A HISTORY OF

WESTERN ASTROLOGY
 A HISTORY OF
WESTERN ASTROLOGY

S. J. Tester

Ballantine Books • New York

 FOR PHYLLIDA

Copyright © 1987 by Jim Tester

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-92042

„ , ISBN: 0-345-35870-8

This edition published by arrangement with The Boydell Press,

an imprint of Boy dell & Brewer Ltd.

Cover design by James R. Harris

Cover photos: (background) Blue Comet in Space © P. Ambrose/FPG International

(foreground) Sagittarius from the Ara tea,
University Library of Leyden, courtesy of Faksimile — Verlag Lazem

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Edition: January 1989

10 987654321
 Contents

Listofillustrations vi
Preface vii

I Introduction 1
II From thebeginnings toManilius 11
IIIFromManilius to Vettius Valens 30
IV Alexandria to Byzantium: Ptolemy and later Greek
astrology 57
V The LatinMiddle Ages 98
VI Renaissance and enlightenment: the second death of
astrology 204

Index 245
 List of Illustrations

I 'Birth-stone' showing Mithras and a 'reverse' zodiac, 2nd or

3rd century A.D., from Housesteads on the Roman Wall
(Museum of Antiquities of the University, Newcastle-upon-
Tyne) 105
II Taurus, from a manuscript of al-Sufi's book of constellations
(Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Marsh 144, p. 96) 107
III Geomantie image of Jupiter copied from a fourteenth-century
illustrated text of Michael Scot (Oxford, Bodleian Library
MS Bodley 266 f. 197v) 146
IV (a) Vezelay, tympanum over the west doorway showing the
zodiac 202
(b) Detail of Cancer from the Vezelay zodiac 203
 Preface

Books are sometimes fancifully treated as the offspring of their

authors. If this one be so regarded, it is one to confound the
obstetricians, since it is both premature and overdue. It is premature
because until the masses of material buried in MSS - Greek, Latin,
Pahlavi perhaps, Arabic, - have all been published, sorted, related,
assimilated and distilled out, no history of Western Astrology is going
to be possible, long or short. It is overdue, because it is badly needed;
so many wrong things are written about astrology - especially in the
Middle Ages - that some correction is necessary. It is partly that
scholars like Thorndike, who did too much in one man's working life
to get it all right, saw astrologers where there weren't any, and trusted
gossips like Simon de Phares; partly that everyone seems to have seen
astrology wherever the word astrologia occurred, or wherever an
author began his work with a description of the zodiac and the
characteristics and powers of the planets - though what followed was
a wholly astronomical work; or saw astrology wherever, in MSS or
windows or carving, a zodiac represented time, the calendar; for all
these reasons it seemed that from the twelfth century on (or even the
tenth!) Europe was full of astrologers. Which it was not. It is hoped
that this book presents a plausible picture: it is honestly based on
what evidence I have found, and it must stand or fall as my considered
opinion. At the least it may provide a framework in which to slot new
research and knowledge, until it cracks and breaks and becomes first
inadequate and then wholly wrong, as it will.
I cannot provide a bibliography. One which merely lists in alphabe­
tical or any other order all the books, articles, MSS, etc. referred to in
the footnotes is worse than useless, if it is not merely an author's
boast, since it presents the reader with a daunting wood and no
guidance through the trees. A short select bibliography is very useful;
but impossible for this book, because there are no other such works to
refer to. The reader who pays attention to footnotes will, I hope, find
all he wants.
There are some debts of gratitude to express: the obvious ones, but
none the less very warmly felt for being obvious, to various librarians
and libraries, especially of the University Library, Bristol; the Bodleian
Library, Oxford; and the British Library. And there are personal ones.

vii
 I

Introduction

Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher in Western history, is said to

have been strolling along, his head in the air, gazing at the stars, and
so to have fallen down a well, from which he was rescued by a pretty
servant-girl, who went on at him because he was so busy finding out
what went on in the sky that he didn't see what was before his feet: a
not inapposite remark to a philosopher. Perhaps it was because of his
experience with the well that Thales said all things were made from
water. Another of the early Greek philosophers said that the first stuff
of the universe was air, and another, fire. Add earth to those three,
and we have the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, which we
shall meet again and again in this story. Thales lived in the sixth
century B.C., before astrology was introduced into the Greek world.
But he, and star-gazing, and philosophy, and indeed even the rescue
by the servant-girl, are not irrelevant. Star-gazing is of course far older
than philosophy, and older than history; and philosophers with their
heads in the air are with us still, as is the common sense of
servant-girls. But the conjunction of star-gazing and philosophy and
Greece takes us very properly to the roots of our subject. For this is the
story of Western European astrology, and that self-styled ancient art is
today very much as the Greeks formed it. It was they who took the
star-gazing and its magic and mumbo-jumbo and added philosophy,
added geometry and rational thought about themselves and their
universe, and produced the art of astrology. It was they who wrote the
ancient textbooks of the art on which all later astrology has been based
- even the two important Latin books on the subject are derived from
Greek sources.
The literature of and on astrology is immense. Apart from specialist
works on particular aspects or writers of antiquity and the Middle
Ages, and Bouche-Leclerq's L'Astrologie Grecque, which remains the
best introduction to that subject, it is almost wholly, except as source
material, useless to the historian. Books on the subject fall generally
into three categories. First, there are books by astrologers or sympath­
isers, which are sometimes useful in explaining how astrology works
but are usually unhistorical - sometimes grossly so - and universally
uncritical. Second, there are books by those attacking astrology. Those
1
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

of the past are occasionally useful sources of information, but they are
for the most part at least as uncritical and unhistorical as those of the
first group. Third, there are popular outlines and histories, which have
lately been increasing in numbers though not in value. Practically
none quotes primary sources, and most seem to have been copied one
from another, generalisations, footnotes, mistakes and all. It is necess­
ary, therefore, to go back to the primary sources, many of which have
been printed, but few of which are easily accessible.
The first two categories of books, those by writers explaining or
defending astrology, and those by its attackers, seem to have existed
from very early times, when astrology became a skilled and public art,
in the early centuries B.C. There has always been, in every Western
society since the Greeks, more than one attitude towards astrology.
But before rather simply categorising attitudes, it is necessary to be
more precise about the subject itself. The name 'astrology' appears to
cover anything from a vague acceptance of stellar 'influences' on the
lives of men to precise and fatalistic predictions of the future. But
keeping to the narrower sense in which it has been defined in the
Preface, and not to anticipate its own proper divisions, there are and
have been broadly two kinds of astrology, which we may call 'hard'
and 'soft'. Hard astrology is that which assumes or accepts a firm
determinism, so that sufficient knowledge and expertise should allow
firm predictions to be made of events and actions which are 'written
in the stars' and so must happen. Soft astrology allows for the moral
freedom of man, and its attitude is summed up in the maxim, 'the
stars incline, they do not compel'. The division between these two
kinds of astrology is not always clear cut, nor do they always appear to
be mutually exclusive, but can both be held by the same individual.
This is particularly true of pagan antiquity, when the notion of free
will was not itself very clear. A Stoic like Seneca can firmly assert
man's moral freedom, and at the same time as firmly hold that fate
rules all things, and that true freedom consists in following fate
instead of opposing it, going with what is bound to happen instead of
trying to go against it, and being dragged willy-nilly. Nevertheless the
distinction between hard and soft astrology is a real one, of some
historical importance, especially in later, Christian centuries.
There are consequently four possible, and three actual, attitudes
towards astrology. One is to support hard astrology, to believe in a
determinist fate and in the necessary links between the patterns in the
heavens and events on earth in the lives of men. For those who hold
this view, the value of astrology lies in foreknowledge of the
inevitable, for as Ptolemy says (Tetrabiblos I, 3): 'Even with regard to
things which are going to happen of necessity, their unexpectedness
usually causes distraught confusion or joy beyond bounds, while

2
 INTRODUCTION
foreknowledge accustoms and composes the soul by the rehearsal of
things to come as though they were present, and prepares it to receive
everything which happens in peace and steadfastness'. Then there are
those who reject such determinism, and believe in man's freedom, and
who consequently cannot accept hard astrology. These fall into two
classes: there are some who reject fate, but do hold that the stars can
give some guidance, either as to character or even as to future events,
while leaving us free to modify our behaviour in the light of the
knowledge we gain from astrology. These are the supporters of soft
astrology, and most modern astrologers would seem to come into this
category. Lastly, there are those who reject all astrology, hard and soft
alike, whether on religious or other grounds, and whether they believe
in man's freedom or hold to some scientific or other determinism. All
three attitudes are ancient, and the Christianising of Europe made
surprisingly little difference.
Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos has just been quoted. Its four books became for
centuries the most influential textbook of astrology. Its author was that
same second century geographer and astronomer who wrote the
Almagest, the great textbook of astronomy for thirteen centuries.
Ptolemy did for Greek astronomy what Euclid did for their geometry.
Incidentally, what is now generally known as the 'Ptolemaic system',
which is really a simplified and popularised, bastard form of an
Aristotelian system of concentric spheres of aether or crystal, bears no
real resemblance to the intricate and exact mathematical system of
epicycles of the Almagest. The only real similarity between the system
of Ptolemy and the Ptolemaic system lies in their geocentricity, and
the continued use of the name is unfair to Ptolemy. He was an
Alexandrian Greek of the mid-second century A.D., and Alexandria
was the home of Greek astrology. In his Tetrabiblos (by which name, or
by its Latin form, Quadripartitum, his Apotelesmatica is generally
known) he summed up the astrology of his time, as he saw it in his
scientific fashion. In that book he says that the astrologer must be a
man 'who fully understands the movements of all the stars and the sun
and moon, so that he knows the place and time of any configuration'.
Under 'stars' Ptolemy was including the planets: the Greek, oi
TrAdvqTEc; doTEpec;, means simply 'the wandering stars'. They were so
called because instead of moving in regular daily circles about the
pole, as do the 'fixed' stars, they move across the heavens, against the
background of the stars, and at times stand still or even move back on
their tracks - when they are going back they are called 'retrograde'.
Now it is not necessary to become an expert astronomer to understand
astrology and its history, but it is important to have some idea of the
mechanics of that celestial universe which provides the data for the
astrologer.

3
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY
For him, as indeed (for convenience' sake) for modem elementary
textbooks of mathematical astronomy, the universe is a vast hollow
sphere on the inside surface of which the stars appear to be fixed, and
at the centre of which is the stationary earth. Between the fixed stars
and the earth lie the courses of the sun, moon and planets. These last
were, for much of the period of astrology's history, five in number, the
five visible to the naked eye. Four - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and Venus -
are easy to see; the fifth, Mercury, is much more difficult to spot, since
it stays so close to the sun. It is true that Uranus can also sometimes be
seen without a telescope, if the night is clear and one knows exactly
where to look; and there are astrologers who claim that it was known
in antiquity, but there is no evidence of this, and all the ancients
speak only of seven planets - seven, because for the ancients the sun
and moon are also planets, for they also wander. The order of these
seven planets, moving in from the outermost towards the earth at the
centre, is Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. This is to
put them in descending order according to the time they take to pass
right round the heavens, the basically correct assumption being that
the longer they take to go round, the further from the earth they are.
These seven are the 'seven stars in the sky' of the old rhyme, 'Green
grow the rushes O'. The 'April rainers' were almost certainly originally
angels (possibly 'Gabriel's rangers'), the angelic 'Intelligences' which
in Christian Neo-platonism turned the eight moving spheres - one
each for the seven planets and one for the fixed stars: the sphere of the
stars revolves round the earth once a day. The 'nine bright shiners' are
these eight spheres and a ninth, the outermost, the Empyrean. The rest
of this old counting rhyme has nothing to do with astronomy or
astrology, though certainly it is full of interest and mystery.
Now take the seven planets in the order set out above, and then
name the hours of each day after them, beginning with the first hour
of Saturday, named after Saturn; the second hour belongs to Jupiter,
the third to Mars, and so on round the twenty-four hours. Then the
first hour of the next day goes to the Sun. If each day is then called
after the name of its first hour, we have the names of the days of the
week. It is best to look at the names in a Latin language like French or
Italian, and compare them with the Latin, remembering that Sunday
was renamed the Lord's Day (Dominica dies) in many Christian countries,
though not in our own, despite (or because of?) the Puritans. The
seven day week is thus partly a consequence of the fact that there were
seven planets and twenty-four hours in the day, though it probably
had as much to do with the phases of the moon - new, first quarter,
full, last quarter - which recur roughly every seven days.
Let us return to the mechanics, and draw a circle to represent the
sphere of the fixed stars, the dot in the centre being the earth (Fig. 1).

4
 INTRODUCTION

Fig. 1

Let us put the north and south poles at the top and bottom of the
figure, and half way between them draw in the great circle of the
equator. (A great circle on a sphere is one whose plane passes through
the centre of the sphere.) This is the celestial equator, an imaginary
line on the inner surface of the sphere; it is the projection on the
sphere of the earth's equator. The whole sphere and everything in it
except the earth, which remains stationary, revolves on the axis
between the poles, in an east-west direction, taking 23 hours 56
minutes for each revolution. The Pole Star, which most people can find
on a starry night from the 'pointers' of the Great Bear, is virtually at
the celestial north pole, and the constellations can be seen to wheel
round it in a circle during the night.
If we watch the western horizon at and just after sunset, and note
which constellation sets with or just after the sun; and if we continue
to watch and note the constellations for a year, we shall find we have
made a list of constellations lying in a great circle on the celestial
sphere, and that the sun has moved right round the heavens, from west
to east, and is now back where it started. This great circle lies at an
angle of about 23Y2° to the equator, and it is called the ecliptic, because
it is where eclipses happen. The sun takes a year to travel round the
ecliptic, in the opposite direction to that of its daily rotation round the
earth, which it acquires by being part of the spinning sphere of the

5
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

heavens. Since it is moving slowly in the opposite direction to that

spin, it takes a little longer than the stars to go round the earth from
east to west - 24 hours, in fact, instead of the 23 hours 56 minutes
taken by the stars.
Since this west-to-east, annual movement of the sun round the
ecliptic is not on or parallel to the equator, but inclined at an angle to
it, during the year the sun seems (from the earth at the centre) to move
north and south, crossing the equator twice: once, in spring, on its
way north, and again in autumn on its way south. And twice a year it
stops moving in one direction, north or south, and turns back, to move
south, or north. The Greek for a 'turning' is tropos, and if we draw in
Fig. 1 two dotted circles to represent the sun's daily, east-west rotation
at these turning points, we shall have the tropics: of Cancer in the
north, because that was the constellation in which the sun turned
south, and Capricorn in the south, for the corresponding reason.
Remember that while the sun is taking a year to go round the ecliptic
from west to east, it is still being carried round from west to east every
day, along with everything else on or in the sphere. Now the sun takes
about 3651/4 days to get back to where it started on the ecliptic; but
that yearly motion slows down its daily rotation, compared to the
stars, so that in that year the stars have been round the earth 366¥4
times. So the stars' day is shorter than the sun's, which is why the
constellations are not all in the same places at the same time every
night of the year.
The fact that the true explanation of all this is that the earth is
spinning on its own axis every day, and travelling round the sun in a
year, does not affect the relative motions at all. The apparent motions
of the stars and sun are as have been described. The description we
now know to be right did in fact occur as a hypothesis to one Greek
astronomer, Aristarchus, at the beginning of the third century B.C.,
but since it was (and is) less than obviously true to our common sense
experience, and since it was little better as an explanation of what men
saw, it remained an idea, only occasionally referred to, and later
refuted by Aristotle's incorrect physics.
The earth at rest in the centre is not a dot, but a sphere. It was
known to be a sphere to all ancient and medieval astronomers, from
Plato's time on, and the proofs they adduced for the fact were those
which are quoted now: the disappearance of ships over the horizon,
the shape of the earth's shadow on the moon, and the appearance and
disappearance of constellations as we move north and south on the
surface of the earth. No scholar who knew even such rudimentary
astronomy as he might pick up from one of the early medieval
encyclopedias could ever have held the earth to be flat. Which is not to
say that there were not 'flat-earthers' about in the Middle Ages; there

6
 INTRODUCTION

were - and are now! But the earth is a sphere, and we must be at some
point on its surface. The point on the sphere of the stars directly
overhead is the zenith, and the circle limiting our vision, the edge of
the earth's curve over which we cannot see, is the horizon. Let us put
these on a new diagram, Fig. 2, and let us also put in the ecliptic and
the tropics. These last represent the daily rotation of the sun at its
furthest north and south points on the ecliptic, so let us draw in with a
firm line those parts of the tropics which are above the horizon. These
firm lines will then represent the daylight hours of the longest and
shortest days. Twice a year, when the sun in its journey round the
ecliptic crosses the equator, the day and night will be equal, and the
crossing points are called the equinoxes; in the northern hemisphere
the point where the sun crosses the equator on its way north is the
spring, or vernal, equinox, and the other is the autumn equinox.
The whole starry sphere, like the sun, moon and planets, is going
round from east to west each day; but since it moves slightly faster
than the sun (or, more exactly, since the sun lags behind a bit), the
constellations as it were catch the sun up, so that at one time of year a
given constellation, say Orion, may be above the horizon during the
daytime, and so be unseen, and later in the year it will have moved
round and will come above the horizon at night, and we shall be able
to see it. So, for example, Sirius, the Dog-star, the brightest star in the
sky, is visible in winter in the northern hemisphere, but in summer is
high in the sky in the daytime, and so invisible - which is why those
days are the 'dog days', so notorious in ancient accounts of the
behaviour of women, because then Sirius is with the sun, which is at
its hottest.
The most conspicuous object in the night sky, when it is there, is
the moon. Its motion is extremely complicated, and only three things
need be noted now. First, its motion against the star-sphere, though
apparently wandering, is always fairly close to the ecliptic. Second, the
time between one new moon and the next is about 2972 days (the
lunar or synodic month), while, third, the time it takes to go round the
ecliptic is just over 27 days (the sidereal month). Fig. 3 shows why
these months are of different lengths. When the moon is between the
earth and the sun (though not in exactly the same plane, which would
produce an eclipse), the moon's dark side is turned towards us, and
then we cannot see it, and it is a new moon. At the same time, it is on
a line joining the earth and some star - let us call that star S; this is
position A in Fig. 3. When the moon and the earth have moved to
position B, 27 and a bit days later, the moon is again in line with star
S, the direction of which from the earth has not changed, since the
stars are at such distances from us that their bearings are unaffected
by the earth's motion in its orbit round the sun. That is, in position B,
•7
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Fig. 3

the moon has been right round the sky, round the ecliptic, and that is
one sidereal month. But the earth-moon system has to move on for a
little more than two days before the moon is back in line with the sun,
to give us another new moon, at the end of a lunar month (position C),
because the position of the sun against the stars is changing, as we
have seen.

8
 INTRODUCTION

The regular watcher of the night sky will soon distinguish the five
planets visible to the naked eye. They shine with a sometimes brighter
and always steadier light than the rest of the stars, and only twinkle
slightly when low on the horizon. All of them move across the sphere
of the fixed stars, with a rather irregular motion. They appear at times
to stand still (in their 'stations') and even to move back for a while - to
'retrograde'. All travel within a few degrees of the ecliptic, at different
rates, Mercury taking only 88 days to go right round, but Satum taking
nearly thirty years. The zone round the ecliptic, about 8l/2° on either
side, in which the sun, moon and planets travel, is called the zodiac.
Mercury, being so close to the sun, is a very difficult planet to spot,
since it is only visible for about half an hour — before sunrise near the
autumn equinox, and after sunset about the spring equinox - and it is
rarely as bright as Sirius. Venus, in contrast, is the brightest object in
the night sky after the moon. It can cast shadows, and is even visible
sometimes in daylight. For part of the year it appears as a morning
star, and as such the ancients knew it as Phosphoros (Greek) or Lucifer
(Latin), both words meaning Tight-bringer'. At other times it is seen
as Hesperus or Vesper, the evening star. Pythagoras is said to have
identified the two as one planet, Venus. Mars shines with a reddish
light, and because of its two-year period it is visible every night for
about eighteen months, and then it disappears for four to six months.
Its motion is the most irregular of all the planets' movements, as seen
against the fixed stars, and its brightness varies greatly with its
changing distance from the earth. It was this obviously varying
distance which made the theory of concentric spheres so unsatis­
factory - if all the spheres have the same centre, the distance of any
planet cannot vary - but the irregularity of Mars' motion makes any
geocentric scheme very complicated and difficult. Jupiter, taking
nearly twelve years to complete its journey round the zodiac, is
majestically bright - hence no doubt its association with the ruler of
the Olympian gods. But the title, 'sun of the night', was given by
Babylonians and Greeks to Saturn, which is no brighter than a fairly
bright star, but which takes nearly thirty years to go round. Its
slowness suggested age, and age no doubt wisdom and power, and it
also suggested great remoteness, and so coldness and mystery. While
the sun is bright and warm and life-giving, Saturn soon became
associated with cold and death and malevolence. These five planets are
the five known to astronomers and astrologers throughout the cen­
turies before the development of the telescope.
That, then, was the system with which the astrologer dealt, a system
built up from observations with the naked eye, observations which
any man may make today who has the patience and a few simple
instruments to measure angles and altitudes. That it was geocentric is

9
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

not important: it must always be remembered that what is important

to the astrologer is the relative positions of the earth, sun, moon and
planets, and that these are the same, when expressed as angular
relations seen from the earth, whether the system of cosmology we use
is earth- or sun-centred. Our senses tell us that the earth is stationary,
and that all else goes round it, and this was the system accepted by
men throughout most of recorded history. The astrologer, said
Ptolemy, should so understand the movements of the heavenly bodies
that he can know 'the place and time of any configuration'; and
certainly astrology as defined for this book could not exist before an
accurate, or fairly accurate, mathematical system was devised which
enabled men to plot such 'configurations' - that is, the relative
positions of earth and planets against the background of the fixed
stars. This gives us an earliest date for the beginning of astrology
proper, so to speak. Somewhat surprisingly, to those who believe
astrology to go back thousands of years before Christ, that date is
about the end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century B.C.
Before that, back to the times of the first intelligent men, no doubt,
there was speculation about the influence of the heavens on the lives
of men, and some prophesying from stellar omens. But this is a kind of
'proto-astrology', about which we can only make more or less
informed guesses, and it does not come within the scope of this story.
Most of what is written about it is four-fifths speculation, and some is
very much more. The object of this book is to trace the history of
mathematical astrology from Greek times, when it began, to the
eighteenth century, to give some account of men's attitudes to it, and
its place in the history of society and ideas. Whether it is a true science
or art, or humbug, or something in between, it has been an important
item in the mental furniture of Western man for twenty-three
centuries, and its history is part of our history.

10
 II

From the Beginnings to Manilius

Astrology is the interpretation and prognostication of events on earth,

and of men's characters and dispositions, from the measurement and
plotting of the movements and relative positions of the heavenly
bodies, of the stars and planets, including among the latter the sun
and moon. This may or may not imply belief in stellar 'influences'; it
certainly implies constant and therefore usable relationships between
configurations in the heavens and events on earth. Since astrology
proper depends on the charting of the movements and positions of the
planets, it could not arise until after the growth of mathematical
astronomy. While many and fantastic claims have been made ever
since antiquity for the vast age of Babylonian astronomy, it seems safe
to say that some sort of mathematical, theoretical astronomy was only
developed late in Mesopotamian history, from the fifth century B.C.
on, and that the real development of the science was the achievement
of the Greeks.1
Early Mesopotamian astronomy was purely descriptive, and the
'prehistoric' period lasted from about 1800 B.C. until the fifth century.
Accurate and tabulated observations were probably not made before
about 700 B.C., and then they mostly concerned the moon and
eclipses, and not planetary movements. Indeed Ptolemy, in the second
century A.D., while using old eclipse tables, complains of the lack of
reliable planetary observations. Most of the mathematical astronomy
that was developed in Mesopotamia by the end of the fourth century
B.C. seems to have been concerned with the construction of ephemer­
ides for the calculation of the difficult lunar calendar. Calendrial
computation may be seen as the prime cause of the rise of scientific
astronomy, whether the calendar was needed for religious or agri­
cultural purposes (though the two are hardly separable in early times).
Greek mathematical astronomy cannot be said to have really begun
until the fourth century, with Eudoxus, and its great age was the third
and second centuries B.C., from Aristarchus to Hipparchus. Ancient

1 On this and what follows, see O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 2nd edn
(Providence, Rhode Island, 1957) 97ff, and M. P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen
Religion (Munich, 1961) II, 268ff.

11
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Egypt made only two contributions to the story of astronomy, since

the science did not develop there: 'Egyptian astronomy', says Neu­
gebauer,2 'remained through all its history on an exceedingly crude
level which had practically no relations to the rapidly growing
mathematical astronomy of the Hellenistic age'. The two contributions
were a simple calendar, which in one form or another has lasted until
the present, of twelve months of thirty days plus five or six extra days
('epagomenal' days) to make up the year; and the notion of twelve
daylight and twelve night hours, which the Hellenistic astronomers
made into the twenty-four equal, 'equinoctial', hours we still use.
So it seems that horoscopic astrology cannot be older than the fourth
century B.C., and Neugebauer says categorically that 'the main
structure of astrological theory is undoubtedly Hellenistic'.3 The
earliest truly astrological texts we possess are from Hellenistic Egypt,
in Greek, from the late third and second centuries; the earliest more or
less complete textbook is the poem in five books of the Roman poet
Manilius, at the beginning of the first century A.D.; the earliest of the
few known Babylonian horoscopes is dated 410 B.C., and the great
mass of horoscopes preserved from ancient times, all Greek, belong to
the first five centuries of our era. So the claims made by many
astrologers for the great antiquity of their art must be taken with
considerable scepticism. Astrology as defined here is a fairly recent
and largely Greek creation. Which is odd. For it is commonly and
rightly held that the classical Greeks had no star-cults, and indulged in
no worship of gods or goddesses of the sun, moon or planets. So
astrology was not indigenous to Greece, but must have been intro­
duced. What sort of astrology could have been introduced, and when?
Why did the non-starworshipping and rationalistic Greeks accept it so
readily and develop it, and what did they do to it?
The science or art of horoscopic astrology was a late and Hellenistic
creation, but it had, of course, a long prehistory; and two streams may
be said to have mingled in the Greek schools, the Babylonian and the
Egyptian. Egyptian ideas did not have to be imported. After the
conquests of Alexander the Great, the Egypt of the Ptolemies was part
of the Greek world, and Alexandria became and remained for
centuries the intellectual capital of the ancient world. It was the
Babylonian tradition that was introduced, and it was from the east that
the very idea of such an art as astrology came into Greece. Not that the
Greeks were wholly indifferent, or wholly scientific in their attitudes
to the heavenly bodies. They would have been a strange people
indeed had they not regarded the sun and moon as in some way

2 Neugebauer, op. cit., 80.

3 Ibid., 170.

12
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

divine. Famell concluded 'that sun-worship had once been prevalent

and powerful among the people of the pre-Hellenic culture, but that
very few of the communities of the later historic period retained it as a
potent factor of the state-religion, while at the same time the
individual's perception of the great luminary was still one that may be
termed religious'.4 Wilamowitz is more emphatic: 'Sun-worship is not
originally Hellenic. The gods of the Greeks, who loved and hated,
helped men and harmed them, were of the earth, belonged to the
earth, and appeared among men. In their ranks the Y-rrepiojv (powers
above) did not belong. Still less did the moon'.5 After discussing
star-myths, some of which, like those about Orion, were certainly
derived from foreign sources, he says: 'All these had nothing to do
with religion. It was first through astrology that the constellations had
any influence on the fate of men, and even there they were funda­
mentally only oqpaTa (signs)'.6 The clearest ancient authority on the
subject is Aristophanes, who in his comedy, Peace (lines 406-413)
distinguishes Greeks from barbarians by the fact that the barbarians
worship the sun and moon as gods. The Greeks themselves believed
that their astronomy was derived from Babylonia, and that astrology
was brought into Greece by the 'Chaldaean' Berosus. What kind of
astrology was it?
From the second millenium B.C. there was developed in Mesopota­
mia a vast bulk of omen-literature, which was collected and organised
in the work known as the Enuma Anu Enlil, about 1000 B.C. The
astronomy of these omens was purely descriptive, and all concern the
nation as a whole, or the king and royal princes. None is concerned
with the fate of individual men. A typical such omen reads: 'When the
Moon occults Jupiter (Sagmigar), that year a king will die (or) an
eclipse of the Moon and Sun will take place. A great king will die.
When Jupiter enters the midst of the Moon there will be want in
Aharru. The king of Elam will be slain with the sword: in Subarti
...(?) will revolt. When Jupiter enters the midst of the Moon, the
market of the land will be low. When Jupiter goes out from behind the
Moon, there will be hostility in the land'.7 These omens are taken from
stars, sun, moon and planets, eclipses, clouds, thunder and earth­
quakes. They clearly presuppose that there is some relationship
between what happens in the sky and what happens on earth, though
they do not suggest that the relationship is one of cause and effect.

4 L R. Famell, The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, 1909) V, 419f.

5 U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen (Berlin, 1931) 1, 257.
* Ibid., 262. c , .
7 R. Campbell Thompson, The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and
Babylon (London, 1900) II, 192, p. lxvii.

13
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

From the seventh century on exact observation becomes increasingly

important, and still later arithmetical computation plays a part in this
sort of proto-astrology. The names of the constellations, including
those which lie along the ecliptic, are frequently used, but there is
no sign of the zodiac as such. Many of the names were taken over by
the Greeks, and the combined Greco-Babylonian description of the
heavens was later given the name sphaera graecanica, to distinguish it
from the sphaera barbarica, the non-Greek (the true meaning of
'barbaric') and usually Egyptian description. Alongside these omens
there are a few which give predictions about a child according to the
month of birth, but these may be derived from lists of lucky and
unlucky months rather than from any astronomical data.
Among the constellations named in the omens are familiar ones like
Aries and Leo and Scorpio, now known to everyone as zodiacal signs.
But the zodiac of the astrologers is no older than astrology itself. The
first divisions of the paths of the sun and moon through the heavens
were made for calendrial purposes, as a way of measuring time. It is
difficult for us now to imagine a time when 'the date' was not simply
known, from looking at a calendar. But for many thousands of years
men only knew what time of year it was by looking at the natural
calendar of the sky, and dated the sowing of crops and all their
activities by the risings and settings of the Pleiades or of Sirius or of
some other easily recognisable star or star-group. The groupings of
stars were of course quite arbitrary, and different peoples have
different constellations, with different names, though some, such as
Ursa Major (the Plough, or Big Dipper), are so clearly marked out in
the sky as to be common to all. The sun's path round the ecliptic in the
year seems first to have been divided simply into four, the four
seasons, the dividing points being at the equinoxes and the tropics.
The division of the path of the moon led to the naming of 'lunar
mansions', known in Greek and important in far eastern and Indian,
and also in Arabic astrology. As early as the second millenium a
number of constellations were listed as standing 'in the moon's path',
and a list of eighteen contains the names of ten of the twelve we now
call zodiacal signs. The twelve from Aries to Pisces seem to have
emerged as standard form no earlier than the end of the fifth century
B.C., and the first mention of twelve equal signs, as opposed to the
constellations (of unequal extent in the heavens), was in 419 B.C.8
There was certainly some connection between this selection of
twelve and the evolution of a lunar-solar calendar of twelve months of
about thirty days, but it is quite unclear when or by whom this

8 Rupert Gleadow, The Origin of the Zodiac (London, 1968) c.ll.

14
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

time-measuring zodiac was linked with astrology. That it should be so

linked was quite natural. The combination of the ideas of lucky and
unlucky days and months, the importance of the birth date, and the
movement of the sun round the ecliptic, would lead to it. The most
obvious time and place for the connection to be made are the late fifth
century and Babylonia, with its relations with Egypt affecting its
astronomy. The general outline of the development of the idea of the
zodiac is summed up by Gleadow: 'The zodiac grew up, and must
have grown up, as a device for measuring time. Only later did it come
to be used for divination, and later still for the analysis of character'.9
So around the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth
century B.C. Babylonian astrology had probably reached the stage of
putting together lists of lucky and unlucky days and months, the
taking of omens (including those for individuals), and the course of
the sun, moon and planets through the zodiac; though here, as often,
it is very important to distinguish a belief in the value of signs in the
heavens as prognosticators of earthly events, from that clear interpre­
tation of plotted positions and movements which we know as
horoscopic or, more properly, as genethlialogical astrology. The latter
was probably just emerging at the end of the fifth century; and this is
the most likely time for its introduction into Greece. That there was
some contact between Classical Greece and Babylonian astronomy is
evident from Democritus, Frag. 55A, which shows that he, towards the
end of the fifth century, was acquainted with the Babylonian triad of
Sun, Moon and Venus (Sin, Shamash and Ishtar); and a generation
later, Eudoxus (according to Cicero, De Divinatione, II, 22) was
repudiating the claim of the 'Chaldaeans' to be able to forecast a man's
fate from the date of his birth. Slightly later still Theophrastus referred
to the same claim, according to Proclus in his commentary on Plato s
Timaeus (3.151 Diels). The earliest clear references to Babylonian
astrology in Greek are in the Hippocratic medical work On Diets of
about 400 B.C.
Now none of these sources is cleany referring to horoscopic or
genethlialogical astrology: all could simply be talking about the kind
of crude proto-astrology we have already described. The mention of
the Hippocratic writings, however, leads us to a name we have already
met: Berosus, who is clearly linked by the Roman writer Vitruvius (of
the late first century B.C.) both with genethlialogical astrology and
with Greece: 'It must be allowed that we can know what effects the
twelve signs, and the sun, moon and five planets, have on the course
of human life, from astrology and the calculations of the Chaldaeans.

9 Ibid., p. 206.

15
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

For the genethlialogical art is properly theirs, by which they are able to
unfold past and future events from their astronomical calculations.
And many have come from that race of the Chaldaeans to leave us
their discoveries, which are full of acuteness and learning. The first
was Berosus, who settled on the island of Cos and taught there, and
after him the learned Antipater, and then Achinapolus, who however
set out his genethlialogical calculations not from the date of birth but
from that of conception' (Book VI, 2). Nothing further is known,
incidentally, of either Antipater (whom there is no good reason to
connect with the Stoic Antipater of Tarsus) or Achinapolus. The other
relevant reference to Berosus in ancient authors10 tell us that he was a
priest of Bel and lived to be a hundred and sixteen years old; and
Pliny quotes his authority for believing that the Babylonians had been
observing the heavens and keeping records for 490,000 years! One
might reasonably be forgiven if one rejected the whole story as fiction,
but that there was a fairly widespread tradition that astrology was
brought to Greece by Berosus, that there is evidence for his existence
apart from his astrology, and that we know that astrology was not
indigenous among the Greeks.
At least the association with Cos, and the date, probably the early
fourth century, are plausible enough. Cos was the home of the
Hippocratic school of medicine, and there were connections between
astrology and medicine from very ancient times. And the time was
ripe. The critiques of the old Olympian religion - of the anthropo­
morphic pantheon of Zeus and Hera, Ares and Aphrodite, Hermes and
the rest - by the fifth century philosophers and Sophists had led to the
attempt by the philosophers themselves, and notably Plato and
Aristotle, to find more satisfactory gods in the heavens. In the Laws
and the Epinomis especially, Plato argued for the divinity of the
heavenly bodies, who were to be worshipped for the eternal math­
ematical beauty of their regular movements. Whether Plato was
influenced by his somewhat dubious 'Chaldaean guest' or more by the
Pythagoreans, who were inclined to the same sort of view of the stars
and who had greatly influenced his cosmological dialogue, the Timaeus,
is not of importance here. Pythagoreanism, Plato and Aristotle, and to
some extent the Orphic religion (which came from the east, and also
influenced Plato), all prepared the ground for the reception of
astrological ideas. That astrology proper was late developing in Greece
is evident from the fact that all later astrology fixes the vernal equinox
at either 8° Aries or 0°, and not 15° as older astronomers like Eudoxus
had done. The early fourth century, then, seems the most likely time

10 Vitruvius, II.1, VIII.1; Seneca, Quaest. Nat., III.29, 1; Pliny, N.H., VII.123, 160 and 193;
Censorinus, De die natali, xvii.

