Astrology is the art, or some would say, science, of attributing meaning to the transits of the stars and planets as they appear in the heavens. Its origins lie deep within the astral religion of ancient Mesopotamia of the third and second millennia BC. From Mesopotamia astrology spread to the adjacent regions, changing its form as it went, adapting to Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy in classical Greece. In Christian Europe it assumed a pervasive influence on almost every activity and aspect of thought from its introduction in the eleventh and twelfth centuries until the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth. Even though many in Europe affected hostility towards the casters of horoscopes, in one form or another the assumptions of astrology were universally accepted. Planetary influence on weather and human disease, for example, was acknowledged without question.

In spite of its superficial ability to adapt to its host culture, European astrology was never entirely shorn of its pagan religious connotations, and friction between the celestial science and Christian orthodoxy ebbed and flowed, depending on changing intellectual fashions, but never entirely disappeared. Twelfth and thirteenth century theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus were obliged to devote considerable effort towards justifying its existence in Christian culture and explaining their interest in it. Indeed, in the fifteenth century, under the impact of Renaissance Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, astrology's pagan overtones became a positive attraction. In its fundamentals, the practice of astrology in Europe until the seventeenth century, and its survival in a more limited form until the present day, therefore represents the continuance, albeit in a disguised form, of Mesopotamian astral religion.

Central to astrology's unorthodox belief system is a reliance on Gnosis, on the argument that the individual can achieve direct contact with the divine cosmos. Although a loose astrological 'priesthood' existed in Mesopotamian society, where the astrologers constituted a highly educated elite, in Hellenistic society it became essentially democratic: anyone could study astrology and anybody could have their horoscope cast. Indeed, the birth chart, which developed after around 400 BC (the earliest extant version dates from 410 BC), when analysed in a hermetic context, permitted any individual to understand both the reasons for their current incarnation and the best path to follow in order to return to the stars at death in a superior spiritual manner to that in which they descended through the planetary spheres at birth.

Unfortunately the poor reputation of astrology amongst western scholars over the last three hundred years has resulted in a number of negative consequences as far as the study of its history is concerned. The subject has perhaps not been given the attention that it deserves. (1) In addition modern views on the nature of astrology are imposed on to the past. For example, it is commonly held that astrology is fatalistic in relation to modern western notions of individual freedom, assuming that human life followed a preordained pattern, inducing in the believer a state of passive acceptance of external events. (2) It is held the the same characteristics applied to medieval astrology. This assumption is now open to question.

The role of astrology in the Islamic world has also been largely ignored by western scholars, an oversight which is surprising in view of European astrology's direct descent from Islamic sources. Astrology virtually disappeared from western Europe in the fifth century under the combined impact of the Germanic invasions and the hostility of Christianity to anything which smacked of paganism. It was the Islamic world, therefore, which was responsible for transmitting the legacy of Babylonian astral religion to medieval Europe. Eighth, ninth and tenth century astrologers such as Alberuni (al-Biruni), Albumazar (Abu Ma'shar), Alfreganus (al-Farghani) and Messahala (Masha'allah) assumed an unquestioned authority amongst medieval Christian astrologers. As late as 1649 William Lilly's 'Christian Astrology', the first and major opus on astrology in the English language, cited works by Albumazar, Alfreganus, Albubater, Alkindus, Alcabitius, Albohali, Alkindus, Albategnius and Messahala, all available in Latin translations dated from 1272 to 1613. (3)

The traditional date of the foundation of Islamic astrology is 770 AD., in which year the Indian astronomical-astrological treatise, the Sindhind, arrived in Baghdad. A number of the major figures, such as Masha'allah, al-Kindi and his pupil Abu Ma'shar, belonged to this period and it seems clear that the major work concerning the study of revolutions or conjunctions, that is the application of astrology to the study of history, was accomplished at this time. The impact of the theories of astrological influence on history proposed by Abu'Mashar and Masha'allah on the evolution of European notions of historical periodisation has yet to be fully evaluated but may be considerable. (4) The most enduring astrological text book, al-Biruni's 'Elements of the Art of Astrology', which included detailed rules for the interpretation of nativities, horoscopes cast for the time of birth, was published at Ghaznah in 1029. The 'golden age' of Islamic astrology, as of Islamic science in general, occupied the tenth and eleventh centuries, a phenomenon which Seyyed Nasr has attributed to the relative power of Shi'ite princes in those centuries and the tolerance of Shi'ism to pre-Islamic belief systems particularly Hermeticism and Pythagoreanism, philosophies which themselves frequently offered a sympathetic home to astrology.

