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).

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 sixteenth-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 periods 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. The historians who concerned themselves with late antiquitylike Gibbon and Burckhardttreated it as little more than one of the pullulating superstitions of the age. And Burckhardt, returning to the same theme in his essay on the cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, dismissed astrology in that context too, as a superstition which went against such central values of Renaissance culture as empiricism and indi- vidualism.

5. See e.g., A. Grafton, Commerce with the Classics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), chapter 5.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 74 Starry Messengers Only a few unusual scholarslike the erudite student of medieval and Renaissance historiography, demonology, and astrology, Friedrich von Bezoldremained familiar with astrological terms and concepts. And even they found relatively few readers willing to master what they had to say in detail. After 1900, the brilliant Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg dedicated himself to interpreting the images of stars and planets, decorous and threatening, distorted and precise, that pullulated in Italian frescoes and German pamphlets. He started with almost no knowledge of the ªeld: even such basic terms as great conjunction were unfa- miliar to him, and he looked eagerly for expert assistance in reading genitures. Yet his energy and penetration enabled him to carry out such bravura feats of historical detective work and interpretation as his deci- pherment of the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia and his recreation of the debates that raged around the date and year of Luthers birth.6 Warburgs achievements, though beyond praise, were not only the product of his mother wit. In the last decades of the nineteenth and the ªrst ones of the twentieth centurythe age in which the modern astrological revival beganmany scholars turned back to the astrological tradition. Historians and philologists as varied in formation, method and at- titude as Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, Franz Boll, Franz Cumont and A. E. Housman began the exhausting process of surveying the sources for the history of astrology from antiquity onwards. They produced catalogues of manuscripts, critical editions of individual texts, and large-scale surveys of astrological literature. These in turn provided the underpinnings for War- burgs and Bolls dazzling essays on the role of astrology as the locus classicus for cultural contact between the Near East and the West, from antiquity through the Middle Ages and after. Their products include such still-indispensable tools as the Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum and Housmans ªve-volume edition of and commentary on Manilius. Warburg

6. Warburgs classic pieces on astrology are at last available in the splendid English translation of his collected works, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. K.W. Forster, tr. D. Britt (Los Angeles: A : Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Human- ities, 1999). On the development of his interest in astrology see e.g., K. Lippincott, Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and the Astrological Ceiling of the Sala di Galateo, in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg 1990, edited by H. Bredekamp et al. (Weinheim, 1991), pp. 213232 and M. Gherardi, Un germe selvaggio della scienza: Franz Boll, Aby Warburg e la storia dellastrologia, in F. Boll and C. Bezold, Interpretazione e fede negli astri, tr. M. Ghelardi and S. Müller (Livorno, 1999), pp. 723. For Warburgs letters, which illuminate the story in many ways, see e.g., Ausreiten der Ecken: Die Aby War- burg-Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz, 1910 bis 1919, ed. D. McEwan (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998); Henning Ritter kindly provided me with copies of Warburgs letters to Boll, preserved in the Heidelberger Universitätarchiv, and D. McEwan guided me through Bolls correspondence with Warburg and Saxl, preserved at the Warburg Institute.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 75 knew many of these scholars, and owed a great deal to the detailed advice he received from Bollas well as from a younger specialist, his Viennese assistant Fritz Saxl.7 Unfortunately, these scholars sometimes worked from assumptions as problematic as their erudition was immense. Warburg saw astrology as a vast sticky spiderweb of delusions which captured the intellectuals of the Hellenistic and Imperial worlds. Housman saw it as a mass of foolish errors, whose intricacies provided him with a matchless set of intelligence tests for his rivals, all of which they naturally failed. The spread of astrology, such scholars held, showed that the ancients had suffered a massive failure of nerve in the centuries after Plato and Aristotlethat they had resigned the hard-won, difªcult freedom of thought seized by the greatest ancient philosophers in favor of the superstitious comforts of magical thinkings and the illusions of determinism. Such interpretations played into the hands of less expert scholars like George Sarton, who foolishly condemned the entire study of astrology as irrelevant to the history of sci- enceand won by doing so a brilliant rebuke from O. Neugebauer, in the form of a one-page essay on The Study of Wretched Subjects which of- fers a classic statement of the historical importance of the ªeld.8 The magniªcent philological tradition these scholars founded has been carried on into more recent times by Neugebauer, E. S. Kennedy, David Pingree, John North and Alexander Joneswhose edition of the astrological papyri from Oxyrhynchus represents one of the twentieth centurys most massive and expert pieces of philological work. In the period since World War II, moreover, historians of astrology building on this philological tradition have asked new questions and applied new methods to the ªeld. Eugenio Garin, Paola Zambelli and Germana Ernstall of them scholars of vast learning, all of them committed to the high philological and editorial standards traditional in the ªeldhave investigated the intellectual, religious and political careers of astrologers in Renaissance Eu- rope. They have shown how artful practice of astrology could serve, in skilled hands, to win high patronage at court or to justify a social revolution in the streets.9 Astrology evidently had something to do with the

