The Fated Sky: Astrology in History

Also by Benson Bobrick

Testament:

A Soldier’s Story of the Civil War

Wide as the Waters:

The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired

Angel in the Whirlwind:

The Triumph of the American Revolution

Knotted Tongues:

Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure

East of the Sun:

The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia

Fearful Majesty:

The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible

Labyrinths of Iron:

Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War

Parsons Brinckerhoff:

The First Hundred Years

Astrology in History

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2005 by Benson Bobrick

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON& SCHUSTERand colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bobrick, Benson, date.

The fated sky : astrology in history / Benson Bobrick.

p.      cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Astrology—History. 2. History—Miscellanea. I. Title.

BF1729.H57B63 2005

133.5’09—dc22 2005051674

ISBN-10: 0-7432-8194-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8194-2

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

Acknowledgments

My grandfather, who was a devoutly religious scholar and a bishop of the Methodist Church, acknowledged in his old age that he had once been persuaded, reluctantly, to consult an astrologer about the whereabouts of a wallet he had lost. The wallet had all sorts of valuables in it and he had looked everywhere for it in vain. The astrologer cast a chart for the question—Where is my wallet?—and after examining the planets, told him, correctly, where it could be found. That both pleased the bishop and annoyed him. Many years later, he was still clearly abashed. He had too honest a mind to dismiss it, but he couldn’t explain it either. And so in my own mind, too, this story curled a question mark over the entire subject which, some forty years later, I at last began to explore. As a student of history, I took the long view, which in the end proved indispensable for getting my bearings right. This book is the result.

Astrology may be a suspect subject, at least to some; the history of astrology can scarcely be to anyone who cares about the history of ideas. In recent years, that history in all its aspects has benefited from the work of a number of fine scholars—John D. North, Michael Molnar, Robert Zoller, James Herschel Holden, Patrick Curry, David Plant, Nicholas Campion, J. Lee Lehman, Tamsyn Barton, Anthony Grafton, William R. Newman, Hilary Carey, Annabella Kitson, Demetra George, Laura Ackerman Smoller, Robert Hand, and John Frawley, among the more prominent—who have made it possible to glimpse the true sweep and compass of the art. Invaluable work is also being done daily by Project Hindsight, dedicated to the recovery and translation of the classic Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew works; and by ARHAT, the Archive for the Retrieval of Historical Astrological Texts. Both deserve to be better known. All my cordial contacts with the American Federation of Astrologers and the Astrological Association of Great Britain were also fruitful of results.

I have indeed relied on the labors of many, but those who helped in any direct or coordinate way with the making of this book are absolved of any errors it contains. Among family, friends, colleagues, associates, and helpful correspondents, I am happy to name: Eleanor Bach, James and Peter Bobrick, Robin Brownstein, Herschel Farbman, John Frawley, Svetlana Gorokhova, Nancy Griffin, Peter Guttmacher, Hagop Merjian, Gloria Mulcahy, Peter Murkett, Pamela Robertson, George and Gene Rochberg, David Roell, Lora Sharnoff, Edward W. Tayler, P. L. Travers, Richard and Bea Wernick, and Danielle Woerner, among others, who over the years contributed something of value, however indirectly, to the text. My dedicated agent, Russell Galen, stood foursquare behind the book from the start; my editor, Bob Bender, was exemplary as always in allowing me to work in my own way. His assistant, Johanna Li, helpfully attended to details. Three hometown haunts—Mocha Joe’s, Amy’s Bakery Arts Cafe, and The Cafe Beyond—often provided sustenance and a home away from home. Throughout, Hilary and the twins, Zuzu & Jasper, did much to keep my spirits up. I am grateful to them all.

Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

To Hilary & the Twins

and

In Memory of my learned friend

George Rochberg,

whose ear was tuned to the Music of the Spheres

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come…."

Hamlet,Act 1, Scene 5, ll.187–88

Part One

The universe, eternity, the infinite are typified by the sphere…On a sphere every point is a center, and every point is the highest point, and this explains the puzzle of time and space. There never was a beginning of time, and there never will be an end. Time always is. Any number of trillions of years hence, and any number…past, and you are just as near the end, or the beginning, of Time as now, and no nearer. This moment is the center of Time; this instant is the highest point in the revolving sphere. The same with that other form of Time, Space. There is no end to Space, and no beginning. This point where you now stand, this chair, this tree, is the center of Space; it all balances from this point. Go to the farthest fixed star and…you have only arrived at Here. Your own doorstep is just as near the limit, and no nearer. This is the puzzle of puzzles, but it is so.

