculation about the end of
time." This may be compared with the statement made by Newton: "The predictions of
things to come relate to the state of the Church in all ages: and amongst the old Prophets,
Daniel is most distinct in order of time, and easiest to be understood: and therefore in
those things which relate to the last times, he must be made the key to the rest." (loc. cit.,
p. 15). Smoller says (p. 86): "Scripture was by far the most important source of
information about the apocalypse for d'Ailly and his contemporaries. Passage in Daniel
and Revelation spelled out, albeit in enigmatic form, God's plan for the world's end.
Commentaries of these two books were key vehicles for eschatological speculation in the
Middle Ages." Of course, Newton is not considered to have lived during the time of the
European Middle Ages. Newton says in the section of this work devoted to Revelations
(p. 250-251): "'Tis therefore a part of this Prophecy, that it should not be understood
before the last age of the world; and therefore it makes for the credit of the Prophecy, that
it is not yet understood. But if the last age, the age of opening these things, be now
approaching, as by the great successes of late Interpreters it seems to be, we have more
encouragement than ever to look into these things. In the general preaching of the Gospel
be approaching, it is to use and our posterity that those words mainly belong: In the time
of the end the wise shall understand, but none of the wicked shall understand. Blessed is
he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this Prophecy, and keep those things
which are written therein. The folly of Interpreters has been, to foretel times and things
by this Prophecy, as if God designed to make them prophets. By this rashness they have
not only exposed themselves, but brought the Prophecy into contempt. The design of
God was much otherwise. He gave this and the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to
gratify men's curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were
fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the
Interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world. For the event of things predicted
many ages before, will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by
providence."
9. Christian chronography goes back to early Christian times. This topic has been
treated by William Adler in his Time Immemorial: Archaic History and its Sources in
Christian Chronography from Julius Africanus to George Syncellus (1989). Such
chronography had an elaborate development during the European Middle Ages, and we
see from Smoller's study of d'Ailly's work that it was a lively field during the
Renaissance. Indeed, there is some life in the field up to the present-day, although the
field has grown old, and is not as active as it once was. What may be striking in placing
Isaac Newton in this tradition is that he lived in the 17th and early 18th centuries, during
the height of the period often said by historians to contain the Scientific Revolution. In
Newton's work, one can see him engaged not in a Revolution but in an Evolution as far as
a transition from the astronomy/astrology which had been prevalent up to his time to the
separation of the fields of astronomy and astrology as we see them today. An
examination of the work of central and peripheral figures who brought about the so-
called Scientific Revolution in Europe might well reveal that one could better speak of an
evolution during this period -- perhaps an instance of cultural punctuated evolution, in
3. Evaluations of John Dee have varied widely, from his own day to
the present. In her biography of Dee, John Dee (1527-1608), published in
1909, Charlotte Fell Smith says (Chapter 1): "There is perhaps no learned
author in history who has been so persistently misjudged, nay, even
slandered, by his posterity, and not a voice in all the three centuries
uplifted even to claim for him a fair hearing. Surely it is time that the
cause of all this universal condemnation should be examined in the light of
reason and science; and perhaps it will be found to exist mainly in the fact
that he was too far advanced in speculative thought for his own age to
understand. For more than fifty years out of the eighty-one of his life, Dee
was famous, even if suspected and looked askance at as clever beyond
human interpretation." And further (Chapter 23): " ... Dee's memory may
be entrusted to the kinder judges of to-day, who will be more charitable
because more enlightened and less impregnated with superstition. They
may see in him a vain, presumptuous and much deluded person, but at any
rate they must acknowledge his sincere and good intentions; his personal
piety; his uncommon purity of thought and mind. If in his thirst for
knowledge of the infinite unknowable, he pushed back the curtain farther
than was wise or justifiable, did he harm any one's reputation beside his
own? Did he not suffer all the penalty in his own miserable failure, so far
as comfort and prosperity in material things were concerned? In all the
vague hopes held out by him to Queen, Princes and Emperors, of
enriching them through his alchemical skill, he was no conscious
charlatan, playing a part to lure them on, but a devout believer in man's
power and purpose to wrest scientific secrets from the womb of the
future. Can we look back upon the discoveries of three hundred years and
feel his certainty was vain? The powers of electricity, the training to our
uses that marvelous and long concealed agency and light; the healing
Heilbron comments: "Now Dee had lectured on only the first two of