16
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

for the introduction of astrology into Greece, and Cos was probably at
least one of the places where that introduction was effected. It is
possibly not without significance that although the Greek states did
not set up temples to the sun, moon or stars, Cos had a small shrine of
Helios, the sun-god, and Hemera, the goddess of day.11
Why did the Greeks then take to astrology, so much so as to make it
their own and create the art as we now know it? Only partly because
they were at that time already turning from the old religious forms to
more personal and sometimes mystical religions. There is no evidence
of widespread popular astrology until much later, in the second
century, and it was not the uneducated and superstitious who
accepted and developed it. It was the philosophers, like Plato, who
prepared the ground, and the Stoics - who were among the greatest
logicians and physicists of their times - who most fully worked it into
their system. It was the doctors and the scientists like Theophrastus
who accepted it and developed its associations with medicine and
plants and stones, and with the science of alchemy, which was then
nearer to chemical technology than to the magical search for the
philosophers' stone it much later became. Those who have admired
the Greeks for their clear rationalism (and who have always ignored
anything they saw as contrary to it as un-Hellenic, no matter whether
the author was a Greek and the language Greek and the time Classical)
have so pre-conditioned their own thinking as to misunderstand both
astrology and its appeal to the Greek mind. Farnell wrote:12 'Let it also
be here noted among the great negative gains of Greek religion, that
the communities avoided star-worship, and that therefore in the days
of its independence the Hellenic spirit was saved from the disease of
astrology'. (Notice the curious 'liberal' assumption that it was the
alien, autocratic rule of the Macedonians which turned the clear­
headed Greeks into addle-pated astrologers and the like.) Even
Cumont, after much of value on 'the new sidereal theology' of the
philosophers, and on the Pythagorean 'system of numbers and
geometrical figures designed to represent certain gods' being 'in
accordance with astrological theories', even Cumont can write: 'The
insatiable curiosity of the Greeks, then, did not ignore astrology, but
their sober genius rejected its hazardous doctrines, and their keen
critical sense was able to distinguish the scientific data observed by
the Babylonians from the erroneous conclusions which they derived
from them. It is to their everlasting honour that, amid the tangle of
precise observations and superstitious fancies which made up the
priestly lore of the East, they discovered and utilised the serious

11 Famell, op. cit., 419.

12 Ibid., 420.

17
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

elements, while neglecting the rubbish'.13 That statement is untrue

both in its detail and in its totality; it could only have been written by
one who had decided what was to be allowed as 'Greek on a priori
grounds. It is the 'Macarthyism' of the Classical scholar: too many
Greeks indulged in un-Greek activities! George Sarton was much
nearer the truth when he wrote: 'One might almost claim that Greek
astrology was the fruit of Greek rationalism. At any rate, it received
some kind of justification from the notion of cosmos, a cosmos which
is so well arranged that no part is independent of the other parts and
of the whole'; and 'the basic principle of astrology, a correspondence
between stars and men, enabling the former to influence the latter,
was not irrational'.14 Neugebauer sums it up pithily: 'Compared with
the background of religion, magic and mysticism, the fundamental
doctrines of astrology are pure science'.15
The point, and it is a very important point indeed, is that astrology
appealed to the educated Greeks precisely because they were rational,
and because it was a rational system, or could be made to look like
one. It is not an accident that the two greatest of the Greek
astronomers, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, were both also astrologers, the
latter the author of the most influential ancient textbook of astrology.
Nor were the Greeks necessarily wrong about this; but right or wrong,
they accepted astrology, and its acceptance as a learned and scientific
study was the common, if not the normal, attitude to it down to the
eighteenth century, and it is impossible to understand men like Kepler
and Newton unless astrology is seen for what the Greeks made it, a
rational attempt to map the state of the heavens and to interpret that
map in the context of that 'cosmic sympathy'16 which makes man an
integral part of the universe. The scientific basis of astrology in
antiquity is seen in the order in which the planets are named. In Plato
and Aristotle we find what is known as the 'Egyptian' order: moon,
sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; the older Babylonian order
was moon, sun, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars, an order which
from the fifth century on was sometimes changed to moon, sun, Mars,
Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter. But the order called 'Chaldaean',
which was undoubtedly Greek and astronomical, derived from the
planets' periods of rotation round the ecliptic, and hence their

13 F. Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (New York and
London, 1912) 40ff and 53.
14 G. Sarton, A History of Science: Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries
B.C. (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1959) 165.
15 Op. cit., 171.
16 The phrase is Greek: e.g., Ideler, Physici et medtci graeci minores (Berlin, 1841) I, 396:
Xwpis yap KoopiKr)^ oupnaQciac; toi<; dv9pdnToi<; ouScv yivcTai: 'nothing happens
to man outside, apart from, the cosmic sympathy'.

18
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

assumed distances from the earth, was moon, Mercury, Venus, sun,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. It is this order, which becomes standard from
the second century B.C., which is used in Greek astrology.
The learned Greeks of the fourth and third centuries received
Babylonian astronomy and astrology together, and developed both —
indeed, they used the same word, astrologia, for both. One of the first
writers to distinguish the two words, astronomia (which is rare in the
Classical period) and astrologia, was Isidore of Seville, in the seventh
century A.D.17 At almost any time in Latin, astrologia can mean either
or both. But Isidore defines astronomia as dealing with 'the turning of
the heavens, and the risings, settings and motions of the stars, and
why they are called what they are', and then distinguishes what he
calls physical astrology, which deals with 'the courses of the sun and
moon, or the fixed seasons of the stars', from superstitious astrology,
which is that which is 'pursued by the mathematici, who prophesy by
the stars, and who distribute the twelve heavenly signs among the
parts of the soul and body, and attempt to foretell the births and
characters of men from the courses of the stars'. Now such a
distribution of the twelve signs certainly was made in Egypt, in
Alexandria; and many of the learned Greeks we are concerned with
lived and worked in that great Greco-Egyptian city of the Hellenistic
age. There they inherited some aspects of Egyptian thought which
they incorporated into their astrological thinking, and which had a
lasting influence on astrology. It is important, first, that ancient Egypt
produced no astrology of its own. All the works directly or indirectly
concerned with astrology as we know it were written by Hellenistic
Greeks in the third century B.C. or later. Nor are there any astrological
pictures from ancient Egypt, even though, as Gleadow says,18 'no
culture has left more abundant monuments in record of its beliefs'; the
two 'zodiacs' of Dendera, the two of Esna, the horoscope of Athribis
and the coffin of Heter, all belong to the first two centuries A.D.
Astrology was the creation of the Hellenistic Greeks; but many of the
men who made it were Alexandrian Greeks, and the Egyptian
influence was strong.
We have seen that one of the Egyptians' most important contribu­
tions to astronomy was the calendar, of twelve months of thirty days
each, plus five 'epagomenal' days (six in leap years). They began their
year with the heliacal rising of Sirius, which in dynastic times
immediately preceded the flooding of the Nile, on which Egypt
depended. The heliacal rising of a star or constellation occurs when the

17 Etymologiae, III.27.
18 Op. cit., 182.

19
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

star is seen rising in the east just before sunrise; its heliacal setting is
when it sets in the west immediately after sunset. By the end of the
second millenium B.C., thirty-six constellations were associated with
the calendar, each constellation's heliacal rising taken as the 'last hour
of night' for ten days, when the next constellation had to be used.
There are many lists of these thirty-six constellations from the Middle
Kingdom on, and they vary a great deal in their names and order, as
might be expected over a long period. The constellations so used are
known as 'decans', though the origin of the name is obscure.19 Now
the risings of these decans during the night were used to divide the
time of darkness into hours; and since in summer, at the time of
Sirius' heliacal rising, twelve are seen to rise before dawn, the night
hours were twelve. There were ten full daylight hours in the time of
Seti I (about 1300 B.C.), decimal counting being the rule. Add to these
an hour of twilight at each end of the day, and we have twelve day
hours and twelve night hours, the length of the hour varying with the
time of year. Twice a year, at the time of the equinoxes, day and night
are equal in length, and all the hours are equal, and it was obviously
more convenient for astronomers to use these equal, 'equinoctial'
hours regularly, and so we got our twenty-four hour clock.
Now two constellations are easily and safely identifiable in the
decan lists, Sirius and Orion; and Sirius was the leader. The interval
between the heliacal setting and rising of Sirius, the period of its
invisibility, was about seventy days; and the other constellations were
probably chosen to have about the same period of invisibility. They
thus all lie in a zone parallel to and south of the ecliptic - that is, in or
near the zodiac. Now since the year is a little longer than 365 days, and
not 360, the decanal calendar gradually got out of step with the actual
year, which necessitated complicated alterations. When in Ptolemaic
Egypt the calendar was reformed by the addition of a sixth epagomenal
day in leap years, the Greco-Babylonian zodiac was already known,
and it was a simple step to add the decans to the zodiac, so that they
became ten-degree divisions of that circle. It is as such that they are
shown round the edge of the circular zodiac at Dendera, in the time of
the Roman emperor Tiberius. Once they became sections of the
zodiac, they were absorbed into astrology.
One of the texts in connection with the decans belongs to what is
known as the Hermetic literature, writings in Greek of Ptolemaic
Egypt, which include one of the most important source-books of
ancient astrology, the work attributed to Nechepso and Petosiris. But

19 On the word, Sekovoi;, decanus, see A. E. Housman, Manila Astronomicon Liber Quartus
(London, 1920) ixff. On the astronomy of the decans, see Neugebauer, op. cit., 81ff.

20
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

first, why 'Hermetic'? One of the ancient Egyptians great gods was
Thoth. He was originally associated with the moon, and hence became
the god of time and time-measurement, and so of astronomy. Possibly
because of this, or perhaps quite separately, he was also associated
with writing, and so with all the arts and sciences which depend on
writing, including medicine, astrology and alchemy. In the Egypt of
the Ptolemies, in the course of the fourth century, the Greeks of Egypt
identified the Egyptian gods with their own, so that Osiris became
Dionysus, Horus Apollo, and so on. Hermes already possessed many
of the attributes of Thoth, and we know from Aristoxenus of Tarentum
that the identification Hermes-Thoth was made before the end of the
fourth century. Now the Egyptian Greeks often applied the epithet
'megistos' (greatest) to their gods, and sometimes used the Egyptian
form of intensifying an adjective by repetition, and we find megistos so
repeated in inscriptions. In some way we cannot now trace, the name
of Hermes was so dignified, and in his case three adjectives were
abbreviated to 'trismegistos' (thrice greatest), and the form Hermes
Trismegistos became a name in its own right. To Hermes Trismegistos
were attributed works of all kinds, connected with many arts: 'The
Hermetic literature presents us with the most varied forms: under the
patronage of Hermes were put writings on astrology and astrological
medicine, magical recipes, works on alchemy, small philosophical or
theosophical treatises, questions of astronomy, physics, psychology,
embryogeny, natural history (Kyrartides) - in short, everything which,
with the decline of rationalism, was taken to be science'.20 All this
literature is Greek, and there is no evidence that any of it preserves
any of the ancient writings of the Egyptians themselves. Much of the
earliest work in the corpus is on astrology, which must be later than
the early fourth century, and most of it is second century or later.
Two of the most important of these astrological writings were the
treatise known as the Salmeschiniaka (the sch is pronounced as in
school), and the textbook of Nechepso-Petosiris; and fragments of
many more lie buried in the appendices of the twelve volumes of the
Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum. Others have become
known from Arabic writings of the ninth century and later, and a few
in late Latin versions.21 Only fragments of both works survive; the

20 A.-J. Festugiere, La Revelation d'Hermes Trisme'giste, L’Astrologie et les Sciences occultes,

I (Paris, 1944) 82.
21 On the Salmeschiniake see W. Kroll in Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. V, cols 843-6. For
Nechepso-Petosoris, E. Riess, 'Nechepsonis et Petosiridis fragmenta magica', in Philo-
logus, Suppl. VI (1892), 325-388. The Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum was
published at Brussels between 1898 and 1953 under many editors, chiefly Cumont and
Boll. The Latin text of one important Hermetic astrological treatise had been published,
with a long commentary, by W.Gundel: 'Neue astrologische Texte des Hermes

21
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Salmeschiniaka is quoted by Nechepso-Petosiris, and the latter is

quoted or referred to by almost all later astrologers. Both these works
are Greek, and both belong to the middle of the second century B.C.
Both works show evidence of ideas of Babylonian origin, and indeed
the Salmeschiniaka may have been first a Babylonian work. It mentions
the Babylonian god Nebu, and it deals with five-day intervals, which
were Babylonian, as opposed to the Egyptian decans; and the name
may be derived from the Babylonian word salmi, meaning 'pictures . A
five-day interval gives one seventy-two such pictures, and it is
interesting that Pliny, nearly three centuries later, also refers to
seventy-two pictures: 'They (that is, those who cannot cope with
astronomy) are excused by the vastness of the universe, its immensity
divided across its height into seventy-two signs, that is, likenesses
of things and animals, into which the learned have divided the
heavens'.22 On the other hand, the pictures were probably Egyptian
(Pliny puts the Pleiades in the tail of Taurus: but the sphaera graecanica
had only the fore half of a bull in the sky, while the sphaera barbarica,
which was basically Egyptian, had the whole animal); the decan
names in the work are certainly Egyptian; it is included by later
writers under the name of Hermes Trismegistos, and the papyrus
fragments are Egyptian. So it looks as though in this work we can see
the mingling of Babylonian and Egyptian Greek astrological traditions,
in the second century B.C., in, probably, Alexandria.
Much more frequently quoted by later authors than the Salmeschi­
niaka is the work attributed by them to Nechepso and Petosiris. These
two were assumed to be an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh and High Priest,
which lent them the authority both of rank and antiquity. It was
common (and still is to some extent) for astrological writers to claim
great antiquity for their art; but there is no real doubt that the names
have no historical connection with ancient Egyptian personages, or
that the work was originally Greek, written in the second century B.C.,
or even between 80 and 60 B.C., as Riess thought. The book seems to
have been a medley of verse and prose, and very long. It is difficult
even in the pages of Riess' article to disentangle what was original to
Nechepso-Petosiris; it becomes almost impossible in the works of later
Greek writers of the second to eighth centuries A.D., who tend to refer
to Nechepso and Petosiris, or simply to 'the ancients', whenever they
feel the need for the authority of the centuries, which is much of the
time. There was certainly much in the work which is commonplace in
later writers, and a good deal, on comets, on eclipses in various signs,

Trismegistos', in Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil-hist.

Abteilung, Neue Folge, Heft 12 (Munich, 1936).
22 Pliny, NH, 11.8110.

22
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

on good and bad times for action, and on the expected length of life,
for example, which was probably ancient in the second century. Some
of it, for example Riess' Fragment 12, sounds like 'updated' Babylonian
omen-literature - brought up to date by being put into a zodiacal
context: 'When Mercury is in Gemini at the time of the rising of Sirius,
the rising (of the Nile flood) will be a proper one, there will be
rejoicing among the people, and the king will be victorious'. It may be
that the rule for the Lot of Fortune (that it stands to the Moon as the
Ascendant to the Sun) was in Nechepso-Petosiris, and also the idea
that the Ascendant at birth is where the Moon was at conception. It is
impossible now to be clear about the origins of many of the ideas
current in these early centuries of astrology. What is certain is that
they were developed and gradually assimilated to a zodiacal system by
the Hellenistic Greeks of Egypt, whether they were originally Egyptian
or Babylonian ideas, or invented by the Greeks themselves.
Other evidence of early, relevant mixing of Babylonian and Egyptian
thought is provided by astrological medicine. Berosus was said to
have settled on the island of Cos, the home of Hippocratic medicine,
and astrology early found its way into the Hippocratic corpus of
medical writings. In Egypt, medicine was under the patronage of
Thoth, as was astronomy; when, in the guise of Hermes Trismegistos,
he collected astrology as well, he naturally gathered under his aegis
astrological medicine, or iatromathematica, to give it its ancient Greek
name. At some stage in the fourth and third centuries the parts of the
human body had been allocated to signs of the zodiac, beginning at
the top, with the head, and at the vernal equinox, with Aries, and
working down the body and round the zodiac, ending with Pisces
looking after the feet. This association of anatomy with the stars was
most likely made by the Greeks themselves, under the influence of
that idea of cosmic sympathy, of the oneness of the universe,
including man, which played such an important part in Stoic thought.
The idea of the universe as the macrocosm, and man as the microcosm,
reflecting in his nature and structure that of the whole, is a Greek one,
and largely Stoic. Now in the Hermetic corpus there are some writings
concerned with what might be called homoeopathic medicine: the
general idea was that the sign governing a particular part of the body
was affected by a malevolent planet, or a planet in a bad aspect; and
by sympathy, the part of the body was also affected, and was sick. It
followed that the remedy was to increase the power of the sign, by
using such plants and animals as were associated with it. Egyptian
medicine already had a large and ancient stock of such semi-magical
remedies, and the association with the stars was probably made under
Babylonian influence. In Babylonia also, medicine was magical; the
Greeks were the first to develop scientific medicine - it was indeed

23
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

their oldest empirical science. The Babylonians regarded the positions

of the stars and planets as having favourable or unfavourable aspects,
and medical charms and amulets were made or chosen to accord with
favourable states of the heavens.
The association of plants with the heavenly bodies23 probably grew
out of astrological medicine. Plants were individually associated with
signs of the zodiac, with the planets, with the decans, and even,
though much more rarely, with fixed stars. Though most of the texts
we have are from very much later, Pfister reckons that the material
they contain points to the period between the second century B.C. and
the first century A.D. as the time when the details were worked out. In
the same way, Egyptian medical practice was responsible for the
linking of certain animals with signs and planets. But the association
of stones with signs of the zodiac is of dubious antiquity and presents
many problems. Stones were early related to the planets, including the
sun and moon in their number, and these relationships appear to have
been derived from resemblances, mostly in colour, between the stones
and the planets.24 They were also associated with fixed stars, according
to a treatise which exists only in a Latin version of the Arabic of
Mesha'allah, the eighth century astrologer, but which the author
claimed was derived from Hermes. Colours were associated with the
planets from very ancient times in Babylonia, but the different colours
attributed to the several planets differ widely in our authorities, the
only common elements being red for Mars and gold for the sun. But
there seems to be little connection between the stones attributed to
signs or planets and colour. It seems more likely that the stones are
derived from the association in Egypt of magic stones with days of the
months and with the decans, and then later through the decans with
the zodiac, and from that, still later, with the planets. Planetary metals
were almost certainly derived from alchemy. The original home of
alchemy was Hellenistic Alexandria, and the same Egyptian associa­
tion of lucky and unlucky times - days or decans - with the stars led to
the mingling of astrology and alchemy which was to have such a long
history, and to the allocation of different metals to the several planets.
Gold for the Sun, and silver for the Moon were obvious choices, and
the association of quick-silver with Mercury, which already had just
such a mobile character, lasted long enough to transfer the planet's
name to the metal. Lead was given to Saturn: its weight and colour

23 On this and for details, see F. Pfister, 'Pflanzenaberglaube', in Pauly-Wissowa,

XIX.1446ff, esp. 1449ff on astrology; for lists of plants, see Festugiere, op. cit., 139ff,
Gleadow, op. cit., 85f, and the Appendices to CCAG, e.g., VI.83; VII.253f; VIII 3 132 153'
VIII.4.260 etc.
24 On planetary colours and minerals, see A. Bouche-Leclercq, L'Astroloeie erecque (Paris
1899) 313ff.

24
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

suited the slow, cold planet. Jupiter was originally given electrum
(gold and silver alloy) but later and usually tin, Venus copper, and
Mars, as befitted the god of war, iron.
Most of this sort of association, the mixture of different 'sciences'
with astrology, took place in a confused and confusing way, with no
general consensus of opinion, in those same third and second
centuries B.C. in Egypt which saw the development of astrology itself.
There is one further possible Egyptian contribution to the tradition.
The zodiac as we know it, with its twelve signs, was the invention of
the Babylonians. But there were and are other ways of dividing the
circle to the ecliptic. The most important and longest lasting is into
houses , which the ancients called, generally, tottoi, or in Latin loci.
The name 'house' for such a division is confusing, since each planet
has one or two signs of which it is the 'ruler', and these are called the
'houses' (oTkoi or domi in the ancient languages - or domicilia) of the
planets. But the tottoi, loci, developed into the modem 'houses', which
govern different spheres of man's life, and which, since they are
concerned with what happens in this world, mundus, are called
'mundane houses'. These may have originated in Egyptian divisions
of the ecliptic.
The simplest division, and probably the oldest, is into four quad­
rants. The four points dividing the quadrants were called KEvrpa or, in
Latin, centra or cardines. They were: the point of the ecliptic which was
rising above the horizon at the time in question; the point where the
meridian (the arc of longitude passing through the observer's zenith)
cuts the ecliptic; the point on the ecliptic which is setting; and the
point directly opposite the second - that is, where the other half of the
meridian cuts the other half of the ecliptic. The first was called the
cbpooKOTTo^, horoscopus, or ascendens, and is now known as the Ascen­
dant, abbreviated to ASC. The second was the pcooupavqpa, the
Midheaven, still known by its Latin name Medium Caeli, and abbre­
viated to MC. The third was the 6uois or Suvov, the occasus, or
setting-point; and the fourth was the uttoyeiov, still, like the second,
called by its Latin name, Imum Caeli, the IMC.
For the ancient Egyptians, the sun and stars are strong and young in
the east, rise to their greatest power in the midheaven, and decline
into age and weakness in the west. Hence if the quadrants are related
to human life, it is natural that the first, from the horoscope to the MC,
should govern a man's youth, the next from the MC to the setting
point his manhood, and so on round the circle. This is simply stated in
a Hermetic astrological work, a late compendium of older material,
some of which survives in a Latin translation: 'Chapter XXIV: On the
four quarters of the figure, and how you can know of the four ages of
man in nativities. The beginning of the four is the horoscope. Now

25
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

from the first degree of the ascendant to the degree of the Medium Caeli
is called the eastern, masculine quarter; and this quarter signifies the
first age of life. The second quarter is feminine, and is called
meridional; that is, from the degree of the Medium Caeli to the degree
of the setting point. This is the southern and meridional quadrant.
This signifies the middle age, which follows youth; for in middle age a
man shows what he can do. The third quarter is from the degree of the
setting point to the degree of the IMC, which is opposite the MC. It is
a masculine quarter and signifies old age. The last is from the degree
of the IMC to the ascendant, and this is feminine and is the northern
quadrant; it signifies extreme and decrepit old age and death'.25 Early
astrology probably worked simply in terms of these quadrants, and
traces of this can be seen in the same Hermetic treatise, for example in
Chapter XXVI: 'If the Moon is in the ascendant, and Venus in the
setting quarter, and Mars in the MC, then the child will be born of a
slave mother or of one of low degree ...' etc. Or again: 'If the Sun and
Saturn are in the ascendant, and Jupiter in the MC, and the Moon and
Mars either following or in the setting quarter ...' But the later
twelve-house division is found in the same chapter, as in the formula:
'If the Moon is in the ascendant and Jupiter and Mars are in the
eleventh (house) ...'
The next step was to divide each of these quadrants into two, so that
each cardinal point had two houses, one on each side of it, one having
risen just before it, the other just after it. This system of eight houses,
the octatopos, was to live on in various forms. To each of the eight was
allocated some sphere of human life, such as marriage, sickness,
children, riches, and so on. There is considerable difference among
ancient astrologers as to exactly what is attributed to each house, and
which is the more important, the ascendant or the MC. The step from
eight houses to twelve (the number influenced no doubt by the
twelveness of the zodiacal signs) may have arisen from giving a sphere
of influence to the cardinal points themselves, and then giving them
an equal space in the ecliptic circle. It may have happened the more
easily since the old diagrams were generally not circles at all, but
squares, as indeed they continued to be for centuries. In Figure 4 the
square is simply divided by its diagonals into four Quadrants or
quarters. In Fig. 5 the square formed by joining the mid points of the
sides is added, so that each cardinal point now has two sections, one
on each side, and the eight sections of the octatopos result. Twelve
sections are achieved by inserting the inner square shown in Fig. 6, and
there are our twelve houses, each allocated a particular sphere of life. It
is very important to notice that these twelve sections or houses are

25 See Note 21, Gundel.

26
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

independent of the zodiac. Their position round the ecliptic is fixed by

the degree of the ecliptic rising over the horizon, the ascendant. The
sign of the zodiac which will be in that position will depend on the
time and place. The twelve mundane houses, then, are a sort of fixed
framework within which the zodiac revolves, in a clockwise direction.
Two other elements of the birth-chart were introduced or developed
at this same time from the mixing of the Babylonian, Egyptian and
Greek traditions. One is the doctrine of the dodecatemoria, the other
that of the Lots (xAqpoi, sortes), and in particular the Lot of Fortune
(TuxQ/ Fortuna, the sign for which was often ©). As to the dodecate­
moria, the ancients are thoroughly confused and confusing; the clarity
introduced by the logical mind of Housman, for all its plausibility, is
his own, as he confesses:26 'The materials are dispersed and fragment­
ary, and the order and sequence which I here bestow upon them are
conjectural; but this history, true or no, will explain the variety of the
evidence and harmonise its discord. I advise no one to read Mr Bouche
Leclercq's account of the matter, L’astrol. grecque pp. 299-303, unless he
wants to be confused and misled'. Alas, though the misleading is
Bouche-Leclercq's - he conflates and simplifies without enough
reference to datable sources - the confusion was that of the ancients
themselves.
As to the word itself, dodecatemorion, it clearly has something to do
with twelve parts (dodeca is the Greek for twelve, and a morion is a
part), so that any twelfth part might be called a dodecatemorion.
Consequently, in the Babylonian tradition, the signs of the zodiac
themselves, as twelfth parts of the ecliptic, were sometimes called
dodecatemoria. Now each thirty degree sign could be divided into
twelve parts of 2V2°, and each part allotted to a sign, in the same order

26 Housman's Manilius, Book II (London, 1912) xxii.

27
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

as they are arranged in around the zodiac. Each of these 2'/2° parts was
also a dodecatemorion, and therefore was by some writers very
properly if long-windedly called a 'dodecatemorion of a dodeca­
temorion'. This obviously mutiplies the possibilities for interpretation,
since while a planet might be in a certain sign, say Cancer, it might be
in the dodecatemorion of that sign belonging to Gemini, and so its
influence would be modified by both Cancer and Gemini. There were
various rules for calculating what the sign of the dodecatemorion was,
and because the one decided upon was then referred to as the planet's
dodecatemorion, they came to be called, improperly, 'dodecatemoria of
the planets' or 'of the moon'. At the same time, there were evolved
dodecatemoria of the cardinal points (the ASC, MC and so on) and of
the Lots; and Manilius has yet another kind of dodecatemorion of the
planets, in which each 2V20 part of each sign is allotted in ¥2° steps to
the five planets in the order Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury. All
this looks clearer than the sources in fact are, and some of the
confusion, involving single degrees or half degrees of signs, possibly
arose from the grafting on to the Babylonian-Greek zodiac of some of
the Egyptian lore of lucky and unlucky days and times, each having its
chronocrator, the 'ruler of the time'.
The Lot of Fortune as we know it in our sources is certainly the
invention of Hellenistic Egypt, but it may ultimately be derived from
an older Babylonian 'place of the moon', the great god Sin. The moon
was very important in Babylonian astronomy and astrology, and their
calendar was lunar. The involvement of the moon in all the various
methods of calculating the position of the lot of Fortune, plus the fact
that it is sometimes referred to as 'the horoscope of the moon',
suggests an early connection with Babylonia. The moon was com­
monly regarded as having power over man's physical constitution,
while the sun was responsible for his psychical make-up - though
ancient writers occasionally reversed these roles. Now the goddess
Fortune, Tyche, became in Hellenistic times, with the breakdown of
the older religion, almost the most important of the gods. Men felt, in
the post Alexandrian world, that more and more of their lives was
ruled by chance, luck, Tyche. And, as Bouche-Leclercq remarks, 'her
sex, her Protean nature and her capriciousness all brought her closer
and closer to the moon'.27 So a place in the circle was found for her
which depended on the moon, the sun, and, since all positions
ultimately depended on it, the horoscopus, the ascendant. The means of
calculating the position of the Lot of Fortune are variously described
by different authorities, some of whom seem not to be at all clear
about what they are doing. Its general importance - it ranks with the

27 Op. at., 289.

28
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO MANILIUS

ascendant itself - was however admitted by all, even by Ptolemy, who

mentions no other Lots, but who sums up the basic principle of its
computation by saying that the Lot of Fortune should have the same
relation to the moon as the ascendant to the sun, 'that it may be as it
were the horoscopus of the moon' (Tetrabiblos, III, 10). The other Lots
most commonly used were the Lot of Daimon, the Lot of Necessity,
and the Lot of Eros, though there were probably other Lots in these
early centuries, which left traces in later horoscopes. There may also
have been confusion between Lots and houses, loci, as Neugebauer
and van Hoesen suggest,28 which would not be surprising, since the
loci often bore the same names, Necessity, Daimon, Eros and so on.
We may now sum up the position of Hellenistic astrology in the
time of Hipparchus, astronomer and astrologer, in the mid second
century B.C., omitting details, since on details the sources are
frequently, indeed most often, contradictory, as astrology was still in
the early stages of its evolution. The main lines are, however, fairly
clear. The birth-chart, which has for long been called (strictly speak­
ing, improperly), the horoscope, gave as accurate a picture as was
possible of the state of the heavens at the moment of birth, setting the
sun, moon and five planets against the circle of the zodiac. This
moving circle was then itself set within a fixed framework of eight, or
more often twelve loci, or houses, each one governing some sphere of
the life of man, so that the influence of the planets could be evaluated.
This relationship of the zodiac to the circle of the houses was fixed by
the horoscopus, the ascendant, the degree of the zodiac which was
rising over the horizon at the moment of birth, which marked the first
house. Interpretation was then further complicated by the addition of
dodecatemoria and various Lots, among which by far the most
important was the Lot of Fortune. The fixed stars played almost no
part in all this, apart from those constellations which gave their names
to the signs of the zodiac. There is an occasional mention of
paranatellonta, or synanatellonta, stars which rise at the same time as a
given sign, and of major stars like Regulus or Sirius, but they appear
to be of little or no significance at this stage. The mathematics and the
astronomy behind all this was very crude, and in particular the
methods of calculating the divisions of the houses were clumsy and
approximate; it was not until the invention of spherical trigonometry,
probably not before the time of Ptolemy, that more accurate division
became possible.

28 O. Neugebauer and H.B.van Hoesen, Creek Horoscopes (Philadelphia, 1959), com­

mentaries on horoscopes Nos 95 and 137, pp. 36 and 411,

29
 Ill

From Manilius to Vettius Valens

Manilius takes the story of astrology to Rome, where it had arrived at

least two centuries earlier; it is referred to both by Ennius and Plautus,
who wrote at the end of the third and the beginning of the second
century B.C., and the first expulsion of the astrologers from the city
had been in 139 B.C. But before we consider people's attitudes to
astrology, especially those of the philosophers, and the reactions of the
state and the growing Christian Church, let us continue the account of
the evolution of astrology itself, beginning with the poem of Manilius.
Nothing is known of the life of the author, and even the name has
occasioned much discussion and doubt, though the commonly accepted
form Manilius has been most cogently argued for and will be used in
this book. The exact dates of the writing of the five extant books of the
poem are also the subject of much argument, though there is no doubt
that the poem as a whole belongs to the period between 9 A.D. and
the early years of the reign of Tiberius, say 15 A.D. As we now have it,
the poem is in five books, the last possibly somewhat mutilated, as
Housman thought, and having large gaps. The work is probably
unfinished: in Book II Manilius promises an account of the planetary
influences, which we never get, and twice in the work he promises to
gather it all together, but never does; and it is certainly impossible to
cast a horoscope or fully interpret one from Manilius' work, though it
clearly sets out to be an astrological textbook. It may seem a little odd
to the modem reader that anyone should want to write a textbook in
verse, but there are two points to remember. First, hexameter verse
had been the vehicle for the greatest Latin philosophical work of the
preceding hundred years, the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, and the
only astronomy the Romans had in Latin was in verse translation, of
the astronomical poem of the Greek Aratus, of the third century B.C.
And second, Manilius was undoubtedly writing for the circle of
litterati of the court, and verse was the proper didactic medium for
such people. Indeed, the difficulty of expressing mathematical and
astronomical ideas in Latin hexameters was for them one of the great
attractions of the work, and one of which Manilius was fully conscious
and - not wholly justifiably - proud.
The first book is an introduction to elementary astronomy, a sphaera,

30
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

as it was called - just sufficient description of the heavens to enable

the student to follow the astrological matter to come. It covers in part
the ground of the last section of the first chapter of this book,
describing the circles of the tropics and equator, the arctic and
antarctic, the horizon and the meridian, and also the Milky Way. It
includes this last not as relevant to astrology, but because Manilius is
copying an older sphaera, a description of the heavens, and much of
the book is taken up with lists of the fixed stars in their constellations
- not always accurately placed, since Manilius' astronomy reflects the
state of the science before the time of Hipparchus, a century and a half
before his own time. Lines 263-274 list the signs of the zodiac, though
the position of the zodiac itself is not described until four hundred
lines later:

First Aries shining in his golden fleece

Wonders to see the back of Taurus rise,
Taurus who calls, with lowered head, the Twins,
Whom Cancer follows; Leo follows him,
Then Virgo; Libra next, day equalling night,
Draws on the Scorpion with its blazing star,
Whose tail the Half-horse aims at with his bow,
Ever about to loose his arrow swift.
Then comes the narrow curve of Capricorn,
And after him Aquarius pours from his urn
Waters the following Fishes greedily use,
Which Aries touches, last of all the signs.

The order of the signs, moving round the zodiac in an anticlockwise,

east-west direction, and beginning with the vernal equinox, was
Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius,
Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces, to give them the Latin names by
which they are commonly known, and which are familiar to all those
who read their 'horoscopes'. They are usually denoted by symbols,
which vary a good deal in older authorities, and are not found at all
before Byzantine times; the common forms today are, in the same
order:"y' K Q HP — 1TL G ''S ~~ X- Manilius' lines 805-812
list the planets, in the Chaldaean order we have already met: Saturn,
Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. These also have their
symbols, again of recent origin, except those for the sun and moon,
though that for the sun seems to have changed at the Renaissance: the
older form was and the post-Renaissance form Q; the others are
Saturn X , Jupiter 9, , Mars Q", Venus Q , Mercury , and Moon d .
The book ends with a lengthy section on comets, and their importance
as portents, with historical examples, but we shall leave comets for a

31
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

thirty-five lines of Book V (which looks unfinished) possibly also

belong to the sphaera of Book I, where they certainly more naturally fit.
They classify the fixed stars according to their magnitude.
The other four Books deal with astrology; for detailed summaries the
reader is referred to the editions of Housman and Goold.1 We shall
here be concerned only to illustrate Manilius' own thought and the
confused and evolving state of astrology at this time, from those
passages where he differs from many other ancient authorities. In his
fourth book, as occasionally in odd passages elsewhere, he indulges in
some philosophical generalities. He was writing for the educated
Roman gentleman of the Augustan literary society, a gentleman with
considerable acquaintance with Greek philosophy, especially, perhaps,
that of the Stoic school. Near the beginning of the book (lines 14ff)
Manilius wrote:

The fates rule the world, and all things are established by a
settled law; each long age is marked with its settled chances. At
our birth we begin to die, and our end depends upon our
beginning. Hence flow wealth and power, and poverty, too often
found; hence all are given their skills and characters, their faults
and virtues, their losses and their gains. No one can renounce
what he is given, or possess what he is not given, nor can he
grasp by his prayers the fortunes denied him or escape that
which presses on him: each must bear his own lot.