—JOHN BURROUGHS, Journals, January 13, 1882

Chapter 1

AMERICA WOULD NEVER have been discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 had it not been for the thought of Arab astrologers in Baghdad in the 9th century A.D. When Columbus set sail on the great western voyage that carried him to America’s shores, he had biblical prophecy to inspire him, Arab astrology to guide him, and various practical aids that three continental astrologers, who were also mathematicians, had supplied: the planetary tables of Regiomontanus; a map drawn up by Paolo Toscanelli; and an ephemeris prepared by Samuel Zacuto, who later made the splendid astrolabe of iron used by Vasco da Gama in his voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. These were all of use to Columbus in his celestial calculations and his navigation of the open sea. He also used an astrolabe and quadrant to determine the altitude of stars, set his hourglass by the transits of the Sun, depended on the North Star to fix magnetic north, and judged the time of night by the constellation of the Great Bear. He overawed the natives of one island by his ability to predict a lunar eclipse, and drew with some success on astrological lore to predict the weather—taking his ships to shelter, for example, in the port of Santo Domingo because an aspect between Jupiter and Mercury seemed to portend a tropical storm. Yet Columbus could not proceed solely by the sky. Knowledge of celestial navigation in Europe was wanting, and so, for the most part, he relied on a magnetic compass to measure his course or direction, and on his own method of dead or deduced reckoning to estimate his position on the main.

But it was the stars that led him on. Columbus understood that the world was a globe and believed that by sailing directly west he would eventually reach the shores of Asia (or the Indies). He could not know, of course, that America intervened. But it was not the fabled wealth of the Indies that held him most in thrall. For the voyage itself was spurred on by an astrological idea. That idea was the great conjunction theory of history, as first set forth in the writings of the Persians, elaborated by the Arabs, and adopted by the Latin West. Columbus had encountered it in the work of the French cardinal, theologian, and astrologer Pierre d’Ailly.

According to this theory, important historical events such as the rise and fall of empires, the birth of religions, and cultural transformations were marked by the great planetary conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn as they revolved through their cycles in the sky. Such great conjunctions occurred once every 960 years—a principal source of our idea of the millennium—as the planets completed a circuit of the zodiac, combining and recombining in the signs. In the course of that round, the two conjoined—that is, occupied the same degree of celestial longitude—forty-eight times. For d’Ailly, human history was explained by the unfolding impact of these conjunctions, according to their scale. Shifts between triplicities or elements (earth, air, fire, and water, by which the signs of the zodiac were grouped) were associated with dynastic change; the greater or near-millennial conjunctions were linked to epochal change as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes and overwhelming floods. In d’Ailly’s view, such great conjunctions had heralded or coincided with the Great Flood, the fall of Troy, the death of Moses, the foundation of Rome, and the advent of Christ. All astronomers are agreed in this, he declared, that there never was one of those conjunctions without some great and notable change in this world.

D’Ailly’s work had convinced Columbus that the end of the world was near, and that it would be accompanied by the conversion of all heathenkind to Christ. For that reason, he called himself Christophorus (or Christo-ferens, as he came to sign his name), the Christ-bearer, and conceived himself the agent of God’s work as the world approached its final days. All this he explained in a letter to his royal patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He wrote of the Indies: These vast realms are peopled with immortal souls, for whose redemption Christ, the Son of God, has made an atoning sacrifice. It is the mission which God has assigned to me to search them out, and to carry to them the Gospel of Salvation. He took as his text Isaiah 11:10–12—The Lord shall…recover the remnant of his people…and gather together the dispersed…from the four corners of the earth—and his historic first voyage itself seemed emblematic of that charge.

On the morning of August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail with three small ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—from Palos, Spain, and steered for the Canary Islands, where he reprovisioned before striking due west. After a difficult voyage of two months with a near-mutinous crew, on October 12 he at length sighted land. At two o’clock in the morning, a gun was fired to give the signal. All three vessels then took in their sails and laid to, waiting impatiently for the dawn. Upon making landfall, the voice of prayer and the melody of praise rose from his ships, and his own first action was to prostrate himself upon the ground. To Columbus, his journey’s end was heaven-sent. For their part, the natives on the small Bahamian island were not wholly mistaken, perhaps, when they cried out at dawn to their brethren, Come see the people from the sky.

