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Gnostic Liberation from Astrological Determinism: Hipparchan "Trepidation" and the Breaking of Fate

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Gnostic Liberation from Astrological Determinism: Hipparchan GNOSTIC LIBERATION FROM ASTROLOGICAL DETERMINISM: HIPPARCHAN "TREPIDATION" AND THE BREAKING OF FATE BY HORACE JEFFERY HODGES Introduction Of all the intellectual systems of late antiquity, whether religious, philo- sophical, or some combination thereof, perhaps the one constructed by the Gnostics presented the most radically innovative view of things, for it quite literally demonized the cosmos. Being neither the embodiment of the Stoics' rational, all-pervading "logos," nor the result of the well-intentioned, Platonic demiurge's desire to emulate the ideal forms, nor an expression of the Old Testament god's glory and wisdom, the cosmos, instead, stemmed entirely from evil. All other ancient views, as Hans Blumenberg has demonstrated, preserve at least a residue of trust in the cosmos.' Consequently, Gnostics pursued their radical critique of the cosmos further than any other group, finding in the seemingly regular, predictable motions of the heavens only the expression of a malevolent plot designed to deceive and entrap them. This perspective thus predisposed them to view celestial irregularity as sig- nifying the possibility of a higher, more benevolent force, for such might suggest evidence of an extra-cosmic intervention in the world by a more powerful god of salvation. This article will argue that at least some Gnostics used Hipparchus's discovery of the precession of the equinoxes as evidence for such an intervention in the world by the soteriological god, a miracu- lous intervention that successfully shifted the zodiacal sphere to break the bonds of astrological fate and release the Gnostic elect from the power of the cosmos and its creator. ' H. Blumenberg, 7he Legitimacyof theModern Age (Cambridge, 1983), 269-277. 360 AstrologicalDeterminism Synchronically analyzed in purely systemic terms, Gnosticism's antago- nism toward the cosmos sprang directly from its rigorous dualism. Regard- ing matter as the principle of evil, and spirit alone as the expression of the good, Gnostics hypothesized two gods-the soteriological god of spirit and the material god of creation. Originally, only the spiritual god existed, but for reasons fundamentally inexplicable, though the Gnostics attempted various explanations, he emanated a series of spiritual beings similar to but lesser than himself. Unfortunately, the lowest of these beings, a feminine principle identified in many Gnostic myths as "Sophia," fell from the spir- itual realm into the void, accidentally producing both matter and the lower, cosmic god, who took this matter and shaped it into a cosmos. Moreover, Sophia lost part of her spiritual substance in falling, and the lower god managed to trap this lost power within material human bodies of his own creation, intending it to serve his purposes. To ensure human subservience, he assigned seven subordinate entities (also of his own making but prior to his creation of humans) to the seven planets of antiquity, placing them (though he sometimes included himself as one of the seven) collectively in charge of "fate," by which force, he inexorably bound humanity to his material realm. Not only the Gnostics concerned themselves with planetary fate, of course; they merely drew from an already widely accepted tradition in late antiquity, for fatalistic attitudes had spread throughout the Mediterranean by Roman times.z Ancient peoples had doubtless long found impressive the apparent correlations between celestial and earthly patterns-the chang- ing position of the sun in the sky and the sequence of the seasons being the most obvious, as the second-century-C.E. astronomer Claudius Ptolemy himself informs us in his astrological work, the Tetrabiblos.3 But those ear- lier beliefs in the influence of the heavens had probably never taken on an all-encompassing or completely deterministic nature. Truly fatalistic atti- tudes seem to have had their origin in Mesopotamia sometime after 650 2 Franz Cumont, Astrologyand Religionamong the Greeksand Romans(New York and London, 1912), 154; Frederick H. Cramer,Astrology in RomanLaw and Politics(Philadelphia, 1954), 3-44; Wilhelm Gundel und Hans Georg Gundel, Astrologumena:Die Astrologische Literaturin derAntike und Ihre Geschichte(Franz Steiner Verlag, GMBH, Wiesbaden, 1966). 3 Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos,I, 2, ed. and trans. by F.E. Robbins, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1964), 8-11. .
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