These fine phrases are the commonplace of the Stoics, and there is no
doubt that the Stoicism accepted by many educated Romans, especially
in the form in which it was cast by Posidonius, who adapted it to
some extent to suit Roman ideas, made easier the acceptance of Greek
astrology. Not that all Stoics did believe in astrology; but their creed,
insisting that fate ruled all things, and that a common law and
'sympathy' bound everything in the universe into one whole, clearly
allowed for divination, the perception of the workings of that law, of
fate, through signs, including signs in the heavens. For, as Manilius
says later (lines 883-896):

Nature is nowhere concealed: we see it all clearly, and hold the

universe in our grasp. We, being part of the universe, see it as
our begetter, and, being its children, reach to the stars. Surely no

1 A. E. Housman, M. Manila Astronomicon liber primus (London, 1903). The other books
were published as follows: Book II in 1912, Book III in 1916, Book IV in 1920 and Book V
in 1930. G. P. Goold s edition and translation in the Loeb Classical Library appeared in
1977. It contains (pp. xvi-cv) a comprehensive guide to the poem.

32
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

one doubts that some divinity dwells in our breasts, and our
souls return to the heavens, and come from there; and that just as
the universe is constructed out of the four elements of air and fire
and earth and water, the whole being a lodging for the governing
Mind within, so we too possess bodies of earthly substance and
spirits nourished by the blood, and a mind which governs all and
controls every man. Is it so strange if men can understand the
universe, seeing that there is a universe within themselves, and
each is in small image a likeness of god?

This is that cosmic sympathy so dear to the Stoics, which made man
an image of the universe, a microcosm; an idea that was to have a very
long history, with ramifications in many fields besides astrology.
A little more than the first quarter of Book I, which runs to nearly a
thousand lines, is taken up with the classification of the signs of the
zodiac according to their natures and qualities, as masculine and
feminine, human or bestial, simple or multiform, and so on. The
gender of the signs, as Housman remarks, 'is founded not on sex but
on the Pythagorean fantasy that odd numbers are male and even
numbers female', so that the feminine group, since we start from Aries
as first, 'is led by a female Bull, providentially amputated at the
shoulders'. In three places Manilius is either unique or at any rate
different from most ancient astrologers: he classifies Aries, Leo and
Sagittarius as running, Gemini, Virgo and Aquarius as standing,
Taurus, Libra and Capricorn as sitting, and Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces
as lying down. This classification is different from a similar one in
Ptolemy, in that Ptolemy's is obviously based on the nature of the
signs, while Manilius bases his on the posture of the signs in pictorial
representation. Again, Manilius lists four signs as 'maimed' (Hous-
man's word: the Latin has fraudata ... amissis ... membris, diminished
by the loss of some parts), Scorpio, Taurus, Cancer and Sagittarius.
Lists of such signs in other astrologers are generally longer, though
Vettius Valens names only two. Scorpio was maimed by the loss of his
claws, which went to make the constellation Libra; Taurus limps on a
doubled-up leg, Cancer has no eyes, and Sagittarius but one (in the
pictures, that is). In the allocation of signs to seasons, the ancient
astrologers differ: most begin the seasons with the tropical signs,
spring with Aries, summer with Cancer, autumn with Libra and
winter with Capricorn; but occasionally they are put as the ends of the
seasons, and Manilius sets them in the middle of his groups of three,
so that Pisces, Aries and Taurus belong to spring, and so on.
He then deals with what are technically known as aspects; that is,
the geometrical relations of the signs. A modern textbook defines
aspects thus: 'Astronomically, aspects are certain angular distances

33
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

made at the centre of the earth between a line from one planet and a
line from another. These are measured in degrees along the ecliptic'.2
For 'planet' read 'sign' and this will do for the ancients. We shall have
much more to do with aspects when we come to Ptolemy, and one
example must suffice here. Since there are 360° in a complete circle,
three lines can be drawn from the centre to the circumference 120°
apart, the three points on the circumference making an equilateral
triangle (Fig. 7). As there are twelve signs of the zodiac, it can be seen
that four such triangles, known in antiquity as trigons (the Greek for
'triangle' is Tpfycovov, transliterated into Latin as trigonum), can be
inscribed in the zodiac, each linking three signs as a group, which
modern astrologers usually call a 'triplicity' but sometimes a trigon,
like the ancients (Fig. 8). So one can also inscribe squares (with an
angle of 90° at the centre) or hexagons (with a 60° angle), or draw lines
across the circle horizontally or vertically, to get other aspects, the
most obvious of which is direct opposition.
With regard to the aspects, the only point in which Manilius differs
from others is in his estimate of the trigon as being much more
important and powerful than the square; most others make them equal
in power, but opposite in effect.
There follow twenty lines linking the signs with the twelve great
gods and goddesses, six of each. The list given by Manilius is:

Aries: Minerva Libra: Volcanus

Taurus: Venus Scorpio: Mars
Gemini: Apollo Sagittarius: Diana
Cancer: Mercury Capricorn: Vesta
Leo: Jupiter Aquarius: Juno
Virgo: Ceres Pisces: Neptune

It will be noticed that by this arrangement, gods face goddesses across

the zodiac. There is other evidence, both literary and monumental, for
the attribution of the same signs to the same gods, and two things
should be remarked here. First, that there is no connection between
the allocation of gods or goddesses to signs and the gender of the
signs, and second that this has nothing to do with the system of
planetary houses', according to which, for example, Gemini is in the
house of Mercury.
After this digression, Manilius goes on with the relations between
signs, describing those signs which 'see' and 'hear' one another (in
which classification there are minor differences between the various

2 M. E. Hone, The Modern Textbook of Astrology, 4th edn (London, 1968) 180.

34
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

Fig- 8

authorities), and those which 'love' and 'lie in ambush for' one
another: with these last it is perhaps better to stick to Manilius's Latin
terms, and call them amantia and insidiantia. It is here worth quoting
Housman's note in full, for the joy of his English:

The amantia and insidiantia are apparently unknown except to

Manilius, who arranges them as follows. From the point or
pEOEp06Aq|ja between the first masculine sign Aries and the first
feminine sign Taurus, there is drawn a diameter of the circle; and
across the wall thus built the masculine signs play Pyramus to a
series of treacherous or apathetic Thisbes. Each pays court to that
feminine sign which is equidistant with himself from the
dividing point, and she, if a northern sign, repays him with
trickery, if a southern, with indifference. The scheme therefore is
the following.
Aries loves Taurus, who tricks him.
Gemini loves Pisces.
Leo loves Capricornus.
Libra loves Scorpius.
Sagittarius loves Virgo, who tricks him.
Aquarius loves Cancer, who tricks him.

On the enmities between signs, Manilius is again alone among our

ancient authors, as he is on what Housman describes as 'the less fertile
and attractive topic of friendship'.
There is more on the signs, on their 'characters' and effects on men's
arts and professions and interests in Book IV. Between ten and
eighteen lines are given to each of the signs in order, beginning with
Aries; as an example, we may take what he writes of Gemini (152ff):

35
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

A softer inclination and gentler way of life comes from Gemini,

through various kinds of singing, and harmonious voices, and
slender pipes, and words fitted to the natural sound of strings.
Work itself is pleasure to them. War's arms and trumpet they
wish far from them, and bitter old age; they go lovingly through
life in peace and perpetual youth. They discover the paths of the
stars, and by understanding the mathematics of the heavens they
complete the whole circle of the sky and pass beyond simple
knowledge of the constellations. Nature is subject to their
intelligence and at their service in all things. Of so many gains
are Gemini said to be productive.

Much of this can be seen to tie up with the fact that Apollo, the god of
the Muses, was said to dwell in this sign (Book II, 440), and much of it
accords with what other astrologers say. Most later astrologers,
however, make the planets responsible for most of it, not the signs. In
all of this, Manilius is drawing on sources now lost, and is using them
carelessly enough to get some of his details wrong - or perhaps his
sources made the mistakes, and he did not spot them. It is one of the
characteristics both of astrological writers and even more of the scribes
who copied their work that they did not always fully understand what
they were doing, and their mathematics was generally weak.
On the quadrants, Manilius is very much in accord with other
astrologers, and makes the same mistake as many of them in assuming
that they cut the zodiac into four equal parts, and seeming to imply
that the Medium Caelum is directly over the observer's head, and the
Imum Caeli beneath his feet. Now the place of each of the four
cardinal points is fixed as regards the observer; the zodiac moves
through them. They are, it will be remembered, the points where the
observer's horizon and meridian cut the zodiac, and the horizon and
meridian are stationary lines; the zodiac, of course, is turning round
the observer every twenty-four hours. If the zodiac were on, or parallel
to, the equator the signs would rise and set at a constant rate and the
cardinal points would divide the zodiac into four equal parts. But the
zodiac is inclined to the equator at an angle of about 23Vi°, and the
consequence is the signs rise at different rates, and the quadrants are
not equal. Since the division into loci, mundane houses, depends on
this first location of the cardinal points, ancient authorities are
confused about that division. Older methods of computation were
arithmetical and clumsy, and though fairly accurate for Babylon or
Alexandria, were, when taken over and applied to other places in
other latitudes, inaccurate.
Manilius' order of importance of the four cardinal points is his own,
but there is so much disagreement among early astrologers that it is

36
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

Fig-9

clear that the doctrine had not yet been settled. The same is true of the
allocation of functions, areas of life, to the houses. These are the twelve
divisions forming that fixed framework with the cardinal points
within which the zodiac revolves. They are generally numbered from
the ascendant, the horoscopus, round in an anticlockwise direction
(Fig. 9).
Manilius' account of the houses, which he calls loca templa, sedes or
partes, is given here for comparison with later sources. He does not
number them, nor does he deal with them in order round the circle.
He first takes those not in any aspect, that is, not standing in any of
the recognised geometrical relationships, with respect to the ascen­
dant: that is, numbers 2, 6, 8 and 12, which are either next to the
ascendant or five places away. Of these Manilius says (II, 864ff):

The one which has risen third from the highest heaven (i.e. third
from the MC, counting back - No. 12) is an unfortunate place,
hostile to future affairs, and over-productive of evil; nor is it
alone, for equal to it is the one which shines with its star
opposite, next to the setting point (the occasus - No. 6). And last
this one seem to excel (that is, that the sixth house may not be
better than the twelfth), each moves equally subject to a cardinal
point (both are what the Greeks called diTOKA(|jaTa, setting after,
by modern astrologers called cadent) and spreads the same ruin.
Each is a gate of labour (porta laboris); one is for climbing, the
other for falling. No better fate attends the one above the setting
point (No. 8) or the one below the ascendant (No. 2): one (8)

37
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

rushes down, the other is backward and retarded, and each

either trembles at its imminent end, being so close to a cardinal
point, or is about to lose support and fail. They are rightly known
to be the abodes of Typhon (Typhon, or Typhoeus, was one of
the Titans who rebelled against Zeus and were defeated and
punished, Typhon by having Etna piled on top of him; this name
for these two houses is peculiar to Manilius).

He next deals with those related to the ascendant by trigon or

hexagon, numbers 3, 5, 9 and 11. He first deals with the last of these,
next to the MC on the east, 'which follows next after the summit of
heaven' (which the Greeks called ETravacpopd, rising after, now called
succedent). This is the house which in other authorities is called
ayaOdc; Saipcov, bonus daemon, or bonus genius, 'the good spirit', and
which Manilius calls Fors, or Fortuna felix (the text is doubtful at this
point). Jupiter dwells here and, as Housman says, 'Manilius loads it
with praises, and forgets in his enthusiasm to tell us what it presides
over'. He then deals with the one diametrically opposite, No. 5, next
on the west to the IMC, which is called Daemonie (Manilius confesses
he cannot find a Latin name for it) and presides over health and
sickness. We are then told about the other two opposites, Nos 9 and 3;
the first, next to the MC on the west, where the sun lives, is called
Deus, God, and looks after the affairs of the body, and the other, next
on the east to the IMC, is called Dea, Goddess, and is the house of the
moon. It is not clear from the text what the function of this 3rd house
is; as it stands the text says that it 'shines with a yellow light and rules
over deaths' - fuluumque nitet mortisque gubernat (line 912), but the first
three words are all doubtful, especially mortis, which is a highly
irregular accusative plural; and in any case Manilius himself puts
death under the seventh house. (Goold reads, 'fratrumque vices
mortesque', and translates 'it controls fortunes and fates of births'; but
it's an odd translation of vices mortesque, and where did fortune come
from?)
The last four houses form a square, since they are the four
containing the cardinal points. Manilius starts from that containing
the MC, which is Venus' home, and which looks after marriage; it is
often simply called Fortuna, and is No. 10. Opposite is No. 4, with the
IMC. It is called Daemonium, and there Saturn dwells. Being where it
is, and having Saturn as its tutelary god, 'it acts as a father exercising
its powers over the fortunes of fathers and of old men' (lines 934-5).
The other pair of opposites is Nos 1 and 7, the first containing the
ascendant, the other the occasus, or setting point. The first house is the
abode of Mercury, and presides over the fate of children and the

38
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS
desires of parents; the seventh is called Ditis ianua, the door of the
underworld, and presides over death, as it does over the end of the
day, and also over constancy and the keeping of promises. Two points
should be noticed with regard to what Manilius says about the planets
and these houses. First, they are not the planetary houses properly so
called, about which Manilius says nothing anywhere; and second, that
Mars has apparently no house to dwell in at all.
So much for the 'mundane houses'. Manilius' doctrine of the Lots, or
sortes, is in his third book. He is alone in having twelve such Lots,
numbered in the same direction as the houses, and starting with the
Lot of Fortune as number 1. Other ancient astrologers deal in terms of
anything from one to seven such Lots; the only point on which they all
agree is the importance attaching to the Lot of Fortune. On the other
hand there are more than twelve names for Lots in the ancient texts,
and it may be that Manilius found his circle of twelve in his
source-books - it is extremely unlikely that he invented it, since he is
obviously following other authorities, often with less than complete
understanding. Since Manilius' Lots are numbered in order, it clearly
suffices to know where to put the first, and the rest follow.
Now the position of the Lot of Fortune is determined with relation
to that of the horoscopus, the ascendant: the Lot of Fortune must be as
far from the moon as the ascendant is from the sun. So the calculation
of its position involves those of the sun, moon and ascendant. And
this implies knowing where the ascendant is. Given that the time of
birth is known, where is the horoscopus - what degree of what sign
was rising over the eastern horizon at that moment? The answer to
this question depends on the rising times of the signs, and these
rising times depend in turn on the latitude of the birthplace, because
of the obliquity of the ecliptic (the zodiac) to the equator. Manilius
here displays the modesty of his understanding. He rejects, early in
the book, what he calls 'the vulgar method of calculation', which
assumes that each sign takes exactly two hours to rise - because, as he
says explicitly (line 225), 'the circle of the signs lies in an oblique
circle' (a point he had ignored in Book II when discussing the cardinal
points). Then two hundred or so lines later he describes a third way of
working out the position of the ascendant, which is with a minor
variation precisely that same vulgar and erroneous method. As
Housman says, 'Alas, alas! This alternative method of yours, my poor
Marcus, is none other than the vulgar method which in 218-24 you
said you knew, and which in 225—46 you exposed as false. The wolf, to
whom in his proper shape you denied admittance, has come back
disguised as your mother the goose, and her gosling has opened the
door to him'. The details of the calculations are complicated, and we
shall leave them until we come to Ptolemy and his Tetrabiblos; suffice

39
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

it here to say that earlier writers are few of them clearer or better than
Manilius.
A further inconsistency between this book and the previous Book II
lies in Manilius' attribution to each of his twelve Lots certain areas of
human life, as for example civil life to the third, and money and
prosperity to the sixth. But, to quote Housman again, 'liars need not
have long memories if they address themselves only to fools, who
have short ones; an astrological poet writing his third book may safely
forget his second, because an astrological reader will never remember
it. But the impious and attentive sceptic will not fail to remark that
some of the goods now packed in these compartments have already
been stowed elsewhere'. Marriage is indeed here assigned to the fifth
Lot; it has already been given to the setting point in II 839 and to the
tenth house in II 925, and these three places cannot all be the same.
Passing on to further division of the zodiac itself, we come to the
decans, on the Egyptian origins of which something has already been
said in Chapter II. Here yet again Manilius preserves what must be an
older tradition, in allocating each decan, each 10° third of each sign, to
the signs in order; most other, and all later astrologers attribute them to
the planets. So, for Manilius, the first ten degrees of Aries belong to
Aries, the second ten to Taurus, and the third to Gemini; the first
decan of Taurus is Cancer's, the second Leo's, and the third Virgo's;
and so on round the circle. Manilius himself gets the first two decans
of Pisces wrong, allocating them to Aries and Taurus instead of
Capricorn and Aquarius. He does not say precisely what the effect of
all this is, but presumably the effect of the sign is modified by the
decan: if the birth lay in, say, the second decan of Gemini, the effects
of Gemini were modified by the influence of Scorpio; if in the third
decan of Scorpio, then Pisces modifies the influence of Scorpio itself.
The next smaller division is into dodecatemoria, on which Manilius
is confused and confusing. The only point in which he stands alone is
in producing dodecatemoria which are only half a degree. Each is
therefore one fifth of the 21/2° dodecatemorion, and the five in each of
the 2V2° units are then allocated to the five planets (excluding the sun
and moon, that is) in order. They are called dodecatemoria pre­
sumably, as Housman suggests, because each planet then possesses
twelve of them in each sign. To add to the complications, Manilius
treats of the degrees of the zodiac individually, in Book IV, listing
those degrees of each sign which, because they are too hot or too cold,
too wet or too dry, are partes damnandae, harmful degrees. Something
over a hundred (the text is doubtful) out of the three hundred and
sixty are such. Although other astrologers have similar lists of
individual degrees and their effects or their links with planets, there is
no agreement between them, and Housman says of Manilius' scheme,

40
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS
I have found no counterpart anywhere else, and I have discovered no
plan or principle at the bottom of it'.3 Manilius apologises profusely
(lines 430ff) for the necessity he is under to put so many numbers into
verse, and goes on obviously enjoying his own dexterity in doing so.
The way in which we are having to leap from book to book in order
to get some sort of logical order into the exposition of Manilius' ideas
shows how lacking in coherent organisation his work is. The second
half of the third book is concerned with two topics: the ways in which
the divisions of time composing man's life - years, months, days,
hours - are influenced by the heavens; and the methods by which we
may know how long our lives are going to be. As to the first, Manilius
expounds two, mutually incompatible, systems. The first starts from
the sun's sign, the second from the ascendant. The common and
peculiar element is that in both systems the influence in question,
over years and months and so on, is attributed to the signs of the
zodiac, whereas Ptolemy and most later astrologers ascribe this
influence to the planets. There is little doubt that Manilius' system is
the older. It was possibly the system of an astrologer friend of Cicero,
Nigidius Figulus, the first truly Roman astrologer we know of.4 There
is a reference to it in a satire of Persius (V 45ff), who may have been
drawing on Nigidius, as did his contemporary Lucan in the Pharsalia
(I 649-65). Manilius may have got his ideas directly from Nechepso-
Petosiris, since the idea is certainly Egyptian, derived from an earlier
level of ideas in which periods of time were governed by star-groups
unrelated to the zodiac. A half-way stage between the position of
Manilius and that of Ptolemy is found in Paulus Alexandrinus - two
centuries later than Ptolemy, but such was the confusion among
astrologers that old elements of the system were preserved in some,
and changed in others, and it is practically impossible to set a date to
any particular doctrine's invention or introduction. Paulus describes a
system of 'time-rulers', ypovoKpdTopEc;, very similar to the second
method of Manilius, but then goes on to ascribe the influence to the
planets in the signs.
The same process of evolution may be seen in the matter of
forecasting the length of life. Manilius ascribes the prime influence to
the signs (though he also allots some power to the houses, and is alone
in doing so). Many other ancient writers do the same, all apparently
following Nechepso-Petosiris in this principle, though not in the

3 Book V, p. xii.
4 The fragments, which tell us virtually nothing about Nigidius Figulus' system, were
published by A. Swoboda, P. Nigidii Figuli Operum Reliquiae (Vienna/Prague, 1899,
reprinted Amsterdam, 1964) 106-128. Swoboda's detailed disquisition on Nigidius'
astrological writings is on pp. 35-61 (in Latin).

41
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

crudity of the older practice, which dealt simply in terms of quadrants

and degrees of the equator. Later astrologers, like Ptolemy again,
ascribe the influence to the planets. The overall picture is one of broad
evolution from ideas of the influence of fixed stars and star-groups in
general, to that of certain particular star-groups which lie in the path
of the sun and moon, and hence to the signs of the zodiac, and then to
the paramount influence of the planets in the signs. It is, of course,
precisely this last that Manilius promises to deal with, and never does.
What he does treat of at the end of Book IV is the effect of lunar
eclipses in each of the signs; which doctrine Manilius probably also
got from Nechepso-Petosiris, though there is little of it in other and
later astrologers.
A lot of this fourth book is devoted to astrological geography, the
lands and regions of the earth allotted to the several zodiacal signs.
There are many such lists in our sources, and it is possible to put them
into some sort of rough chronological order by considering the
geographical scope of each list. The earliest are concerned only with
the Near East and India (known of through trade up the Red Sea and
Persian Gulf, as well as through Alexander's conquests), while the
later lists extend to the north and west. There is very little agreement
between these lists, and no good reason to go into details here. But the
reason for this kind of astrological geography is stated clearly enough
by Manilius in lines 807-817:

So the whole earth lies divided between the stars, from which are
to be drawn the rights proper to each; for they enjoy the same
communication with one another as the signs between them­
selves, and as they (the signs) join together or in hatred separate,
at one time diametrically opposed, at another joined in a trigon,
by different causes directed to various influences, so lands are
related to lands, cities to cities, shores to shores, and kingdoms
set against kingdoms. So will each man have to avoid or choose a
place for himself and, according to the stars, mutual trust is to be
hoped for or dangers to be feared, as his genes (race, family) has
come down from the high heavens to earth.

So far we have hardly mentioned the fifth book, which deals with
the stars and constellations which rise at the same time as the various
signs of the zodiac, or their decans, or even their separate degrees. The
technical words for such stars are ouvavcrrrAAovTa and TrapavaTcAAovTa,
paranatellonta being the usual word for them in later sources and the
one we shall use here. It seems most likely that lists of paranatellonta
were first drawn up in order that men might be able to tell the time at
night when the signs of the zodiac were themselves not visible; like

42
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS
the zodiac itself, and the decans, they were originally time-measurers.
Plato s pupil Eudoxus made a list of them, which was used in the early
third century B.C. by Aratus in his Phaenotnena, a poetic description of
the heavens. Hipparchus made a more accurate list a century later, and
no doubt there were many more. It was difficult to make an exact list,
since the rising times of the signs were themselves only approximate,
and clearly, since these last vary with the latitude of the observer, so
too should tables of paranatellonta. It would therefore be necessary to
specify for what latitude the table was drawn up. In fact, the ancients
dealt not with latitudes, but with climata, or 'climes'. Each clima, clime,
was defined by the ratio of the longest to the shortest day. For
example, at Alexandria the longest day was fourteen equinoctial hours,
the shortest ten, and the ratio was 7:5, while at Babylon the ratio was
3:2. Based on these two cities, two systems of climata were developed,
in each case seven climes being listed, and the two systems were
constantly confused. Later, with more accurate trigonometrical
methods, a system of climes beginning with the equator where the
days are always the same length, and increasing the length of the
longest day in half-hour steps, was developed; Ptolemy, in his
astronomical work, the Almagest, lists eleven such climes, of which the
presumed habitable seven became standard for most later writers. So a
table of paranatellonta could be made up for a given clime, and used to
tell the hour of the night when the signs of the zodiac were hidden.
At some stage these paranatellonta began to be used for astrological
purposes also. Later authorities say that this was first done by Teucer
of Babylon, who probably lived in the first century A.D., but it must
have begun much earlier. A link was probably established, in Egypt,
between these time-reckoning lists and lists of fixed stars and their
influence on men's lives; and then between these and accounts of the
effects of the decans and separate degrees of the zodiacal signs.
Something of this early confused state can be seen in the Hermetic
treatise we have already referred to in Chapter 2.5 Chapter XXV of that
work deals with 'the fixed stars, and in what degrees of the signs they
rise', and contains a very long list indeed, with such items as:
'Between the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh degrees of Aries,
Aelurus (the Cat) rises, and it makes men fearful, and unwilling to
accept responsibility, and foolish'. The name of the star-group Aelurus
is from the sphaera barbarica, the Egyptian description of the heavens.
But it is not only the fixed stars that are mentioned in the list: for
example, 'when the twentieth degree of Aries is the horoscopus, it
makes men immodest'. Teucer of Babylon did make such a list, and

5 Pp. 20-21 and note 21.

43
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

there are fragments of others extant, but there is only so much

agreement between them as might be expected to be derived from the
similar inferences made from the names of the constellations.
As an example from Manilius' list, we may take lines 118-127 of
Book V:

With the twenty-seventh degree of Aries the Hyades will rise.

Those born at this time do not enjoy peace or quiet, but they
seek crowds of people and the bustle of affairs. They like noisy
social unrest, and want the Gracchi holding forth from the
platform, leading revolutions; they enjoy civil strife, and add fuel
to the fires of disquiet. They (that is, the Hyades) stir up dirty
hordes of filthy peasants; and they begat the faithful swineherd
of Odysseus. These are the characters the Hyades produce as
they rise.

This sort of treatment of paranatellonta belongs to an early stage in the

evolution of astrology; the fixed stars play a decreasingly important
part in the art as it develops. In modem astrological practice only a few
important fixed stars actually occupying particular degrees of the signs
themselves are taken into account in the interpretation of a natal chart.
So the general picture which emerges from Manilius' five books is of
astrology in the early stages of its growth from crude beginnings with
quadrants and various influences from the stars to more precise use of
the signs of the zodiac, and more and more complicated subdivision
into different sorts of dodecatemoria, down to half-degrees of signs.
The actual interpretation of the influences and their effects varies
greatly from writer to writer, and there is as yet no standard practice
among astrologers, no general agreement, though some lines are
beginning to be discernible. We know nothing of what Manilius
believed about the influence of the planets, since either he did not
write about it at all or what he wrote has been lost. It would not be
safe to argue that because he gives so much influence to the signs and
parts of signs, and to the fixed stars, the planets must have been pretty
unimportant; since as we have seen, Manilius is quite happy to
allocate the same field of influence to a number of different parts of the
heavenly machinery.
That the planets were important and were becoming more so is
evident from the fragmentary sources we have telling us of astrology
in the time between Manilius and Vettius Valens, and from Vettius
Valens himself. Mention has already been made of Nigidius Figulus,
who worked in the mid- first century B.C. That was, of course, before
Manilius; but Manilius was drawing on sources much older than his
own time and, as is evident from his mistakes, he was not a practising

44
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

astrologer. Nigidius was; and we are told by Lucan in the Pharsalia

(I 649-665) that he consulted the skies for guidance on the outbreak of
the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, just before morning
twilight in late November 50 B.C.6 What Nigidius did was describe the
positions of the planets and pronounce his verdict: the state of the
heavens forecast great dangers and disasters for Rome. He told his
audience that the sun was not in Leo, nor was Saturn in the tenth locus
- either would have made things worse, presumably; but Mars was in
Scorpio, and above the horizon, the only planet to be seen; Jupiter was
in the sixth locus, Venus dim and obscured, and Mercury stationary. It
appears that all this is astronomically impossible for that time, and it
may be that either Lucan has got it wrong, or he or Nigidius 'cooked'
it to make it look black for Rome. The details do not matter; but it can
be seen that what interests Nigidius is the positions of the planets and
their relations to the loci.
The same emphasis on planetary positions is found in the horo­
scopes collected together by Neugebauer and van Hoesen.7 Their book
contains all the Greek horoscopes they could find in the papyrus
sources together with those they gleaned from literary sources such as
Vettius Valens and the appendices to Cumont's Catalogues.8 Those
from the papyri are scattered fairly evenly over the first four centuries
A.D.; those from literary sources, which make up the great majority,
because of the collection of Vettius Valens, mostly belong to the
second century (from about 100 to 188 A.D.). The literary horoscopes
are all used as illustrative examples by their authors, and are clearly all
drawn from collections of horoscopes made in these early centuries -
all are obviously genuine natal charts, and can be dated accurately, for
the most part, from the astronomical data they present. Almost all of
them are simply lists of the planetary positions, with a few references
to the positions of the horoscopus (the ascendant) and the Lot of
Fortune. All four cardinal points are mentioned in only one horoscope,
one of the earliest literary examples; the Medium Caeli is only
regularly included from the late fourth century on. Fixed stars are very
rarely mentioned at all, and paranatellonta only once, in the second
century. Very few of the horoscopes contain any recognisable astro­
logical material besides the factual data on which interpretation could
be based, and very few indeed make any kind of predictions. The
positions of the planets are obviously computed from 'handy tables'
such as those later made by Ptolemy, and are often only approximate -

6 The astronomy and astrology of these lines is dealt with by R. J. Getty, 'The Astrology
of P. Nigidius Figulus (Lucan 1 649-65)', in Classical Quarterly, XXXV (1941) 17—22.
7 O. Neugebauer and H. B. van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes (Philadelphia, 1959).
8 See Chapter II, note 21.

45
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

indeed, frequently only the sign, without any degrees, is given. The
order of enumeration of the planets varies in the papyri, but in the
literary sources regularly follows the sequence Sun, Moon, Satum,
Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, followed by the horoscopus.
These horoscopes provide us with ample evidence of the wide­
spread interest in the practice of astrology in these first two centuries
of our era. They are drawn up for individual citizens as well as for
emperors and governors, and astrology is clearly becoming popular, at
least in the Greek cities of Hellenistic Egypt and the Near East. They
also show us yet again how fluid was the state of astrology at that
time: the few examples that contain some astrological material display
features which are sometimes unique, and of no lasting significance.
There was obviously no standard practice, no 'Bible' of astrology: any
theorist was free to develop his own ideas and to borrow from
wherever he chose. One such second century theorist, according to his
editor9 was 'a notably independent personality' since his theory was
'held together by a principle foreign to all the rest' of his contempor­
aries, 'that the portions of the heavens measured in the zodiac which
are governed by the various planets are determined by the sizes of
their epicycles'. The epicycles were the circles which carried the
planets in the geometric model of the universe of contemporary
astronomy. He lists the spheres of influence of those portions of the
zodiac in a manner all his own. That of the horoscopus governs the life
and psychic character of the subject; that of the Sun, fathers and their
affairs, matters of ruling, and of perception; that of the Moon, mothers
and their business, and the body; and so on. He also preserves an
account of the older division of the zodiac into eight loci, the octatopos.
This, and the linking of the Sun with the soul, and of the Moon with
the body, brings this fragmentary treatise into close relation with the
Hermetic work referred to earlier.10 It is clear that Egypt, and probably
that means Alexandria, was still the home of astrology, and astrology
was still, as it was to remain until its virtual disappearance from the
western scene in the sixth century, very much a Greek science.
Vettius Valens is a Latin name, but the man came from Antioch,
travelled widely, and came to rest in Egypt, in Alexandria, where he
wrote, in Greek, his Anthology of astrology.11 It is a long work, in
difficult, crabbed Greek, and the text as published by Kroll is anything
but reliable. Of the book Neugebauer and van Hoesen wrote: Tn spite
of the great extent of astrological doctrine contained in the Anthology,

9 F. E. Robbins, 'A New Astrological Treatise: Michigan Papyrus No. 1', in Classical
Philology, XXII (1927) Iff.
10 Chapter II, p. 21 and note 21.
11 Vettii Valentis Anthologiarum Libri, ed. W. Kroll (Berlin, 1908).