Columbus would later say that he owed all he had achieved to the grace of God and God-given arts of astrology, geometry, navigation, and arithmetic.

His own heavily annotated copy of d’Ailly’s work, Treatise on the Image of the World, may still be seen in the Columbine Library at Seville.

ACCORDING TO AN ANCIENT TRADITION, common to both Gnostic and Syriac Christians as well as to the Persians and Jews, Adam received the doctrines and mysteries of astrology directly from the Creator, and by knowledgeably scanning the constellations in the skies foretold that the world would one day be destroyed by water, then by fire. As a memorial to those who came after him, he (or his descendants, Seth and Enoch) had this knowledge engraved upon two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone. According to Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian and near contemporary of Christ, the second pillar could still be seen in Syria in A.D. 63.

Astrology is the oldest of the occult sciences. It is also the origin of science itself. From astrology are derived astronomy, calculation of time, mathematics, medicine, botany, mineralogy, and (by way of alchemy) modern chemistry, among other disciplines. Logarithms were originally devised to simplify the calculations necessary in casting horoscopes; the ray theory of vision—the foundation of modern optics—developed from astrological theories of the effect of stellar rays on the soul. For five thousand years, from ancient Sumeria and Babylonia to the present day, the stars have been viewed as shaping, by divine power, the course and destiny of human affairs. Indeed, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the earliest symbol of deity known to us—the cuneiform sign for god—was a star (*).

Astrological terms permeate our language: conjunction, opposition, forecast, aspect, lunatic, venereal, disaster, influence—as in influenza, since all epidemics were once ascribed to celestial effects; we speak of mercurial, saturnine, or jovial temperaments; and people thank their lucky stars, or consider a person ill-starred if his luck is bad. The Hebrew word mazzal means sign or constellation; so Mazzal tov (the colloquial Congratulations!) really means, May you have good stars! The term fall is astrological, for the fall or autumn equinox marks the descendant of the zodiac year; and revolution is taken from an astrological calculation called a solar return. The star-shaped halo that once encompassed the Roman emperor’s posthumous image—according to the belief that he ascended to heaven as a star—was later transformed into the halo of the Christian saint. The pharmaceutical symbol Rx—commonly said to be an abbreviation for the Latin verb recipere (from which we get recipe or compound)—is derived from the ancient symbol for the Roman god Jupiter, based on the Eye of Horus, an Egyptian god with magical healing powers.

ASTRONOMY STUDIES THE heavenly bodies in order to formulate the natural laws that govern them and to understand how the physical structure of the universe evolved; astrology describes the influence of those bodies upon human character and life. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reputedly remarked, Astrology is astronomy brought down to earth and applied to the affairs of men. It is an applied science, insofar as it is based on astronomy; an exact science, insofar as its judgments are based on mathematical calculations; and an empirical science, insofar as its deductions are based on data gathered over the course of time.

Its method is a horoscope, which is a map or diagram of the heavens cast for a particular moment of time, and read according to well-established rules. Those rules, if properly applied, are free from the elements of chance or divination; moreover, they are substantially based on a written tradition that derives its authority not just from dogma and belief, but from thousands of years of observation. The idea at the heart of astrology is that the pattern of a person’s life—or character, or nature—corresponds to the planetary pattern at the moment of his birth. Such an idea is as old as the world is old—that all things bear the imprint of the moment they are born.

Whether this is true or not may be subject to debate. But the belief that it is has proved to have enduring power.

Astrology in modern times has undergone a remarkable resurgence, and is now (as Carl Jung predicted it would) knocking again at the doors of academe. Astrologers are attempting to verify traditional doctrine by scientific methods and in general to meet the demand of Johannes Kepler (one of its true believers) that they separate the gems from the slag. In a number of countries, including England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States, astrology is once again being taught at the university level, for the first time since the Renaissance. In England, courses in the subject are now offered at Brasenose College, Oxford; Bath Spa University College; the University of Southampton; and the University of Kent. It can also be studied at Cardiff University in Wales, the Bibliotheca Astrologica in France, the University of Zaragoza in Spain, Dogus University in Turkey, Benares Hindu University in northern India, and at Kepler College in the United States, among other schools. Scholarly journals such as Culture and Cosmos (A Journal of the History of Astrology and Cultural Astronomy), the Dublin Astrologer (The Journal of the Dublin Astrological Centre), and Apollon (The Journal of Psychological Astrology), have begun to establish themselves, while the prestigious Warburg Institute in London recently created a Sophia Fellowship for astrological research.

