Secrets of Nature Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology Jed Buchwald, general editor Sungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi’s Black-Box to the Audion Myles Jackson, Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, editors, Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe Alan J. Rocke, Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry Secrets of Nature Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe edited by William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Sabon by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Secrets of nature: astrology and alchemy in early modern Europe / edited by William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton. p. cm.— (Transformations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-14075-6 (alk. paper) 1. Astrology—Europe—History. 2. Alchemy—Europe—History. I. Newman, William R. II. Grafton, Anthony. III. Transformations (M.I.T. Press) BF1676 .S43 2001 133′.094—dc21 2001030602 Contents 1 Introduction: The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe 1 William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton 2 “Veritatis amor dulcissimus”: Aspects of Cardano’s Astrology 39 Germana Ernst 3 Between the Election and My Hopes: Girolamo Cardano and Medical Astrology 69 Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi 4 Celestial Offerings: Astrological Motifs in the Dedicatory Letters of Kepler’s Astronomia Nova and Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius 133 H. Darrel Rutkin 5 Astronomia inferior: Legacies of Johannes Trithemius and John Dee 173 N. H. Clulee 6 The Rosicrucian Hoax in France (1623–24) 235 Didier Kahn 7 “The Food of Angels”: Simon Forman’s Alchemical Medicine 345 Lauren Kassell 8 Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy 385 Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman Contributors 433 Index 435 Frontispiece: Chart of alchemical elections from Thomas Norton, Ordinal of Alchemy, found in British Library MS. Add. 10302, late fifteenth century. This page intentionally left blank This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction: The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton The Position of Astrology One night in 1631, a young Jesuit lay sleeping in his order’s college at Würzburg. He slept the sleep of the just, not only because he had found a scholarly vocation, but even more because the Holy Roman Empire had reached an uneasy state of truce. The emperor had conquered his Prot- estant enemies; no one, the Jesuit later recalled, could even imagine that heresy would revive. Suddenly a bright light filled the room. Waking, he leapt out of bed and ran to the window. He saw the open square before the college full of armed men and horses. Hurrying from room to room, he found that everyone else was still deeply asleep and decided that he must have been dreaming. So he ran to the window, where he saw the same ter- rifying vision. But when he woke someone to serve as a witness, it had van- ished. In the next few days, he became a prey to fear and depression and ran about, as he later recalled, “like a fanatic,” predicting disaster. The oth- ers made fun of him—until, with satisfying rapidity, invaders materialized and the city fell. Suddenly, the prophet was treated with respect in his own country. Since he taught, among other subjects, mathematics, his friends inferred that he must have used one of his technical skills to forecast the invasion. Surely, they argued, he had used the art of astrology to make his prediction. Nothing else could explain his ability to foresee so unexpected a turn of events.1 The young Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, had actually foreseen the future through direct divine inspiration, a fact he carefully concealed. What mat- ters, from our point of view, is the reaction of his friends. As late as the 1630s, the most highly educated young men in south Germany still found 2 William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton it rational to believe that astrology could enable Kircher to predict vital po- litical and military events. Evidently astrology still enjoyed a level of cred- ibility that now seems hard to fathom, and that in a highly educated and deeply Christian milieu. Kircher, who became not only a brilliant archae- ologist and Oriental scholar, but also a practitioner of natural science so adept that his public demonstrations won him at least one charge of be- ing a magician, evidently agreed with his friends’ belief in the ancient art of predicting the future through the stars, even though he had not had re- course to it in this case.2 Astrology was not classified as occult or dismissed as superstitious: it was, in fact, a recognized, publicly practiced art. This story illustrates the principle, as vital as it is easily ignored, that the past is another country. In educated circles in the United States and Eu- rope, astrology seems merely risible now. No member of the elite wants to be caught with an astrologer. The revelation that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, regularly consulted the astrologer Joan Quigley was trumpeted by their liberal critics and ignored by their conservative allies. And when the Economist noted, a few years ago, that a Brazilian stock advice service that relied on the stars had made enormous profits for its customers, it covered the phenomenon only in order to heap ridicule on all concerned, although the service had scored multiple suc- cesses. Astrology has, and can have, no currency in our skeptical, myth- shredding intellectual economy. Even the most astute scholars share these views. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, for example, argued that only cred- ulous fools with authoritarian personalities would resign psychic con- trol over their lives to the stars. That explained, in his view, the fact that the art flourished in Los Angeles. Only in the German preface to his essay, originally written in English, on the Los Angeles Times’ astrology column was Adorno honest enough to admit that the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s had exhibited similar tendencies themselves.3 No one who starts from presuppositions like this can hope to under- stand the pull of astrology in the present, to grasp and explain the fact that between 20 and 50 percent of the population of the world’s developed countries, in western Europe, North America, and Asia, believe mildly or strongly in astrology, right now.4 It is all the more necessary, then, to adopt a different attitude when we turn toward the nature and role of astrology and related disciplines in the past. What E. P. Thompson magisterially condemned as “the enormous condescension of posterity” can only hin- Introduction 3 der us from understanding the beliefs and practices of practitioners of as- trology and those who used their services. Renaissance astrologers, for example, drew up luxurious, custom-made manuscript genitures for the rulers of Renaissance Europe: not only for their spouses and children, but also, of course, for their enemies. They tab- ulated the births and fates of men, women, and monsters in collections of genitures, first in manuscript and then in print.5 On request, they investi- gated what the planets had to foretell at a particular moment about spe- cific marriages, journeys, and investments or about their clients’ physical and mental health.6 Often they stalked city streets and squares, hawking almanacs: pamphlets, usually of eight or sixteen pages, in which they explained why planetary conjunctions or eclipses foreshadowed disaster.7 Astrological doctrines inspired some of the most spectacular works of Renaissance art, from the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara to Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I.8 Astrological practices influenced and some- times ruled behavior in the most modern, forward-looking sectors of Renaissance culture. At the court of the Estensi in the 1440s, the brilliant young Marquis Leonello changed his clothes according to an astrologi- cally determined rhythm, choosing each day a color that would draw down the favorable influence of a particular planet. In Republican Florence, in the same years, the mercenary captains who led the city’s armies received their batons of command at an astrologically determined time.9 In much of early modern Europe, in other words, astrology was a prominent fea- ture of the practice of everyday life. A good many of the most eminent pro- tagonists of the Scientific Revolution, finally, joined in the production of genitures and almanacs, and a number, including Kepler, worked hard to reform the art in the light of philosophical criticisms and new scientific data.10 Yet few historians are willing, even now, to give astrology its due. Tra- dition weighs heavily against doing so. Even before Friedrich von Bezold, Aby Warburg, and other pioneers began to study the subject systemati- cally in the last years of the nineteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt had described the humanists who revived the art as so many sorcerers’ ap- prentices. They wished to find in ancient culture ways to express their new, objective understanding of the world around them and their new, subjective understanding of their own individuality. Sadly, they made the error of believing that astrology was one of these. In fact, the revival of this 4 William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton fetid, authoritarian superstition led them both to misread the cosmos as a whole and to subjugate the individual to universal laws.