46
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

one receives the impression that the development of the theory had
not yet reached its climax in the second century A.D. when both
Vettius Valens and Ptolemy wrote their compendia. And both authors
were satisfied by using simple arithmetical schemes, e.g. for the rising
times, which belong to a period of astronomical theory which had
been long surpassed at that time. The cliche which is so popular in
histories of astronomy about the stimulating influence of astrology on
exact astronomy is nowhere borne out where we are able to control the
details.'12 There is no need for full summary of the Anthology here (it is
tedious enough in the original!) simply to demonstrate again the truth
of what Neugebauer and van Hoesen say. But a few points are of
interest. At the beginning of his second book, Vettius Valens lists the
four trigons, and links them both with the planets and with the four
elements of later Greek philosophy and medicine: the three signs
Aries, Leo and Sagittarius are attributed first to the Sun, secondly to
Jupiter and Saturn, and to the element of Fire; the trigon Taurus, Virgo
and Capricorn belongs to the Moon, and Venus and Mars, and to the
element of Earth; Gemini, Libra and Aquarius are Saturn's, with
Mercury and Jupiter, and Air; and the last trigon, Cancer, Scorpio and
Pisces go to Mars, with Venus and the Moon, and Water.
In Chapter XV of the same book, after a number of chapters setting
out details of the loci, tottoi, we are given a short list of the twelve,
telling us the names of the nine with 'private' names, as it were: the
others are the Lot of Fortune, the horoscopus, and the Medium Caeli.
'The one called 8eo<;, god, signifies the affairs of fathers, that called
Sea, goddess, the affairs of mothers; the dyaSo«; Saipcov, the "good
spirit", concerns children; dyaBq Tuyq, "good fortune", looks after
marriage (as well it might!), koko<; Saipcov, the "bad spirit", sufferings,
and Kaxf] Tuyq, "bad fortune", distress; the Lot of Fortune and the
horoscopus, the ascendant, deal with life and the life of man; Saipcov,
daemon, or "spirit", signifies matters of thought, the M.C. matters of
action; £po><;, Eros, love, concerns desires, and dvayKq, Necessity,
concerns enmities.' Later, in Chapter XII of Book IV, there is another
much more detailed list of loci. It is not clear whether these are the
same tottoi, or loci - Valens nowhere uses o’i'koi, houses - or different
ones, and the confusion is typical; but it looks as though what follows
is a list of the 'mundane houses', and the previous list was of the
sortes, the Lots, like Manilius'. 'Let the loci begin from the horoscopus,'
he says, 'which rules life, governorship, the body and the spirit. The
second governs a man's life and is the gate of Hades; it rules the
shadow (or possibly shade), giving and taking and sharing, inter­

12 Op. cit., p. 185.

47
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

course with women, commerce and business and inheritance, and is

the locus of testaments. The third is that of brothers, of life abroad, of
kingship and power, friends and kinsmen, of profits and of slaves. The
fourth, of reputation, of children, wives, private affairs, old persons,
business, the city (in the ancient, not the modem, sense), the house
and possessions, of permanence and change, including change of
place, of dangers and death and distress, and of mystical matters. The
fifth, the locus of children, is that of friendship and community, of
freedom and of all good works. The sixth, of slaves, of injury, enmity,
suffering and weakness. (The seventh is missing from the text; it is the
locus at the cardinal point of the occasus, the setting, and its role may
have been similar to that described by Manilius, looking after the end
of life, and oaths and good faith, and so on, since these things are
missing from Valens' list.) The eighth is the locus of death and
inheritance, of idleness and of weak judgment. The ninth, of friend­
ship, of life abroad, and foreign profit, of god and the king and the
ruler, of astronomy (though aoTpovopia should very likely be read as
oixovopi'a, administration) and decrees of ordinances, of epiphanies of
the gods, of prophecy, and of participation in mysteries and hidden
matters. The tenth is the locus of affairs, and reputation, of progress, of
wife and children, and of change and new matters. The eleventh, of
friends, of hopes, gifts, and the children of freedom. The twelfth, of
foreigners, of enmity, of slaves, of distress and dangers, and judg­
ments, and of sufferings, death and weakness.' The general masculine
and somewhat xenophobic basis of all this may be noted, as well as
the confused and considerable overlap of the loci, and it may all be
compared with Manilius' account to reinforce the impression of
fluidity, not to say confusion, of astrological ideas at this time.
One new note is struck in the Anthology, however. Or at least, if it is
not new, it is here sounded clearly for the first time in our literature,
though by no means for the last. Astrology has now become, if not a
secret art, at least one jealously guarded by its practitioners. In
Chapter XI of the first book Vettius Valens writes: 'I adjure you, most
honoured brother, and all those being initiated into this systematic
art, learning of the starry bowl of the heavens, and the zodiac, and the
Sun and Moon and the five planets, and also of foreknowledge and
holy Necessity, to keep all these things hidden, and not to share them
with the uninstructed, except those who are worthy and able to guard
and receive them rightly.' It is an adjuration repeated elsewhere in the
Anthology, as in the Proemium to Book VII: 'Now concerning all these
things and this book, an oath should be required of all who receive
them, to accept what they read guardedly and as if it belonged to the
mysteries.' (The mysteries were the religious secrets of sects such as
the Mithraists or the Orphics, carefully guarded by the initiates.) Some

48
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

reasons for this secrecy will soon become apparent; it may not be
taken as evidence that astrology was from the beginning some sort of
arcane knowledge disclosed only to initiates, and derived from far-off
Egyptian priests. It was not; though it was a Greco-Egyptian art, as is
evident from the Alexandrian provenance of most of our early sources,
and from the authorities used and quoted by Vettius Valens. Of the
ninety-three source references in Kroll's index, only two are to
Chaldaei, Babylonian authorities; ten are to Critodemus, of whom not
only is nothing known for certain, but what little is known is
contradictory: he is referred to by Pliny, which means he must be at
latest a contemporary (that is, not later than 79 A.D.), but the passages
in Valens which are derived from him are probably to be dated, by the
horoscopes they include, to the end of the first century. Eight
references are to the work On the Ascendant of Hypsicles, of whom
again nothing is known; and the rest are in ones and twos, apart from
'the ancients' - except those to Nechepso-Petosiris, who are referred to
no less than forty-two times. Since 'the ancients', oi TraAaioi, probably
refers to the same authorities, over half the' source references in
Vettius Valens are to these Egyptian books.
Astrology was always, for the Romans as for later ages, a foreign, an
eastern art. There is no evidence for any indigenous Roman astrology.
With all their superstitious predilection for divination, the Romans
never indulged in star-gazing. Their divination, like their religion,
was firmly earth-bound, as befitted their farmers' common sense.
Astrology, together with Greek philosophical ideas and Greek literary
models, was introduced into Rome in the early second century B.C.,
the time when Romans first soldiered among the Greek cities of
southern Italy and came into contact with the civilisation of Hellenistic
Greece. Nor did astrology ever gain any firm hold among the
intelligentsia: references to astrology in Roman literature are few,
considering the extent of that literature. It came into Rome with Greek
slaves and teachers, and was at first regarded with great suspicion, as
were all new things Greek. Typical, no doubt, of the reaction of the old
republican Roman gentry was that of Cato, who wrote, when outlining
the characteristics of the good bailiff:13 'Let him harbour no sponger or
diviner or soothsayer, nor let him want to listen to the counsels of any
astrologer (chaldaeum).' The counsels of the astrologer would have
concerned, doubtless, the right (in the astrological sense) time to plant
or prune or reap or put the bull to the cow; a curiously uncertain way,
Cato obviously thought, to run a farm. Some twenty years later, in 139
B.C., when there was considerable unrest among the lower classes and

13 Cato, De agri cultura, 5.4.

49
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

especially among the large immigrant slave population, an edict of

Cornelius, the praetor peregrinus, expelled astrologers from Rome and
Roman Italy. At this time the Stoics, whose philosophy was just being
introduced into educated Roman circles, were largely opposed to
astrology, under the influence of Panaetius of Rhodes, whom Cicero
mentions14 as having 'rejected the predictions of the astrologers , as
did the Stoic astronomer Scylax of Halicarnassus. But between this
time and the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., as Cramer says,15 'the
majority of Rome's upper class had been converted.' One of the chief
causes was the teaching of Posidonius, the Stoic philosopher and
teacher and friend of Cicero, who had such a great influence on many
Roman minds.
There were then as there are now, at least two kinds of astrologers,
and two kinds of astrology. On the one hand there were the 'quacks',
the popular hawkers of horoscopes, on a level with the soothsayers
and fairground magicians who plagued the Roman mob and who,
being all 'easterners' and foreigners, were so suspected in times of
civil disturbance. On the other hand, there were the 'scientific'
astrologers, also Greeks, and usually from Alexandria, who developed
the theory and practice of the art at the intellectual level of the
educated Roman. To this latter kind of astrology there were through­
out Roman history two attitudes, one of acceptance - though generally
only of a 'soft' astrology: few Romans accepted a hard fatalism - and
one of qualified rejection: qualified by a greater or less willingness to
allow some influence of the stars on the lives of men. Epicureans like
Lucretius, with their atheistic materialism and their desire to rid man
of all superstitious fears, were bound to be opposed to astrology, and
so were Academic sceptics like Cicero and eclectics like Pliny.
The attitude of the state was always ambivalent. The emperors, from
Augustus on, nearly all had their court astrologers, some of them, like
Tiberius' friend Thrasyllus, of very great influence. The theory of
astrology was never proscribed and anyone was free to dabble in it or
argue about it; the practice, however, was limited. Augustus' decree of
11 A.D. made illegal the holding of any private or secret consultation
with 'diviners', and the predicting of anyone's death. This decree was
invoked at least twenty times in the next hundred years or so to bring
charges of treason against individuals suspected of plotting the

14 De Divinatione, 11.42.
15 F. H. Cramer, Astrology in Roman Law and Politics (Philadelphia, 1954) 80. Cramer's
book is a summary of Roman history from the second century to the end of the
Principate, with all the gossip included, in which everything touching on the stars and
star-worship, magic and superstition, is more or less indiscriminately included, and in
which there is much guesswork and 'probable inference'. Nevertheless it does assemble
most of the not very numerous firm facts.

50
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

emperor's death. But although court astrologers contrived to have

great power, those not in favour with the emperor, and the horde of
popular horoscope sellers in general, suffered frequent persecution.
Six times in the first century they were banished from Rome and Italy,
always at times when political unrest made the possibility of the
'support of the stars' for rebels dangerous for the authorities. As
Cramer says,16 once the senatorial order had accepted scientific
astrology, as did Crassus and Pompey and Caesar himself, 'the time
was past when governmental curbs of astrologers breathed contempt
of this "science" as such. On the other hand, the argument that
astrological promises of success might encourage subversive elements
had become all the more valid during the decades of ferocious civil
strife from the days of Marius to those of Octavianus (90-30 B.C.).
With the advent of monarchic government another motive was added:
to keep in times of tension from political opponents that very
information about the future which the rulers themselves considered
reliable.' It was no doubt this hostile attitude of the authorities, and
the dangers attendant on becoming involved with any prominent
political figure as patron, especially the emperor himself, and possibly
also the scepticism of many of the abler intellectuals, which made
astrologers keep themselves and their art to themselves.
The Stoic philosopher and teacher Panaetius was one of those who
argued against astrology. Cicero, in the De Divinatione (II 42), tells us
that Panaetius was the only one of the Stoics to reject the claims of the
astrologers. He flourished in the second half of the second century
B.C., a period when astrology was developing rapidly in the Greek
world. There were at this time a number of 'schools', or sects, of Greek
philosophy, including Sceptics and Cynics (who naturally rejected
astrology, as they did almost everything else); the successors of Plato
in the Academy, now heavily tinged with ideas from other schools;
and those of Aristotle in the Lyceum, the Peripatetics. The two most
important sects, in terms of later influence on men's thoughts about
themselves and the world, were the Epicureans and the Stoics.
Epicurus' philosophy, best known through the poem of the Latin
writer Lucretius, De Rerunt Natura, was materialist and atheist, with
the avowed intention of freeing men from superstition of all kinds and
so allowing him to attain to peace of mind, free from vain fears.
Epicureanism was by its nature bound to be unsympathetic to
astrology, except perhaps an astrology of a hard, fatalistic and
scientific kind such as did not in fact exist. Astrology was then, as
ever, too tied up with the aspirations and emotions of men, with their
religious feelings, for the Epicurean to accept it.

16 Cramer, op. cit., 236.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

The Stoics were also technically materialist, but their materialism

was not simple and hard like that of the Epicureans, who admitted the
existence of nothing except the atoms and the void. The Stoics
admitted no distinction between matter and spirit; it might be said
that they 'spiritized' matter as much as they materialized spirit. They
inherited the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, and a fifth, also
probably from Aristotle, the ether, finer than the other four. For the
Stoic, the soul was material, but of a fine matter that could inter­
penetrate the body, and such that after death it could rejoin the
etherial regions of the heavens. For him, Fate ruled everything, and it
was the part of the wise man to move with, rather than against, Fate,
and so achieve that freedom from care which was the common aim of
Stoic and Epicurean alike. All things in the universe obeyed the same
law of Fate, so that the 'cosmic sympathy' was natural to Stoic thought,
and indeed they were the first to assume that the same physical laws
would apply to heavenly bodies as to earthly ones, as opposed to
Aristotle's view that the laws of the sublunary world were different
from those of the celestial. Manilius' famous line,

fata regunt orbem, certa stant omnia lege

(the fates rule the world, all things are established by a settled law), is
pure Stoicism. And Stoicism was thus naturally inclined to accept
astrology. It - Stoicism - was also a creed suited to the Romans.
Whereas the Epicureans advised the wise man to withdraw from the
distractions and dangers of political life, the Stoics emphasised his
duty to his state, his commitment to politics.
If Zeno, Chrysippus and Panaetius made Greek Stoicism, it was
Posidonius who gave it the form in which it became part of the Roman
tradition. He was a great admirer of Rome, and the teacher of many
young Romans, including Cicero; and his Stoicism became an impor­
tant part of the Roman intellectual life. Much is sometimes made of the
'Stoic opposition' under the early emperors, though in view of the fact
that all those who opposed what they saw as an un-Roman tyranny
were brought up on tales of Brutus and Mucius Scaevola and the old
Roman heroes - Stoic sages before Stoicism - it is perhaps difficult to
say whether it was opposition because it was Stoic or Stoic because it
was opposition. Certainly one of the greatest of the Roman Stoics,
Seneca, was no opponent of the emperor, even if he was sentenced to
death by his old pupil Nero.
Now we know that Posidonius was favourably inclined towards
astrology from Cicero. In the De Divinatione (I 130) he says that
Posidonius thought 'that there are in nature certain signs of future
events'; and according to St Augustine, quoting probably from the lost

52
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

De Fato, Cicero referred to Posidonius as 'much given to astrology'.17 It

was Posidonian Stoicism which the Romans inherited; but the
practical scepticism which seems to have been typical of the Romans
prevented many intellectuals, even Stoics, from fully accepting the
ideas of 'the Chaldaeans'. Seneca, in his Quaestiones Naturales (II 32),
argues that since everything in nature moves according to the same
laws of fate, all things may be signs for him who can read them -
though he is careful to point out that not all the signs can in practice
be read, since we do not yet know enough about them and their laws.
Now the observations of the Chaldaeans, he says, take into account
the powers of the five stars (that is, the planets); but surely all those
thousands of stars do not shine for nothing? 'What else is it which
introduces such great errors into the work of those skilled in casting
natal charts except that they allot so few stars to us, when all those that
shine above us lay claim to part of us? It may be that those which are
lower in the heavens direct their power upon us more closely, but
surely those too that either are fixed or because their motion is equal
to that of the sky appear fixed, are not without some lordship over us?'
This is obviously both anti- and pro-astrology: at the least it leaves
room for the astrologer, especially one who makes much use of the
fixed stars.
In the early third century A.D., Plotinus erected the last great
philosophical structure of antiquity, Neo-Platonism; so called because
it was a development of Platonism, with much of Aristotle, and much
that was pure Plotinus. His works, all in the form of shortish essays,
were gathered together by his pupil and disciple Porphyry - not, alas,
in chronological order of writing - into groups of nine, whence they
are known as the Enneads, ennea being the Greek for nine. In two
essays, a very early one (Enn. Ill 1) and a very late one (II 3), Plotinus
attacked astrology. His basic objection was that the soul, the true self
of man, in proper Platonic style, is above the physical world and
therefore outside its laws. In the earlier treatise he argues first that
astrology takes away what is properly ours, and 'leaves us as stones
rolled along, not as men acting of ourselves and according to our own
natures.' Secondly, if the stars are signs, and it is then to be argued
that they are therefore causes of those things they signify, then all
such signs are causes - birds and entrails and other omens. Again, he
says that according to the astrologers, inferences can be made
concerning the fortunes of others from one man's birth-chart - parents
or children, wives or husbands - but what about their proper
birth-charts? Further, at a given moment a man and an animal might

17 St Augustine, De Civ. Dei, V.2.

53
 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

be bom: do they therefore have the same destiny? And lastly, how can
the stars, who are gods, cause evil, and how can they be better or
worse depending on their relative positions in the heavens?
Now it is a striking fact that many of these same arguments are
deployed by Plotinus' great contemporary, Origen, one of the greatest
of the Greek Fathers. A detailed comparison of the long passage
quoted from Origen by Eusebius18 with the essay of Plotinus shows
clearly that they were drawing on a common source of ideas. That can
only really have been Ammonius Saccas, their common master in the
school at Alexandria. There is more in Origen than in Plotinus,
however, and one short passage is interesting and important enough
to be quoted: 'There is a theorem around which demonstrates that the
zodiacal circle moves like the planets from west to east, one degree in
a hundred years, and this in a long time alters the positions of the
twelve signs, so that the calculated sign and the actual sign are
different; and the prognostications, they say, are found not from the
actual sign but from the calculated sign of the zodiac; which cannot
really be understood at all.' This is a problem, concerning the
precession of the equinoxes, to which we shall have to give some
attention later. The point is that the equinoctial points, the points
where the ecliptic crosses the equator, are not fixed; what is called 'the
first point of Aries', when the sun is on the equator on its way north,
is in fact today no longer in Aries but in Pisces. So Origen is
absolutely right, for the sign of the zodiac Aries, if one starts Aries at
'the first point of Aries', the vernal equinox, does not correspond with
the sign actually in the sky, which is Pisces.
Origen takes us for the first time into a Christian context. He and
Plotinus, if they are representing the arguments of Ammonius Saccas,
really represent the philosophers' views of the mid-second century. By
then the Christian Church was, of course, over a hundred years old,
and was spreading across the Roman Empire from its beginnings in
the Near East. It was still a Greek church. The common tongue of the
eastern Mediterranean, and of most of the traders, craftsmen and
professional classes, was the Koine, which word is simply the Greek
for 'common'. Greek, this late common language, was the tongue also
of all the Jews of the Dispersion - to whom the Gospel was first
preached. The books of the New Testament were all written in Greek.
Latin was the language of the western half of the Empire, stretching
from present Romania and Italy north and west, and including North
Africa west of Cyrenaica. But western cities like Marseilles (an ancient
Greek colony anyway and always an 'international' city) and Arles,

18 Eusebii Pamphili Evangelicae Praeparationis Libri XV, edited and translated by E. H.

Gifford (Oxford, 1903). The passage is in Book V, c.XI; the quotation is at 294d.

54
 FROM MANILIUS TO VETTIUS VALENS

centres of trade and commerce, had large Greek-speaking communi­

ties. While it is not true that Christianity was restricted to the lower
social classes, as is so often asserted, it had certainly not yet made any
considerable inroads into the governing classes of the Roman Empire.
The Octavius of Minucius Felix, the first Latin apologetic work
deliberately aimed at the educated Romans, was probably written at
the very end of the second century. Even as late as the middle of the
fourth century, Augustine in Latin North Africa had a pagan father.
If we look for the attitude of the early Church, of the first two
centuries or so, to astrology, we find very little evidence indeed of any
'attitude'. There is no mention of astrology or astrologers, or even of
divination in general, in any of the early councils of the Church: they
are mostly concerned with matters of discipline and of relations with
pagans, and sometimes with heresy. The so-called 'Apostolic Constitu­
tions', which are possibly as late as the fourth century, prohibit
association with those dealing in incantations, divination, soothsaying
and so forth, but do not explicitly mention astrology. A late Arabic
version of the decrees of the Council of Nicaea, in 325, does include a
prohibition of astrology, but it is the only source for that council
which does. The first clear condemnation comes in the decrees of the
Council of Laodicaea, in 364 or 367, which somewhat curiously made
an apparent distinction between mathematici and astrologi (perhaps the
first are the 'scientific' astrologers and the second, the 'quacks').
However, we might expect the Church to be opposed to astrology as a
pagan form of divination, another superstition, and one that dimin­
ished if it did not deny the freedom of man. There are at least two
pieces of evidence that this was so.
Epiphanius, in his book De Mensuris et Ponderibus, chapter XV, tells
the story of Aquila, dating from about 120 A.D.:19 'Now Aquila lived
in Jerusalem, and noticed that the disciples of those who had
themselves heard the apostles, in their great faith, worked miracles of
healing and other wonders, and being much stirred in spirit by this,
embraced the Christian faith himself, and after a little time sought and
was admitted to baptism. But since he did not change from his
previous way of life, that is, from believing in the vanity of astrology
(the Greek here has aoTpovopia, astronomia, but it is astrology which
is meant; the two words, astronomia and astrologia, are still inter­
changeable), in which he was very exactly learned; but every day he
consulted the position of his own birth-chart: he was questioned by
the masters and reproved on this account, but he not only did not
correct his ways, but rather contentiously opposed them, and sought

19 Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completes, Series Craeca, XLIII.262.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

to establish what is not to be established, namely fate and all that

follows from it; he was therefore thrown back out of the Church, as
being unsuited for salvation.' The other piece of evidence comes from
the acid pen of the great African Tertullian, from the forty-third
chapter of his Apologeticum: 'I freely admit that there may be some
who can rightly complain of the uselessness of Christians. First among
them will be the pimps and panders and procurers, and then
cut-throats and poisoners and magicians, and also soothsayers and
diviners and astrologers.'
Tertullian was writing at the end of the second century. It was about
the middle of that century that Ptolemy wrote the Tetrabiblos, with
which we are concerned in the next chapter. Although it had very
great influence on medieval and later astrology, that book itself only
marks a stage in the long evolution of the art from its beginnings in
Babylonia and Egypt. Ancient systems of time-reckoning produced the
ideas of the zodiac and its signs, and the decans, and these were then
used to assist in the interpretation of heavenly signs for earthly events.
The primitive astrology thus produced was refined by the Greeks,
with their astronomical and philosophical ideas - especially perhaps
Pythagoreanism with its number-symbolism, and Stoicism with the
ideas of cosmic sympathy and the universal rule of Fate - to bring
about the confusion of systems and parts of systems found in the early
sources, with dodecatemoria and single degrees, loci and Lots, planet­
ary aspects and characters, genders and spheres of influence, the four
elements and stones and metals and plants - all the apparatus we have
seen gathering about astrology in these first chapters. Much of this
was systematised by Ptolemy, though his was by no means the last
word.

56
 IV

Alexandria to Byzantium:
Ptolemy and Later Greek Astrology

'Of the ways of foretelling the future through astronomy (astronomia),

two are among the most important and the most powerful: one, which
is first both logically and practically, is that by which we learn about
the ever-altering configurations, produced by their movements, of the
sun and moon and stars in relation to one another and to the earth; the
second is that by which we enquire into the changes produced in the
world through the particular natural states of those configurations. The
first has its own proper theory and method, desirable in itself even if
it does not achieve the results given by its combination with the
second; and it has already been systematically and scientifically set out
(as best I could) in its own treatise (syntaxis - the Almagest). Of the
second, which is not so self-sufficient, we shall give an account (logos)
in this book in a way that is philosophically fitting.'
So 'the most divine Ptolemy' begins his Tetrabiblos.' He is most
widely known today as a scientist, as geographer and astronomer, but
for many centuries he was also the most famous of Greek astrologers.
It is only very recently that anyone has thought it odd that a great
scientific astronomer should also be an authority in matters astro­
logical. Ptolemy regarded the two as complementary, and although
astrology is 'not so self-sufficient', since it depends on astronomy for
its factual basis, he promises to give of it a genuinely philosophical
account. It is the other part of the science of the heavens, which
renders the whole useful. The Almagest is Part I: Part II is the
Tetrabiblos.
This famous textbook, which gathered commentaries about it right
from its first publication, Ptolemy wrote about the middle of the
second century A.D., most likely in Alexandria, the cultural and
scientific capital of the age. The city of Alexander the Great1 2 was

1 Claudii Ptolemaei Opera, III.l, Apotelesmatica, ed. F. Boll and E. Boer (Leipzig, 1954); or
with an English translation in the Loeb Classical Library, Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. and tr.
F. E. Robbins, 1940 (latest reprint bound on its own, 1980). Reference in the text are to
the Boll-Boer edition; translations by the author.
2 For what follows see E. Brescia, Alexandria ad Aegyptum (Bergamo, 1922).

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

founded by the young conqueror — he was then twenty-four! — in 332

B.C., nine years before his death. A good harbour on the Mediterran­
ean was formed by joining the island of Pharos to the shore of the bay:
the light on the island eventually gave its name to all such lighthouses.
On the south side, the city had a port on Lake Mareotis; the lake was
connected by a canal with an eastern branch of the Nile, which gave
Alexandria good access to the hinterland. It remained a Greek city
until its conquest by the Khalif, Umar in 641, and continued to be the
chief maritime city of the Levant until the fourteenth century. To say
that it was a Greek city is, however, a little misleading. It was founded
as a Greek colony in Egypt, but it was always from its foundation a
mixed city, with an 'international' population. It was, at its height, a
large city of about half a million inhabitants, of all sorts. For it was not
only a port, but a manufacturing centre, of glass and metalwork (from
which alchemy takes its origins), of paper, of scents and incense, and
of weaving, especially of carpets. It had a reputation, for culture and
also for extravagance and luxury, similar to that of fifteenth century
Florence or nineteenth century Paris. There were fine buildings in
Alexandria, many erected by Roman emperors: Antoninus Pius, for
example, contemporary with Ptolemy, built the Gates of the Sun and
of the Moon. Perhaps the historically most important buildings were
the Museum and the Library. They were probably built by the first
two successor-kings of Egypt - successors, that is, to Alexander: their
dynastic name was Ptolemy, which misled some medieval Latin
writers into calling our Ptolemy, the scientist, rex Aegyptorum, king of
the Egyptians. 'Museum' did not then mean a home for a collection of
monuments of the past. The word is merely the Latin form of the
Greek for 'home, or temple, of the Muses', and the Muses were the
goddesses of the arts; so the Museum was the home or temple of the
arts and sciences. It was in fact a sort of research institute, where
scholars were maintained by the state, and all kinds of scholarship,
literary, philosophical and scientific, were practised and encouraged
there for about five hundred years.
Not that Alexandria was the only centre for learning, or of
philosophy, in those centuries. Athens continued to be the home of
philosophy until Justinian closed the pagan schools in 529; and
philosophy flourished also in other places, notably in Rhodes and in
Syria. It was part of the intellectual background of all educated men,
and well to the foreground for many. A number of philosophers from
Aristotle on wrote short 'evangelical' tracts, proclaiming the good
news of the value of philosophical contemplation in a troubled world,
and exhorting men to its practice. It was one such protreptic work, the
Hortensius of Cicero, which converted the young Augustine to the
study of philosophy in the fourth century. Philosophy included what

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

the ancients called 'physics', a rational account of the physical

universe; and just as in our own time most educated people have
some ideas of atoms and molecules, and even of more fundamental
particles, and of the theory of evolution, so in Ptolemy's day the
cultured man had an eclectic philosophy drawn from many schools,
which made up a general picture of himself and his world. The parts
of this picture of most importance to the understanding of astrology
are the doctrine of the four elements and the four qualities, and the
notion of the unity of the universe. Behind such philosophical ideas as
these, as behind the development of astrology itself, lay the Greeks'
belief that this is a rational universe, that we can give a reasoned
account of it and understand its workings: that it is an ordered
structure, a cosmos. The Greek word meant 'order', and since good
order was for the Greek beautiful, the verb formed from cosmos meant
to make beautiful, to adorn - hence 'cosmetic'! Throughout the story of
astrology, through whatever dark and muddling ways it winds, we
must remember that it would never have emerged from the slough of
superstition in which it was begotten, and into which it so often
seems about to disappear, it would not even now exhibit the same two
antique faces, of rationality and of magic, if the Greeks and above all
Ptolemy had not caught it and bound it to the framework of their own
rationalist vision of the world.
The four elements are older than philosophy. In the sixth century
beginnings of philosophy, Thales selected water as the 'stuff' of the
universe, Anaximenes air, and Heraclitus fire; and both the latter
produced the other elements out of their 'first matter'. Fire, air, earth
and water: air, water and earth represent the three commonest
examples of the three states of matter we are familiar with - gaseous,
liquid and solid. And fire is obviously different: it seems to come out
of solids, it is usually killed by water, and it is a source of light and
heat. A fifth element was added by the Pythagoreans, the aether, a sort
of heavenly fire. They possibly added it because their philosophy was
based on number, on mathematics, and there are five regular solids,
one for each element: the cube for earth, the pyramid for fire, the
octahedron for air, the icosahedron for water, and the dodecahedron
for aether. More important, the Pythagoreans extended and 'canon­
ised', as it were, another very ancient doctrine, that of the 'opposites' -
one-many, limited-unlimited, odd-even, male-female, and so on -
which runs right through Greek philosophy and Greek medicine. It
was Zeno of Elea who took two pairs of these opposites, hot and cold,
and wet and dry, and made all else from them; and Aristotle who
married the two doctrines and made his four 'simple bodies' (Physics
192 etc.) fire, air, water and earth, from, in turn, the hot and the dry,
the hot and the wet, the cold and the wet, and the cold and the dry (De

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Gen. et Corrup., II). The Stoics took this over, and some of them
simplified the equivalences to fire - hot, air - cold, water — wet, and
earth - dry. The elements, the qualities and the opposites passed into
the general background of late Classical thought, especially in
medicine. And it was the Stoics who made widely accepted the other
great doctrine, of the oneness of the cosmos, including man. All
things, they said, are held together by the same cosmic force, or logos,
reason, including man, so that Epictetus, who was an ex-slave from
Nero's bodyguard, could write (II, 10.2): 'Consider then what you are
distinguished from by your reason: you are distinguished from the
wild beasts, you are distinguished from your flocks. You are because
of it a citizen of the world and a part of it (noAiTqg tou Koopou koi
pepos auTou).' Because all things are one, and all are governed by the
same natural law, or logos, we can understand it all, and also each part
affects the whole and is affected by it.
It is the outstanding mark of Ptolemy's astrology that it is informed
by the philosophical and scientific spirit of his age. He aims to give an
account (logos again) of astrology which is systematic and which fits in
with contemporary philosophical ideas. The details of his system,
which do not differ in any great respect from those of his predecessors
- for Ptolemy was not so much a discoverer or innovator as a collector
and systematiser - are less important than his methods. Sometimes
what he has to say on a particular topic is less noteworthy than what
he has not said; for though he was not an inventor of new doctrines,
he ordered his material according to his own ideas and did not blindly
follow his sources. These he seldom mentions at all, and never by
name. Quite likely 'the ancient', of chapter 11 of Book III, is
Nechepso-Petosiris; the Egyptians are referred to several times, in
particular as having 'completely united medicine and astronomical
prediction' (1.3); and in 1.21 the Egyptian and Chaldaean systems of
'terms' are distinguished. In the same chapter Ptolemy refers to an
'ancient manuscript' he had come across, much damaged, he says, but
does not tell us where it came from or who may have written it. It is
probable that the introductory chapters to the whole work, and
possibly those on astrological ethnography, are derived from the Stoic
Posidonius. Several times Ptolemy refers to 'those who have written
on these things'; but always he makes up his own mind, and explains
his principles. It is what he does with his material that matters.
In I.iii.18 Ptolemy says that the Egyptians 'completely united
medicine with astronomical prediction' (ouvqipav TravTaxq t<jj Si’
aoTpovopiac; TTpoyvajOTiKq) Tqv iaTpixqv). But the link was ancient,
and forged in Greece. The old magical medicine of Babylon and Egypt
already dealt in terms of lucky and unlucky days, and possibly also of
lucky and unlucky states of the moon and stars, before Berosus came

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

to Cos. The moon and stars and magic and medicine have gone
together throughout history: there is still more than a little of the
magician in the modem physician, and some people still believe that
the phases of the moon affect their health. Medicine as an empirical
science was the creation of the Greeks; and since they had made a
science of astrology, as part of astronomy, it was not surprising that
they should accept and develop the ancient links between the two. It
was probably the Sicilian school which established them on what
appeared to be a sound philosophical basis. Sicily had been colonised
from Greece, along with southern Italy: it was the Magna Graecia of
the ancients. One of the greatest Sicilians was the mid-fifth century
philosopher Empedocles, and it was most likely under his influence
that the idea was developed that man's body was made up of the four
elements and the four qualities, held, in good health, in a proper
balance, or harmony. The idea of harmony seems to have been one of
the bases of all Greek thought, and the notion of the balance of
opposites in man's nature was soon part of Greek medical thinking.
The late fifth century Hippocratic treatise 'On the Nature of Man'3
spends the first seven chapters on the 'humours' and their relation to
the seasons: chapter 4 says: 'The body of man has in itself blood,
phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; these make up the nature of his
body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health;' the mixture
has to be exactly harmonious to produce perfect health. Chapters 6 and
7 associate the four qualities with the humours, and these with the
seasons, as follows: blood is warm and moist, and associated with
spring (and, later, with childhood); yellow bile is warm and dry, and
goes with summer (youth); black bile is cold and dry, going with
autumn (maturity), and phlegm is cold and wet, like winter (old age).4
The Hippocratic writings had already more than hinted at iatroma-
thematica, as astrological medicine was called. An early collection of
medical maxims, 'Airs, Waters, Places', firmly asserts (1.8) that 'astron­
omy' is of the greatest assistance to medicine. We have already seen
that the various parts of the body had been placed under the influence
and protection of the different signs of the zodiac. The planets had
similar and parallel responsibilities; several lists exist in the literature,
more or less agreeing in detail, and Ptolemy gives his in III.13.4f: 'The
natures of the planets produce the forms and causes of the symptoms,
since of the most important parts of man, Saturn is lord of the right

3 'The Nature of Man' in vol. IV of the Loeb Classical Library Hippocrates, tr. W. H.S.
Jones, 1931.
d For the later development of this humoral theory, its associations with astrology, and
its ramifications in the history of art, see the fascinating Saturn and Melancholy by R.
Klibansky, E. Panofsky and F. Saxl (London, 1964).