For the past thirty years or so, polls have shown that from 30 to 40 percent of Americans (or about 100 million people) believe in astrology and think their lives are governed by the stars. An estimated ten million people have paid an astrologer to cast their horoscope, while almost everybody seems to know their own sign. Astrology columns are carried by most of the nation’s daily newspapers and hundreds of magazines, and can be found on numerous Internet sites. Yahoo alone lists about 1,700 of the latter, while Amazon.com counts 3,155 books on the subject in print. Most large bookstores today devote an entire section to the field. According to one recent estimate, there are some 15,000 full-time and 225,000 part-time astrologers today in the United States.

There can be no doubt that the subject maintains an unshakeable hold on the human mind.

THE BIBLE IS RICH with astrological allusion. It opens with the pronouncement that the lights in the firmament of the heavens were established in part for signs, and in Psalm 19, for example, we read: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. According to rabbinical tradition each of the twelve tribes of Israel represented a zodiac sign, and the astrological symbols for the four fixed signs—a lion, a man, a bull, and an eagle—were carried as totems in the Egyptian desert by the Hebrew host. These same symbols made up the composite creature we call the Egyptian Sphinx, and in accordance with Ezekiel’s vision came to stand for the four great Christian evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Of the twelve precious stones that adorned the breastplate of Aaron as high priest, Josephus wrote, whether we understand by them the months, or the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the Zodiac, we shall not be mistaken. The seven-branched candlestick, he tells us, also symbolized the seven planets, and the twelve loaves of shewbread in the temple the twelve signs. It is said that each of the twelve disciples of Christ likewise stood for (or embodied) a sign—an idea that was carried over into medieval romance, where the twelve knights of King Arthur’s Round Table (a symbol of the zodiac) also stood for the twelve astrological types. The idea that those types together constitute a complete circle of humanity is also carried over into our jury system, which is supposed to ensure that a man is properly tried by a representative assessment (or complete cross-section) of his peers. That means, in theory, that they will combine their experience to perfect the judgment of a case. The Hindus also say twelve is the number of completeness, which is why the Bible tells us that at the age of twelve, Jesus was able to confute the doctors in the temple, because his knowledge was already complete.

Throughout antiquity, the constellations and planets were honored by shrines and temples of learning. There were twelve great Mystery religions, each one paying homage to or deriving its authority from a zodiac sign. The rites of Aries, or the Celestial Ram, so Manly Hall tells us, were celebrated in the temple of Jupiter Ammon in the Libyan desert; the rites of Taurus in the Egyptian Mysteries of Serapis, or the tomb of the Heavenly Bull; the rites of Gemini in Samothrace, where Castor and Pollux—the Dioscuri—were worshipped; the rites of Cancer in Ephesus, where Diana (goddess of the Moon) was revered; the rites of Leo in the Bacchic and Dionysiac orgies of the Greeks, and so on.

The ecclesiastical calendars of all known religions are also linked astrologically with the major phases of the Sun and Moon. Passover, for example, begins on the first full Moon after the vernal equinox; Easter Sunday, which marks the end of Lent, is usually the first Sunday after that;* the Christian Sabbath is the day of the Sun; and the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, starts at sunset on the day of the new moon closest to the autumn equinox. The first day of Ramadan is set by the new Moon in Libra, which begins the most holy period for Moslems of fasting and prayer. In Vietnam, the New Year begins at the time of the first full Moon after the Sun enters Aquarius and is termed Tet. Hanukkah is set by the new Moon in Capricorn, and Purim by the full Moon in Pisces. Christmas was coopted by the Church from pagan celebrations at the winter solstice, which was also the festival of the Persian Sun god Mithras. The rebirth of the Sun god was thus replaced in Christianity by the birth of God the Son.

