|
Introduction and Contents The Dawn of Astrology is Volume 1 of my long-awaited cultural history of western astrology. The development of this book has been assisted considerably by my teaching of the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology (www.lamp.ac.uk/sophia.ma/html) and Kepler College (www.kepler.edu) since 2000. By cultural history, I mean that I investigate the use of astrology within its cosmological, religious and political context. This book differs substantially from previous histories in that, for the first time, I present material from the Stone Age, including lunar counters from 30,000 BCE, and I include substantial discussion of Egyptian astral-religion, Babylonian astrology and Hebrew Cosmology, in addition to the classical astrology which is the normal focus of books on ancient astrology. I also give an account of the cosmological background of Christianity, and its emerging competition with Roman paganism, leading to the decline of astrology in Europe and the decisive shift of astrology’s creative heart to Persia and India. This then sets the scene for volume 2, The Golden Age of Astrology, which will be published in 2009. Below you can read the Introduction and view the contents, with a brief synopsis of each chapter. Introduction
No one has ever heard of a collective that did not mobilize heaven and earth in its composition, along with bodies and souls, property and law, gods and ancestors, powers and beliefs, beast and fictional beings… Such is the ancient anthropological matrix, the one we have never abandoned.1 In the modern West astrology is an accepted if, in some quarters, controversial feature of popular culture. In some parts of the world, such as India, it remains as much a part of the prevailing world view as it was thousands of years ago, evidence of continuity between the contemporary world and a time when it was universally accepted that the heavens revealed meaning for humanity. In the West, perhaps 70% of the adult population reads horoscope columns. The language of birth-sign is ubiquitous. Most people, well over ninety percent, know what zodiac sign contained the Sun at their birth, signs and a significant number, probably between 40% and 50%, identify with their zodiacal character. Astrology’s use in the political sphere is less than it was until the seventeenth-century. President Reagan’s well-known use of astrology was the exception rather than the norm. Similarly, its application to finance is restricted. Yet, the fact that it occurs at all is a matter of high historical interest: how did a pre-Christian, pre-modern way of understanding humanity’s place in the world survive into the twenty-first century? This book attempts to locate the origins in the ancient world of the astrology practised in the medieval and modern West. It cannot aim to be definitive, for historical scholarship in astrology is still at a rudimentary stage; there are thousands of Babylonian cuneiform tablets which have never been catalogued, let along translated, an unknown quantity of which may include material about the stars, while most Greek astrological texts have either not been translated or, they have, not properly studied. However, I have aimed to include areas which are normally excluded from histories of astrology, including evidence of interest in the stars from prehistory, and Egyptian and Jewish cultures, as well Babylonian astrology, which has all too often been ignored in spite of its huge importance. I have considered Greek philosophy, without which it is impossible to understand the ideological framework within which astrology prospered in the classical world. I have, though, made little mention of India, whose astrology is linked to the West, but which followed a different trajectory and is awaiting authoritative treatment. Neither could I consider China, Japan, nor the other cultures, such as those in the Americas, whose astrology was completely isolated from the West. This is, then a history of Western astrology – and a cultural history at that; I have considered technical developments only in as much as they provide a framework for our understanding of changing views of humanity’s relationship with the sky. First, some definitions; astronomy, from the Greek, is simply translated as the law of the stars, astrology as their word (logos). Equally, logos as reason, mind or logic of the stars might take us closer to astrology’s origins in a context in which the entire cosmos was thought to be a single, living entity all of whose constituent parts, from the psychic to the physical, and from gods, to planets, people, plants and minerals, were interdependent and interlinked. To adopt a useful distinction between astronomy and astrology, the former is the study of the physical universe, the latter of the psychic (in both its soulful and psychological senses), cosmos. But, cosmos itself comes with its own set of meanings. The Greek word kosmos may be translated as adornment, in which sense it is the root of our word cosmetic. It was an adornment because it was beautiful, harmonious and, in spite of the unpleasantness which could afflict human life, essentially good. Cosmos, in this traditional sense, is a subjective thing. It is beautiful, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not as an external observer, but as a participant in cosmos itself. One cannot stand outside cosmos: to study it is to study one’s self. As a living creature, humanity is created in the image of cosmos, and by gazing at it, sees itself. This, briefly