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ear, the spleen, the bladder, phlegm and the bones; Jupiter of touch,
the lungs, the arteries and the seed; Mars of the left ear, the kidneys,
the veins and the genitals; the sun of sight, the brain, the heart, the
sinews (or possibly, by the mid-second century, the nerves - veupov
in the Greek), and all on the right side; Venus of smell, the liver and
muscles; Mercury of speech and thought, and the tongue, the bile and
the buttocks; and the moon of taste and of drinking, the mouth, the
belly, the womb and all on the left side.' Clearly the relationships of
the planets and the signs, and the aspects of the planets, could make
quite a difference to the patient's chances of recovery from sickness or
injury, whatever the drugs used. And the drugs themselves, the plants
used, were also affected by the movements of the heavens.
Gathering certain flowers or herbs at particular times in the moon's
cycle, or under special stars, was an older practice than astrology, but
here again it was assimilated, and the zodiacal signs and the planets
gathered each their own flower or plant, or several, since there were
many more useful plants than there were signs and planets. Nor did
those who made the lists always know why they were doing it or even
what plants they were listing: one, for example, says 'Mercury's plant
is the pentadactylum, or the pentapetalum, or the eupatorium, or the
anthropocheir, or the pentaphyllum, or the pseudoselinum.’ The first,
second and fifth are all the same plant, the creeping cinquefoil, which
is also given as Mercury's plant in three other lists at least. In other
lists mullein is given to Mercury, and pseudoselinum is probably wild
parsley. There are many lists5 and all very different not only in the
plants they name, but in the fullness of their information; some are
bare names, and others give some medical reasons for their choices,
though these reasons seem to bear no more than a chance relationship
to the parts of the body governed by the attached signs or planets.
Sometimes the connexion is magical: the cinquefoil is said by one
authority to be good for fevers, for the joints, the spleen and the
stomach, and to stop toothache. This seems to indicate little connexion
with Mercury: but we are also told that to touch the mouth with the
root produces good orators, and there is the link. It is not perhaps
surprising to find the heliotrope associated with the sun; and it was
probably because Saturn was 'the sun of the night' that it was
sometimes listed under that planet. The sun's plant was more
commonly the polygonum (bistort), which was apparently an aphro­
disiac, the root of which was good for the eyes; and Saturn's was often
the asphodel, which among other virtues possessed those of removing
fear of demons and easing the troubles of teething. The peony went
with the moon. The moon and magic were always associated, and the

5 See Chapter II, p. 24 and note.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

peony was anciently a magical plant: 'It had to be dug up at night, lest
woodpeckers should peck out one's eyes; and like the mandrake, the
groan it gave on leaving the ground was fatal to all hearers. The seeds
were a protection against witchcraft, and the roots, even if only hung
round the neck, a remedy for the falling sickness'.6
Most of these plant-lists are to be found in the writings of authors
later - sometimes much later - than Ptolemy. Since they all copied
freely from one another, and astrology was always a conservative art,
and plant magic is very ancient, we may safely assume the assimi­
lation of much of this into Greek astrology by the second century. It
had not, however, become sufficiently rationalised, nor sufficiently
grounded in 'physics', for Ptolemy to use it, and he does not mention
plants. But medicine he is certain about. In Chapter 3 of Book I it is
cited as one of the important benefits of 'astronomy' that it is used in
the 'iatromathematical systems' of the Egyptians, so that (§19) 'through
astronomy they may know the qualities of the underlying tempera­
ments, and the symptoms which will occur because of the circum­
stances, and the proper causes of these; since without the knowledge
of these remedies would for the most part fail, because the same ones
are not suitable for all bodies and all afflictions.' In the thirteenth
chapter of Book III he explains why it is important to observe the east
and west especially carefully, and note which signs are 'afflicted' by
malevolent planets in bad aspects, because (§4) 'the parts of the
individual sign of the zodiac which surround the part of the horizon
which is afflicted will show the part of the body which the cause will
affect, and whether the indicated part can suffer a wound or a disease
or both; and the natures of the planets produce the forms and causes
of the symptoms.'
It is the nature of the planets which is the cause; for Ptolemy this is
the 'physical', or philosophical, explanation for iatromathematica. For
example, Saturn is said (1.4.3) 'chiefly to possess the quality of cooling
and by cooling gently drying, most likely because he is furthest away
both from the warmth of the sun and from the exhalations of moisture
about the earth.' Consequently (III.13.6) 'in general Saturn makes men
cold-bellied and over-full of phlegm, and subject to discharges,
emaciated, weakly, jaundiced, liable to dysentery, and coughing, and
bringing up phlegm, and colic, and elephantiasis; and women he also
makes liable to afflictions of the womb (or hysterical: the Greek
uoTEpiKo«; means both, the two being connected in ancient medi­
cine).' Now here, in the cooling and drying, the warmth and moisture,
and the phlegm - though not, be it noticed, melancholy (black bile),
which Ptolemy attributes to Mars - we have the four qualities and the

6 A. M. Coats, The Treasury of Flowers (London, 1975) p. 8.

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humours. The Aristotelian-Stoic background is clearly shown in the

second chapter of the work: 'It could easily and very clearly be
demonstrated to anyone that a certain power from the (outer)
ether-like and invisible nature is distributed over and penetrates all
the wholly changeable substance round the earth; of the primary
sub-lunar elements, fire and air are surrounded and changed by the
movements of the ether, and themselves surround and change all the
rest, earth and water and the plants and animals in them.' Changes in
the qualities of the elements, their balance, produce the sub-lunary
changes, and these are mediated and affected by the heavenly bodies,
by the sun particularly, and the moon, but also by the planets and the
rest of the stars. Consequently their relative positions, or aspects,
affect the results on earth; as is known to farmers and herdsmen, and
sailors, and others who observe the sky in the course of their work.
And this is all very philosophical and rational.
Which is what Ptolemy undertook to be in giving his account of this
part of astronomy. That is why and how he can select from his sources
what he is going to use and what he will leave out. Sometimes the
omissions are explicit. At the beginning of 1.22, for example, after the
long chapter on 'terms', in which he discusses the relative merits of
the Chaldaean and Egyptian systems and decides between the two, he
says: 'Some have distinguished even finer divisions of the rulerships
than these, calling them 'places' (tottoi) and 'degrees' (poipai); they
suppose the 'place' to be the dodecatemorion of a dodecatemorion (i.e.
the twelfth part of a sign, the twelfth part of the zodiac), that is two
and a half degrees, and give the lordship over each to the signs in
turn. Others, according to some other sorts of irrational arrangements,
(dAoyox;, without logos), assign each degree from the beginning to each
of the planets, following the Chaldaean arrangement of the terms.
These, as having only a plausible and not a physical (but a baseless)
explanation (logos), we shall leave out.' In the following chapter
Ptolemy deals briefly (in twenty-three lines!) with 'faces' and 'chariots'
and 'the like': all begun with 'they say'. 'They' differed a great deal
over these curious divisions: at least the idea of 'faces' suggested by
Ptolemy - a planet is in its proper 'face' if its house and those of the
sun and moon stand in the same relation as itself and those two
luminaries - and that of the fourth century Paulus Alexandrinus, who
equates the 'faces' with the decans, so that Mars is in its proper 'face'
in the first ten degrees of Aries, and so on, are completely different. It
was clearly something Ptolemy did not wish to be concerned with.
Again, after his outline of what he is going to cover in the last two
books, he says: 'Of each of these subjects we shall make a summary
sketch, setting out the actual practical methods of investigation with a
bare outline of their active powers, as we have promised; and the

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superstitious nonsense of many, for which plausible reasons cannot be

given, we shall pass over, going straight to the primary physical
causes. What can, however, be properly comprehended we shall
investigate, not by means of lots or numbers (where no account of
causes can be given) but through the proper observing of the
configurations of the stars with relation to their houses.'
This is the nearest Ptolemy comes to hinting at the intrusion of
numerological magic into astrology, though it was clearly a temptation
for the quack. Numbers are, of course, magical; very curious things
can be done with numbers, as every non-mathematician and some
mathematicians know. The Greeks did not invent mathematics,
though they did discover their own, and made very great advances in
the field. Kitto writes:7 'Mathematics are perhaps the most character­
istic of all the Greek discoveries, and the one that excited them most.'
He then describes some mathematical games that whiled away his
own quiet hours, and says, 'it was with great delight that I disclosed to
myself a whole system of numerical behaviour of which my math­
ematical teachers had left me (I am glad to say) in complete ignorance
... They had never told me, and I had never suspected, that Numbers
play these grave and beautiful games with each other, from everlasting
to everlasting, independently (apparently) of time, space and the
human mind. It was an impressive peep into a new and perfect
universe. Then I knew how the Pythagoreans felt when they made
these same discoveries ... The ultimate and simplifying Truth that the
Ionians were trying to find in a physical Something was really
Number.' The Pythagoreans made number games philosophically
respectable, and the great authority of Plato raised mathematics into
theological realms. But at the lowest level, numbers remained magical.
And it was easier to play these games in Greek, for the Greeks used
their letters as numbers, so that alpha, beta, gamma etc. were written
for 1, 2, 3 and so on. This meant that a name was also a number: the
name of Plato, Platon in Greek, could be added up to 1261 - and that
again added to make 10, which was surely significant! It was easy to
combine this sort of symbolism with a list of the planets, or a diagram
of the zodiac, or both, to produce some very simple rules to achieve
certain results without bothering too much with the complications of
astrology. Many such devices survive in the literature: to find a man's
zodiacal sign, for example, add together the letters of his and his
mother' names (for a woman take her own and her father's names) and
then count round the zodiac, starting of course from Aries. Six of the
signs are then good, three — Cancer, Scorpio and Capricorn — are bad,

7 H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth, 1951) pp. 190-1.

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and the remaining three, Libra, Taurus and Sagittarius, are in

between. Or to discover which will die first, a man or his wife, add the
syllables of their names, and count round the zodiac, beginning this
time from Capricorn, until you land on either Leo, which indicates
that the man will die first, or Virgo, which marks the wife as doomed.
Ptolemy will have none of this; it is al1, alogort, unaccountable,
irrational. The result of his philosophically critical requirement is that
his work is more restrained, and generally simpler, than that of other
Greek astrologers. Four short chapters (14—17) of Book I deal with the
aspects and other relations between the signs, including the lack of
any relationship, or disjunction. Ptolemy only recognises four aspects
properly so called: opposition, trine, quartile and sextile, all of which
can be measured in whole signs. In opposition, signs are separated by
six signs, in trine by four, in quartile by three and in sextile by two;
or, more accurately, the angles between them include those numbers
of signs. Conjunction is not mentioned, since it cannot apply to signs,
only to planets. Ptolemy gives a curious mathematical explanation why
these four aspects are significant, but goes on to explain that trine and
sextile are harmonious aspects because the signs concerned are all the
same, all masculine or all feminine; and quartile and opposition are
bad because they relate differing signs.
Comets are dealt with very summarily in the Tetrabiblos. Apart from
four lines in 11.14.10, where they are said to signify droughts and
winds, there is only one paragraph in 11.10, which is very general and
does not go into the details of classification and interpretation found
in other writers. Hephaistion of Thebes, for example, who wrote a
three-book Apotelesmatica early in the fifth century,8 quotes Ptolemy
verbatim, the whole of II.10, but then goes on for nearly two pages of
Pingree's text describing the different kinds of comets and their
effects, drawing on 'Nechepso-Petosiris'. After Ptolemy's words
Hephaistion goes on: 'Of comets, one is called Hippeus (the Knight)
and is the sacred star of Venus; it is the same size as the full moon,
moves very swiftly, and has a bright tail streaming behind it. It is
borne backwards through the zodiac by the cosmos. It indicates the
swift fall of kings and tyrants, and brings about changes in the affairs
of those countries towards which its tail points.' Seven such descrip­
tions are given, one comet for each of the planets, and Hephaistion
concludes the chapter: 'Those called Locides and Pogoniae, with the
rest, occur outside the zodiac in the northern part of the sky.'9 There
was a great deal of argument in antiquity over whether comets could
occur outside the zodiac or not, and what difference there was

8 Ed. David Pingree, Hephaestionis Thebani Apotelesmaticorum Libri Tres, I (Leipzig 1973)
9 Pingree, op. cit., 74-96. b'

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM
between northern and southern comets. Most authorities regarded
comets as sub-lunary; it was a reasonable view, when everything
above the moon was thought to be eternally unchanging, and when
comets were grouped together with 'shooting stars', or meteorites. It
had the authority of Aristotle behind it, who in his Meteorologica
spends two chapters discussing theories of their nature and origin, in
the course of which he says: 'We may regard as a proof that their
constitution is fiery the fact that their appearance in any number is a
sign of coming wind and drought.'10
Not only is Ptolemy usually briefer and simpler than others, but he
frequently gives some reason for his statements, where other astrologers
just say 'Saturn is exalted in Libra' and leave it at that. Ptolemy gives a
'physical' explanation of exaltations and depressions, so that Venus,
which is moist by nature (1.4.6) is exalted in Pisces, 'in which sign the
beginning of the moist spring is signified', and depressed in Virgo,
the sign of dry autumn. Occasionally his 'explaining' leads him into
some awkward wriggling. Chapter 6 of Book I is 'Of masculine and
feminine planets': 'Again, since the primary kinds of natures are two,
male and female, and of the powers we have already set out that of the
moist substance is especially feminine (for generally there is more of
this part in all females, and more of the others in males), tradition
reasonably has it that the Moon and Venus are feminine, because they
have a larger share of the moist, and the Sun, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars
are masculine, and Mercury is common to both kinds, since he is
equally productive of the dry and the moist substance.' So indeed
Mercury is described at the end of Chapter 4. When we come to the
next chapter, on the 'sects' of the sun and moon, the diurnal and
nocturnal planets, we are told that the day is more masculine because
it is hotter and active, and the night feminine as being moist and
restful. Tradition, again, reasonably tells us that the Moon and Venus
are feminine and therefore nocturnal, and the Sun and Jupiter, as
masculine, are diurnal; and Mercury is common, as before. What has
happened to Saturn and Mars? They should, by the same argument,
both be diurnal. But tradition, alas, knew nothing of Ptolemy's
reasoning, and divided them; so Ptolemy finds a reason: tradition
also assigns to each of the sects the two planets of a destructive nature,
but not this time as having the same physical causes, but for opposite
ones. For similar stars being associated with those of a good
constitution increase their power to do good, but if those which are
not suited to the natures of the destructive planets are mixed with
them, then much of their power to do harm is broken. Therefore

10 Aristotle, Meteorologica, trans. H. D. P. Lee, Loeb Classical Library, 1952, 55.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

tradition assigned Saturn, which is cold, to the warmth of the day, and
Mars, being dry, to the moisture of the night; so each of them achieves
due proportion because of the mixture and becomes a fitting member
of the sect which provides the right mixing.' A curious - and curiously
Greek - argument: it seems that these two powerfully malevolent
planets themselves seek a 'due proportion', the proper mixture, even
to their own detriment.
However, the basic rationality of Ptolemy, the orderliness of his
thought, is shown in the planning and setting out of the whole work.
It is set out as a system. Book I is concerned with the mechanics of
astrology, which is then divided into two parts: 'catholic', or universal
astrology, treated in Book II, and individual astrology, or geneth-
lialogy, which takes up Books III and IV. These two books are further
divided into three parts, the first concerned with events before birth,
the second with the time of the birth itself, and the third with what
comes after birth. The last section takes up the whole of Book IV. Each
book has an introduction telling the reader the proposed order of
presentation, and in III.4 Ptolemy provides a detailed 'table of
contents' for the last two books. He does his best to make his account
of this part of astronomy 'philosophically fitting'.
The philosophy to which his astrology is suited is, not surprisingly,
Stoicism. Not surprisingly, because Stoicism was the most successful,
the most accepted, philosophy at the time: it was immensely adapt­
able, and it was complete - it provided a workable system of ethics
based on a physics which was not only highly advanced but made
sense.11 The aim of the Stoic was to achieve a state of self-sufficiency,
auTdpKEia, so that nothing should be able to trouble his fundamental
peace of mind. The way in which he could reach this state was by
'living in accordance with Nature', which implied knowing what
Nature was and how it worked. The basis of the Stoic position is the
oneness of nature, of the universe, including gods and men. It is
neither materialist nor spiritual, or perhaps it is both. It could be said
to materialise mind, since for Stoicism minds are of the same stuff as
the whole physical world; but it could equally be said to spiritualise
matter. Since mind and matter, men and gods and things, are all of the
same stuff, all work according to the same laws, to the same Law,
which can be called Fate. In contradistinction to Aristotle, who
thought that there were two kinds of physics, one for the sublunary
world, and one for the heavens ('natural motions' in the two regions
were quite different), the Stoics invented astrophysics, for they

11 See S.Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London, 1959). Chapter III of that book is an
illuminating consideration of the problems of Fate and determinism, 'the possible' and
free will.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

believed, as we do, that the same physical laws applied throughout the
universe. Not that we are not free; we may always choose to act in this
way or that, or not at all. So we may choose to act in accordance with
those laws, with Fate, or not. Whether we do live according to Nature
or not makes no difference to what happens: what is bound to happen
will happen anyway. But it makes a great difference to the quality of
our lives. We can go our own way, and conflict with Nature, and suffer
disappointment and pain and grief; or we can walk with Fate, and
achieve peace. And we have already seen that since all things are one
and the same stuff and work in the same way, there is a cosmic
sympathy which makes sense of divination, and therefore of astrology.
It was the Stoic teacher of Cicero, Posidonius, who rationalised
divination most accommodatingly for the late Classical mind, and on
whom Ptolemy probably drew most heavily for his apologia in his
opening chapters. In his Prologue he says that 'most chance events of
great importance clearly display their cause (arriav) as coming from
the heavens surrounding us', and astrology, the second and useful part
of astronomy, investigates to«; aiTOTEAoupEvac; pcrapoAdc,, 'the changes
produced' in what they, the heavens, surround. This explicit idea of
causation is reinforced in Chapter 2: the aspects of the planets are
there said to cause changes (dTTEpyd^ovTai), and the temperament of
each man is determined by the state of the heavens at his birth. There
are of course other causes at work (ouvam'ai) such as heredity and
environment and upbringing, which are very important and must be
taken into account, but the causes derived from the surrounding
heavens are the most important and powerful. The same doctrine of
causes is reiterated at the beginning of the next chapter, which sets
out the benefits astrology can confer - a chapter which is essentially
Stoic in its arguments. This causation is not restricted to the planets:
the chapter on the fixed stars (1.9) tells of their natures 'with reference
to the active power of each'; the same phrase is used in the following
chapter where the modifying effects of the seasons are considered.
When we come to universal astrology in Book II we find that the basic
causation of ethnic differences is 'climatic' (in both the Greek and the
English senses) and through the 'humours'; but national differences
are derived from the characters of the planets, as masculine, diurnal
and so forth. 'The first and most powerful cause' (q TTpdxrq koi
ioyupOTaTq aiTia) of the general conditions of countries and cities
lies in the eclipses of the sun and moon and the movement of the stars
at the time (II.5), and Chapter 8 tells us how to calculate which stars
are helping to cause any event. The whole chapter on 'rulerships'
(oiKoSEOTTOTiai) is concerned with the active, causative powers of the
planets. And so far as the individual is concerned, III.1.1 makes the
position quite clear: 'The cause of events both in general and with

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respect to each individual is the movement of the planets, sun and

moon'.
So the answer to the question, was Ptolemy's astrology 'hard or
'soft', were the movements of the heavenly bodies causes of tempera­
ments and events or only signs, must be that it was 'hard': or at least,
that it was fatalistic in a Stoic sense. It is an important reservation. The
Stoic's somewhat ambivalent position is made clear by Ptolemy in
1.3.6ff: 'We should not think of all these things happening to men as if
they followed their heavenly cause by some original and irrevocable
divine ordinance, decreeing exactly what has been laid down for each
man, bound by necessity to happen to him, no other cause whatever
being able to counteract it. Rather we must think that while the
movement of the heavenly bodies is eternally completed according to a
divine and immutable fate, the change of earthly things happens
according to a natural and mutable fate, drawing its primary causes
from above according to chance and natural consequence. And also,
while some things happen to men through very general circumstances
and not according to the individual's own natural endowments - as
when because of great and inescapable changes in the heavens men
die in great numbers by fire or plague or flood (for the lesser cause
always gives way to the greater and stronger) - other things happen
because of small and chance antipathies in the heavens, according to
each individual's nature and peculiar temperament. So we ought to
listen to the astrologer (genethlialogos) when he says that to such and
such a temperament, with such and such a particular condition of the
heavens, such and such will happen as a result. If what is going to
happen to a man is not known, or if being known it does not receive
treatment to inhibit it, it is bound to follow the sequence dictated by
its original nature; whereas if it is foreknown and is provided with a
remedy (the remedy being what it is because of natural laws and fate
together) it either does not happen at all or is considerably modified'.
So our fate, foretold by the stars, which are part of the working of the
eternal law, is natural and mutable, and the foreknowledge provided
by the astrologer helps us to cope with it.
Ptolemy says that we ought to listen to the astrologer. One would
have expected an astrologer to say, 'You ought to listen to us when we
say ..and there is other evidence in the Tetrabiblos to suggest that
Ptolemy was not himself a practitioner of the art. The book is not in
any sense a practical handbook: it would be very difficult to draw up a
natal chart and interpret it from what Ptolemy wrote. He was led to
make a rational summary of this part of astronomy by the logic of his
thought as a philosopher and scientist. So he drew on all the sources
he could find, including his battered old manuscript: and he did not
always fully understand his sources - indeed he occasionally mis­

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understood what he read. He may be forgiven for some of the

confusion; for example, for not being entirely clear what a tottos,
topos, was. The word means 'place', and it is used in various ways to
different divisions of the zodiac by different authors. How did
Ptolemy himself divide the ecliptic?
First, and obviously, into the twelve signs of the zodiac. That is, into
the twelve thirty-degree divisions bearing the names of the old
constellations Aries, Taurus and so on; incidentally, Ptolemy always
refers to the sign we know as Libra by its older name, the Claws (of
the Scorpion, that is: XqAai in Greek). He was, of course, well aware of
the precession of the equinoxes, which had been discovered by
Hipparchus three hundred years earlier: that what is still called 'the
first point of Aries' moves to the west at a rate of about Vz of a second
of arc each day, or right round the equator in 25,800 years. The result
is that the vernal equinox, the first point just referred to, where the
sun crosses the equator moving north, is now actually in the
constellation Pisces. Ptolemy, like most astrologers, works with a fixed
zodiac, not a natural one: the thirty degrees beginning from the vernal
equinox are the sign Aries, whatever the constellation which is
actually there. He usually calls these divisions dodecatemoria, often
zodia (<q>8ia), and occasionally simply signs (oqpeia) or 'parts of the
zodiac'. He firmly accepts (1.10) the first point of Aries as the
beginning of the circle (recognising that a circle has no natural
beginning) and explains in chapter 22 why the fixed zodiac is used:
'The beginnings of the signs and of the terms it is very reasonable to
take from the solstitial and equinoctial signs, both because our
authorities make this clear, and especially because from what we have
already said we see that the signs' natures and powers and associa­
tions take their cause from the solstitial and equinoctial starting-places
and not from any other sign. For if other starting-places are assumed,
we shall be compelled either never to use the natures of the signs as
indicating the future or, if we do use them, to be wrong: for the
divisions of the zodiac which cause the signs' powers (i.e. the
thirty-degree units beginning with the solstices and equinoxes) move
on and are changed.'
He also divides the zodiac into quadrants (TETapTqpopia), each
beginning with one of the 'angles', or KEVTpa, the Ascendant, the
Medium Caeli, the Setting point, and the Imum Caeli. In III.11 the MC is
said to be quartile to the ASC, and chapter 2 of the same book
suggests that the MC is known separately from the ASC and can be
used instead of it in particular circumstances; but nowhere in the
Tetrabiblos does Ptolemy describe how to find them, nor worry about
or mention the problem of the inequality of the quadrants caused by
the obliquity of the ecliptic. In fact all this is dealt with in the

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Almagest, as part of the other branch of astronomy (II.7—9); but the

astrologer not prepared to study that difficult work would get little
help in avoiding confusion or worse from the Tetrabiblos.
Now dodecatemorion does not always mean 'sign'. Strictly it simply
means, in Ptolemy, a twelfth part, and consequently it is most often
used of the most frequently referred to twelfth parts, the signs of the
zodiac. But in III.11, a long chapter on length of life, one of the
important 'places' (tottoi) is 'the dodecatemorion about the horoscope',
defined as the five degrees before the ASC and the twenty-five degrees
after. These thirty degrees clearly do not constitute a sign; they are a
'place', a topos, which nowadays would be called the first 'house'.
'House', oTko<j, is never used by Ptolemy of such a division, nor
indeed by any other Greek astrologer; the word is kept for the 'houses
of the planets'. Aries and Scorpio, for example, are the houses of Mars.
Generally, Ptolemy uses topoi, 'places', to refer to the mundane houses;
sometimes he calls them dodecatemoria, and frequently zodia, which we
translate as signs. To add to the confusion, topos is used in two other
ways; in 1.22 topos is defined as 'the dodecatemorion of a dodecatemo­
rion, that is two and a half degrees' - a division Ptolemy rejects: and
the term is nowhere else used in this sense. But the word does simply
mean 'place', and is used in both the literal and metaphorical senses of
the English word. It can also mean 'topic', and there are one or two
places in the Tetrabiblos where it may be used in that sense. Topos is
translated pretty haphazardly in the Loeb edition, as 'place, house,
region and topic', with little understanding - and consequent confusion.
That there should have been such confusion in Ptolemy's time is a
reflection of the still unsettled state of the art of astrology. Imprecision
of language is the inevitable result of lack of clarity of ideas.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Ptolemy did divide the zodiac
into houses, each concerned with particular aspects of human life,
which were later generally called topoi; and that this division was
based, like that into quadrants, on the ascendant. The late fifth century
commentary on Paulus Alexandrinus, attributed to Heliodorus, makes
it plain: 'As in the beginning Paulus divided the zodiac into 12 parts
and made the beginning of that division Aries, so now he cuts the
whole circumference of the zodiac into 12 parts, not calling them by
the names of the signs, but the first, taking the first point on the
horizon according to the time of birth, he calls the horoscope ... and
we begin from the horoscope, because it is the foundation and ground
of the other eleven houses (topoi); for unless this one is found, it is
impossible to set up the rest'.12 Since Ptolemy usually deals in whole

12 Heliodori, ut dicitur, in Paulum Alexandrinum Commentarium, ed. E. Boer (Leipzig, 1962);

c.23, 62—63.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM
signs, one house is equivalent to one sign - which sign depends on the
time of birth - and so he can use 'sign' of this sort of 'twelfth part' also.
We have already seen that Ptolemy rejects the 2V20 dodecatemorion,
and the consideration of separate degrees; nor is there in the
Tetrabiblos any mention of the decans. He does, however, spend a
whole long chapter (1.21) on the 'terms', dpia. This he does without
definition or explanation: it is simply taken for granted that the reader
knows what it is all about. The only other place terms that are
considered is in the curious appendix to the whole, IV.10. He begins,
'with regard to the terms, there are two main systems in use: the first
is the Egyptian, which is based on the lordships of the planets'
houses, and the other is the Chaldaean, based on the rulerships of the
triplicities.' Each sign of the zodiac is divided into five unequal
sections, and each section then allocated to one of the five planets
(excluding, that is, the sun and the moon, which have no terms). The
obvious areas of potential differences are, how many degrees for each
term in each sign, and to what planet should each term be assigned?
The Chaldaean system, which Ptolemy describes briefly but rejects in
favour of the Egyptians', has at least the merits, as he himself admits,
of simplicity and plausibility. It is based on the triplicities: Aries, Leo
and Sagittarius; Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn; Gemini, Libra and
Aquarius; and Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces. The ruler of the first is
Jupiter; of the second, Venus; of the third, Saturn by day and Mercury
by night; and of the last, Mars. Each sign is then divided into five
terms of eight, seven, six, five and four degrees - thirty in all. The
planets are then taken in the order of their rulerships - Jupiter, Venus,
Saturn, Mercury, Mars - and assigned to the terms in order, in each
sign; in each triplicity the first, 8°, term is given to the ruling planet,
and then the same order of planets is preserved.
It is a simple system, being clearly 'artificial' and arithmetical;
which is exactly why Ptolemy preferred the Egyptian system, because
it at least appeared to have some sort of reasoning behind it. He says it
is based on the lordships of the planetary houses, and then accuses it
of inconsistency, because sometimes 'they assign the first terms to the
lords of the houses, and sometimes to the lords of the triplicities, and
sometimes also to the lords of the exaltations', and even this they do
not do properly. Why, for example, do they give the first place in
Capricorn to Mercury, when Mercury has no relation of rulership to
that sign? Secondly, he says, the numbers of degrees in the terms do
not seem to follow any system.13 'For (§5) the number totalled for each

13 It is at this point, p. 92, that the Loeb translator loses contact with his author to some
extent, largely because he seems to have relied on Bouche-Leclercq, who is himself more
confused than Ptolemy.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

planet from all the signs (in proportion to which they say the planets
periods are distributed) rests on no fitting or acceptable reasoning.
There may be variations in detail, he says, but the totals remain the
same: they are in fact, 57 for Saturn, 79 for Jupiter, 66 for Mars, 82 for
Venus and 76 for Mercury - a grand total of 360°. (These very figures
are given as planetary 'periods' by Vettius Valens.) And the system he
'accuses' the Egyptians of actually using is the Egyptian system as
described by Paulus Alexandrinus,14 who gives a table identical to that
of Ptolemy.
Ptolemy himself then goes on with a passage of curious difficulty,
the understanding of which depends on knowing what 'rising times'
are. They are defined by Neugebauer and van Hoesen15 as indicating
'how many degrees of the equator cross the horizon of a given locality
simultaneously with the consecutive zodiacal signs'. So the rising time
of a given sign is the number of degrees of the equator which rise at
the same time. For anyone on the equator, the rising time of any point,
say, 30°,"V, is its Right Ascension; in this case the ancients spoke of
the sphaera recta. As one moves further north or south from the
equator, the rising times vary, and this is the sphaera obliqua, and one
can indeed talk of Oblique Ascension. At the equator the rising times
of all the signs are equal; at the Pole, the same six signs are above the
horizon all the time. Fig. 10a below shows the situation as the first
point of Aries is about to rise over the horizon at latitude 45°; in 10b
the equator has turned enough to bring the whole 30° of Aries above
the horizon, and the amount of the equator that has risen at the same
time is shown by a heavier line. In 10c and d we are looking at the
other side of the sphere and watching Aries set. Since Aries is directly
opposite to Libra in the zodiac, it can be seen that the rising time of
Aries is the setting time of Libra and vice versa. The correct working
out of the rising times of the signs involves spherical trigonometry; it
is done by Ptolemy in the Almagest, and the results are set out in
Tables in II.8.
The passage in the Tetrabiblos (1.21.6-7) is as follows: 'Now some
try to produce a persuasive and rationalistic argument about the
terms, that the rising times of each planet in every clime make up
together the same sum; but that is false. For they follow the common
practice, which being based on evenly increasing rising times does not
even come close to the truth, and according to which on the parallel
running through lower Egypt they want the sign of Virgo and also of
Libra to rise in 38°20' and that of Leo and Scorpio in 35°, while it is
shown in the tables that the latter rise in more than 35° and Virgo and

14 Pauli Alexandria Elementa Apotelesmatica, ed. E. Boer (Leipzig, 1958) lift.

15 Neugebauer and van Hoesen, op. cit., 11.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

Horizon

Libra in less'. In fact, the rising time given for Leo and Scorpio in
Ptolemy's tables is 35°36' for the clime of 'Lower Egypt', and that for
Virgo and Libra is 34°47'; the times for Meroe, in Upper Egypt, are
32°44' and 31°20' respectively - they will become relevant in a
moment.
Ptolemy's criticism is that the rising times do not add up to the
totals for the terms, and the authorities have the wrong rising times
anyway. It is true that the rising times are wrong, compared with
those of the Almagest. But the picture changes when we look at the
tables for rising times compiled for the seven climes, on two different
systems, A and B, by Neugebauer and van Hoesen.16 Although Paulus

16 Ibid., 4.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Alexandrinus says explicitly (c.3) that he is quoting rising times for the
third clime, Alexandria, those he actually gives for each sign are
exactly those set out for Meroe in Upper Egypt by Neugebauer and
van Hoesen; and they are the figures quoted by Ptolemy as Egyptian,
though for Lower Egypt. Clearly the authority (? Nechepso-Petosiris)
used by both Ptolemy and Paulus Alexandrinus used rising times for
Meroe and either gave them mistakenly for Alexandria or, more likely,
simply gave the column for the first clime and gave also the difference
to add to make up each of the following six columns — Ptolemy is
absolutely right in saying that they followed a simple (but wrong)
arithmetical method. The times Ptolemy quotes, 35° for Leo and
Scorpio and 38°20' for Virgo and Libra, are in fact more wrong than
Ptolemy realised.
If we add up all the rising times for each of the planets - that is, for
the two signs which each planet rules - we get totals which are far
larger than those for the terms: for Mars, for example, adding up the
times for Aries and Scorpio, Mars' two houses, we get 388. But if we
divide this by six, we get (to the nearest whole number) 65, which is
nearly the same. And if we do the same for the other planets, using the
figures from the same first column, we get the following totals, all the
result of division by six: Saturn 59, Jupiter 59, Mars 65, Venus 76 and
Mercury 81. Curiously, we can get a closer approximation to the term­
totals by taking the figures of the first column on the other system, B:
Saturn 57, Jupiter 62, Mars 66, Venus 73 and Mercury 78. The
anomalies are obviously Jupiter and Venus, but the similarities are too
striking for us not to accept that the term-totals are indeed based on
the rising times; that these are probably Upper Egypt times, not
Lower; that the rising times totals have all to be divided by six; and
that Jupiter and Venus have more than their proper share. We can also
be fairly sure that Ptolemy did not really understand all this; nor, a
fortiori, did Paulus Alexandrinus.
But how did such a complicated system arise? And what are 'terms'?
The Greek word is dpia, horia, which means limits or boundaries; the
Latin word used by Firmicus Maternus is fines, and by others, termini,
both being simply translations of the Greek. They are the limits within
which a planet exercises 'lordship', oiKoSEcmoTEia. Now in ancient
Egypt the heavenly bodies ruled over times, days and months and so
on. And we have seen17 that there were once seventy-two divisions of
the sky: seventy-two five-day segments of the Egyptian year of 360
days. Supposing that the planets were originally assigned 'limits'
within each of these seventy-two divisions, when the twelve-sign

17 See Chapter II, p. 22.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

zodiac took over, the totals would have to be divided by six. The
original allocation probably included the sun and moon as well as the
five planets, and certainly the old Egyptian scheme was linked to ideas
on the length of life an individual was granted by his 'time-lord',
chronocrator. Now Paulus Alexandrinus tells us that the total number
of terms was made equal to the 360 degrees of the zodiac; and that the
sun and the moon are not included in the scheme because they are
lords of all times. If the sun is in a good position, it grants 120 years,
and if the moon is favourable, she gives 108. The sun's 120 divided by
six gives us roughly the difference between the rising times total and
the term-total for Jupiter, and it looks as though the terms originally
assigned to the sun were given to Jupiter, and enough of the moon's to
Venus to make up the 360. The association of Jupiter with the sun and
of Venus with the moon is common enough to explain this re­
allocation without positing any particular optimism among those who
made up the system - both Jupiter and Venus are beneficent planets.
At the end of this section, Ptolemy gives an account of his battered
ancient manuscript, and the system it describes,'and sets out his own
table of terms, which is slightly different in detail from the Egyptian,
but gives the same totals to each of the planets. None of this is given
the sort of philosophical explanation which Ptolemy provides else­
where. So aspects are explained in 1.14, and in the following chapter
he gives reasons for the terms 'commanding' and 'obeying': Tn the
same way those signs are called "commanding" and "obeying" which
are equidistant from the same equinoctial sign, whichever it is,
because they have equal rising times and are on equal parallels. Of
these, those which are on the summer semicircle are called "command­
ing" and those on the winter semicircle "obeying", because when the
sun is in the former it makes the day longer than the night, and when
it is in the latter, it makes the day shorter'. The 'summer semicircle' is
that half of the zodiac which is north of the equator, containing Aries,
Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo and Virgo: the six signs that would be
permanently above the horizon for anyone at the north pole. That
Ptolemy (and all other ancient authorities) should not mention the fact
that in the southern hemisphere the converse would hold, and the
signs change roles, is not surprising: for them, as for many centuries
after, the inhabited world, the oikoumene (hence 'oecumenical' for
'world-wide'), lay wholly in the northern temperate zone.
The planetary houses are explained in terms of their natures and
positions. Having assigned to the sun and moon Leo and Cancer,
because they are the most northerly of the signs, and therefore closer
to our zenith and 'most productive of heat and warmth , and Leo is
masculine like the sun and Cancer feminine like the moon, Saturn, for
example, 'which is by nature colder and opposed to heat, and has the

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

highest and largest of the orbits', acquires 'the signs diametrically

opposed to Cancer and Leo, that is Capricorn and Aquarius', because
they are cold and wintery signs, and what is more, since they are in
opposition to the sun in Cancer and Leo, their aspect is 'inconsistent
with beneficence'. So for the rest of the planets: Jupiter's houses are
Sagittarius and Pisces, Mars' houses are Scorpio and Aries,18 Venus'
are Libra and Taurus, and Mercury's, as befits the planet nearest to the
sun, the houses next to the luminaries', Gemini and Virgo. The same
sort of logic applies to the 'exaltations' and 'depressions' of the
planets: the sun is exalted in Aries, when it is increasing in strength,
and depressed in Libra, and Saturn again is the opposite of the sun,
depressed in Aries and exalted in Libra. And so on, though the
explanations have to be 'stretched' a bit occasionally: for example,
Venus is exalted in Pisces because she is moist by nature and it is in
Pisces that 'the beginning of the moist spring is presignified', where
the 'pre-' is what is important, since in 1.10 it is Aries which signifies
spring.
When he comes to genethlialogy in Book III, Ptolemy is well aware
of the claims of conception to be treated as more important than birth,
for the calculation of the natal chart (chapter 1). When the time of
conception is accurately known, he says, we should use it. But usually
it is not known, whereas the birth time is observable, if not easily
measured accurately in those days before good mechanical clocks, as
he recognises at the beginning of the next chapter. So the use of the
birth-time has to be justified. The former, the time of conception, may
be called the source, or origin, or first beginning, the dpxq, but the
latter, the time of birth, is also a beginning, the Korrapxq. 'The first
might be called the coming into being of a human seed, the second the
coming into being of a man.' At birth, he says, the child takes on most
of the characteristics, which it did not have in the womb, which are
proper to human nature. This may reflect both some knowledge of
embryology, a fairly advanced part of Greek medical science, and
something of that Neo-platonist 'journey of the soul' through the
spheres we shall meet in Macrobius and others. In any case, he argues,
the configuration of the heavens at birth has a similar causative
function to that of the configuration at conception, since the two are
similar. This unexplained assumption is probably derived from his

18 Mars is 'destructive and unharmonious', and these signs are quartile to the
luminaries: Aries is quartile to Cancer, the moon's house, and Scorpio to Leo, the sun's.
It is however perfectly true, as Robbins says in his note on p. 81 of the Loeb text that
Aries is also in trine with Leo and Scorpio in trine with Cancer, and these are good
aspects. But Aries and Scorpio are here said to be of a similar nature to Mars, that is
dry, though this is the only place where they arc so described, and it is not really
consistent with what is said of them elsewhere. 7

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

Egyptian sources; for example, Nechepso-Petosiris is probably the

authority for the belief that the ASC at birth is the sign of the moon at
the time of conception. This belief has an air of plausibility: since the
moon runs through all the signs of the zodiac in four weeks, and the
length of pregnancy varies a good deal, a reasonable conception date
can generally be found, with the moon in the same sign as the ASC is
in at birth.
There is behind much of what Ptolemy says a great deal that is of
social historical interest, as indeed there is in other astrological
writings.19 A long chapter (III.14) on 'the quality of the soul', or as we
might say, the mental character, caused or produced by the planets in
different combinations and aspects, is followed by one on 'diseases of
the soul', or mental disorders. The 'more moderate diseases', he says,
have already been dealt with in chapter 14: they include such
afflictions as stupidity, extravagance, avarice, lewdness and so on.
These Ptolemy describes as extreme patterns of behaviour, those
which fall short of or exceed the mean. But chapter 15 is concerned
with those which affect the whole nature, both the active, intellectual
parts and the affective, passive part, and might be called pathological,
vooqpaTtbSq. The perversion of the intellectual part produces epilepsy
and various kinds of insanity; but if Jupiter or Venus, the benign
planets, have any influence, these afflictions are curable. If Jupiter is
the good influence, they can be cured by medical means such as diet
or drugs; but if Venus is at work, through oracular responses or by the
help of the gods. The perversion of the passive part of the soul affects
the character most apparently in regard to matters of sex, and here it is
obvious that Ptolemy has a 'modern' (though not contemporary)
attitude to 'perversion', which includes both male and female homo­
sexuality.
The title of the fifth chapter of Book IV is rather coyly translated in
the Loeb edition as 'Of Marriage'; but the Greek simply says, 'of
combinations', that is, of men and women, and though much of the
chapter is taken up with 'lawful connexions', other kinds of union are
also dealt with. The virtues of a good wife are dignity, industrious­
ness, and managerial ability; it is a bonus if Venus makes her also
beautiful and charming, or Mercury bestows intelligence. Husbands
should also be dignified and industrious, and practical; the cor­
responding bonus is to be neat and handsome. And thrift is a virtue in
both husband and wife. It is a fascinating chapter which shows that
Ptolemy and his contemporaries would have found little to be
surprised at in the 'agony columns' of our press (sex magazines
included).