The transmission of Islamic astrology to western Europe seems to have been coincident with this golden age. Lynn Thorndyke has shown how the translations of Islamic astrological texts by Christian scholars may have been underway by the late tenth century, considerably earlier than the twelfth century which was once thought to be the peak period of translation. (5) True, Claudius Ptolemy's classic work, the Tetrabiblos, was not translated until 1138, yet this event marked the culmination rather than the birth of the process. (6) That the translation of astrological material occurred at the beginning of the period of translation of Arabic texts into Latin has caused a reassessment of the process by which Islamic astrology penetrated Christian thought. The convention amongst most nineteenth and twentieth century historians has been that the process of translation represented a quest by western scholars for the true learning of the ancient classical world, principally science and philosophy, and that astrology was an unfortunate superstition which was acquired as part and parcel of the intellectual baggage inherited from the Islamic world. However, if astrological texts were amongst the first to be searched out and translated this suggests that western scholars were equally interested in astrology as in Aristotelian philosophy or classical science. Indeed, they may have been more interested in astrology than in astronomy or mathematics.

Certainly, such a proposition is not difficult to substantiate. Astrology, after all, was a supremely practical branch of knowledge. It provided insights into human biology and psychology, politics, economics, meteorology and virtually every aspect of existence on earth, supplying to the believer a completely satisfying unified theory of knowledge. More than this, it offered a scientific means of predicting the future by the simple means of anticipating projected astronomical cycles and interpreting these in accordance with rules which were to be found in any text book. European scholars would have been aware of astrology before even the first Arabic translations, a number of works having survived in Latin manuscript since the fifth century. (7) It is likely then, that an interest in astrology was fuelled by various extant texts which, though largely ignored since the collapse of Roman power, by the tenth century were sufficient to encourage European scholars to discover more about this mysterious subject, claiming as it did to hold the ultimate key to knowledge.

Astrology held out to politicians and ambitious clerics the possibility that the future might be predicted and advantage gained over one's rivals. Already in the ninth and tenth centuries it is said to have been the fashion amongst Frankish nobles to acquire the services of a personal astrologer, even though contemporary knowledge of the subject was crude in relation to the subleties and complexities of the Islamic art. (8) In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a number of the greatest translators were employed in precisely this role. Adelard of Bath seems to have cast horoscopes for the future king Henry II of England while Michael Scot secured a position at the court of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II. (9)

The nature of medieval European interest in Islamic astrology raises vital questions concerning astrology's attitudes to fate and human free will. It is though, the applications to which astrology was put which explicitly defy the commmon assumption that astrology and fatalism walked hand in hand. What, we must ask, was the point of forecasting the future unless there was some possibility of changing or amending the predicted events? Indeed, a large part of European astrology was devoted to the adjustment of the future via the principles of natural or ritual magic. The use of charms, talismans and prayer, the adminstration of herbs or the implementation of changes in lifestyle were all acknowledged means of amending one's destiny. The bulk of such methods involved the manipulation of the web of symbolic relationships between all natural and supernatural phenomena which were held responsible for the regulation of those phenomena. If this failed, direct appeal might be made to God. Such an attitude closely mirrored that found in early Babylonian astrology in which it was considered essential to offer thanks to, or placate, astral divinities depending on the nature of the relevant forecast. To the Babylonian or Assyrian priest an astrological prediction frequently required human intervention in the form of a religious ritual designed to enhance or mitigate its effects.