7. See Ghelardi, and, for the wider context, H. Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997). 8. O. Neugebauer, The Study of Wretched Subjects, Isis, 42 (1951), reprinted in Neugebauer, Astronomy and History (New York, Berlin, Heidelberg and Tokyo: Springer-Verlag, 1983), p. 3. 9. E. Garin, Lo zodiaco della vita (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1982); P. Zambelli,Lambigua natura della magia (Milan, 1991; 2d edition, Venice, 1996) and Una reincarnazione di Pico ai tempi di Pomponazzi (Milan: Il Poliªlo, 1994); G. Ernst, Religione, ragione e natura (Milan: F. Angeli, 1991).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 76 Starry Messengers pragmatic politics of Machiavelli and the radicalism of Campanellaa point recently underlined by Anthony Parel in a highly original analysis of the astrological elements in Machiavellis thought.10 Keith Thomas and Michael MacDonald have recreated the practices of astrologers in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, using the rich evidence of case-books to work out the ways in which astrologers understood and advised their clientele. Astrology emerges from their work as a highly rational way of treating otherwise inaccessible and intractable problems.11 A team of scholars, organized and led by Zambelli, has vividly de- scribed and set into context the greatest media event of the sixteenth century. Many astrologers predicted that a second Deluge would occur in 1524. Heavy rains fell in some parts of Italy, but civilization was not swept away by the ºoods that ensued. Elsewhere the weather was dry.12 This failure, Ottavia Niccoli has argued, severely damaged the social au- thority of the astrologer and his art. Both the widespread publicity achieved by astrological almanacs and predictions and the high level of de- bate about their premises emerge clearly from Niccolis work.13 Detailed new studies on these lines and others continue to appear regularly, casting a sharp light on the activities of astrologers and the needs of their audi- ences and patrons. These scholars attack a wide range of periods and individuals and use a rich palette of historical methods. All of them, however, agree that historians of science cannot understand astrology if they start by despising its principles and practitioners. Rather, they must seek to understand the fac- tors that made astrology seem a rigorous and credible form of knowledge at different times and places. They must ground themselves in the intellectual assumptions and everyday practices of astrologers, in the technical language they spoke and wrote and in the forms of prose, verse and charts with which they presented their data and conclusions to individual clients and the larger reading public. And they must do all of this on the simple but vital assumption that astrological activities made sense to the often formidable individualslike Leonello dEste and Ludovico Sforzawho pursued them most energetically.