19 See for example Franz Cumont's L'F.gypt des astrologues (Brussels, 1937).

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

The longish chapter 7 of the same book is concerned with friends

and enemies; and the last eight lines with slaves. Some manuscripts,
possibly correctly, make this a separate chapter. It merely tells us that
the relevant part of the zodiac to consult is the twelfth house, of the
Evil Daemon; and it is all Ptolemy has to say on slaves. Paulus
Alexandrinus, two centuries later, does no more than mention slaves
under the twelfth house. But Firmicus Maternus, a near contemporary
of Paulus, spends eight pages on slaves, including a chapter on their
offspring. Hephaistion, at the beginning of the fifth century, wrote
three books on astrology, the first two derived largely from Ptolemy
and Dorotheus of Sidon (a century earlier than Ptolemy), the last
wholly from Dorotheus. In Book II he quotes the chapter of Ptolemy
entire; and he has an extra chapter of eight lines which refers to a Lot
of Slaves, a KXqpo«;, which is found by counting from Mercury to the
moon, and then taking the same angular distance from the horoscope.
He also gives an alternative method, counting from the same planet to
the Lot of Fortune. But in Book III he has a chapter on the
manumission of slaves, and a long one on runaways, both derived
from Dorotheus. Heliodorus' commentary on Paulus, written at the
end of the fifth century, reverts to brevity, but also mentions the Lot,
with another method of counting, from Mars. There was, it seems, the
now familiar confusion among astrologers as to how to calculate the
Lots.
Now the Alexandrians Ptolemy and Paulus seem to regard slavery
with much less concern than some other authors, and less than one
might have expected of ancient writers. But this in fact merely reflects
the difference between Egypt and most of the rest of the Empire in the
matter of slavery. Large scale slavery was unknown in Egypt. Agri­
cultural land was the king's, and most manufacturing industries were
state monopolies; so peasants and workers, who could not afford to
own slaves themselves, provided a pool of cheap labour for those who
needed it. The only forms of slavery introduced by the Greeks were
domestic - the middle and upper class Greeks could not have existed
without their household slaves. It is significant that in Ptolemy's time,
when slaves were at their most expensive throughout the Empire, they
only fetched half the normal prices in Egypt;20 local demand was low,
since they were really only needed for domestic purposes, and the
export of native slaves was prohibited. Rostovtzeff puts it briefly:21 Tn
sum, slavery, as an economic factor, was of far less importance in
Ptolemaic Egypt than in other parts of the Hellenistic world.'

20 A. H. M. Jones, 'Slavery in the Ancient World', Economic History Review, 2nd Series 9
(1956) 185-199.
21 M. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 1941) 322.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

On the dangers of travel, and the many ways in which men can die,
Ptolemy might be disturbing, even frightening, were it not that our
own age can more than match Ptolemy's catalogue at most points. In a
time of air disasters and road deaths astrologers are once again much
exercised by the questions of the right and wrong times to travel. The
list of dangers that might beset the traveller if the planets were against
him included shipwreck and piracy, deserts and cliffs and earth­
quakes, running out of provisions, wild beasts, serpents and other
poisonous creatures, highway robbers and 'dangerous accusations' - a
perennial hazard of foreign travel, it seems, - and the best he could
hope for would be a profitless voyage. In the account of the ways in
which a man might meet his end there is no mention of old age! It is
true that under 'natural deaths', a term embracing death by every
conceivable illness, 'cardiac affections' are listed as caused by Jupiter;
but one would have expected old age to come under Saturn. There is a
terrifying picture suggested by the list of 'violent deaths'; they include
being trampled by a mob, the noose, wild beasts again (including
those in the arena!), 'in prison', poisonous bites, poison and 'feminine
plots', death 'through women or as a murderer of women', drowning,
being crushed in the collapse of a building, fall from a height, being
killed in civil faction or war, being killed by pirates, robbers,
criminals, generals and kings, decapitation, crucifixion and burning,
cautery and the surgeon's knife; and at worst, one could lie unburied.
In this chapter (IV.9) there occur some of the very rare mentions of
fixed stars. If Saturn is in the neighbourhood of Argo, it indicates
shipwreck; if Mars is 'in the Gorgon of Perseus', death by decapitation
or mutilation; if the same planet is at the MC or IMC, 'particularly in
Cepheus or Andromeda', crucifixion is forecast. The power of the fixed
stars (the Greek word is aTrAaveic;, which simply means 'not-
wandering' and avoids the notion of being 'fixed' to something; the
Latin fixae can mean just 'firm, unmoving') is dealt with in 1.9, where
three lists are given of those in or near, north of and south of the
zodiac, and each star is likened to one of the planets in its effects. Very
similar lists are given by most ancient astrological writers, and the
attributions to the planets are fairly constant in all. These lists include
the constellations in the older eighteen-house zodiac of the Babylon­
ians, in which Taurus was split into the Pleiades, the Hyades and
Orion, the southern and northern Fish were separate, and Cetus,
Perseus and Auriga were included. Not much use, however, is made
of the fixed stars (except perhaps Regulus, in Leo) by any Greek
astrologers, and very little indeed by Ptolemy, who makes no mention
of one of their chief connexions with astrology, the lunar mansions .
The phrase merely means the lodging places, resting places, of the
moon; they are sometimes called stopping places, stationes, stations .

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They are probably the main reason for the survival of interest in the
fixed stars. Like other features in this early astrology, they originally
had nothing much to do with it, but were assimilated. They became
more important later in Arabic astrology, mainly because the Islamic
calendar was and is lunar, and the mansions belong to what might be
called a lunar tradition going back, in all probability to Babylon, which
also had a lunar calendar.
Here once again we find the mingling of the three traditions,
Babylonian, Greek and Egyptian. The Babylonians contributed the
stars, the constellations and groups associated with the moon; the
Greeks the lists of days, hemerologies, fit or unfit for this or that
activity, though these might have been as well derived from Egypt:
many primitive peoples have such lists of lucky and unlucky days,
often linked with the moon, since in times without calendars the only
way of knowing which day was which was by reference to the
heavens, especially the phases of the moon. And the Egyptians'
contributions were the pictorial symbolism and the involvement of the
gods, and hence, later, of the planets.
That the lunar mansions were originally Babylonian is fairly clear.22
They are behind the second century list of fixed stars of Maximus of
Tyre; the Arabic lists of mansions of Alchandri (ninth century) and
Abenragel (eleventh century) go back to seventh century sources, and
a very similar Coptic list, with Greek names, must be earlier, since
Coptic was 'dead' by then; they were known in Vedic India, and all
seem to betray Greek origins. But they are lunar, not solar, and the
Babylonians had by the sixth century B.C. a list of seventeen
'constellations which stand in the way of the moon', and an eighteen-
group zodiac probably linked with it; and their calendar was lunar.
The twenty-eight mansion scheme was derived via Egyptian magic by
the linking of the lists of lucky and unlucky days of the lunar month
with the hemerologies and with the zodiac.
As far back as Hesiod, in the mid-eighth century B.C., the Greeks
had lists of days of the month when it was or was not propitious to
carry out certain activities. The last section of his poem, Works and
Days (lines 765-828) mentions sixteen of the thirty days of the month
and what should or should not be done on each; the fifteenth alone is
a wholly bad day, and the fourteen not mentioned are 'changeable or
neutral'. But Hesiod also warns the reader that 'the same day is at one

22 S. Weinstock, 'Lunar Mansions and Early Calendars', journal of Hellenic Studies, LXIX
(1949) 48ff; cf. also CCAC, IX.1, 138ff; I. E. Svenberg, De latinske Lunaria (Goteborg, 1936);
Lunaria et Zodiologia latina, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia, XVI (Goteborg, 1963);
Philip Yampolsky, 'The origin of the Twenty-eight Lunar Mansions', Osiris IX (1950)
62-83. '

82
 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

time a mother, at another, a step-mother', and very few men know

which. He does not link the days individually with gods, though Zeus
(Jupiter to the Romans) has overall control, but merely numbers them,
'first, fourth and seventh', and so on, with a 'sixth from the middle'
which suggests reference to the phases of the moon: 'sixth from the
middle' presumably means sixth from the full moon. All this is
presumably from a native Boeotian Greek tradition, and there are
Orphic hemerologies from about the same period. But by the time of
Herodotus, in the fifth century, the Greeks were fathering all their
ideas on the Egyptians: 'And these are other discoveries of the
Egyptians, to which of the gods each month and day belongs, and
what will happen to each man according to his (birth) day, and how
he will die and what sort of a man he will be. And these things those
of the Greeks who are poets make use of.' (11.82) So according to
Herodotus the attribution of the days to gods is Egyptian; but
Babylonian hemerologies from the tenth century on do the same, so it
was perhaps common, and the Greeks were the exception.
The Orphic list quoted by Weinstock has animal symbols of the
phases of the moon, and twenty-eight such symbols, most of them
animal, are found in Egypt. The figure twenty-eight occurs in magical
papyri also: it is four times seven, and lunar, which is enough to make
it a magic number. The symbols were easily linked with similar
symbols of divinities, without as yet any connexion with the stars. The
process was then probably as described by Weinstock:23 the 'constella­
tions standing in the way, the path, of the moon' were systematised as
twenty-eight, and this series and that of the animal symbols and days
converged. Out of this came the mansions of the moon, with the same
pictorial symbolism, tied now to the star-groups, as in the Arabic lists.
By the second century A.D. they had been assimilated into zodiacal
astrology, but with only the most tenuous connexion, through the
association of first days, then mansions and thence star-groups, with
gods, and hence with planets. And this was done in Greek, probably
again in Alexandria.
Ptolemy, as has been said, makes no mention of these lunar
mansions, though they were certainly known in his day, not even in
his outline of the effects of the fixed stars in the zodiac. There is,
however, a hint of them in IV.10.20: when writing of the 'time-lords',
the chronocratores, the one for the month, he says, is found by
counting round the zodiac at twenty-eight days per sign, and the one
for the day by counting at two and a third days (that is, one twelfth of
twenty-eight) a sign: that is, the whole zodiac equals one month of

23 Op. cit., 65.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

twenty-eight days. And with regard to 'ingresses', or transits, (§21),

the moon is the planet which is important to the consideration of a
day. The combination of the association of the moon with the day and
the use of a twenty-eight day lunar month is surely an echo of the
mansion system.
This last chapter of the work is a curious one. Its matter is not
included in the 'list of contents' in III.4, and is different from that of
most of the rest of the Tetrabiblos-, there are also some small
inconsistencies of detail and of terminology. But the style is un­
doubtedly Ptolemy's, and there is no reason why the chapter should
not be an appendix added by Ptolemy himself; it looks like an
afterthought added because of its importance, possibly from another
source. It describes its own subject at the beginning as being 'the
divisions of times': it is about the governance of sections of time, the
influences brought to bear on particular 'bits' of time. It is closely
linked with III.11, which deals with the complicated matter of
determining the expected length of a man's life. Bouche-Leclercq is
perhaps overstating things when he writes: 'The calculation of the
length of life, with an indication of the kind of death ordained by the
stars, is the chief task of astrology, the operation judged most difficult
by practitioners, most dangerous and damnable by its enemies.'24
Certainly it is the part that kings and governors and those in authority
have sought to repress or at least control; but there is and was a lot
more to astrology. But that the topic was of great importance is shown
by the length of Ptolemy's chapter and the number of illustrations he
gives to help the reader understand an immensely complex procedure.
This is very unusual, since Ptolemy tends to avoid details of practice,
and consequently needs and uses few illustrations. There were many
different methods of finding out the expectation of life in Greek
astrology, some very crude and simple, and some, like Ptolemy's, both
bafflingly complicated and flexible enough in their possibilities to
provide almost any answer.25
The system was probably based on Nechepso-Petosiris, since 'the
ancient' is quoted at the beginning; and it is the system Ptolemy says
he finds most agreeable and according to nature. It depends on
finding what he calls the dtjjeTiKoq TOTroq, the 'aphetic place or house':
'the house which sends a man out into the world' perhaps, or it may
be 'the house sending its influence out on to the subject' - what
Ptolemy really meant by the word we can only guess. The Latin

24 L'astrologie grecque, 404.

25 The reader who is interested in all the details will find the Loeb translation fairly
literal - though the text is in some places certainly corrupt - but will get little help from
the footnotes, based as they are on Bouche-Leclercq.

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

writers use a number of terms for it, the commonest being prorogator
and significator. The five aphetic houses in order of preference, of
power, are: the Medium Caeli, the Ascendant, the eleventh house, that
of the Good Daimon, the Setting point, and the ninth house, that of
'the god'. Then the actual 'sender forth', the acpETq«;, is, for a daytime
birth, in order of preference again, the house where the sun is, if it is
in an aphetic house; the moon's house, under the same condition; the
house of the planet which has the most rulerships over the house
where the sun is, or the house of the preceding syzygy (full or new
moon), or over the ascendant; and in the last resort, if none of these
bodies is suitable, the ascendant itself. For night-time births, the order
is the moon's house, then the sun's, and then the planet's which rules
over the moon's house, or the syzygy, or the Lot of Fortune; and as
long-stops, the Lot of Fortune if the preceding syzygy was a full moon,
the ascendant if it was new. The lunar astrology of the night-time
births, with its use of the Lot of Fortune, the 'horoscope of the moon',
must eventually hark back to Babylon.
Having found the beginning (some simpler systems just take the
ascendant as a starting-point, without any complications), we have to
find the end, and this is where the complications really set in. The
ultimate limit is set by the Occident, the setting-point; and then there
are all the complex ways in which the luminaries and the planets and
their aspects may interfere and shorten or lengthen the expectation.
Ptolemy's method involves measuring intervals in degrees of the
zodiac and then converting these into degrees of Right Ascension (that
is, along the equator), and those into years. To do this accurately we
need his tables in the Almagest, which is no doubt why he preferred
this method, and why other astrologers with less understanding of
spherical trigonometry stuck to simpler arithmetical methods.
The appendix, IV.10, also uses aphetic houses, or prorogators. But
first it makes some general points about 'times': 'Just as in all
genethlialogical matters a greater destiny takes precedence over
particulars, that greater destiny being about the countries of the
subjects, to which the general enquiries about births are naturally
subordinated (such as the form of the body and so on), so also anyone
making a scientific enquiry must always grasp the first and more
powerful cause, so as not to call one born in Ethiopia, let us say,
white-skinned and straight-haired, and a German or Gaul black and
curly-haired, without realising it, simply in accordance with the
indications of their births; or call the latter (the Germans and the
Gauls) gentle in character and fond of discussion and contemplation,
and those born in Greece savage and uneducated' (§§2-3). One gets a
distinct feeling that here Ptolemy's prejudices are showing. At any rate
the point is that one should first grasp the universal conditions of

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

destiny, and then join with them the particular modifying conditions.
So when we are dealing with the 'divisions of times' the actual ages
of the subjects must be taken into account, so that we do not predict
unsuitable things, assigning 'to a baby business dealings or marriage
or other adult affairs, or to a very old man begetting children or other
such belonging to younger men.' One might well wonder how old
'very old' has to be, and doubt Ptolemy's knowledge of biology - or
the world! Some indication of how old is given in his list of 'the ages
of man' and their allocation to the planets: for there are, in the general
sense, seven ages of man corresponding to the seven planets, 'begin­
ning with the first age and the first sphere from us, that is, the moon's,
and ending with the last of the ages and the furthest of the planetary
spheres, that of Saturn.'
These seven ages of man became commonplaces, and are familiar to
readers of Shakespeare from Jaques' speech in 'As You Like It'. The
moon rules over infancy, up to the fourth year, when Mercury takes
over for the age of childhood, to fourteen, the age, as Ptolemy says, of
the schoolboy. From fourteen to twenty-two Venus is in charge, the
age of the lover. The fourth age, young manhood, lasts nineteen years,
and is the sun's, the age of ambition. Mars has fifteen years of
manhood, when a sense of mortality and urgency seizes a man; and
Jupiter has twelve years of old age and retirement. Shakespeare's
picture of the rest of life, Saturn's portion, is no less depressing than
Ptolemy's:
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion:
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
The periods thus allotted to the planets are: Moon, four years;
Mercury, ten; Venus, eight; Sun, nineteen; Mars, fifteen; and Jupiter,
twelve. No specific period is given for Saturn in this context, since all
that is left after the age of sixty-eight belongs to the cold planet; but
other sources for these same 'periods' give Saturn thirty years.
These periods have puzzled many commentators; Neugebauer and
van Hoesen merely quote them as minimal periods, following Vettius
Valens and Firmicus Maternus, without comment; and Bouche-
Leclercq, having given plausible explanations for the sums allotted to
Saturn, Jupiter and the Sun (the two planets' sidereal periods, and the
Metonic cycle), says (p. 409) that the ten, eight and fifteen for Mercury,
Venus and Mars 'are to be classified among the arcana'. Robbins refers
to Bouche-Leclercq with obvious agreement, but then quotes the
Michigan papyrus P.Mich.149 (Loeb p. 445, footnote) 'which speaks of
the "period of Mars, who returns to his original position in fifteen

86
 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

years (ev tcd Apecu^ kukAco, de; tv eteoiv is’ ti)v dnoKaTdoTaoiv
Eysi)/ And the gttokcitgotcxoi^, apokatastasis, return to the original
position, is the answer. 'Sepharial' explains it clearly:26 'They (sc. the
Chaldaeans) found that Saturn came to the conjunction with the same
asterism or group of stars after a period of 30 years, Jupiter after a
period of 12 years, Mars after a period of 15 years, the Sun after a
period of 19 years, Venus after a period of 8 years, and Mercury after a
period of 10 years, as seen from the earth.' The italics are mine: the
important point is that the apokatastasis is when Saturn is seen by us
against the same star-group. A glance at any astrologer's ephemeris to
check the positions of the planets in the zodiac over a long period will
show that the periods quoted are roughly correct. Indeed, even
Norton's Star Atlas,27 having defined an opposition as 'favourable'
when the Earth and the planet are near the point where their orbits
most closely approach, and as this point is always about the same
longitude, favourable oppositions always take place about the same date
in the year (original italics), then says (pp. 33-34) that Venus' maxi­
mum magnitude occurs about every eight years, that favourable
oppositions of Mars come every 15 or 17 years, Jupiter's every 12 years,
and the most favourable conditions for Saturn every 29-30 years. So
there was nothing arcane or magical about these planetary periods;
they are soundly astronomically based. But it looks as though Ptolemy
was as unaware of this as the modern commentators, for although he
usually provides explanations, none is offered here.
Having done with the ages of life and their general characteristics,
Ptolemy goes on to particulars, and this takes us back to dcpEOEn;, or
prorogations. This time we have to base our deductions on 'all of
them, not just on one, as in the matter of the length of life: the one
from the ascendant applies to affairs of the body and to journeys
abroad; that from the Lot of Fortune to matters of property; that from
the moon to spiritual (mental) affairs and to marriage and personal
associations; that from the sun to matters of honour and reputation;
and that from the Medium Caeli to the other particular affairs of life,
such as business affairs and friendships and the begetting of children.'
We also have to take into account all the planets and all their aspects.
This is so that everything shall not be governed solely by one
beneficent or malevolent star, because as Ptolemy says, a man's
fortune is always mixed: 'a man may lose a relative and gain an
inheritance, or take to his bed ill and at the same time receive some
honour or promotion.'

26 Transits and Planetary Periods (London, 1920; reprinted 1970) 14.

27 Arthur P. Norton, A Star Atlas and Reference Handbook (15th edn, Edinburgh and
London, 1966).

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We then have to identify the 'rulers of the times', the 'time-lords',

the chronocrators. We find the chronocrator of the year for each
aphetic house by setting out from there and counting round the
zodiac, one sign for each year since birth, and taking the ruler of the
last sign. The ruler of the month is found by counting twenty-eight
days to a sign, and that for the day by counting two and a third days
to a sign. These calculations have already been discussed in relation to
chapter 11 of Book III. Lastly, we have to pay attention to what
Ptolemy calls ETrepPaoeis, which seems to include 'ingresses' proper
and 'transits': that is, the entry of a planet into a sign and its passage
through it. Here the transits of Saturn refer to the general houses of
the times, those of Jupiter to the houses of the year, those of the sun,
Mars, Venus and Mercury to those of the month, and those of the
moon to those of the day. The whole picture is then related to the
original birth-chart, and assessed: it is, in fact, very similar to what is
now called a progression.
A progression is what it says it is, a moving forward of the birth­
chart into the future to see what effects the changed positions of the
heavenly bodies will have. But the same procedures can be used to
find out about an event or action now, by setting up the chart for this
time, and then working, as it were, backwards to the birth-chart. This
is what the ancients called a Karapxq, an 'inception', and the Middle
Ages and later an electio, a choice. Ptolemy does not mention or deal
with katarchai, but most other Greek astrologers do, some at very great
length and in detail, and in later Greek astrology it was obviously one
of the most important activities of the practising astrologer. There was,
it seems, some disagreement about their propriety, since there is no
mention of them either in Paulus Alexandrinus' Introduction or Helio-
dorus' commentary on it, nor are they dealt with as such by Firmicus
Maternus, but others such as Dorotheus of Sidon in the first century
A.D. and Antiochus of Athens, a younger contemporary of Ptolemy,
wrote books on them or 'On Interrogations', which are the same.
While genethlialogy seems to have grown from a rational astro­
nomical basis, under the influence especially of Stoic philosophy, the
part of astrology that deals with katarchai has its origins in magic and
superstition, and always preserves the 'family face', as it were. We
shall stick for the present to the Greek word (the singular is katarche),
since it is a word of wide meaning in the texts, katarchai ranging from
inceptions properly so called - beginning a journey, for example - to
enquiries about lost property and the outcome of sacrifices; it became,
in fact, as did so many words, a technical term of astrology.
Both the ancient Egyptians and the Babylonians used lists of lucky
and unlucky days, like that of Hesiod, and linked them with the
heavens, especially with the moon and its phases. It is after all the

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most rapidly and predictably changing body in the sky. We have also
seen how days can be linked with star-groups, both through the
mansions of the moon and the Egyptian decans. The planets are
connected both by the hours of the day, and hence the days of the
week, and by their paths in the zodiac. On the other hand, Manilius'
chronocrators are based on the signs, not on the planets; possibly he
was working from ultimately Babylonian sources. The earliest Greek
astrologer known to have drawn all this together and written on
katarchai is Dorotheus of Sidon, who wrote in verse in the middle of
the first century A.D., and whose work is preserved in an eighth
century Arabic version (made from a third century Persian translation)
now published by David Pingree.28 But the practice must be a lot older
than Dorotheus, for Nigidius Figulus in 50 B.C. was doing something
very like it in relating the positions of the planets to the houses, and a
short time after Dorotheus Aquila was consulting his charts every
day.29
Dorotheus' Book V, the last and by far the longest, is wholly
concerned with 'interrogations', katarchai. It begins (Pingree, p. 262):
'This is the book of Dorotheus, King of Egypt. There are five books; he
wrote four of them on nativites in which he mentioned every good
and evil, and misery or happiness that men may attain from the
beginning of their situation till its end, and he wrote one of them
about the matter of commencements, and it is this book, which is
called the fifth book, in which he mentioned the condition of every
action which is begun, whether its limit is determined or it is not
determined where the beginning of this action or its middle or its end
will end up and what of good or evil will happen in it.' The book
opens with the general rules. Dorotheus classifies the signs as
'straight' or 'crooked': a very simple division into those that rise in
less than two equinoctial hours and those that rise in more. Then he
tells us what the general effect is if the ascendant is in such and such a
kind of sign - straight, tropical, twin and so on. Katarchai depend
mainly on the ascendant and the moon, and how they are aspected; of
the forty-three chapters, about thirty are mainly concerned with the
moon's position and relationships. For example, in c.17 he says: 'Look
every time concerning the matter of marriage at the sign in which the
moon is'; all four of the chapters on slaves are mainly lunar, as are
most of the seven medical chapters. For instance, c.29 says: 'But if the
moon is flowing from Saturn, then it indicates a fever that shakes him
and a hidden malaise in his diet, or some of this will reach him in his

28 Dorothei Sidonii Carmen Astrotogicum, ed. David Pingree (Leipzig, 1976); Arabic text,
English translation and collected Greek and Latin fragments.
29 For Nigidius and Aquila, see Chapter III, pp. 44 and 55.

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belly or in his body, or his spleen will swell, and sometimes it will
bring down a miserable disease on him, and a wound and difficult
sore will reach him so that his limbs will be wounded or will be
dislocated, and sometimes his black bile will be stirred up in him until
his intestines are cramped and bum, and it is an indicator that every
illness which reaches him will stay in him a long time.' We can notice
here in passing the association of black bile, melancholia, with Saturn.
The houses are also important, especially the four cardines, whose
special place is probably a relict of the old four-fold division: 'There
were some of the ancient scientists who looked concerning the matter
of theft from the four cardines, and if one of them was asked about a
theft or something lost he would look concerning what was stolen or
lost from the ascendant, and at the midheaven for the owner of the
goods, who is the one from whom these goods were stolen or who is
seeking them, and for the matter of the thief from the sign opposite
the ascendant, and the shelter of the thieves for what they stole and
where they put the goods from the cardine under the earth' (Pingree
p. 297). There is in Dorotheus the usual confusion of names, 'house',
'sign' and 'place' being interchangeable in the later versions and
reflecting that confused use of the Greek terms we have already
noticed.
Not only houses and signs are important. Dorotheus also employs
the dodecatemoria, decans and terms; his list of the latter is exactly the
same as Ptolemy's 'Egyptian terms'. Planetary ingresses and transits
have their significance, as do their retrogradations and 'stations' -
when the planet appears to stand still. But the moon remains the most
important, and was clearly so for Hephaistion of Thebes, a compiler of
the late fourth to early fifth century.30 His third book, on katarchai, is
based on Dorotheus' fifth, but he also links the moon (c.6) with what
are called 'active' and 'inactive' days: 'Days are thought to be "active"
(epTrpaKToi) whenever the moon is in the birth-sign or in trine with it
along with beneficent planets, or in any sign with beneficent planets
in the absence of malevolent ones, except at full and new moon; hours
become "active" whenever the birth-sign is in the ascendant or in
trine with it, or rises with the horoscope of the moon (that is, the Lot
of Fortune) without being in aspect with any malevolent planet. Days
are "inactive" (cmpaKToi) and bad whenever the moon is square with
the birth-sign or the opposite sign, with malevolent planets, and at full
and new moon, or when one of the malevolent planets is in the
ascendant or in aspect with the full or new moon in the absence of
beneficent planets.'

30 Hepaistio Thebanus: Apotelesmatica, ed. David Pingree (2 vols, Leipzig, 1973-4).

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

For the Greeks this was a fairly advanced part of astrology, which is
presumably why it did not get a mention in Paulus Alexandrinus'
Introduction; but most later astrologers included in and wrote 'on
katarchai' or 'on interrogations' (porrqoeic;). Julian of Laodicea, at the
end of the fifth century, says firmly that one must examine the sun
and moon and their lordships, and the ascendant and the Medium
Caeli, and 'the beginnings (katarchai) of every affair are understood
from the moon and their ends from the lord of the moon's house'
(CCAG, vol. I, p. 138). Rhetorius, of about the same period, has a
chapter on 'the horoscope of the katarche' (CCAG, vol. V.4), and most
of the later (and generally anonymous31) Greek sources provide many
examples such as: 'Find the lord of the ascendant and the moon and
the lord of the Lot of Fortune; the most powerful of these shows what
the question is and who the questioner. Then find the lord of the
house of the ruling planet, note its nature and what house it is in, and
judge accordingly. If you wish to know the reason for the question,
find the planet indicating the questioner, and see what planets it is
moving away from, and judge according to their natures. And if you
also want to know the result, look at the planet indicating the
questioner and find what planet it is going to join with, and judge
according to that planet's nature' (CCAG, vol. IX, p. 161).
This obviously requires a fair knowledge of astronomy; it required
more before the age of accurate observation and cheap printed books.
But it also required a good deal of astrology, to 'judge according to the
natures' of the planets and so on. It was just this difficulty with the
divinatory art which made room for magic, to assist. Vettius Valens
among others introduces into this whole complicated picture an
element of pure magic: number symbolism. Numbers are curiously
fascinating, of course; and there are many people today who would
maintain that the manipulation of the ancient rules of such symbolic
use of numbers can yield surprising and plausible results.32 But it

31 The assigned authorship of most of the texts printed in the appendices of CCAG,
especially the older volumes, should be treated with cautious scepticism, the editors
being overgenerous in accepting manuscript attributions and allotting passages to
named authors on the basis of similarity of text. There is far too much doubt as to
dating, and far too much borrowing for such certainty - not to mention forgery; Pingree
(Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 25 (1971) 203-4) has shown that 'Palchus', given not only a date
and provenance but considerable authority in CCAG, is merely a corruption of al-Balkhi,
the 'place-part' of an Arabic name (like the 'Cricklade' in Robert of Cricklade), and the
work attributed to him a fourteenth century compilation of Eleutherius. This is easily
confirmed by a look through the passages attributed to Palchus in CCAG: all are
attributed to him because of similarities to MS Angelicus Gr.29, which is the only one in
which the name of Palchus is given; but that manuscript was written in Mitylene in
1388 by Eleutherius.
32 See, for example, 'Astro-Numerology ... Fact or Fiction'? by Philip A. Moritz, in
Astrology, 46 (1972) no. 3.

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originally had nothing to do with astrology, and astro-numerology is

just one of the many areas where 'occult sciences' attached themselves
to astrology. There is a great deal of this sort of mixture in later Greek
(or Byzantine) astrology: magical stones and plants, alchemy and
cheiromancy and geomancy, and other 'blacker' arts. Their history
does not belong here, for none of these really influenced astrological
principles or fundamental methods. They could be attached to and
make use of any kind of astrology, and their development is matter for
the historian of the occult. But the ramifications of the theory of
katarchai illustrate the need to remember that astrology always exists
on many levels; in antiquity it ran from Ptolemy's scientific-
philosophical systematisation to this sort of method for finding your
zodiacal sign: take the letters of your own name, and those of your
mother (if you are male: of your father, if female), and taking letters as
numbers, add them together (a-j = 1-10; k-s = 20-100; t-z = 200-800,
for example). Divide the total by twelve, and using the remainder
count round the zodiac, beginning with Aries and counting, as usual,
anticlockwise (CCAG, vol. IX.1, p. 138). Performing this operation with
my own and my mother's names gave Cancer as the result: my
ascendant is actually in Virgo, and my sun-sign is Aries. Doing it
again in Greek, using the Greek equivalents of the names and the
actual Greek number-values of the letters was no better: it produced
Pisces. Or to find out which sign governs the year (CCAG, vol. IX.1,
p. 170) simply discover where the moon is on 13 March.
One famous book emerged from this period - or at least, later than
Ptolemy and earlier than the eighth century: the Centiloquium, known
in Greek as 6 Kap-noc;, and attached under Ptolemy's name to the
Tetrabiblos.33 It consists of a hundred astrological aphorisms of from
two to eight lines (hence its Latin name) derived from the Tetrabiblos
and other sources: a little under a third of these sayings are
non-Ptolemaic. A number are concerned with katarchai, as e.g. 42:
'When a sickness begins when the moon is in a sign in which at birth
there was a malevolent planet, or in one in square with it or in
opposition, it will be very hard to bear; if a malevolent planet is in a
bad aspect, it will be dangerous; if the moon is in a house where at
birth there was a beneficent planet, it will not be dangerous.' The links
between the moon and medicine are there also in half a dozen others;
which is not surprising since the moon is the chief influence on
physical, bodily, matters, as 61 says: 'The moon shows that bodily
matters change in the same way as she does in her movements.' There
is indeed a good deal on the moon in these sayings, which is in accord
with the general background of fifth and sixth century astrology, with

33 Greek text edited by E. Boer, in Claudii Ptolemaei Opera, III.2 (2nd edn, Leipzig, 1961).

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 ALEXANDRIA TO BYZANTIUM

its greater magical content. Another un-Ptolemaic feature is the

emphasis put on the houses, which play so small a part in Ptolemy's
work: a third of the hundred are concerned with the moon or the
houses or both, and the evil nature of the eleventh house is
particularly stressed (39, 55 and 79), even though according to Ptolemy
it is the house of the Good Daemon.
This suggests that the system of houses was still in a somewhat
confused, or at least 'fluid', state in this period; which reminds us that
we must not be misled by Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos into thinking that all
was thereafter settled and clear. As well as the houses, the Centilo-
quium makes reference to the decans (95) and to the paranatellonta, the
stars which rise at the same time as a sign or a decan (95, 96): 'It is the
nearest "centres" which show the effects of the eclipse; examine the
nature of the conjoined stars, wandering and fixed, and the paranatel­
lonta, and judge accordingly.' There is more emphasis on the influence
of the fixed stars than there is in Ptolemy: 'When you cannot make the
moon conjoint with two planets, make it conjoin with a fixed star
having the constitution of the two' (28). 'The fixed stars bring about
good fortune which is without explanation and contrary to expecta­
tion, but for the most part they mark such good fortune with
misfortunes' (29). 'Make use of the fixed stars in the building of cities,
of the planets in the building of houses' (36). So, although this work
was early fathered on Ptolemy, it in fact reflects the astrology of the
fifth century and later. It was translated into Latin in 1136 by either
Plato of Tivoli or John of Seville and became one of the basic textbooks
of late medieval astrology; with Ptolemy's authority, and with its
many commentaries (especially those of the Arabs), it made that
astrology less Ptoletnaic and more like the Byzantine.
It is really a matter of choice when we stop talking of Tate Greek' or
Tate Classical' and begin using the term 'Byzantine'; there was, of
course, no break, no 'Fall of the Roman Empire'in the east until the
fifteenth century. Byzantium was a small Greek colony on the
Bosphorus founded in the seventh century B.C., and it was there that
Constantine decided to found his New Rome, inaugurating the city on
11 May, 330 A.D. It has ever since been known as Constantinople, the
city of Constantine; but the culture and history associated with it is
called Byzantine. If a date is required, one could reasonably take 476,
when the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed and only the
Greek half was left; or, more in line with common usage, the reign of
Justinian, 527-565; or perhaps, as is often done, that of Diocletian, the
emperor who in the late third century divided the empire formally
into halves and ruled in a style that could properly be described as
Byzantine. It matters very little; at any rate we shall from now on
speak of Byzantine, not late Greek, astrology.