paraphrased, is the world-view formalised in the literature of classical Greece, though with older antecedents, and articulated precisely in a practical form in astrology of the Greek-speaking world. The split between the two words, astronomy and astrology, is a feature of the modern West and, in the classical world, their meanings overlapped. To the Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the 2nd century CE, there were two forms of astronomy, one which dealt with the movement of the stars, the other (which we would call astrology) with their effects or significance. From then until the seventeenth century, the two words were interchangeable. In ‘King Lear’, Shakespeare had Edgar refer to his brother Edmund, who had been posing as an astrologer, as a ‘sectary astronomical’. Other terms Shakespeare might have used include mathematician (the astronomer Johannes Kepler studied astrology as part of his duties as ‘Imperial Mathematician’) or Chaldean (both astrology and astronomy were commonly traced to Mesopotamia). Neither do most non-western countries employ different words to distinguish traditional astronomy from astrology. In India both are jyotish, the ‘science of light’. In Japan they are onmyōdō, the ‘yin-yang way’. The separation between the words astronomy and astrology in any history which deals with the pre-modern West, earlier than the seventeenth century, therefore runs the risk of being anachronistic, being more concerned with modern assumptions than ancient. Various solutions have been proposed to this problem. Edgar Laird suggested the term ‘Star Study’, Roger Beck ‘Star Talk’. 2 For working purposes though, we need a modern definition of astrology which will enable us to discuss its manifestations in different cultures and which extends, in conventional modern terms, from the scientific at one extreme, to the overtly religious at the other. Astrology is therefore both the study of the ways in which significance for life on earth is located in celestial objects and the resulting practices. It may be speculative, but it can also be operative; it involves not only myth and ritual, but also action. It depends on rationales as various as divine intervention, celestial influence or the notion of the sky as a script to read for signs. It functions through horoscopes, calendars, talismans and purification rituals. It can claim that the future is entirely knowable or essentially unknowable, that the world is predetermined or open to manipulation. It can function through divination – communication with divine entities – or the correlation of terrestrial events with celestial patterns. It may emphasise the inner or the outer, either one’s character or the events of one’s life, and can be applied to ultimate spiritual truths – the ascent of the soul to the stars – or to the trivia of domestic life, runaway slaves and lost treasure. Out of this enormous range of styles and applications, we need to distinguish two other useful categories. Natural astrology assumes only that the stars and planets exert a general influence on terrestrial affairs, that the future may be only loosely forecast, and that astrology can say little or nothing about the specifics of human affairs. Judicial astrology, which found its ultimate expression in the development of the horoscope sometime between the fifth and second centuries BCE, assumes that the astrologer can reach precise judgements about matters ranging from the ebb and flow of political events to the details of individual lives. As the narrative of this book unfolds, the distinction between these two ways of perceiving the human relationship with the heavens will become apparent. But the discussion will always be plagued by problems of definition. So let me end by facing the problem with one last set of controversial terms, science, religion and magic. Ancient astrology has been defined as all of these, yet they are frequently defined by historians and anthropologists as much as modern scientists, as if they are hermetically-sealed categories. From a historical perspective they quite clearly overlap and can often not be distinguished. So let me explain how I am using these terms. Religion I define quite conventionally as the worship of, or ritual interaction with, divine beings or anthropomorphised natural forces – nature conceived of as having personality. Magic is the deliberate attempt to engage with, manipulate or control the future, while science is either the practice of a discipline with its own rules, or an understanding of the world as primarily governed by natural processes as opposed to divine intervention. Contents Introduction Chap 1 Distant Echoes: Origins of Astrology Chap 2 Prehistory: Myths and Megaliths Chap 3 The Mesopotamian Cosmos: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth Chap 4 Mesopotamian Astrology: The Writing of Heaven: Chap 5 The Assyrians and Persians: Revolution and Reformation Chap 6 Egypt: The Kingdom of the Sun Chap 7 Egypt: The Stars and the Soul Chap 8 The Hebrews: Prophets and Planets Chap 9 Greece: Homer, Hesiod and the Heavens Chap 10 Greece: The Platonic Revolution Chap 11 The Hellenistic World: The Zodiac Chap 12 The Hellenistic World: Scepticism and Salvation Chap 13 Hellenistic Astrology: Signs and Influences: Chap 14 Rome: the State, the Stars and Subversion Chap 15 Christianity: A Star out of Jacob Chap 16 Rome: The Imperial Heaven Chap 17 Christianity: the Triumph of the Sun Afterword Footnotes: 1 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2006 [1991], p.107
|