10. A.J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 11. K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 12. Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luthers Time, ed. P. Zambelli (Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 1986). See also R. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 13. O. Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, tr. L.G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 77 A number of recent books offer new models for the history of astrology. Tamsyn Bartonan anthropologist trained in ancient science in the Cam- bridge school long dominated by Geoffrey Lloydbegins her work with a snappy denunciation of those predecessors who have distorted the past by drawing anachronistic distinctions between truly scientiªc and merely superstitious pursuits. Astrologers, she admits, tried to explain health and sickness from the stars, Galen from the pulse. But Galens ways of interpreting the pulse were as pathologically intricate in form and as richly steeped in undemonstrable assumptions as anything in astrology. When modern doctors take pulses, they look for something completely different from what interested their ancient predecessor. Nor do they emulate his effort to classify all pulses in accordance with an elaborate taxonomy of in- tensities and speeds. A history of medicine that treats Galen as a hero and Ptolemy as a villain distorts the roles that both of them played. In place of such unhistorical efforts to show that an ancient scientist an- ticipated modern doctrines or arrived at correct conclusions about the nat- ural world, Barton calls for a history that does justice to what now look like lost causes. Justice, in her case, takes a Foucauldian form, as the title of her bookPower and Knowledgesuggests. Power circulates in all social transactions: a historical study of astrologylike one of medicinemust assume that astrology was connected in vital ways to the pursuit of power. Though fashionable, this heuristic device proves helpful. It enables Barton to explain convincingly a central, puzzling feature of astrological treatises, which has long bothered and intrigued their modern interpreters. They present readers with one series after another of precise, rebarbative doctrines, which often contradict one another when examined in detail. Yet they never include the straightforward instructions that would enable a reader to construct a geniture in accordance with their principles. Why, historians have asked, write textbooks that cannot be applied in practice? Barton neatly explains this puzzling feature of works as different as Ptol- emys Greek Tetrabiblos and Firmicus Maternuss Latin Mathesis. The astrologer, she argues, needed an element of mystery both to give his art au- thority and to ensure that younger practitioners would realise they needed the help of older initiates if they hoped to enter into its practice. The user-unfriendly structure and content of such books actually helped astrology to survive in a competitive literary ecology. It proved that astrologers needed inspiration as well as persperation. The art of astrology as a whole ºourished in the Roman world, Barton holds, because it offered power of a vital kind: the power to predict the future which the increasingly contentious and radical politicians of the later Roman Republic and early Empire desperately wanted. Prophets and prophecies of all kinds echoed in the marble colonnades of cities from Au-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 78 Starry Messengers gustan Rome to Alexandria and Antioch, as David Potter has shown in a richly documented survey. Sibyls foretold the future in enigmatic verses, talking heads severed from human bodies evoked it in mysterious mutter- ings, and haruspices read it into the livers of sacriªcial victims.14 Astrol- ogy offered a uniquely prestigious chart for the shark-infested waters of Roman politicsone that had the glamor of ancient near Eastern knowledge and the prestige of quantitative methods to support it. No wonder, then, that astrologers ªrst appeared, in Roman histories and legal records, as the advisers of ambitious politicians; or that Augustus, the most suc- cessful of them all, made his astrological sign, Capricorn, the symbolic cornerstone of his political enterprise. Astrology did not ºourish, as an older generation of scholars held, because the rootless masses in Hellenis- tic and Roman cities, deprived of the opportunity to participate in civic life, symbolically resigned themselves to the whims of a cosmos they could not control. Rather, it met the practical needs of the aggressive, thoroughly activist soldiers and statesmen who created the Roman order in its most impressively universalistic form. Augustus, for example, installed an obelisk to serve as the meridian instrument which traced the motion of the sun through the skies at the center of his great new complex in the Campus Martius. He thus emphasized his own conquest of the Eastas represented by Antony and Cleopatraand highlighted his imperial abil- ity to control the calendar. Astrology was as thoroughly modern, as much an applied art, in the Rome of the Golden Age of Latin literature as it is in the Brazil of Astrocall. Where Barton sheds a bright new light on the origins of the vogue for astrology, Marie Theres Fögen explains how it gradually fell into discredit. Historians and jurists have long relied on a number of passages in the Cor- pus iuris of Justinian, compiled in the sixth century CE, to argue that astrology was illegal in the Roman Empire. They have sometimes treated with reserve or skepticism the passages in Tacitus and Suetonius which de- scribe emperors like Tiberius resorting to a forbidden art. And they have emphasized the testimony of the fourth-century writer Firmicus Maternus, who in his handbook, the Mathesis, denied that astrology could predict the future of an emperor. Emperors, being divine, could not be controlled even by the stars. Though the pioneering American scholar F. H. Cramer insisted on the prominent role of astrology in Roman law and politics, few of those who cited his work of 1954 fully agreed with his position. Fögen works at the Max Planck Institute for legal history in Frankfurt,