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The city soon duplicated everything possessed by Old Rome on the

Tiber: the imperial court and another Senate, one of the Consuls,
Prefects and other magistrates, and all the apparatus of the civil service
and the law. It had its university, state maintained, with professors of
Greek and Latin rhetoric and language, and hosts of students. And it
was the seat of a Patriarch who soon came to call himself 'ecumenical'
and regarded himself as more or less the equal of the Bishop of Rome.
Constantinople was the capital of administration, of learning and of
the Church in the east. Though the official language of imperial law
was Latin, the language of Constantinople and the east was and
remained Greek, so that all the writings of the ancient Greeks,
including the astrologers, were in theory at least available to later
readers in their own language. In actual fact, of course, not everything
was there to start with, and there was a long process of selection,
learned and unlearned, conscious and unconscious, especially in a
time like that of late antiquity, a time of epitomists and excerptors. But
a great deal of astrology from the early centuries A.D. did survive, and
the conservatism of astrologers, reinforced by that of the Byzantines,
ensured that Greek astrology changed very little indeed in a thousand
years.
Rhetorius, whose floruit is put at about 500 A.D., is fairly typical.
His system, so far as one can judge from the many sections of his work
printed in the appendices to CCAG, was basically the same as
Ptolemy's, and derived from similar sources as well as Ptolemy
himself; but the scope of his writings was wider than that of the
Tetrabiblos, and there is considerably more interpretative detail. His
account of the triplicities or trigons (cf. Ptolemy, Tetr., 1.19) includes, as
most later astrologers do, the elements: the fiery triplicity is Aries, Leo
and Sagittarius; the earthly one, Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn; the airy
trigon, Gemini, Libra and Aquarius; and the watery, Cancer, Scorpio
and Pisces: which is exactly what you will find in a modern textbook
of astrology. Whereas Ptolemy has only one Lot, KAqpog, of Fortune,
Rhetorius lists eighteen daytime xAqpoi, and seventeen night-time
ones, in addition to the Lots of Fortune, of the Good and of the
Daimon. He suggests that some astrologers take as the beginning of
the zodiac the sign Cancer, because Cancer was in the ascendant in
the 'horoscope of the world', the thema mundi, which we shall consider
later; and others begin with Leo, as the sun's sign; but it is better to
begin with the spring equinox and Aries. The moon is more important
to Rhetorius than to Ptolemy: its exaltation and depression is the most
important of all, 'because it is the fortune of all: where fortune is
exalted, none is depressed; where she is depressed, none can be
exalted.' His list of houses is the same as Ptolemy's, but he makes
them, as well as the signs and planets, male and female, and he goes

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into detail; for example, 'if Mercury is in a good house, especially the
house of Saturn, and well aspected by Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, it will
produce astrologers, prophets and priests; if Saturn is in the ascendant
in Mercury's house, or Mercury is the ascendant, it will produce
superb mathematicians.'
There is no need to go on at length with such detail; we shall see
more like it when we come to Firmicus Maternus, who drew on the
same sources as Rhetorius, especially Antiochus of Athens. But the
great age of astrology was passing. By the time of Rhetorius astrology
had long been frowned upon by both church and state. The Christian
emperors proscribed it: in 357 Constantius counted the mathematici as
undesirable along with magi and haruspices and dream-diviners and
so on. In 409, Honorius and Theodosius required astrologers to burn
their books in the presence of the bishops and return to the Catholic
faith, under penalty of exile. And in 425 Theodosius and Valentinian
banished various heretics, including the mathematici.34 It did not, of
course, disappear because prelates frowned and emperors issued
edicts; but it must have declined and at least 'gone to ground', for in
the eighth century a Persian called Stephanus Philosophus, 'Stephen
the philosopher', could claim to be reintroducing astrology to 'Rome',
that is, Constantinople. Among his self-justificatory arguments he
insists that the stars are not gods, they only express the will of God;
they act not through any power of their own, but by God's power; and
consequently it is a sin for man not to use it. That there was a revival
of interest in astrology in the ninth century is perhaps shown by the
fact that the oldest manuscripts of the Greek astrologers we have been
dealing with go back only to the tenth and eleventh centuries; but that
it was not a massive revival is clear also, for of all the astrological
manuscripts listed by the Catalogus, only twenty-four are earlier than
the twelfth. But there was enough to stimulate argument about the
propriety or otherwise of the art.
In the middle of the twelfth century one Peter the Deacon (also
called 'the Philosopher') wrote a letter justifying some interest in
astrology to the Patriarch Lucas of Constantinople;35 it is an argument
in favour of iatromathematica, of the use of astrology in medicine. He
quotes Hippocrates (Aphorisms IV.502) to show the importance of
Sirius, for the stars affect the heat and cold in our bodies. But he is
scathing about the 'old astrology of the Greeks'. More interesting is an
exchange of tracts between the Emperor Manuel Comnenus and a
monk called Michael Glycas.36 Manuel Comnenus was, according to

34 Cod. Theod. (ed. Mommsen) VIIII.16.4; 16.12; Sirm. 6.

35 D. Bassi and E. Martini, CCAG, IV. 156ff. Lucas Chrysoberges was Patria-ch of
Constantinople from 1156 to 1169.
36 Edited by F. Cumont, CCAG, 1.106ff.

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the Byzantine historian Nicetas, utterly ruled by his astrology: he even

thought he had fourteen more years of conquest ahead of him not long
before he died. But before he did die, he was convinced of the error of
his ways by the Patriarch Theodosius Boradiotes, and repented and
became a monk. A treatise against astrology had been written by a
monk of the Pantocrator monastery in Constantinople, and Manuel
wrote a refutation, reconciling astrology with his Christian beliefs and
with the Scriptures. He describes the monk's work as 'worthy of the
simplicity of a monk', but unlearned and ignorant. Michael Glycas'
treatise was an answer to the Emperor's; it was written after 1147, but
before 1156, when Glycas was imprisoned and died, for what crime is
not known.
Manuel admits that astrologers have been accused of heresy, but
argues first, that the influence of the sun and moon on the earth and
all creatures on it is undeniable, and 'if these produce effects, so also
must those', that is, the other stars and planets; and second, that
medicine uses astrology, and medicine uses 'physics' which being
natural cannot be against God's laws: the stars, he says, are signifiers,
not causes - SqAcotikoi, not ttoiqtikoi' - and to be given these signs by
God and not use them is the real impiety. Superstition, on the other
hand, such as the use of talismans, and deceiving the gullible, are
sinful. He refers to the Star of Bethlehem and the Magi, taking them to
be skilled astrologers; and even if it was a new star, and not one
whose aspects could be calculated and so on, knowledge of astrologia
(Manuel uses the two terms, astrologia and astronomia without distinc­
tion) was necessary to recognise it as a new star and therefore
significant, and that the eclipse at the Crucifixion was 'unnatural'. To
use signs is good: to treat the stars as living is wrong: the heresy is to
think to them as living causes. Astrology is like medicine: sometimes
it fails, and sometimes God intervenes, but we do not blame the
doctor. The true astrologer recognises the power of God in the
heavens, which are his throne; for 'the heavens declare the glory of
God', for they are his works, and are therefore good. 'But you may
say,' he ends, 'the devil is also one of the works of God: ought we then
to listen to him? But the devil was given the free choice to oppose the
good because of his pride, and he is and is known to be against God.
But the stars are lifeless works of God and without perception or
forethought, and therefore are not against God, but keep their natural
places, and always, since they behave according to the natural laws of
their creation, behave in the same way. Indeed, if they were conscious
actors, the astrologer would not be able to understand what they
signify, since their meanings would be hidden in the mystery of their
volition.'
Glycas begins, and ends, with the Star of Bethlehem: if, he says, that

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justifies astrology, then the Dove at Jesus' baptism justifies augury,

and the raising of the dead, necromancy. The Magi were inspired by
God; and in any case, that was the end of the old order. (There follows
a longish passage refuting the idea of a thema mundi, a birth-chart of
creation, but there is nothing about this in the treatise of Manuel as
Cumont found it.) All mystery is God's, and all revelation and
prophecy is from him, not from the arts of men. Some arts are allowed,
but the Scriptures and authority reject astrology, partly because for
astrology the stars must be causes, not merely signs. If all is fated,
where is freedom? And if there is no freedom, why the Judgment? It is
no good quoting medicine; first, it works by physics, not by astrology
(ouk doTpoAoyiKd>S' <J>uoiKd>g Si: paAAov), and second, its astrology is not
consistent but involves self-contradiction. But he leaves a rather
involved argument confessing the limits of his knowledge of the
subject, and returns to the Star: it was inspiration from God and the
instruction of an angel that directed the Magi, not astrology. Although
in this treatise Michael Glycas uses astrologia and astronomia in­
discriminately, he does in another work give the traditional distinc­
tion between the descriptive and interpretive arts, and says that Seth
and Enoch were instructed in astronomy by the angel Uriel.
Vaguely interesting though this is as a twelfth century dialogue,
there is absolutely nothing new here. The quotation of authority and
counter-authority, including disagreement about what one of them
actually said, is typical of the age, and all the arguments both deploy
are to be found in the Fathers and the ancient writers. Nevertheless, it
is obvious that astrology was sufficiently restored to public view to be
worth arguing about, and indeed the next two hundred years saw a
great multiplication of books on the subject, excerpted from older
authorities and compiled by men with no critical sense and little logic,
and often very little understanding of astrology itself. A fifteenth
century Prognostica is typical of much of this stuff: a girl born under
Gemini, it says, is hawk-eyed; inclined to illness until she is five;
gregarious; has much trouble with her eyes ('Hawk-eyed' may refer to
colour rather than excellence of vision); loves many men who are
special to her; she will not eat hare; she will inherit an ancestral
livelihood; she will marry twice and have twins; she will earn a living
by her own toil, will be worn out by her own parents, will labour
much and have no thanks from her own family; she will leave her
father's house at fourteen to find a husband, giving grief to her
parents; she will have a mark in a hidden place and one on her
shoulder ... and so on and on; and after all that she will live to be
eighty! Astrology has clearly become a sort of fossilized mumbo-
jumbo, and its development does not lie here in the east.

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 V

The Latin Middle Ages

It is 'a fact the whole world knows': the Roman Empire fell in 410
A.D., when Alaric and his Goths sacked the city of Rome. The legions
were withdrawn, and the Empire was submerged under a tide of
barbarians, just as the Roman roads vanished under the grass, and an
age of darkness followed - Fielding's 'centuries of monkish dulness,
when the whole world seems to have been asleep'. It is probably less
widely known that Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ends
only in the fifteenth century, with the fall of Constantinople. In truth,
the first two sentences do contain some oversimplification. It was only
the Latin West which ceased to be Roman, while the Empire in the
East continued right through the Middle Ages, the capital still where
Constantine had set it. But a problem remains, since the Western
Empire did fall: why was it not in the Greek East, with its continuity
of language and culture and tradition, but in the new barbarian
kingdoms of the West, that not merely astrology, but Christian
philosophy and the natural sciences and technology, developed and
flourished?
Why were there two halves of the Empire, anyway? It was divided
linguistically into Greek and Latin speaking areas, and Diocletian had
towards the end of the third century divided it administratively, with
two capital cities, Constantinople and Milan - a better base than the
too southerly Rome from which to control the northern frontier. The
two divisions very nearly coincided; for our purpose the West
includes Italy, Gaul, Britain, Spain and North Africa as far east as
Libya. In this mainly Latin area, the knowledge of Greek, once a
normal part of the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, declined
steadily through the fourth and fifth centuries, and had all but
disappeared, at least outside Italy, by the end of the latter. It was this
Latin West which fell; but in a sense it did not fall, it crumbled, under
the weight of the west- and southward movement of the barbarian
tribes from beyond the Rhine-Danube frontier. A century or more of
sometimes costly attempts to keep them out finally failed when the
pressure of the Huns from further east increased the need to move into
the richer and underpopulated lands of the Empire. The East was
wealthier and stronger and less empty, so the tribes turned to the
West. Once the frontier was breached the peoples moved in, and by

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the mid-fifth century it was really all over. Italy was an Ostrogothic
kingdom, Gaul was taken by the Franks, Spain by the Visigoths and
Africa by the Vandals. This was not the sort of 'invasion' which
simply crushed and destroyed what was there before. It was, after the
battles were done, a movement of whole peoples into lands in large
measure uncultivated and underpopulated. There was living space
there, so they occupied it, and were assimilated. Though the official
imperial administration disappeared, the new rulers changed less than
might be imagined, and many of them, like Theodoric in Italy, were
even rebuilders of Roman cities after the ruins of the fifth century.
While some of the great Roman landowners fled, many stayed and
'collaborated', or became important churchmen; and it probably did
not make a great deal of difference to an oppressed and overtaxed
peasantry that their masters had changed.
Through it all Latin and the Church survived, preserving for the
West a unity which transcended the political divisions. Whatever the
vernaculars of the regions, Latin was the language of religion and of
learning, such as there was. When Roman rule vanished, so too did
the imperial organisation of education, and most of the secular
schools. But the Church needed literate men. It had already provided
and had to continue to provide for the education of at least its clergy;
and that education was basically the same as what had been given in
the state schools. There had in earlier centuries been a conflict: should
Christians be given a pagan education? Was it right for Christians to
read pagan literature, with its tales of gods and heroes and im­
morality? The history of the affair is complex and stretches over four or
five centuries, but the outcome is simply described. The Church in the
end simply assimilated the late antique system of education, pagan
authors and all. Among the most important reasons was that it was the
only system available; and all the great churchmen, including those
most hostile to pagan learning, were themselves products of it. And it
is always difficult for anyone to believe that the system of education
which produced himself was anything but good. The greatest and
most influential of the western Fathers, St Augustine, had himself
been a professor of rhetoric, and justified the use of all that was of
value in paganism and putting it to the service of Christian under­
standing, by reference to the Israelite's 'spoiling the Egyptians' on
their release by Pharaoh (Exodus XII.35-6). So the old curriculum with
its pagan authors and textbooks was preserved in church schools, in
theory always and for centuries in practice also only as a preparation
for the study of the Scriptures and the understanding of the Faith.
It is a commonplace and there is much truth in it, that in northwest
Europe education was until the later eleventh century largely confined
to the monasteries. The combination of the increased independent

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power of the towns and the great monastic reforms of the tenth and
eleventh centuries, which turned monks more away from the world,
led to the growth in importance of the cathedral schools which by the
beginning of the thirteenth century was to produce the universities.
This is, however, largely untrue of Italy, where there was greater
continuity of culture through from Roman antiquity to the Middle
Ages. Despite the decline in the seventh century because of the
ravages of the Lombard invasions, there is some evidence that many
schools survived throughout the period, or were closed only for short
times. It is almost certain that the schools of Rome, Ravenna and
Milan, all administrative capitals, continued in however attenuated a
state, and the same is probably true of Verona and Pavia, and possibly
of Arezzo. All of these except Rome are north Italian cities, and of over
twenty schools which existed in the eighth and ninth centuries and
may have survived from much earlier, all but two, Naples and
Benevento, were also in the north. South Italy and Sicily, along with
Spain and North Africa, the rest of the old western Empire, are left out
of this account because they really only become relevant when we deal
with Arabic scholarship and influence. All these areas became parts of
the Islamic empire in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.
There was a brief period at the end of the sixth century and the
beginning of the seventh when Seville under Bishop Leander and then
his greater brother Isidore became an important centre of studies, and
more will be said of Isidore later. At that time, too, the Anglo-Saxon
schools of England, the product of the combination of Irish and Roman
learning, were probably more important and better developed than
those anywhere on the continent. But when continental Europe north
of the Islamic lands of Harun al-Rashid was united under Charlemagne,
who was crowned emperor by the Pope in Rome on Christmas Day,
800, all these streams were brought together, and Latin education and
culture began to develop under royal and ecclesiastical patronage in a
common and recognisably medieval way.
This Latin West - Western Christendom - was to some extent,
though not entirely, cut off from contact with the east by the Muslim
empire. It had inherited little Latin and less Greek. But paradoxically,
this very poverty and isolation go some way to explain the develop­
ment of thought in the West, rather than in the East. Western scholars
did not labour under the weight of the whole ancient Greek learning.
Despite medieval writers' constant and exaggerated respect for their
predecessors, they could not find there all the answers to their
questionings. Education, too, was freer. In the West it depended
almost entirely on individual masters, and a succession of schools
flourished and declined as scholars died or moved. The Roman
Church, having a virtual monopoly, was both more tolerant, and,

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because it was never identified and frequently at odds with the state,
more independent. The Caesaropapism of the Byzantine Empire made
education the handmaid not of the Faith but of the Administration.
The attitudes to secular learning were different. The East was largely
dominated by a tradition holding the study of philosophy only to be
of use for the understanding and refutation of pagans, and therefore
useless if not actually dangerous in a wholly Christian society. But the
West was Augustinian. For St Augustine there was not and could not
be a division: philosophy and theology were one in their search for
understanding of the Faith. Add to all this the differences in social and
economic development, producing in the West an advancing, expand­
ing world which looked to the future for improvement, where
Byzantium dwelt overmuch upon the past; and there are reasons
enough to go some way towards answering the question asked in the
first paragraph of this chapter.
In all of this we have not yet seen what was the content of this
education. Late antique and early medieval schooling consisted in
theory in the 'Seven Liberal Arts'. They were invented by the Greeks.
The Latin name, artes liberates, is a translation of the Greek EAtuOcpai
Ttyvai, and a better English version would be 'freeman's arts', that is,
the arts or skills fit for a free man, as opposed to a slave. The word
'liberal' in 'liberal arts' has nothing to do with liberality or with
liberalism: the phrase meant those skills suitable for free men. Now
free men in antiquity did not work for their living, or at least not with
their hands; the only ancient writer who confessed to such degrada­
tion was St Paul. What they used above all was words - in the law
courts, in politics, in polemics, in arguments on anything and
everything. It followed that their education, the liberal arts, should be
practically useless except for making speeches or writing books. So
Greek, and then Roman, education was fundamentally rhetorical.
There were attempts to include in the arts the practical disciplines of
architecture and medicine, both respectable occupations, but without
any lasting success. It is from this ancient Greco-Roman tradition that
stems that prejudice, longer and more strongly preserved in England
than elsewhere, for the intellectual and largely verbal arts as against all
those involving the use of the hands. It was, of course, a tradition
suited to the Church. The clergy do not labour with their hands, and
they are largely concerned with the understanding of what is written
and the preaching of the message. It is not surprising that the Church
adopted the seven liberal arts as the proper initial schooling for its
ministers.
What were these seven? They were by the sixth century divided into
two groups: the Trivium, Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic; and the
Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. The divi­

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sion represented the separation of grades of difficulty, and stages of

instruction: a knowledge of Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic was
necessary for the study of the other four. So the Trivium was the
elementary stage: hence our 'trivial'. Grammar meant what it said, and
meant Latin grammar. Medieval students laboured at it without the
benefit of Kennedy's Primer, of course; for most, at least until the
eleventh century, when Priscian's longer work became commoner, the
textbooks were the two very short works of the fourth century
Donatus. Once the rudiments of the parts of speech were leamt,
Classical texts were read: first and most especially Virgil's Aeneid, and
then extracts from such authors as Terence, Horace, Ovid and Statius,
all contained in school anthologies. Rhetoric meant the study of figures
of speech, forms of oratory, metrics and literary devices. Grammar and
Rhetoric together provided a sufficient training in language, and most
men, even in antiquity, were content with those, and went no further.
For Dialectic meant Aristotelian logic, which was not easy and seemed
less relevant. Dialectic, however, was to prove from the ninth century
on the ground out of which Scholastic philosophy grew, for it raised
many of the most important questions of philosophy while providing
few suggestions for answers.
The Quadrivium was little studied either in antiquity or in the early
Middle Ages, but it was held in theory to be necessary for the proper
understanding of the Scriptures. Arithmetic did not mean what we
mean by the name: that the Middle Ages called algorism, and it was
only introduced in the twelfth century. Calculation was done on the
abacus, and Arithmetic was not concerned with calculation but with
numbers, including, among other things, their shapes - we still use
the names 'squares' (e.g., 9: . . .) and 'cubes' (e.g., 8:.<). Geometry
included both elementary geometry as we know it, and 'geography',
the description of the earth and its lands; both subjects could be called
'earth-measurement', the literal meaning of 'geometry'. Music, like
Arithmetic, had little or nothing to do with the practice of the art, but
was all to do with theories of harmony and modes and their effects on
man's soul. Lastly, Astronomy meant astrologia, of which more in a
moment.
However, not only was this neat scheme of seven liberal arts not a
curriculum ever studied as a whole by anyone; it was not so rigid as to
be incapable of evolution. Some idea of the expansion of the ancient
scheme in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is given by a compari­
son of three outline curricula. The first is that of Cassiodorus, who in
the early sixth century succeeded Boethius as secretary to Theodoric,
the Ostrogothic king of Italy, and in his retirement wrote two works
for the instruction of his monks, known as his Institutiones.1 For
1 Edited by R. A. B. Mynors, Cassiodori Senators Institutiones (Oxford, 1937).

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

secular letters, he lists the seven arts and the textbooks to be used,
with Boethius and Martianus Capella prominent among their authors
— the only two given for Astronomy. In 1142 Thierry of Chartres drew
up an encyclopaedic syllabus for his school.2 It is still officially a list
under the same seven heads, but now not only is the 'new logic' (the
translations of Aristotle's major logical works, just arriving in the
schools) included, but we find four authorities for geometry, including
Gerbert d'Aurillac (the late tenth century Bishop of Rheims and Pope);
and Gerland's book on the abacus; and Hyginus, Ptolemy and the
Arabic writer al-Khwarizmi (of whose name algorism is a corruption)
all mentioned under Astronomy. The third curriculum is one for a
medieval Arts Faculty in a Ripoll manuscript of about 1230-1240.3 The
old artes have gone, and now philosophia is divided into three parts:
'Natural', which includes Metaphysics, Physics and Mathematics,
which last is the old Quadrivium. Euclid is now there for Geometry
and Ptolemy for Astronomy.4 The authorities for the second division,
Moral philosophy, include Aristotle's Ethics. Rational philosophy,
which is the Trivium, now consists almost entirely of Dialectic, of
logic, now obviously the only really important subject in the whole
curriculum. The sciences developed, of course, out of the Natural
Philosophy of such a curriculum.
Astronomy - astronomia or astrologia - was included among the
advanced studies from the beginning. Both Latin names are used with
varying or no distinctions, but before the twelfth century the content
is almost entirely what we would call astronomical. There was
probably little practical, professional astrology in the late Empire
except perhaps at court, apart from popular horoscope-pedlars and a
few learned men like Firmicus Maternus. Belief in astrology was
widespread, no doubt, particularly among the uneducated, but it
seems not to have been much to the fore in men's minds, where

2 The work, known as the Heptaleuchon, existed in two manuscript volumes (MSS 497
and 498) at Chartres, which were destroyed by fire in May 1944. Microfilms of the work
exist at Toronto and Louvain, but it has not been published The short prologue was
edited by E. Jeauneau in Medieval Studies, XVI (1954) 171-5. A summary of the contents
is given by A. Clerval in Les ecoles de Chartres au moyen age, du Ve au XVle siecle (Paris,
1895) 220ff. Ptolemy and Al-Khwarizmi are only there for their Tables: the Almagest was
still unknown in Latin.
3 The MS is Ripoll 109, at Barcelona; see M.Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Ceistesleben
(Munich, 1936) 11.193-199 and F. van Steenberghen, Siger de Brabant, Les Philosophes
beiges (Louvain, 1942) 11.415—420.
4 The Ptolemy is now the Almagest. The Ripoll MS is an account of works to be read, and
specimen questions for discussion, under each heading. The interesting thing is that
while seven 'pages' suffice for the whole of Natural and Moral philosophy, without any
questions, the remaining forty-two 'pages' of the (incomplete) manuscript are concerned
with the Trivium, the last two-thirds of these with Dialectic, with more than two
hundred and sixty questions.

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Chance was more likely to hold sway than Fate. There is no real
astrology in late Roman art. There are zodiacs, it is true: but
throughout the centuries, from Roman times to the Renaissance, the
representation of the zodiac, or its description in books, cannot be
taken as evidence for the presence of astrology. The 'Monnus-mosaic
in Trier, for example, as well as those from Münster-Sarmsheim,
Selinum, Avenches and the Yonne, with zodiacs round the sun in his
chariot, or with Atlas the heaven-bearer, or with the seasons and the
months, are all time-pictures, the sun portrayed as Sol invictus, the
time-lord, chronocrator.5 The same is true of those in synagogues, as at
Beth-Alpha or Doura-Europos: 'the picturing of the zodiac in the
pavements of synagogues is less a representation of the heaven with
its stars than a schematic image of Time'.6 Zodiacs on coins and gems
are associated with the sun, with the sun and moon, with the planets
and their gods - especially with Zeus (Jupiter) chronocrator - and all
seem to be connected with religion and the calendar.7 It is very
important to remember that zodiacs are not necessarily astrological;
indeed the chances are that they are not.
This is particularly relevant to the consideration of the worship of
Mithras. It was in his function as time-lord that he collected zodiacs
and zodiacal figures round him, as on a stone of the second or third
century from Housesteads, on Hadrian's Wall (Plate I). Other such
representations of Mithras with zodiacs are found, for example, at the
Wallbrook Mithraeum in London and at Modena. He is often associ­
ated with figures of the moon and planets, and of winds, and others
possibly but not wholly convincingly representing elements - air, fire,
water and so on. Despite J. Vermaseren's frequent insistence8 there is
in fact no evidence to establish any strictly astrological connection
between Mithraism and the heavens. Mithras was certainly a sun-god,
and also Saturn (the 'sun of the night'), who was also identified 'with
the god of Eternal Time, the Persian Zervan, and the Greek Aion'.9 The
importance of the sun's position in the zodiac and the association with
the planets and moon are most probably linked with this time-god
aspect of Mithras, and with the sort of religion and mythology which

5 See K. Parlasca, Die römischen Mosaiken in Deutschland (Berlin, 1959) 41, 87; V. von
Gonzenbach, Die römischen mosaiken der Schweiz (Basel, 1961) 43; J. P. Darmon, 'Sur deux
mosaiques de l'Yonne', in La Mosaique Grtco-romaine (Paris, 1975) 11.313.
6 A. Grabar, L'Art de la Fin de l'Antiquite et du Moyen-Age (Paris, 1968) 11.781.
7 See W. Gundel, 'Zodiac', in Enciclopedfa dell' Arte Antica, VII (Rome, 1966).
8 In his Mithras, the Secret God (London, 1963).
9 Vermaseren, op. cit., 78. For the lack of real connection between Mithraism and
astrology see also R. L. Gordon, 'Franz Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism', in
Mithraic Studies, ed. J. R. Hinnells (Manchester, 1975) I.215ff. Nothing in the two volumes
of papers from that international conference supports the idea of anything more than the
most tenuous association of Mithraism with astrology.

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I 'Birth-stone' showing Mithras and a 'reverse' zodiac, 2nd or 3rd

century A.D., from Housesteads on the Roman Wall
(Museum of Antiquities of the University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

included catasterisms and associated the Bull and Venus with creation,
and Taurus with spring. The time-god relationship is clear in the
Modena relief10 'depicting the egg-birth of the snake-entwined
Orphic-Mithraic god Phanes-Aion, within a zodiac frame, but not
with a cut-out background.' The time element is also seen in the
frequent arrangement of the planets in the order of the days of the
week, as at Bologna, for example. (The order when they are associated
with the seven grades of the cult - Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mars,
Venus, Mercury - is neither calendrial nor astrological, but seems to be
hierarchic.)
An odd thing about the Housesteads stone is that it shows the signs
in the 'reverse' order: if we assume we are facing south, with east on
our left, we see Gemini rising before Taurus, which is followed by
Aries, and that by Pisces and Aquarius. This is also true of the zodiac
with the 'bull-slayer' Mithras on a relief from Osterburken now in the
Badisches Landsmuseum, Karlsruhe.11 There are two possible explana­
tions. It could be that we are actually facing north, so that east is on
the right. This is unlikely, not only because the left-hand east is more
natural to northern countries (if one faces the sun, one is looking
south), but all ancient horoscopes are drawn with the ascendant on the
left. The probable explanation is that the artist was working from a
celestial globe. Books of the constellations were often illustrated in the
way the tenth century al-Sufi's was.12 Although it is late, it was
derived from Classical sources, with two drawings of each constella­
tion, 'giving its image in symmetrically opposed figures, the one as it
appears in the sky, the other as it would be presented on a celestial
globe, where the beholder sees it as it were from the outside, so that
left becomes right and vice versa.' (See Plate II) 'Classical constellation
images are best known from the "Farnese Globe", a huge celestial
marble globe in the Museo Nazionale at Naples, which is generally
considered to be a Roman copy of a Greek original, and from a
number of medieval copies of classical texts.' So the zodiac on the
Housesteads stone is shown as it would be on a globe, seen 'from the
outside'; which is another reason for thinking that the artist was not
interested in astrology (which would naturally have had a 'normal'
zodiac with the ascendant on the left) but in the heavenly bodies as
time-reckoners. It might be added as further confirmation13 that on the

10 J. M. C. Toynbee, Art in Roman Britian (London, 1962) 154, note 4.

11 F. Saxl, Lectures I & II, Warburg Institute (London, 1957) Plate 20b.
12 Bodleian MS Marsh 144; see Emmy Wellesz, An Islamic Book of Constellations
(Bodleian Picture Book No. 13) (Oxford, 1965) from which the quotations are taken (p. 4).
13 I owe this information to the kindness of Dr D. J. Smith, FSA, Keeper of the Museum
of Antiquities, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who provided the photograph of the stone.

106
 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

II Taurus, from a manuscript of al-Sufi's book of constellations

(Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Marsh 144, p. 96)

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

altars flanking this birth-stone the time-epithet saecularis is, uniquely

here perhaps, applied to Mithras.
Mithraism was the only serious ancient rival to Christianity,
spreading with the Roman army the length of the Empire. When the
Empire and its armies vanished, Mithraism faded, and the Church was
left alone in the field. The Church was opposed to astrology as both
pagan and magic, and as appearing to diminish or to deny man's
freedom, and possibly also God's omnipotence. Into the scale against
astrology went the weight of Augustine's unparalleled authority. No
other author is so much represented in medieval libraries, none so
widely read: not only his two most famous works, the Confessions and
the City of God, but his letters and sermons and commentaries and the
host of less well-known books. In many of these works, particularly in
those written in the first few years after he became bishop of Hippo
Regius (the modern Bone - or Annaba, to give it its proper Algerian
name) in 395, after about ten years of consciously Christian living, he
attacks astrology;14 and in the Confessions, written in 397, he describes
how he was himself attracted to it in his younger days:

So I did not cease to consult openly those impostors called

astrologers, because it seemed they had no sacrifices and offered
no prayers to any spirit for their fortune-telling; though true
Christian piety always rejects and condemns it. I knew at that
time a wise, very skilled and very well-esteemed medical man,
who when he learned from my conversation that I had devoted
my time to astrological books, advised me in a kindly and
fatherly way to throw them away, and not to waste my time and
energy, which would be better spent on useful pursuits, on such
vain falsehoods. He had himself, he said, so far studied the art as
to want, in his early years, to become a professional: after all, if
he had understood Hippocrates he would be able to understand
astrology. Yet he had left it aside and followed medicine, simply
because he had found it to be entirely false, and he could not as a
serious-minded man seek his livelihood by cheating people.
When I asked him why it was that many true predictions were
made by astrologers, he replied that this was the result of chance,
operating throughout nature. Yet at that time neither he nor my
very dear friend Nebridius, who mocked every kind of divina­

14 See for example, De Doctrina Christiana, II, c.21; Enarrationes in Psalmos, Ps.58 and 140;
De diversis 83 quaestiones, q.45; De Actibus cum Felice Manichaeo, 1.10. All these were
written in the later 390s. In De Doct. Christ. II, c.29, Augustine points out that a
knowledge of astronomy is necessary for the understanding of the calendar and of the
Scriptures.

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tion, could persuade me to throw it aside, because I was more

influenced by the authority of the astrological writers, and I had
not yet found any certain and unambiguous proof, such as I
looked for, to show me that those things truly said by astrologers
who were consulted were right by chance not because of the skill
of those who inspected the stars.15

It is an instructive passage. Augustine was an intelligent and educated

young near-pagan, who had learned enough of astronomy to be
impressed (he refers elsewhere in the Confessions to the accuracy of the
astronomers' predictions of eclipses and so on), and who had
sufficient Christian background from his mother Monica to reject
magic and superstitious divination through prayers and sacrifices to
'the gods'. He had not found any good reason to reject the authority of
the astrologers; though who these authors were is a bit of a mystery,
since he knew very little Greek. Perhaps Augustine was referring to
popular prediction-books, 'almanacks', the fourth-century equivalent
of 'Old Moore'. At any rate, he had no proof that the true revelations
of astrology were due to chance not skill. Two of his friends tried to
persuade him to leave astrology alone: Nebridius, his contemporary,
who also later became a bishop, and the old ex-Proconsul, Vindicia-
nus, a doctor. As might have been expected, given the close associa­
tion between medicine and astrology, he had at first studied astrology
and intended to make it his career, but rejected it as swindling.16 Ten
years after his conversion Augustine, now a bishop, frequently found
occasion to condemn what he had earlier accepted; which shows not
only that it was something to be reckoned with at that time, but also
that it was still on the bishop's tender conscience.
The obvious place for an extended attack was in The City of God. It
was begun as a proof that the pagan gods had not taken care of Rome,
as a refutation of the accusation that it was because the City had
forsaken her ancient guardian deities that she had fallen to the Goths.
It developed, of course, over fifteen years, into something much wider
in scope and of much greater and lasting importance. In Book V, cc.1-7,
written nearly twenty years later than the Confessions, Augustine set
out his criticism of astrology. The opening of the Book shows that
whatever the status of astrology among the educated and however
much it was disapproved of by the Church, nevertheless at the
popular level there was sufficient belief to make most people equate

15 Book IV, c.3 (abridged).

16 Cf. Conf. VII.6, where Augustine again refers to these dissuaders and explains that he
was finally convinced of his error by the different fates of two children born with
precisely the same natal chart.