The names of the days of the Western week, of course, are those of the star-gods, as derived from Roman and Norse mythology. Sunday is the Sun’s day; Monday the Moon’s; Tuesday the day of Tiw, the pagan god of war, akin to Mars; Wednesday belongs to Woden, akin to Mercury (in French, Mercredi); Thursday to Thor, or Jupiter; and Friday to the goddess Freya, or Venus (in French, Vendredi). Saturday is Saturn’s day and rounds out the cycle.

Our seven-day week itself derives from a convergence around the 2nd century B.C. of the Sabbath cycle of the Jews, in which the seventh day was held to be holy, and an astrological week based upon the planets (which included the Sun and Moon) according to which each day was ruled by one of the seven planetary gods. Each hour of each day was also so ruled, hence the cycle of planetary hours. Following Egyptian practice, there were twenty-four hours in a day, but before clock time they were not all of equal length: the twelve daytime hours were equally divided from sunrise to sunset, the twelve nighttime hours from sunset to dawn. In sequence, the hours belonged to Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, in an endless circle, with each one in turn serving as regent or ruler for that day. This was the Ptolemaic order of the planets, according to their perceived speed and distance from the earth.

The planets also gave us the seven liberal arts, and, by number and type, the seven deadly sins: sloth (Saturn), pride ( Jupiter), anger (Mars), gluttony (the Sun), lust (Venus), avarice (Mercury), and envy (the Moon). Like the signs, the planets inspired worship and adulation, and each of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, according to one scholar, arose in homage to one of the planets then known. The Colossus of Rhodes was an altar to the Sun; the temple of Diana at Ephesus to the Moon; the Great Pyramid at Giza to Mercury; the hanging gardens of Semiramis to Venus; the mausoleum of Halicarnassus to Mars; the temple of Olympian Zeus to Jupiter; and the Pharos of Alexandria to Saturn.

Many of the myths of the ancients, moreover, can be unlocked only by an astral key. One key is the vernal equinox, the Sun’s annual crossing (or passover) from the southern to the northern hemisphere—which enters a new constellation every 2,160 years. Some 4,700 years ago, for example, when it entered Taurus, the Egyptian god Osiris assumed the form of the Celestial Bull, while in the Egyptian desert the children of Israel made offerings to a golden calf. When the equinox later entered Aries, the solar deity was commonly represented by a golden-haired youth cradling a lamb in his arms and holding a shepherd’s crook. When the equinox entered Pisces, the Savior of the World appeared as the Fisher of Men.

In the symbolism of this great story, the Ram (Aries, from the Greek eras, meaning lamb) and the lamb are one. After their Exodus from Egypt, the Jews sacrificed a lamb at the Passover festival; this paschal sacrifice later became the Easter Lamb of sacrifice and crucifixion in the Christian faith. The idea of Passover itself is linked to the Sun’s equinoctial passing or crossing over, which also underlies the symbol of the Cross. We may go deeper. After Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, he ascended into heaven after three days. Just so, the Sun remains for three days in transit at the equinoctial point before it begins its ascent into the northern hemisphere.

This is not to say that the story of the Passover, or the life of Christ, is a mere allegory of a celestial event. God forbid! Astrologically speaking, in the divine scheme of things, it is rather the other way around.

ADORATION OF THE HEAVENS as the face of the divine was perhaps the beginning of true worship, and the mythology of the Egyptians and Greeks often involved parables or stories of the stars. The Trojan War, Homer tells us in the Iliad, was provoked by Jove and Latona’s son, that is, Jupiter (Zeus in Homer), and Apollo, the Sun. Arrayed on the side of the Trojans are Apollo, Venus, and Mars; on that of the Greeks, Neptune, the Moon, Vulcan, Athena, and Jupiter. Mercury is not mentioned by Homer, but Iris, the rainbow goddess, is his female form. As a messenger, she acts with strict neutrality, but every scene on earth is a reflex, outcome, or willed event of some previous celestial scene. What do you think Homer and Vergil had in mind, wrote one Renaissance astrologer, Girolamo Cardano, when they continually made the gods quarrel or fight, the Homeric ones for the Greeks or Trojans, the Vergilian for Turnus or Aeneas? Clearly that some of the stars favored one party, others the other. That is the explanation of those numerous meetings and counsels of the gods…Therefore when they said that Venus favored Aeneas because he was very handsome, or that Juno, that is, fortune, and the Moon favored Turnus, or that Apollo, or the Sun, favored Hector because he was strong and just, they had in mind, concealed under the veil of fable, the genius or star that ruled each one at birth. The Twelve Labors of Hercules are also a figurative description of the Sun’s passage through the twelve signs and are akin to the stories the Babylonians told about their own solar hero, Gilgamesh, whose life unfolded in twelve epic songs.