14. D. Potter, Prophets and Emperors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 79 itself one of the most contentious and innovative scholarly institutions in western Europe, and a center of efforts to develop new methods for the critical study of the sources of ancient law. She subjects the sources, especially but not only the legal ones, to a minute critical examination. In the Frankfurt tradition, she undertakes both a precise analysis of the legal texts and a wider effort to set them into their historical context. She shows, by careful philological argument, that no strong evidence exists for any formal condemnation of astrology in the ªrst three centuries of the Empires existence. Astrologers often faced accusationsfor committing errors, for making alliances with rebels, for offending their imperial patrons with unpleasant prophecies. But the art of astrology itself had no status in the law, except that of a normal, legitimate art of predic- tioneven if an intellectual like Cicero found it ridiculous. Over the centuries, however, attitudes shiftedradically. Christian theologians insisted that only their God could know the future. Individ- uals had free will, with which they could choose salvation or damnation; to accept the world view of the astrologers was to forget this basic existen- tial fact. Christian theology could brook no competition from forms of re- vealed knowledge which involved conversing with the demons that inhab- ited the planets. Even though the Fathers knew that the Magi had been the ªrst to recognize the baby King of the Jews, they did everything they could to deny that this story legitimated what they now termed the forbidden art of astrology. Imperial politics also entered a new key in the fourth century. From Constantine to Diocletian, emperors became less and less tolerant of claims to power independent of theirs. They condemned not only individuals who practiced the ancient arts of prediction unwisely, but also the substance of those arts themselves. Astrology and magic were formally forbidden under Diocletian. Firmicus edgy effort to show that astrology did not threaten royal power emerges from Fögens analysis not as a standard astrological doctrine long employed to ward off criticism and worse, but as a direct response to a changed environment, a desperate effort to make astrology seem respectable and unthreatening. As classicists, Barton and Fögen had to work, for the most part, from didactic and legal sources and from outsiders descriptions of what astrologers thought and did. By contrast, three students of early modern astrology, Jean Dupèbe, the late Pierre BrindAmour and Ann Geneva, have ex- ploited personal correspondence, publishing history and multiple contemporary testimonies to create the lives and works of two highly pro- ductive and inºuential astrologers. Dupèbe edited the correspondence, and BrindAmour analysed the genitures, of the most notorious astrologer of the sixteenth century, Nostradamus. Their work amounts to a brilliant

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 80 Starry Messengers synthesis of intellectual history, publishing history and the history of science, in the manner of Jean Céard, to whom both profess a debt.15 Using their rich materials with both imagination and precision, Dupèbe and BrindAmour succeeded in recreating the career of a brilliant charlatan. Nostradamus, it emerges, was not at all adept at using tables and erecting horoscopesthe basic tasks of the astrologer. He often applied his own id- iosyncratic principles, ascribing them to ancient Eastern sages or to his mysterious ancestors, rather than the techniques normally used. His planetary positions and house divisions were often both inaccurate and incon- sistent. He did not belong, in other words, to the community of the astro- logically competentthe members of which, such as Luca Gaurico and Girolamo Cardano, were often savagely critical of one anothers work. Nonetheless, he succeeded brilliantly. His pamphlet-sized almanacs and prophecies in verse, attractively gloomy works that gave readers a pleasant shudder of alarm at every stanza, spread throughout Europe in the pockets of ordinary readers and the pouches of ambassadors. Soldiers and sailors, kings and diplomats scanned them uneasily for signs of the times. Nostradamus used the celebrity he attained through print to develop an even more proªtable business. He worked up custom horoscopes, at a price, for individuals of high net worth throughout Europeespecially in the Holy Roman Empire. Mining entrepreneurs consulted him for instructions on where to sink their shaftsand sent him rich jewels in thanks even as their businesses turned up their toes. Detailed analysis of the quantitative data in these horoscopes reveals Nostradamus as a charla- tannot in our terms but in his own, a technically incompetent astrologer. But detailed analysis of his poetic prophecies shows how brilliantly he could endow the most ºat-footed and ordinary predictions with an appear- ance of novelty and mystical force. In the end, he became the head of a little astrological boutique, efªciently producing bad astrology for a large market. William Lilly was also a brilliant astro-politician, as Ann Geneva makes plain: he read the regicides program for Charles I into the constel- lations he charted. But he was as serious a student of the stars and of atmo- spheric prodigies like parrhelia as Nostradamus was a superªcial one. Lilly spun networks of informants across England with whom he exchanged astrological data and prophecies. He broke with tradition by writing textbooks in which he made clear exactly what a reader needed to know to erect and interpret a ªgure. And he used his astrological and prophetic tal- ents to cut a considerable ªgure in the politics of the English Revolution.