Did then, European scholars see in Islamic astrology a means of achieving greater human control over the natural world, of asserting individual freedom in the face of Destiny? In order to fully understand Islamic and medieval European attitudes to astrology it is necessary to look beyond the apparently fatalistic predictions dispensed by astrologers and place their work in the context of the Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Neo-Pythagorean teachings which pervaded esoteric circles in Islam from the eighth century onwards, and in western Europe from the tenth and eleventh centuries.(10)

Particularly influential in the Corpus Hermeticum, the foundation of Hermetic teaching, was the myth of Er. In this passage Plato described the subjugation of the original free soul to the demands of necessity as a consequence of physical incarnation. According to his account the stars and planets revolved on the spindle of necessity, and the soul, which prior to incarnation had taken a free choice concerning the circumstances of life and external events, but not the personality, was incarnated via the planetary spheres into a world governed by Necessity.(11) Necessity and, by implication the personality, was therefore regulated by the planetary spheres. In this dire situation Reason, the quality of the soul, was largely smothered by the passions engendered in the realm of Necessity. Throughout the Hermetic teachings life is portrayed as a battle between Reason and Necessity, with the latter invariably holding the upper hand. The initiate was required to strive to develop the attributes of Reason in order to attain liberation from the chains of Necessity.

Such an attitude often resulted in hostility to astrology, for the planets were portrayed as the gaolors who imprisoned the originally free and pure soul in this terrible world. To study astrology was therefore to accord undue reverence to celestial bodies which were rather to be objects of resentment or hatred. Yet the same doctrine could equally be used to justify faith in astrology, for were not the planetary spheres the path by which the initiate might return to the realm of Reason? In Hermetic and Neoplatonic cosmology the realm of Reason, whether conceived as heaven, or the Platonic world of Being, lay beyond the planetary spheres. In medieval art the seeker of enlightenment is frequently shown ascending a ladder to heaven via the planets. This, at least, was the rationale behind Mithraic religion. There were other contradictions. It was, for example, common amongst Platonic philosophers to deride predictive astrology on the grounds that it claimed to derive absolute knowledge from the study of the physical motions of the planets, an activity contrary to both the letter and the spirit of Platonic philosophy: the most devastating attack on astrology in the ancient world was launched by Carneades, head of the Academy in the third century B.C. Yet Platonic cosmology, reinforced by later Stoic accretions, provided the fertile intellectual climate in which astrology spread throughout the Roman world.

Such contradictory attitudes to astrology, a consequence of the internal contradictions in Platonic, Aristotelian and Hermetic teachings as well as of the differences between them, were replicated in the Islamic world. Schools such as the Ikhwan al-Safa and philosophers such as Ibn Sina repeated the classic Platonic position as outlined by Carneades by rejecting predictive judicial astrology while adhering to Neoplatonic and Hermetic cosmology with all its overtones of both spiritual and physical planetary influence. However, the fact that such people saw the practice of judicial astrology as a denial of freedom did not prevent others, influenced by the same esoteric background, from becoming devotees of the predictive art.

Seen against the background of Hermetic teaching, astrology starts with an understanding that people devoid of Reason are governed by Necessity and therefore subject to Fate. For these people astrological predictions may indeed be immutable. (12) As a highly mathematical art astrology subscribed to the Pythagorean notion of a universe regulated by number and revealed in celestial motions. By analysing and living in harmony with these motions the astrologer achieved a freedom based on the recognition and understanding of Necessity, a philosophical position derived from Stoic teachings in which individual perception of an external event was of more importance than its nature. Yet it was also part of the astrologer's task to amend external events. As we have seen in the case of his European successor, by providing talismans, prescribing medical treatment or offering a range of advice, the Islamic astrologer initiated a dialogue with destiny, the goal of which was to mitigate the demands of Necessity. Hence the close ties between astrology and the treatment of the sick, the direct application of cosmological knowledge to the prevention or postponement of death. Destiny, to the astrologer schooled in hermetic thought, was negotiable. In this process what Ibn Sina called talismat (drawing celestial forces upon terrestrial ones) was an essential accoutrement of nujun (judicial astrology). Talismat offered the practical solution once nujun had enabled a forecast to be made. The philosophical quest of the Ikhwan al-Safa was of a different order yet no less devoted to the principle of astrology as a route to the perception of the Truth.