If the pagan myths are astrological allegories of a sort, so too may be some of the biblical tales—for example, that of Samson, whose name in Hebrew means belonging to the Sun. His long hair, like the lion’s mane, was his pride and symbolized his strength; it is his encounter with a lion as a young man that first proves his might. Delilah is his opposite in every sense. If he is Leo-like, the root of her name in Hebrew is the word for Aquarius—the opposite sign. This is a story in which astrological opposites meet, mate, and clash.

WE MAY EVENTUALLY KNOW what everything is, but we will never know what everything means. Ludwig Wittgenstein once touchingly glanced at this idea in one of his mournful moods when he wrote, We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Religion occupies the sacred heart of all those questions to which the problems of life give rise, and astrology is the most venerable branch of that inner knowledge from which religion springs.

This is not a book for or against astrology, but a book about its impact on history and on the history of ideas. That impact has been large, and without a competent knowledge of the subject it is almost impossible to accurately trace or construe much of history itself or the ideas that have governed its course. For it runs, and has run, like an underground river through human affairs. Indeed, until the middle of the 17th century at least, astrology entered into the councils of princes, guided the policy of nations, and ruled the daily actions of individuals, great and small. Astrological predictions often affected the course of events, while those in power based their actions on astrological advice. It is said that the Incas submitted to the Spanish almost without a fight because the arrival of the conquistadors happened to coincide with an astrological prophecy that their civilization was coming to an end. Depending on how one cares to interpret this, the prophecy fulfilled itself or, by acquiescence, was fulfilled. Either way, astrology had power.

The very idea of a period of history (to which the Incas belonged) is astrological, and based on the conjunction theory Columbus embraced. That theory brought the otherwise indistinguishable flow of time into an ordered sequence, and made history intelligible by identifying its hectic course with celestial events. It also helped to explain why history often seemed to repeat itself, as imaged in the repetitions in the sky. Modern science, like modern history, tends to disregard it, but this is a senseless bias or neglect. The history of science itself is so beholden to astrology that it owes it a debt of respectful attention if not abundant gratitude. Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great, Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked, if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers? Astrology, of course, possesses its own kind of knowledge, which has nothing to do with what modern science reveres. But in some sense, it is also true that magic and science originally advanced side by side. The desire to understand the secret workings of nature created an intellectual environment favorable to experiment and induction; alchemy gave birth to chemistry; Neoplatonic and hermetic ways of thinking led to the heliocentric hypothesis of Copernicus, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The mystical conviction that number contained the key to all mysteries fostered the development of mathematics—and subsequently revived it in the wake of the Dark Ages when knowledge of the subject had waned.

The irreverent scorn in which astrology is sometimes held is ultimately based on a superstition, one all the more dangerous, as Theodore Roosevelt once remarked (in an essay entitled, The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit), because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from superstition itself. No medieval superstition…could be more intolerant…than that…which not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. Surely a degree of humility is not unbecoming in any attempt to assess the value of a doctrine—or teaching—that has survived for thousands of years.

LIKE THE BONES OF Columbus himself, those of astrology have been stirred so often as almost to acquire a life of their own. Exhumed and reinterred at least half a dozen times over the course of three centuries, from Vallodolid to Santo Domingo, from Havana to Genoa to Seville, the explorer’s remains have seemed to multiply like the relics of a saint, and today can be found in at least three sites in both the Old World and the New. If astrology is dead and buried, as some would have it, its grave is as unquiet as that of Columbus, and as indeterminate as his tomb.

Sir Elias Ashmole (for whom the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford is named) once remarked: There are in Astrologie (I confess) shallow Brooks, through which young Tyroes may wade; but withal there are deep Fords, over which the Giants themselves must swim. There is far more to the subject than tends to meet the modern eye. Its story, at the very least, is enlarged with remarkable lives, including some of the most illustrious (and infamous) in human history, and draws its line through the whole chronology and range of human culture, from the back alleys of imperial Rome, where fortune-tellers plied their trade, to the inner circles of secular and religious power.

*Except when the ecclesiastical full moon (determined from tables) and the astronomical full moon do not correspond.