Euclid's thirteen books, not upon 'every proposition," and his treatment
was by no means unprecedented. ... It was already a commonplace to refer
to Pythagoras, Plato, and the sublime when recommending the study of the
Elements. ... One can hardly avoid the conclusion that Dee's 'Pythagorean'
elucidation of 1550 was but a reworking of the traditional uplifting
prolegomena to the study of Euclid. ... The fact that no contemporary
reference to Dee's lectures has been found, not even in the lengthy preface
on the dignity of mathematics published by his friend Montaureus in
11551, provides further evidence that they contained little unfamiliar to
the Parisians. It appears that the aging Dee, dissatisfied with the reception
of his life's work and pressed to defend it, misrepresented the
commendable but unexceptional Euclidean lectures of his youth as a
spectacular and unprecedented achievement." (p. 6, 7-8). During the years
1551-1553, Dee served the Duke of Northumberland, "a man for whom no
one has ever had a kind word." (Heilbron quotes here G. R. Elton,
England under the Tudors, 3rd ed., 1969, p. 209). Dee tutored the Duke's
children, including Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester and a favorite of
Queen Elizabeth. Also, Dee helped the Duke "to promote a search for
northern routes to to the riches of the orient. Dee's confidence,
enthusiasm, and mathematics, not to mention his training by Gemma and
Mercator [two noted geographers and cartographers], were just what was
wanted to reassure uneasy investors in expensive voyages through
unknown seas." (p. 9)
15. Clulee studies in detail the main three surviving works of Dee
related to natural philosophy and mathematics. These are the
Propaedeumata aphoristica, whose presentation by Shumaker and
Heilbron was discussed above; the Monas heiroglyphica, a baffling piece
evidently related to alchemy and a proposed project for recovering the
original language of God (cf.. the book of Genesis) of which the languages
of people are corrupt descendants; and the Mathematicall Praeface which
appeared as a preface to a translation of Euclid's Elements attributed to
Henry Billingsley, which, as Clulee shows in his Chapter 6 owes much to
the commentary of Proclus on Euclid's Elements which dates from the 5th
century A.D. Passages from the Mathematicall Praeface have often been
cited, here and there, as showing that Dee was an early advocate of the
emphasis on experiment which many (often enough influenced directly or
indirectly by the late 16th and early 17th century jurist, and publicist and
theorist about science, Francis Bacon) think was characteristic of what
they take to be a Scientific Revolution in the later 16th and 17th centuries.
These latter two works are not much concerned with astrology, as is the
case with the Propaedeumata, and since my concern here is with history
of astrology, won't be discussed here. They are, however, major
documents for anyone who wants to study Dee's beliefs about magic.
19. "The symbol of the monad," says Josten, "as it appears on the title-
page and in the illustrations of the text, is essentially the common
alchemical and astronomical sign of Mercury (d) to which the common
sign of the first division of the zodiac, Aries (q)has been added at the
bottom.
The half-circle and the circle forming the upper part of the common
Mercury symbol are represented as intersecting so as to convey the idea of
a conjunction of Moon and Sun. Besides, the lunar half-circle has been
enlarged into a crescent, and a central point has been added to the solar
circle, in order to achieve complete identity of those upper elements of the
monad symbol with the common signs of Moon (s)and Sun (a). The
central point of the solar circle symbolizes also the Earth around which the
Sun, the Moon, and the other planets, revolve; it is what Dee calls the
20. I have come across (9 Nov 2000) another translation of the Monas
hieroglyphia, this one published in 1947 by J. W. Hamilton-Jones, under
the title The Hieroglyphic Monad and with a commentary by him. In the
translation with analytical introduction published in 1964 by C. H. Josten,
discussed above, Josten says (loc. cit. p. 85) of the translation by
Hamilton-Jones and another translation into French: "There are two
21. Let's see what we can do with Dee's Theorem II. In Josten's
translation, this reads: "Yet the circle cannot be artificially produced
without the straight line, or the straight line without the point. Hence,
things first began to be by way of a point, and a monad. And things
related to the periphery (however big they may be) can in no way exist
without the aid of the central point." Hamilton-Jones has: "Neither the
circle without the line, nor the line without the point can be artificially
produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and Monad that all things
commence to emerge in principle. That which is affected at the periphery,
however large it may be, cannot in any way lack the support of the central
point." The original Latin is: "At nec sine Recta, Circulus, mec sine
Puncto, Recta artificiose fieri potest. Puncti proinde, Monadisque ratione,
Res, & esse coeperit primo; Et quae peripheria sunt affectae
(quantaecumquae fuerint), nullo modo carere possunt Ministerio." One
notes first that Josten has the "things" being however big, whereas
Hamilton-Jones has the periphery being however large. However, let's not
dwell on that. More interesting for present purposes is the comment
Hamilton-Jones makes on this passage. He says (p. 54-55): "Here the
principle of a point within a circle is established, from which all parts of
the circumference are equidistant. Dee says the central point supports the