15. See esp. J. Céard, La nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz, 1977). Dupèbes edition of Nostradamus, Lettres inédites appeared at Geneva in 1983.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 81 Only in the Restoration and afterwhen a new view of language, as a set of clear, arbitrary signs standing for individual things, replaced the old view of language as a web of profound symbols, which had fostered astrological thinkingdid Lilly become what he has since remained, a ªgure of fun. For decades he foundand deserveda wide market for his wares. Genevas analysis rests on massive research in the manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library, above all those of Elias Ashmoleperhaps the richest deposit in existence of the working materials of early modern astrologers, alchemists and magicians. The many texts and images she includes in her work give her account great immediacy and vividness. Geneva reºects at some length on the historiography of astrology and devotes considerable attention to Lillys observations of celestial prodigies. But her work is at is richest and most incisive when she recreatesin the tradition of Keith Thomas, with whom she studied, and the more recent work of Patrick Currythe actual conditions of Lillys practice, from the identities and origins of those who consulted him for astrological advice to his own practice as astro-political writer and adviser.16 She rightly points out how difªcult it seems to explain exactly why the customers of a Lillyor a Cardano, a Gaurico, or a Nostradamusfound their predictions so enlighteningespecially since the customers themselves were often very expert practitioners of the same predictive skills. Her own answer is not entirely convincing, and her analysis of Lillys ways of predicting the future could be more ªrmly grounded in period ways of understanding what was involved in prediction. Yet the book is immensely useful and informative. For all their differences of interests and tenor, BrindAmour and Geneva coincide on a point suggested, in a different way, by Bartons analysis as well. In theory astrology was a uniquely rigorous predictive disci- plineone that inferred the future from the measured, absolutely predict- able motions of the planets. In method and substance it had nothing whatever to do with prophecyespecially the forms of prophecy that took unique and non-repeatable events, like monstrous births and celestial ap- paritions, as offering the keys to the kingdom of the future. In practice, however, both Nostradamus and Lilly saw no obstacle whatever to using both the most rigorous astrological data and the most bizarre and unre- peatable portents as revealing divine plans for the years to come. In their casesand in many othersthe astrologer evidently claimed to have and use not only a particularly sharp set of intellectual tools, but also a particularly rich personal gift of insight into the mysteries ahead. The same air of mystery that cloaked the technical procedures of astrology from profane

16. P. Curry, Prophecy and Power (Princeton University Press, 1989).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 82 Starry Messengers eyes could also be evoked when the astrologer laid down astrolabe and tables to utter predictions drawn from his native genius or his examination of a pair of Siamese twins. The arrival, not the journey, matteredand could be plotted by whatever means lay to hand. To that extent, it is anachronistic to pull the study of astrology apart from that of other sorts of prophecyas, for example, critics of astrology like Augustine regularly did. Many astrologers were also magi or religious ªgures, and saw no evi- dent contradiction between the different forms of powerful knowledge they invoked. These books exemplify very different styles of scholarship and argument. Barton and Geneva, for all their differences in detail, coincide in taking a ferociously polemical view of their predecessors, whom they dis- miss for their failure to anticipate the historical insights of the contemporary historian and merely editing texts or explicating technical proce- duresas if one could edit a text without interpreting it, or interpret a horoscope without some understanding of its technical content. Fögen and BrindAmour stand together in the professionalism with which they present, analyse and translate original sources. Fögen and BrindAmour, moreover, are both stylists, whose works make pleasant as well as informative readingin contrast to the occasionally gnarled syntax and self-indulgent ªrst-person prose of the two English books. Many aspects of astrology call for further investigation. For example, all four of these studies illuminate the many unexpected connections between astrology and less quantitative and rigorous forms of prediction. None of them, however, does full justice to the very rationalor at least rational- istside of astrology. As Oswyn Murray pointed out long ago, astrology closely resembles a number of the other encyclopedic intellectual enter- prises that ºourished in the same imperial culture, from jurisprudence to geography. Like them, it aspired to impose a coherent order and taxonomy on an enormous, sprawling mass of facts and phenomena. Like them, it tried to connect the general principles of philosophynatural and moralto the problems of everyday life. Like moral philosophy, it formed one of the rational arts of living lovingly cultivated by ancient intellectuals and their early modern readers. It offered detailed, attractive analyses of individual characters and bodies as well as vague, general predictions about national futures. These features of astrology await their historian. In the end, however, these four books reward their readers and comple- ment one another. Taken together, they reveal how astrological procedures outlasted more fragile creations of the human spirit, like the Roman Em- pire. They illustrate the radically diverse ways in which a single set of technical protocols could be used, interpreted and condemnedand the strange company in which they can often be found. And they bring up be-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 83 fore the reader an intellectual world as strangeto many inhabitants of modern western universitiesand yet as recognizable, as tradition-bound and yet as ªercely modern, as the world of the contemporary astrological counsellors who scan the skies for future stock prices behind the indoor trees, waterfalls and high glass atria of the ªnancial centers of our much beleaguered West.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/106361400568028 by guest on 03 October 2021