Chapter 2

THE APPARENT BIRTHPLACEof astrology was Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, now occupied by Iraq. From the Chaldean East, as it came to be called, which encompassed the realms of Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria, astrology spread to Egypt, and thence to the ancient world of Greece. The Greeks believed the Egyptians and Babylonians had invented it. Plato, in theEpinomis, specifically credited Assyria and Egypt. Marcus Manilius, the Roman author ofAstronomica, an astrological poem written in the age of Augustus, held that the origins of astronomy could be found in the lands of the Euphrates and the Nile. Very deep is the well of the past, wrote Thomas Mann. Should we not call it bottomless? We may never know for certain whether the Egyptians owed the fundamentals of their astrological knowledge to the Babylonians, or whether, as some continue to insist, the Babylonians imbibed it at least in part from some Egyptian source. But just as religious ideas, and their symbolic language, seem to belong to a kind of received understanding worldwide, so those of astrology, which are religious in nature, belong to the immemorial past. Even so, there are markers in time that allow some of its progress to be traced.

Four thousand years before Christ, the Babylonians and Assyrians scanned the heavens for omens of their fate, and from atop their ziggurats, or multitiered towers, mapped the course of the planets and from their observations began to make predictions about the weather, the harvest, drought, famine, war, peace, and the fates of kings. Some of the earliest known towers were at Uruk and Ur. The biblical prophet Abraham, father of the Jewish people, was born in the city of Ur of the Kasdim (a phrase meaning light of the astrologers) when the rulers of Mesopotamia were said to be astrologer-kings. Astrology flourished in the reign of Assurbanipal (called Sardanapalus by the Greeks), who reigned at Nineveh in the middle of the 7th centuryB.C. Assurbanipal was the son of Esarhaddon, who had succeeded Sennacherib, the ruler of Assyria mentioned in Isaiah and 2 Kings. In the time of the biblical prophet Daniel, it was still customary under the Assyrian monarchs for the general in the field to be accompanied by hisasipu, or prophet, on whose interpretation of the signs of heaven the movements of the army relied. Whether or not these Assyrians worshipped the planets themselves as gods—or regarded their patterned flight as the agents of some higher power—they began to trust in their import and recorded their observations on calcite and green-stone cylinder seals. The Sun was depicted as a rayed disk, the Moon as a crescent, and Venus as an eight-pointed star.

A large collection of cuneiform tablets, known asEnuma Anu Enlil, survive from the ancient archives of Nineveh and include many observations made before Assurbanipal’s reign. Most took the form of celestial omens, which accurately noted the rising and setting of Venus with predictions based on its appearance and location in the sky. One typical omen read: When Venus appears in Dilgan (Virgo), rains in heaven, floods on [earth], the crops of Aharru will prosper; and men will reinhabit ruined homes. Or: If Venus appears in the east in the month of Airu and the Great and Small Twins surround her, all four of them, and she is dark, then the King of Elam will sicken and die. Again: When the fiery light of Venus illuminates the breast of Scorpio, then rain and floods will ravage the land. Other planets were also assessed. For example, If a halo encircle the Moon, and Jupiter is found within it, animals will perish and the king of Akkad will be besieged. Or: When Jupiter stands in front of Mars, there will be corn in the fields and men will be slain…When Mars approaches Jupiter, there will be great devastation…In that year the king of Akkad will die.