In this context then, we may acknowledge the function of an astrological text such as al-Biruni's 'Elements of the Arts of Astrology' as something more than a manual for astrological prediction, of use to those whose attitude to life was passive and fatalistic. Rather it offered a code to be deciphered by those who were willing to begin the path of personal liberation from the chains of Necessity. Al-Biruni was a devout Muslim who had absorbed Hindu, Hermetic and other influences while remaining true to the mainstream of his faith. Astrology, in his world, offered a path to the understanding of God no less valid than of any other science.

Seyyed Nasr has defined those characteristics of Islam which allowed it to offer such a ready home to pre-Islamic beliefs and sciences, including astrology. (13) Firstly, its acknowledgment that God's Truth might be revealed through different faiths permitted the ready incorporation of Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Neo-Pythagorean teachings. Secondly a recognition that human reason might enhance rather than, as in Christianity, deny perception of Divine Truth, assisted in Islamic appreciation of classical philosophy, including those schools which explicitly or implicitly supported astrology. Lastly, an appreciation of natural phenomena as 'signs of God to be contemplated by the believers' encouraged the study of the natural environment. Once the natural realm was extended to the celestial spheres astrology too became a means of revealing God's presence. This belief in the power of nature to reveal the Divine was adopted and repeated by European astrologers as late as the seventeenth century. Nicholas Culpepper, the English astrologer who is still celebrated for his work as a herbalist, advocated the study of two great books, the Book of the Scriptures, or the Bible, and the Book of the Creatures, or Zodiac. (14) According to Culpepper, and here we see an exact repeat of Babylonian tradition, the passage of the planets through the Zodiac was the writing of God, there to be interpreted by anybody versed in astrological principles. Culpepper also made it clear that the Book of the Creatures encompassed the entire natural world. In such a perspective God's truth might be revealed through the opening and closing of a flower as through the study of astrology or the sacred scriptures. Thus the Renaissance view of astrology as a path to personal enlightenment was firmly rooted in the Islamic conception of nature. (15)

The question remains as to why Islamic astrology exercised such a fascination for medieval European scholars? For philosophers and theologians it offered somthing which Islam possessed but eleventh and twelfth century Christianity lacked, the prospect of a reasonable and rational route to comprehending God's creation. In addition it held out the seductive prospect of control over a natural world which was otherwise chaotic and threatening. These twin facets of Islamic astrology were, then, a principle motivation behind the great quest by western scholars for Islamic knowledge from the tenth to twelfth centuries, a quest whose consequences were to transform European thought.

NOTES

(1) The effect of modern prejudice on the study of the history of astrology has been raised by Patrick Curry in 'Astrology, Science and Society', pp 1 - 4. The possible reasons are discussed by Halbronn, 'The Revealing Process of Translation and Criticism in the History of Astrology', in Curry, (ed), op cit, pp 213-5.

(2) Commenting on Islamic astrology, Nasr writes of the 'helplessness and passivity of earthly creatures before the angels, or divine agents, who are symbolised by the planets'. See Islamic Cosmological Docrines, p 82. Eugenio Garin describesRenaissance European astrology as characterised by a 'consistent naturalism and rigid determinism'. See Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life, London 1983, p 16. In fact only the Stoics believed in preordained fate. All other schools of astrology allowed for human intervention in the astrological process.

(3) see William lilly, Christian Astrology, London 1647, facsimile edition 1985.

(4) For Abu Ma'shar see The Thousands of Abu Ma'shar, London 1968. For Masha'allah see E.S.Kennedy and David Pingree, The Astrological History of Masha'allah, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.

