Recent Work in the History of Western Astrology1

Starry Messengers Starry Messengers: Recent Work in the History of Western Astrology1 Anthony Grafton Princeton University In early February 1995 the Economist reported, with characteristic bravura and disdain, on a Brazilian debenture deal. A Sao Paolo bank needed to decide on the timing of a large issue for the Euromarket. The ofªcers de- termined the answer not by scrutinizing capital markets or predicting ex- change rates, but by consulting an astrologer. He showed them that since Jupiter was in his exaltation, the time was right. The vice president in charge followed this adviceadmittedly without notifying his superi- orsand the deal succeeded. These methods, the Economist admitted, hardly violated normal practices in Brazil. Astrology-based ªnancial consulting ªrms like Planum, which advised the bank in this case, and Astro-Call have long ºourished there. At that point, however, the reporter abruptly ceased trying to put the use of astrological techniques into context. Instead, the anonymous author took them as evidence for the irrationality of the inhabitants of Brazil, home to all manner of mysticism, from the Kabbala to Macumba. The slaves, gypsies and Middle Europeans who settled the country, it seems, brought these burdens of irrationalism with them. No wonder, then, that even Brazilian bankers prefer the superstitious consul- tation of the stars to the rational contemplation of invisible hands. Astrol- ogy, at least in the Economist, is an intellectual mark of Cain: a sign of intellectual mayhem. It ºourishes in societies that have not yet joined modern Western Europe on the high, austere plains of reason. Astrologers 1. This essay reviews the following works: Tamsyn Barton, Power and Knowledge. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Pierre BrindAmour, Nostradamus astrophile. (Ottawa: Presses de lUniversité dOttawa; Paris: Klincksieck, 1993); Marie Theres Fögen, Die Enteignung der Wahrsager. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1993; Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). Perspectives on Science 2000, vol. 8, no. 1 ©2000 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 70 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 71 and their clients are primitiveeven when they carry out their consulta- tions in postmodern skyscrapers. For once, the Economists sarcasm was not deserved by its object. As more than one scholarly investigation has shown, astrology ºourishes wildly nowadaysnot only in South America, but also in the land of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and their astrological consultant Joan Quigley, who timed press conferences and advised on Supreme Court appoint- ments for a span of seven years. Americans of high net worth consult specialized ªnancial astrologers of their own. The New York politicians and socialites who make up the ªn-de-siècle equivalent of Café Society visit stargazing image consultants in chic Park Avenue ofªces. Theodor Adorno argued long ago in his detailed examination of the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times, The Stars Brought Down to Earth, that a deter- minist cosmology, which portrayed humans as the prey of larger, imper- sonal forces, nicely ªtted the psychic needs of middle-class American males in the early 1950s. Their authoritarian personalities made them eager customers for advice columns that displaced responsibility for their successes and failures onto mysterious unnamed friends and enemies.2 Astrology was ªrmly imbedded in the sprawling mosaic of American ob- sessions long before the New Age dawned. It provided the framework which made hippy cultures interest in birth signs and celestial megaevents intelligible to many who never tuned in or turned on. No wonder, then, that Linda Goodmans Sun Signs sold a record-breaking 2.5 million copies, and remains a perennial in American bookshops even to- day. In fact, howeveras Adorno grudgingly acknowledged in the German preface to his work, which he assumed no American would readthe modern vogue for astrology began in Europe, not in America. Newspaper astrology columns by the Gypsy Petulengro and his competitors spread through the London tabloids of the 1920s and 30s, long before they reached New York. Recent survey research, moreover, suggests that as many Europeans as Americanssomewhere between 20% and 40% of the populationbelieve that astrology has some truth to it.3 Astrology, in short, belongs not only to the past but to the present. Efforts to treat it as a purely marginal phenomenon reºect not the superior rationality of scholars and scientists but their own marginal position, which prevents them from observing the culture they themselves belong toas well as a 2. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 3. H. Wiesendanger, Zwischen Wissenschaft und Aberglaube (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 72 Starry Messengers substantial helping of that condescension of posterity against which E.P. Thompson so memorably warned. Astrology livesnow as for more than two thousand years. In fact, astrology probably represents the most consistent, uniªed and durable body of beliefs and practices in the western tradition. Astrologersnow as in the pastsee themselves as sensitive interpreters of stars and humans alike. They know how to pick out from the thousands of intersecting geo- metrical relationships among the planets in any given geniture those that will affect the body, character and fate of a given client. The possession of this key enables them to read the visible language of the stars, as delicately and precisely as a couturier or a fashion columnist reads the visible language of clothing. Astrology presents itself, usually, as an ancient discipline, one created by the sages of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. To a considerable extent, moreover, it is a deeply traditional art. The genitures drawn up by modern astrologers resemble those drawn up two millennia ago in most important respects. Though modern charts record the positions of planets invisible to the naked eye and therefore unknown to the ancients, Ptolemy would have no trouble in understanding their geocentric frame of references, recogniz- ing the way in which planetary positions are plotted in them or mastering the very traditional terms in which their creators assign meaning to the planets individual natures. Many individual astrological doctrines have continued in use for an as- tonishingly long time. When Joan Quigley needed to understand the rea- sons for the assassination attempt in which Ronald Reagan was wounded, for example, she noted that it coincided with a great conjunctionone of the conjunctions of Saturn with Jupiter which take place every twenty years, and which, as she also pointed out, had accompanied earth-shaking events in the past, like the sudden death of Warren Harding. In advancing this interpretation, Quigley followed a tradition established almost two millennia ago in Sasanian Persia and carried on by astrologers in the Is- lamic world and the medieval and Renaissance west. Cardinal Pierre dAilly, whose use of similar principles in the ªfteenth century has been studied in detail by Laura Smoller, and Cyprian Leowitz, whose six- teenth-century manual of conjunctionist history was read with interest and approval by the great antiquary William Camden, would have recog- nized her as a sister under the skin.4 Yet these continuities of doctrine and practice do not mean that astrol- 4. L. Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy and the Stars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1994); A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 198393), II, pp. 349352, especially p. 351. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 73 ogy has never changed. It has ºourished in the most diverse social and eco- nomic systems, served the needs of republican magistrates and absolute tyrants, stimulated precise investigations into the movement of the planets and suppressed efforts to understand human history in human terms. The historian who hopes to do justice to the astrological tradition must some- how ªnd ways of identifying distinct stages in what seems, from the outside, an unbroken line of development: to ªnd the rings that indicate peri- ods of growth in what looks from the outside less like a tree than a column. The modern tradition of research began in the Renaissance, when a number of remarkable scholarsall of them opponents of astrology in the form normally practicedscrutinized its early history in creative ways. Pico della Mirandola, Joseph Scaliger, and Johannes Kepler saw ordinary horoscopic astrology as a delusion, and tried to understand how it had come into being in the enlightened world of ancient near eastern sages like Hermes Trismegistus, who were generally credited with devising it. All of them ended up challenging not only the mythical genealogy that astrologers rejoiced in, but also the even more widely held belief in the wisdom and learning of the ancient Near East.5 At the same time, however, they represented only one position among many. Some scholars, like Athanasius Kircher, continued to discern traces of alien wisdom in such astrological divinities as the decansthe strange demons, ultimately Egyptian by origin, that ruled each ten divisions of the zodiac. Still others, like Pierre-Daniel Huet, Johannes Fridericus Gronovius and Richard Bentley, energetically carried out research into the most obscrue recesses of the astrological tradition even though they saw it as without redeeming intellectual value. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries astrology lost its credit with most intellectuals. Followers of Winckelmann turned their attention backwards, away from the syncretistic cultures of the Hellenistic world and the later Roman empire, in which astrology ºourished most wildly. Astrology faded from the screens of most scholars interested in the ancient world.

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