Before the ancient twelve-month calendar emerged, the different seasons were identified with particular stars that rose as the seasons turned. At the time the constellations were established (about 3000B.C. ), the Sun at the spring equinox was near Aldebaran, the brightest star of Taurus; at the summer solstice, near Regulus, the brightest star of Leo; at the autumnal equinox, near Antares, the brightest star of Scorpio; and at the winter solstice, near Fomalhaut, the brightest star of Aquarius. These four stars were called royal, and the signs (or constellations) in which they were placed were said to be fixed because they were close to the four fixed points in the Sun’s seeming path among the stars. By 700B.C. , the Assyrians at Nineveh had more or less traced the ecliptic; divided it into four parts according to the seasons; drawn up the list of constellations whose heliacal rising corresponded to the various months; distinguished the planets from the fixed stars; followed their course; and approximately determined the duration of their synodic revolutions. That enabled them to predict eclipses of the Sun and Moon and to accurately fix the duration of the lunar month at a little more than twenty-nine and one half days. The earliest star maps, in fact, were lists of stars charted in their relation to the Moon. Early tablets therefore referred to the stars in the path of the Moon, and the earliest calendars were lunar, a month lasting either from first crescent to first crescent or from full Moon to full Moon. This subsequently evolved into a lunar zodiac of twenty-eight mansions or divisions, which roughly traced the distance traveled by the Moon each day. These mansions were sometimes thought of as the temporary resting places of the Sun, Moon, and planets in their journey across the sky. Over time, the annual lunar calendar or cycle was linked to the now standard zodiac of twelve signs or constellations, as the great astronomer Johannes Kepler once explained: [In ancient times] the farmers had to seek their calendar in the sky…When the Moon was full, they could easily see, for example, that the first full Moon appeared in the Ram’s horns, the second near the Pleiades, the third near the Twins, etc. and finally that the thirteenth again appeared in the first constellation, the Ram’s horns. Thus the full Moons divided the whole circle into twelve parts. The twelve constellations were eventually mapped and formed into a zodiac round (about the 6th centuryB.C. ) and the signs in turn (as distinct from the constellations) were established as twelve 30-degree arcs over the course of the next two hundred years.

Such are the ascertainable beginnings of Chaldean lore. The wordChaldean was originally a geographical term from the AssyrianKaldu and referred to Chaldea, or lower Mesopotamia, near the Persian Gulf. It eventually came to refer to members of the Babylonian priesthood, then to Greek astrologers directly or indirectly affiliated with Babylonian schools, and ultimately to all those who professed to foretell the future according to the stars. The Roman historian Diodorus Siculus tells us that the Chaldeans called the planets the Interpreters because their course and relative positions revealed to men the will of the gods. He adds: The star which the Greeks name Cronos [Saturn] they call the ‘star of the Sun’ [or the ‘Sun of the night’], because it gives the most numerous and important predictions.

Babylonian star lore migrated to Egypt with the Persian conquests in the 6th centuryB.C. , though the positions of many of the stars had already been mapped out by ancient Egyptian astronomers as early as the 13th centuryB.C. In the tomb of Ramses II, who lived about 1292–25B.C. , the 19th-century French Egyptologist Jean Champollion found massive circles of wrought gold divided into 365 degrees, each of which marked the rising and setting of the stars for the day. In the tomb of Ramses V, moreover, he found papyri giving tables of constellations and their influences on human beings for every hour of every month of the year. The different hours of different constellations in the ascendant, for example, were believed to rule different parts of the body—the ears, heart, arms, and so on—according to an astrological tradition that persists to this day. This type of astrology was not only common among the Chaldeans, writes Ellen McCaffery, "but entered the oral tradition of the Hebrews, which seemed to give support to the statement of theSephir Yetzirah (composed in the early Christian centuries) that astrological knowledge had been handed down by Abraham, born among the Chaldees."

THE EARLIEST SURVIVINGbirth chart was drawn for a child born in the region of modern Iraq, just south of Baghdad on April 29, 410B.C. —when Socrates was about sixty and Plato seventeen years old. All in all, some 205 individual horoscopes, most of them Greek, have been preserved from ancient times. It is sometimes said that natal astrology was invented by the Greeks, but that can hardly be, for as early as 1300 years before Christ we have a Hittite translation of a Babylonian omen text offering personal predictions according to the month in which a child is born. Herodotus, in hisHistories, tells us that long before his own time (the 5th centuryB.C. ), the Egyptians had learned how to foretell by the date of a man’s birth his character, his fortunes, and the day of his death.

But the astrological knowledge of the Greeks also seems to go far back. Philostratus, writing in the early Christian era, tells us that astrology was known in Greece as early as 1184B.C. ; Plutarch claims that Hesiod, the Greek poet who lived eight hundred years before Christ, was an adept; and various constellations, such as Orion, the Pleiades, and the Great Bear were certainly familiar to the Greeks when theOdyssey of Homer (in which they are named) was composed. There is also an astrological allusion in which Euripides (480–406B.C. ) refers to a prediction based on the rising of the stars. Pliny, Plutarch’s contemporary (in the first centuryA.D. ), tells us that many early Greek astronomers were also astrologers, including Thales (born ca. 640B.C. ), who is said to have been familiar with Egyptian lore. Thales, not incidentally, described the Earth as a sphere, as did most Greek