(5) Thorndike pointed to Gerbert d'Auvergne's explicit request in 984 that Lupitus of Barcelona send him a book on astrology which he had translated as a sign of active Christian interest in Islamic astrology. See A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vol 1, chapter XXX, p 698.

(6) The Tetrabiblos was written in Alexandria in the mid-second century and 'enjoyed the authority of a bible among the astrological writers of a thousand years or more'. in fact its authority was accepted without question until the mid-seventeenth century. The work was translated from Greek into Arabic by Ishaq ben Hunein in the ninth century and from Arabic into Latin by Plato of Tivoli in 1138. See Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, trans F.E.Robbins, London 1930, pp viii, xii, xiv.

(7) Marcus Manilius' first century astrological poem, 'Astronomica', appeared in a tenth century library catalogue from Bobbio, and Gerbert was aware of its existence in 983. See Manilius, Astronomica, trans. G.P.Goold, London 1977, p cvi. A manuscript of Julius Firmicus Maternus' 'Mathesis', a complete guide to astrological interpretation written around 334 A.D., may have been recorded at Regensburg library in the ninth century. See 'The Mathesis of Firmicus Maternus', trans. Jean Rhys Bram, New Jersey 1975, p 6.

(8) Thorndike, op cit., Vol 1, Bk III, chap XXIX, p 673. Alcuin, who in 770, set up Charlemagne's cathedral school at Aachen, was said to be a skilled astrologer, although his range of knowledge was probably severely limited and restricted to vague ideas of planetary influence. see Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe, London 1969, p 79.

(9) For Adelard see J.D.North, Horoscopes and History, London 1986. For Michael Scot see Michael Scot, Lynn Thorndike, London 1965.

(10) For the philosophical teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, compiled in Alexandria in the first and second centuries B.C., see Hermetica, ed and trans, Walter Scott, 4 Vols, Boulder Colorado, 1982.

(11) Plato, Republic, trans. H.D.P.Lee, London 1955, Book 7, 529-30.

(12) 'Those men who are devoid of mind are merely led along in the train of Destiny'. Hermetica Fragment 19, Scott op cit., p 539.

(13) See Nasr op cit., pp 1 - 18.

(14) Nicholas Culpepper, Catastrophe Magnatum, London 1652

(15) The Rasa'il of the Ikhwan al-Safa, probably compiled in the tenth century, ascribed all knowledge to four groups of books. The third of these, the books of Nature, consisted of 'the ideas in the Platonic sense of the forms of creatures actually existing. from the composition of the celestial spheres, the domain of the Zodiac, the movement of the stars, and so on...to the transformation of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and the rich variety if human industry'. Rasa'il IV, 106, cited in Nasr, op cit., p 39. Culpepper's Book of the Creatures was clearly identical with the Ikhwan al-Safa's books of Nature.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Al-Biruni, The Elements of the Art of Astrology, Ghaznah 1029, trans R Ramsay Wright 1934.

Al-Kindi, On the Stellar Rays, trans Robert Zoller, ed., Robert Hand, Project Hindsight, Latin Track, vol. 1, Golden Hind Press 1993.

Burckhardt, Titus, Mystical Astrology According to Ibn 'Arabi, Trans. Bulent Rauf, Aldsworth, England 1977.

Corbin, Henry, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, London 1983.

Ibn-Ezra, Abraham, The Book of Reasons, trans. Meira B.Epstein, ed. Robert Hand., Project Hindsight Hebrew Track, Vol 1., Golden Hind Press, 1994.

Kennedy, E.S.; Pingree, David, The Astrological History of Masha'allah, Cambridge Mass., 1971.

Lemay, Richard, Abu Ma'shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century, Beirut 1962.

Masha'Allah, Book of Nativities, trans. and ed., Robert hand, Latin Track, Vol. IX b, Golden Hind Press, 1994.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, London 1978.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Islamic Science - An Illustrated Study, London 1976.

Pingree, David, The Thousands of Abu Ma'shar, London 1968.

Thorndike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York 1923 - 41.

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