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'fate' with the influence of the stars. If, he says, anyone means by 'fate'
the will of God, 'let him hold to his opinion but correct his language.
For when men hear that word, "fate", by the ordinary usage of current
speech they simply understand by it the power of the stars' arrange­
ment, as it is when a man is born, or conceived.' There is a further
hint of the common popularity of the astrologer-soothsayer in the
number of references (as in De Doctrina Christiana, 11.21 for example) to
their hawking their predictions around.
Now some men hold the 'power of the stars' to be independent of
God, while others believe it to be dependent upon his will. The first
opinion is to be rejected as really a form of atheism, whether it is held
by pagans or professed Christians. In the second case, either the stars
act of their own volition, the power being given them by God, or they
merely carry out, by necessity, the will of God himself. If the first, how
is it that these heavenly bodies, in all their beauty and grandeur -
clarissimus senatus et splendidissima curia, says Augustine - can cause
evil? It is unthinkable. Then surely it is even less thinkable that God
causes evil through them? But if it is said, as it has been by men of
great learning, that the stars signify events but do not cause them, that
is not in fact how the mathematici, the professional astrologers, put it:
they do not say, 'Mars in such and such a position signifies that a man
will be a murderer'; they say, 'makes him a murderer'. And even
allowing that they are wrong in using such phrases, and following the
learned, what about twins? If, as is usual, the fates of twins are
different, the astrologer says that they were not, of course, born at the
same time. Nigidius Figulus illustrated the difference a small interval
can make by striking a spinning wheel twice in quick succession, and
then stopping the wheel and pointing to the distance between the
marks. Against this Augustine argues that the time of birth, or a
fortiori of conception, and even the times of the ascending of signs,
cannot be measured accurately enough; which was indeed a perma­
nent difficulty in the centuries before the invention of reliable
mechanical clocks. And anyway, as he points out in Chapter 5, exactly
the opposite is said by the astrologer in the cases of twins falling ill at
the same time, namely that they were born or conceived under the
same heavens, at the same time. The classic case of twins with
different fates is, of course, that of Jacob and Esau, with whose story
Chapter 4 is taken up. There is much more argument about twins,
particularly about the relative importance of the times and dates of
conception and birth, concluding with the difficult question, 'Is it not
true that the will of those who are now living changes the fates
decreed at their nativity, when the order in which they are born
changes the fates decreed at their conception?' It is interesting that
Augustine betrays his former involvement in astrology in his use of

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the technical language of the subject: 'Then I ask, if there is so much

difference in the times of the births of twins that they are born under
different constellations, because their ascendants are different and
therefore all their cardines are different (that is, the MC etc.; his words
are: propter diversum horoscopum et ob hoc diversos omnes cardines), in
which that power is located which causes them to have different fates,
I ask, how can this happen, when their conceptions cannot have
occurred at different times?'
The final passages, in Chapter 7, concern 'elections' - katarchai - and
the consequent opportunities for interfering with what is supposed to
be the 'course of fate'. 'Suppose a man to be born,' he argues, 'under
stars promising not an admirable but a contemptible son; and that,
since he is learned, he chooses the particular hour to have intercourse
with his wife, so that he has made for himself a fate he did not have,
and by that chosen act of his, that has begun to be fated which was
not there in his nativity.' That is, although the 'house of children' in
his birth chart made it clear that he would have wretched children, he
can by a judicious use of katarchai so plan their conceptions that they
are destined to be the opposite. Nevertheless, the plausibility of
astrology is admitted; astrologers are very often surprisingly correct.
But this, says Augustine, is because of the hidden influence of evil
spirits, whose concern it is to encourage the growth of this super­
stition in men's minds, not because of any skill in determining and
interpreting horoscopes - 'there is no such art'. The most difficult case
for the Christian to deal with was, of course, that of the Magi and the
Star of Bethlehem, which could hardly be put down to demonic
causes. Augustine's answer is set out most clearly in a treatise he
wrote about 397-8 against Faustus the Manichee:17

Now we (as opposed to the Manichees) set the birth of no man

under the fatal rule of the stars, so that we can loose from any
bond of necessity the free choice of his will, by which he lives
well or ill, for the sake of the just judgment of God. How much
less then do we think that temporal begetting of the eternal
Creator and Lord of all to be under the influence of the stars! So
that star which the Magi saw when Christ was born according to
the flesh was not a lord governing his nativity but a servant
bearing witness to it, it did not subject him to its power but in its
service pointed the way to him. What is more, that star was not
one of those which from the beginning of creation keep their
regular courses under the Creator's law, but at the new birth

17 Contra Faustum Manichaeum, II.5 (PL 42: cols 212-3); and cf Sermon 201.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

from the Virgin a new star appeared, which performed its office
by going before the faces of the Magi in their search for Christ
until it led them to the place where lay the infant Word of God
... So Christ was not born because it shone forth, but it shone
forth because Christ was born; so if we must speak of it, we
should say not that the star was fate for Christ, but that Christ
was fate for the star.

In all this, Augustine is in line with the attitude of earlier Latin

Christian writers. Another great African writer, Tertullian, had writ­
ten1819two centuries earlier a passage much quoted later by Bede,
Alcuin, Ivo of Chartres and many others: astrology 'was allowed only
until the time of the Gospel, so that no one from then on, after Christ's
appearance, should interpret anyone's nativity from the heavens. For
the Magi offered incense and myrrh and gold to the infant Lord as it
were to mark the passing of this world's glories and rites, which
Christ was to remove'; and since magic was condemned, so too was
astrology, a kind of magic. In his Apologeticum™ he says that Christians
do not consult 'astrologers or haruspices or augurers or magicians,
even about their own affairs (since these arts came from demons and
were forbidden by God), much less about Caesar's life' - of which no
doubt they had been accused. The same linking of astrology with
other forms of pagan magic and divination is found in the very early
fourth century in Lactantius;20 and in the Lives of the Fathers21 the
demonic origin of even true astrological forecasting is an example of
the way God uses even his adversaries as agents of his truth, so that
no excuse for ignorance might be left for the wicked.
Not only was astrology thus associated with pagan magic and
superstition, but it was tainted with heresy. It was among the beliefs
of the Priscillianist heretics in Spain. Orosius, Augustine's disciple,
says22 they believed in the soul's journey through the spheres, when it
was influenced by the planets in turn, and in the allocation of the parts
of the body to the signs of the zodiac - the melothesia. The same
associations were made by Gregory the Great, and so passed into
medieval literature.
And to all this as an at least equally potent force working against
astrology's survival must be added the decline of learning in the
centuries immediately following the break-up of the Western Empire.

18 Tertullian, De Idololatria, c.9 (PL I: col. 747)

19 Ch. 35 (PL I: col. 521).
20 Divin. Inst., 11.17 (PL VI: cols 336-7).
21 Vitae Patrum (PL LXXIII: col. 452).
22 See Priscilliani quae supersunt, ed. G. Schepps, CSEL 18,1889, 153-4.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

As M. L. W. Laistner has written:23 'Not persecution or prosecution,

but the lack of proper manuals caused the disappearance of "scien­
tific" astrology in the West for four or five centuries after Firmicus
composed his astrologers' handbook.' There was virtually no knowledge
of Greek, and the study of the Liberal Arts dwindled to the acquisition
of a very rudimentary smattering of grammar and rhetoric, from very
elementary textbooks. Now the preservation of any art or skill from
generation to generation, even at the most rude and popular level,
depends upon the continuity of a high professionalism; without
understanding and development at the highest level, the bottom is
starved and dies. There is no 'pop' without the philharmonic. There
could be no hack horoscope-mongers or star-gazing soothsayers
without skilled astrologers, no production of popular almanacs or
prediction sheets without the expert provision of the material on
which they must all be based. In the late fourth and early fifth
centuries there were few good textbooks of astrology in the West, and
probably fewer learned masters of the subject. Considering that it was
a time of transition, of great insecurity and therefore of great anxiety,
and that in such times men turn to religion and to magic and astrology
for help and comfort, we can reasonably ask why astrology virtually
disappeared from western Europe at this time. The hostility of the
Church and the decay of learning are probably enough to account for
it. Only the very few scholars who progressed beyond the Trivium
(and did not go on to law and civil administration) - and before the
ninth century few enough even got as far as dialectic - only those few
would reach 'astronomy'; and all of that had to be in Latin. Now it is
fair to say that there could be no accurate making of birth-charts, no
real genethlialogy, without Ptolemy's Almagest; neither that nor his
Tetrabiblos existed in Latin. The Latin 'textbooks', including those of
Manilius and Firmicus Maternus, were useless without the mathemat­
ical apparatus; and if there were books such as those Augustine
consulted, derived perhaps from Nigidius Figulus or even Posidonius,
whom Augustine described in The City of God (Book V.5) as a great
astrologer and philosopher', they were probably very much like the
sort of stuff found in the late Greek works represented in the
appendices of the CCAG, or possibly like the 'Elements of Astronomy'
of Geminus, a sort of sphaera, or description of the heavens, with some
account of astrological terms such as trigons, tetragons (squares) and
so on.24 At any rate such books must have disappeared very early, for
23 In The Intellectual Heritage of the Middle Ages, ed. C. G. Starr (New York, 1957) 82 (=
'The Western Church and Astrology during the Early Middle Ages', Harvard Theological
Review, 34 (1941).)
24 Gemini Elementa Astronomica, ed. K. Manitius (Leipzig, 1898). If Manitius was right,
the Greek text is a fourth/fifth century epitome of a Stoic Geminus' first century B.C.
commentary on Posidonius' Meteorologica.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

only a few relics remain. So, what astrologia did the men of the Latin
West inherit, and how much of it was astrological?
Two of the chief Classical sources of later 'scientific' knowledge
were the Quaestiones naturales of Seneca and the Natural History of
Pliny the Elder. Both contained much astronomy. But whereas Seneca's
work was unknown and unused until the twelfth century, Pliny's was
used, at first or second hand, by very many medieval scholars. There is
no astrology in either author, but neither makes any clear distinction
between astrology and astronomy. In Pliny's second book, concerned
with the mundus, the world, the universe, and largely astronomical,
Saturn, for example, is described as 'of a cold and frozen nature', and
the sun is the ruler of the stars and the heavens, 'the soul, or more
precisely, the mind of the whole world'. The authorities Pliny claims
to have used include, apart from his Latin sources, Hipparchus,
Petosiris and Nechepso, Posidonius, Eudoxus, Thrasyllus, Archimedes,
Eratosthenes and Aristotle: but despite the inclusion of Nechepso-
Petosiris, Posidonius and Thrasyllus, there is no astrology here. He
has indeed the Roman Stoic's contempt for popular superstition:

Everywhere in the whole world at every hour by all men's voices

Fortune alone is invoked and named, alone accused, alone
impeached, alone pondered, alone applauded, alone rebuked,
and visited with reproaches; deemed volatile and indeed by most
men blind as well, wayward, inconstant, uncertain, fickle in her
favours and favouring the unworthy. To her is debited all that is
spent and credited all that is received, she alone fills both pages
in the whole of mortals' account; and we are so much at the
mercy of chance that Chance herself, by whom God is proved
uncertain, takes the place of God. Another set of people banishes
fortune also, and attributes events to its star and to the laws of
birth, holding that for all men that ever are to be God's decree
has been enacted once for all, while for the rest of time leisure
has been vouchsafed to Him.25

Along with Pliny the three chief authorities for the early Middle
Ages on matters astronomical were the later writers Calcidius, Marti-
anus Capella and Macrobius, of whom the last was by far the most
influential. The earliest, Calcidius, translated the first, cosmological
part of Plato s Timaeus and wrote a long Neo-Platonist commentary on
it, at about the end of the fourth century.26 He accepted from his late

25 Pliny, Natural History, Loeb Classical Library, vol. I, tr. H. Rackham, 1944, pp. 183-5.
Tirnaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. J. H. Waszink, Plato Latinus
(Leiden, 1962) vol. IV.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

Greek sources the Aristotelian (Meteor. 1.2) principle that processes of

generation and decay in the sublunary world are caused by changes in
the heavens. This clearly makes possible divination by astrology, as he
says (c.157); but he is clear (c.125), following Plotinus, that 'the stars do
not cause what happens, they merely foretell future events.' A fatalistic
astrology would raise the problem, how could the stars, which all have
the same higher nature, possibly cause evil? It would also destroy
God's providence and man's freedom (cc.174-5). Consequently, al­
though astrology is possible, it is (c.186) 'only conjecture about things
pertaining to the body, or affairs belonging to the body, or that part of
mind subservient to the body.' Calcidius is interesting as giving us
the opinions of an intelligent late fourth century astronomer, but his
influence was small. His work was virtually unknown until the twelfth
century, and not much read then; it is significant that whereas
Macrobius was first printed in 1472, Calcidius had to wait nearly half a
century for the first edition of 1520. Perhaps he was just too long and
difficult.
The same cannot be said of the early fifth century encyclopaedia of
Martianus Capella, 'The Marriage of Mercury and Philology'.2728This
curious work is the account of the wedding, before all the assembled
gods, of the lady Philologia to the god Mercury (of course: language
and learning were properly his). Philology has been given seven
sisters as bridesmaids. As each in turn introduces herself, she explains
what she does: the first is Grammatica, the second Dialectica, the third
Rhetorica, and so on — so Books III to IX are in fact a summary
encylopaedia of the seven liberal arts. Book VIII is concerned with
Astrologia,29 and it is wholly astronomical. The only hint of astrology is
a reference (885) to Jupiter as health-giving; but the author does not
even bother to give the names of the signs of the zodiac, because
'everybody knows them'. He does pass on Heraclides notion that
Venus and Mercury move, not in eccentric circles round the earth like

27 Martianus Capella, ed. James Willis (Leipzig, 1983). It is written partly in prose and
partly in verse; the form is known as 'Menippean satire' and was used with a much
more regular structure by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy.
28 Willis in fact (following Dick's 1925 Teubner edition) prints the title of Book VIII as
De Astronomia, on the grounds that the sister in question is called Astronomia in Book
VI (581) and that the word astrologia does not occur in Martianus; but without MS
authority - those MSS which do have a title call it de astrologia, as do also those which
have a sub-scription at the end of the book, save one. Martianus has astrologus meaning
'astronomer' in Book VIII (858), and astronomus with the same meaning in Book III (230).
Neither Martianus nor his later copyists would have made any distinction. It is true that
among the divinatory arts not actually admitted to the wedding is Genethhace (Book IX,
894), 'who knowing the heavenly reason discloses the thread of fate spun by Lachesis
and declares the things to happen in the close-pressing centuries', but this does not
mean that Martianus was making any modern distinctions; after all, the ratio aetheria
was exactly what was studied by the astrologus/astronomus.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

the rest of the planets, but round the sun (854, 857), which itself goes
round the earth. The only point of real astrological interest in the work
occurs not in Book VIII but in Book II, 200, where Philology on her
arrival at the sphere of the fixed stars, 'jumping out of her litter, saw
the immense plains of light and the springlike calm of the ether, and
now she saw the differences and the shapes of the decans, now
wondered at the eighty-four ministers (liturgi) of the heavens standing
near, and saw besides the shining globes of the many stars ..etc.29
We know about decans, of course, though we are not used to
finding them personified, as they are here, and as they are occasion­
ally elsewhere in pagan religious and occult writers. But what are
these 'ministers', the liturgi, of which there are, apparently, eighty-
four? The footnote in the Teubner edition sends us to Firmicus
Maternus (a century earlier than Martianus Capella), who deepens the
mystery: 'Some authorities, wishing to go into more complications in
this matter (sc. of the decans), attribute three divinities to each decan;
these they wish to be known as ministers (munifices), that is, liturgi; so
that nine ministers can be found in each sign, and each decan is
equipped with three ministers. Then again, they divide the nine
ministers which they say are established in each sign among countless
powers of divinities; by these, they say, sudden chance events, pains,
sicknesses, colds and fevers are caused, and all else that comes upon
us unexpectedly without our knowledge; and monstrous births are
also caused by them'.30 Three liturgi in each decan, nine in each sign,
and therefore 108 in all, according to Firmicus. Neither he nor
Martianus explains any further.
Modern scholars do not help. Franz Boll (Sphaera, 1903, pp. 392ff)
merely follows Bouche-Leclercq, and he Saumaise before him, and
says that the liturgi belong to the sphaera barbarica, the Egyptian
description of the heavens, and are paranatellonta, the stars which rise
with the decans. This is also the view, unsupported by evidence, of a
modem editor and translator (into Italian) of Book II of Martianus
Capella, Luciano Lenaz.31 However, they clearly are not paranatellonta.
Not only is there no list of 84, nor of 108, such stars, but in Martianus

29 Ipsa quippe Philologia lectica desiliens, cum immensos luminis campos aetheriaeque
tranquillitatis verna conspiceret ac nunc tot diversitates cerneret formasque decanorum, tunc
octoginta quattuor liturgos caelo moraretur adstare, videretque praeterea fulgentes creb'rorum
siderum glogos, etc. The Latin is worth quoting, since there are ambiguities in it
concealed in translation. For instance, does the decanorum go with diversitates as well as
formas, or are the diversitates separate, as early commentators seem to have thought?
30 II.4, 4. lulii Firmin’ Materni Matlieseos libri VII, ed. W. Kroll and F.Skutsch (Leipzig
1897) vol. I; ed. W. Kroll, F. Skutsch and K. Ziegler (Leipzig, 1913) vol. IL
31 (Padua, 1975) 34, note 86. He suggests that the 84 is simply produced from the seven
of the planets multiplied by the twelve of the signs.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

they are obviously like the decans and similarly personified, and
separated from the stars; and Firmicus does not even hint at such a
solution, but treats them as divisions of the decans (though of course
it is possible that paranatellonta could be so used). The early medieval
commentators, such as John Scottus Erigena and Remi of Auxerre in
the ninth century, both drawing on older glosses, are at a loss. Erigena
says:32: 'Liturgi means ministers. The space between the earth and the
firmament is divided into eighty-four "varieties" (varietates).' And
Remy says the same33 and adds: 'liturgi according to some authorities
are divinities which inflict sicknesses on mortals.' It looks as though
their 84 varieties are derived from a possible but unlikely interpreta­
tion of diversities in Martianus, and the sicknesses come ultimately
from Firmicus or at least the same tradition.
So what are liturgi? And why are there 84 or 108 of them? There is no
certain answer. They are not mentioned by any other ancient astrol­
ogical writer, and there is no reference to them in Bede's astronomical
works or in those of later commentators. It is fairly safe to assume that
Martianus had little or no idea what they were, but merely listed them
with the decans in the same way as an anonymous Gnostic quoted by
Boll puts them in a list which includes angels and archangels! Firmicus
Maternus may possibly have known more, but it looks unlikely. His
three liturgi per decan is too tidy and too complicated at the same time.
It looks like a guess, making liturgi thirds of thirds, and it gives an odd
unit of 3Vj°, a third of the 10° decan; which looks like the 'ninths', the
novenarii, of later astrology.34 These were probably of Babylonian
origin. So also were the lunar mansions, of which there were 27 or 28.
If a 28-mansion sign were divided between the seven planets, there
would be 84 such divisions in a twelve-month (lunar month) circle. All
of which makes sense in a lunar calendar based astrology, but is not
easily fitted into a solar zodiac. Firmicus may be forgiven for
simplifying, if that is what he was doing. If something like this is the
explanation, Martianus' encyclopaedia of the liberal arts, not widely
but continuously known through the early Middle Ages, gives us a
glimpse of yet another complication of late antique astrology.
Nothing about astrology, and little of any value of astronomy is to
be learned from the muddled commentary Macrobius wrote, about 430
A.D., on Cicero's 'Dream of Scipio', the Somnium Scipionis. It was a
popular work not only throughout the Middle Ages but through the
Renaissance also and down into the eighteenth century. Cicero,

32 loannis Scotti Annotations in Marcinum, ed. Cora E. Lutz (New York, 1939) 73.
33 Remigii Autissiodorensis Comment™ in Martianum Capellam I & II, ed. Cora E. Lutz
(Leiden, 1962) 302.
34 But see pp. 164f below on navamshas, 'ninths', for further remarks on liturgi.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

following Plato, had written a Republic, which, like Plato's, closed with
a myth. In Cicero's book this took the form of a dream experienced by
Scipio Aemilianus, in which he is shown the mysteries of the universe
by his adoptive grandfather, the great Scipio Africanus. Macrobius, of
whom practically nothing is known save that he was a pagan,35 wrote a
Neo-Platonist commentary on that Dream (commonly referred to
simply as the Somnium)36 which is one of the chief sources for the
Middle Ages of late antique doctrines of the soul and immortality.
The cosmology and the astronomy are muddled, as is the math­
ematics. A passage of some obscurity (1.19) preserves ancient doubts
about the relation between the inferior planets, Venus and Mecury,
and the sun, the obscurity being due not to difficulties in the Latin but
to the fog in Macrobius' mind. He gives the usual lists of character­
istics of the planets, from the genethlialogi, and then advances fantastic
numerical 'explanations' derived from Ptolemy 'On Harmony'; and
quotes Plotinus as saying that the stars do not cause but only signify
events on earth. But if Macrobius offers us nothing new, he does serve
to illustrate two interesting and important aspects of astrology, which
he helped to preserve into the Middle Ages: the idea of the soul's
journey down through the spheres on its way to join the body,
acquiring various characteristics from the seven planets as it
descended; and the thema mundi, the horoscope of the world, the
'birth-chart' of the creation.
The Platonic separable soul imprisoned in the body became in the
Neo-Platonic amalgam of Plato, Aristotle and Stoicism (which intro­
duced the idea of the soul having the same fiery nature as the
outermost heaven) a soul which had to descend from the etherial
regions where it was at home to the earth, to enter a body. On the way
it passed, necessarily, through the spheres of the planets, and
Macrobius tells us (1.12, 14) that 'in Saturn's sphere' the soul receives
'reasoning and intelligence, which the Greeks call AoyiOTtKov and
SEOjpqTiKov; in Jupiter's sphere, the power of acting, which is called
TrpaKTiKov; in Mars', the fiery ardour of spirit called Bupixov; in the
Sun's, a nature for feeling and opinion, which they call aioBqTiKov

35 His other, larger, work, the Saturnalia, is a conversation on literary, mythological and
religious themes - mostly on Virgil - between pagan Roman senators of the preceding
generation. It shows Macrobius to be a supporter of the 'pagan party' in the state, and
his somewhat idealised portraits of Symmachus, Praetextatus and th others were
probably intended to counter the hostile propaganda of the historian Ammianus
Marcellinus. See Alan Cameron, 'The Date and Identity of Macrobius', in Journal of
Roman Studies, LVI (1966) 25-38.
36 Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. James Willis
(Leipzig, 1963).

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and cpavTaoTiKov; and the soul then receives the motion of desire,
called CTnSupqTiKov, in Venus' sphere, of speaking out and interpret­
ing what it feels, called tppqvEUTiKov, in Mercury's; and the <|>utik6v,
that is, corporeal begetting and growing, it obtains on entering the
globe of the Moon.' The idea that the soul was affected by this journey
was probably an astrological one,37 since Servius (the grammarian and
commentator on Virgil who is one of the characters in Macrobius'
Saturnalia) says, on Aeneid VI, 714, that 'the astrologers claim that
when the souls descend, they draw with them the sluggishness of
Saturn, the anger of Mars, the lust of Venus, the desire for wealth of
Mercury, the desire for power of Jupiter.' The Sun and Moon are left
out of his list. It is a list of five of 'the seven deadly sins': sloth, anger,
luxury (or lust), avarice and pride - the two missing ones are gluttony
and envy. As Zielinski says: 'Of course, anyone could see how well
gluttony could be attributed to the all-consuming Sun, and envy to the
pale Moon.' The Classical poet Horace already had the same seven
vices listed in Ep.I.l, 33ff; and their origin, together with their link
with astrology, is probably in Posidonian Stoicism. Victorinus, Bishop
of Pettau, who died in the Diocletianic persecution of 304, put together
Psalm 32.6 and Isaiah 11.2-3, and had seven heavens with seven
spirits: 'the highest heaven of wisdom, the second of understanding,
the third of counsel, the fourth of virtue, the fifth of knowledge, the
sixth of piety and the seventh of the fear of God'.38 St Ambrose made
the same connexion and called them 'the seven principal virtues of the
Holy Spirit' (Ep.XXXI.3), and so the association of astrology, the seven
deadly sins and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit all passed into
medieval thought.
The thema mundi, the horoscope of the world, was very much more
ancient than any of this. As it is presented in our late sources, it is
strikingly consistent, which suggests that it was long established and
accepted.39 It is normally introduced to explain why Aries is regarded
as the 'beginning' of the zodiac, although a circle has of course no
beginning. So Macrobius (1.21, 23ff): 'They say that when that day

37 For what follows, see Th. Zielinski in Philologus, LXIV (1905) 21f; and Saturn and
Melancholy, by R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky and F. SaxI (London, 1964) 159ff.
38 Tractatus de fabrica mundi, 7; in Victorini Episcopi Petavionensis Opera, ed. J.
Haussleiter, CSEL 49 (1916).
39 Cf. Macrobius, Somn., 1.21; 23; Firm.Mat., III.l; Paul.Alexandr., c.37; CCAG, IX, ii, ed.
S. Weinstock, pp. 176ff; and S. Weinstock, 'A New Greek Calendar and Festivals of the
Sun', Journal of Roman Studies, XXXVIII (1948), pp.37ff. It is interesting that Firmicus
puts all the planets at 15° of their signs, which is a relic of Eudoxus' astronomy, a much
older tradition. Bede in his De temporum ratione, c.VI (ed. Ch. W. Jones, CC(SL), CXX1II B)
explains how the day of the Creation, the 'beginning of the zodiac', was worked out not
by the Greeks but by the Chaldaeans, and concludes: 'And so according to the division
of the zodiac the sun enters Aries on the 15th of the kalends of April, the day light was

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began which was the first of all and is therefore rightly called the
world's birthday, Aries was in the Midheaven; and because the
Midheaven is as it were the vertex of the world, Aries was therefore
held to be the first among them all, the one which appeared like the
head of the world at the beginning of light. And they add the reason
why these twelve signs are assigned to the powers of different gods.
For they say that in that same birth-chart of the world, Aries being as
we have said in the Midheaven, the horoscopus of the world coming to
birth was Cancer, bringing forth at that moment the Moon. The Sun
was rising next with Leo, Virgo with Mercury, Libra with Venus, Mars
was in Scorpio, Sagittarius had Jupiter and Saturn was wandering in
Capricorn. So it came about that each was said to be the lord of that
sign in which it was believed to be when the world was being born.
To the two luminaries antiquity allotted only the signs, one to each, in
which they had been then, Cancer to the Moon and Leo to the Sun. To
the other five stars, however, besides those signs in which they then
had been, ancient times so added the other five as to begin the new
series at the end of the first. We said earlier that Saturn, last of all, was
in Capricorn; so the second set of attributions made the previous last
one first, and Aquarius, which follows Capricorn, was given to Saturn.
To Jupiter, who preceded Saturn, Pisces was allocated', and so on, thus
explaining the 'planetary houses'. All of which is found in other
authorities; and indeed Firmicus says that the explanation is the
reason for the construction of the thema mundi by wise men in the first
place. The more probable ancient order of logic is restored by later
authors - it clearly fits better with the Christian doctrine of Creation,
as John of Salisbury says in the twelfth century:40 'Each planet has its
natural house, in which each was created, provided the astrologers
agree that they were created by God.' He then lists the houses of the
thema mundi in the traditional order.
The origins of all this may go back to Babylon. We can get some idea
of its mythological beginnings from the Epic of Creation.41 According
to this myth, Marduk (who like his Sumerian predecessor Ninurta was
a solar god, so that later Marduk was equated with Jupiter, and
Ninurta with Jupiter's predecessor Saturn, the 'sun of the night') slew
Tiamat, the dragon, who represented the salt waters of the oceans. He

made.' So the day of the Creation was 18 March, three days before the equinox (since
the sun and moon were not created till the third day) as he earlier suggests; though in
c.XXX he gives the date of the equinox as 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation Ladv
Day. ' ’
40 Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici . .. libri, VIII ed C C J Webb
(Oxford, 1909) II.441d.
41 S. Langdon, The Babylonian Epic of Creation (Oxford, 1923). The epic was first
composed about the twenty-second century B.C.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

divided her into two 'like an oyster', that is, lengthways, and set up
half arched over the world, with the heavens as a covering. Then he
made the stations of the great gods': manzazu — the word is used also
of the stations of the moon, and later for exaltations; and sometimes
bitu, house, is used instead. Marduk fixed the year and designed the
signs, and defined the days of the year by signs,42 and then (if the
interpretation is correct) set Nibiru, Marduk's planet, at the equinox,
Aries or Libra, to fix all of them', and set the ecliptic between the
northern and southern stars, and 'caused the new moon to shine
forth , that is, in the west. Of course, there is not much here of the
thema mundi; but there is the notion of the stars and planets being set
in place at the creation, and the confusion is itself instructive. If
Nibiru is a planet and not simply a 'crossing' - that is, one of the
equinoxes; if it is, as Langdon thought, a 'crossing planet', a planet at
the equinox; and if the planet was originally not Marduk's (Jupiter)
but Ninurta's (Saturn), then Saturn was in the house of his exaltation,
Libra. If Saturn was above the horizon in Libra, then the Sun was set
in Aries and the new Moon was in Taurus - all three in the signs of
their later exaltations; and there is some evidence that the other
planets were in their corresponding places. The confusion over the
words manzazu and bitu, stations and houses, we have seen persists in
late antique astrology, and one cannot press distinctions as far back as
the Epic.
More interesting is Tiamat, the dragon stretched across the heavens,
her head and her tail on the equator at opposite ends of a diameter.
Now 'the head and tail of the dragon', caput and cauda draconis, are of
great importance in later astrology, taking their places with the
planets, and given symbols of their own, and O . Astronomers will
recognise these as representing the south to north, or ascending, node
of the moon, and the north to south, or descending node. What are
and were they? The lunar nodes are the points on the ecliptic where
the moon crosses from south to north and back again, its slightly
wobbly orbit being inclined to the ecliptic. The ascending node, > /, is
the point where the moon (or, in modern astronomy, any planet)
passes from south to north of the ecliptic, so it was frequently referred
to as the northern node, and this was the caput draconis, the head of
the dragon. The descending node, where the moon crossed the ecliptic

42 Langdon is perhaps anachronistic in inserting '(of the zodiac)' after 'signs' (p. 153);
'constellations' is probably all that is meant. The Assyrian word used is not known
elsewhere. The text at this point also says that Marduk 'placed three stars each' for the
twelve months. The literature on these 'decans' is immense and unrewarding: it is safe
to say that what it meant is now unthinkable, and that much that has been suggested is
too anachronistic to be possible.

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on its way south, was the cauda, the tail of the dragon. These nodes
move round the ecliptic, precess, in the same way as the equinoctial
points precess round the equator. They take about eighteen and a half
years to go right round the ecliptic from east to west. The time taken
for the moon to get from caput to cauda and back again is between 27
and 27V2 days, a period (the mean is 27.212220 days) still known to
astronomers as the Draconitic period. In late medieval and
Renaissance astrology the head and tail of the dragon became 'things',
with aspects and so on and almost the powers of planets, but they
have virtually dropped out of modern astrology. Their connection with
the modem constellation Draco, which snakes round the Little Bear, is
probably that the modern line of stars is all that is left of the ancient
Dragon. From the number of different myths Greeks and Romans
attached to this constellation we might guess that they inherited it, its
name, and its associations from a time before memory. It looks most
likely that it is to be traced back over the millenia to the dragon of
Babylonian mythology, especially since the caput and cauda draconis
turn up in some strength in Hindu astrology later, and so come,
through the Arabs, into the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
There is no mention of any of this in Macrobius, although an
attentive reader could gather a great deal of astrological jargon from
his book, and much that looks like astrological reference in later
writers is really only from Macrobius' Commentary. For all early
medieval learning is book learning, and almost all that is concerned
with astrologia is from Macrobius, Isidore and above all Bede. So much
were books considered the source of all knowledge that Cassiodorus
derived the name 'liberal arts' from liber, a book.43 Cassiodorus
(490-583) was Master of the Offices, or secretary, to the Ostrogothic
king of Italy, Theodoric; he retired from his duties to his estate at
Vivarium to found a monastery and live his old age out in peace.
There he wrote for his monks, as the darkness of paganism and
ignorance deepened over western Europe, 'an Introduction to their
studies', and 'divided his work into two books: one dealt with
Christian learning and in general with their monastic life, and the
second contained a compendium of such secular knowledge as was
indispensable to the study of Holy Writ' (Mynors, p. ix). Tn which
books,' says Cassiodorus himself in his Preface, 'I am not putting
forward my own teaching, but the sayings of the ancients, priscorum
dicta, which for us coming later it is right to praise and glorious to set
forth.' The motive, that it is all for the better understanding of
Scripture, and the attitude, that not original ideas but priscorum dicta

43Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937) II, 4.

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matter, are both utterly typical and persistent throughout the story of
medieval scholarship.
There is in Book II of the Institutes, which is really a sketch of the
liberal arts and a list of their textbooks, a section de astronomia;
Cassiodorus himself always uses the forms astronomia, astronomus, but
he is quite happy to refer to Varro's De astrologia; there is no
distinction. He gives, three times with nearly identical wording a
definition of astronomia which he probably got from Varro (Inst.II.iii.6
and 21, vii.2): 'Astronomia is that discipline which examines all the
movements and shapes of the heavenly constellations and rationally
enquires into the relations of the stars to one another and to the earth'.
The same words are used by Isidore and later authors. Cassiodorus
says there are many books in both Greek and Latin on astronomy (of
which Ptolemy's are the most important) including handy tables of
positions and so forth, but apart from Ptolemy he names no authori­
ties, nor does he suggest that there are any translations into Latin of
Greek books.44 He admits the usefulness of astronomia to navigators
and farmers, but then warns (vii.4): 'But the other things which go

44 That he does not mention Latin books (other than Varro) is one piece of negative
evidence against the view that there was a textbook of astronomy by Boethius. Boethius,
who had preceded Cassiosorus as Theodoric's magister officiorum, was executed in 525
on suspicion of having plotted with Byzantium. He had set out to translate into Latin
and comment on the works of Plato and Aristotle, but got no further before his death
than the Organon, the logical works of the latter. In prison he wrote one of the most
famous and widely read of all medieval books, the Consolation of Philosophy. Before that
he had written textbooks on some of the liberal arts, using Greek sources, in the
knowledge that the West would need Latin books when there was no longer any Greek.
He certainly wrote a Geometry, an Arithmetic and a Music. Did he also write an
Astronomy? For an affirmative answer there are four arguments. Cassiodorus in one of
his letters written in 507 (Variae 1.45, 3f) actually says: 'In your translations Pythagoras'
Music and Ptolemy's Astronomy are read by the Italians, Nichomachus' Arithmetic and
Euclid's Geometry are heard by western men.' Against this is the undoubted hyperbole
of the letter's conclusion: 'and whatever arts and disciplines eloquent Greece produced
in the works of individual men, Rome has received in clear Latin at your hand, yours
only.' Secondly, there are occasional references in medieval library catalogues to works
on astronomy along with or among Boethius' works - two at least seem clearly to refer to
a work by Boethius (Becker, Catalogi, 1885, Nos 32 and 77), and one of them may be the
book at Bobbio referred to in Gerbert's eighth letter. (I fear I cannot share the certainty
of George Goold on p. cviii of his Loeb edition of Manilius that the reference is to
Manilius.) But the attributions are neither absolutely certain nor textually always
reliable, and there are many occasions and places where one might have expected to
find Boethius' Astronomy if it had existed but where it is not. Thirdly there are the two
very doubtful references in Gerbert's letters (Epp. 8 and 130). Lastly there is the stated
intention of Boethius himself in his Arithmetica; but he died with so many unfulfilled
intentions! The main argument against there having been a Boethian version of
Ptolemy, besides the lack of reference in Cassiodorus' Institutes, is the total absence of
any text or any clear citation of it. On the whole it must remain an unanswerable
question, with the balance in favour of the Noes rather than the Ayes. It can safely be
said that if it did ever exist it was never read or used by anyone in the early Middle
Ages.

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along with the knowledge of the constellations, that is, things

pertaining to knowing men's fates, which are without any doubt
contrary to our faith, ought to be so far unknown to us that they seem
not even to have been written.' He goes on to refer to St Basil and St
Augustine to support his condemnation of such astrology. He returns
to the same theme in the immediately following Conclusion to the
book, a very revealing passage: 'But some, charmed by the beauty of
the constellations and their bright splendour, seeking out most
zealously the very causes of their own perdition, rushed blindly into
the study of the stars' motions so that they might believe themselves
able to foreknow events by unlawful calculations.' He maintains that
Plato and Aristotle as well as Scripture are against this, and that if
anyone wants to know about 'the powers above' and the future he
should read the Apocalypse of St John! But clearly in the second half of
the sixth century there were still some who were tempted by the
'books of the astrologers' just as Augustine had been a century and a
half before.
There may have been practising astrologers and real believers in the
art in Spain among surviving Priscillianist heretics, though the
evidence for actual astrological practices, apart from various magical
activities, soothsaying and such-like, is very slender indeed.45 At any
rate by the time of Isidore astrology was really a matter of history.
Isidore was Bishop of Seville after his brother Leander, in the
Visigothic kingdom of Spain, from 602 until his death in 636. He is
remembered especially for his Origines or Etymologiae, a vast twenty­
book encyclopaedia of learning culled from other men's books which
fills two volumes of the Oxford Classical Texts.46 Its title is accurate:
the names of all the topics, and hosts of words not forming separate
topics, are furnished with 'etymologies' only very rarely and quite
accidentally correct. We have already noted (Chapter II, p. 19) how
Isidore needed, because there were two words, astronomia and
astrologia, to make some distinction. Many later medieval authors felt
the same compulsion - if there are two terms, they must denote two
things - and either followed Isidore or produced different, sometimes
quite contrary, definitions. The natural tendency, given their respect
for words and 'etymology', was to take the nomos bit of astronomia to
refer to law or custom (the meaning of the Greek), and the logos part of
astrologia to mean reason, account, and thus make almost precisely the
opposite distinction to that we now make. The essential point is that
no one in the Middle Ages or for centuries after made any real

See the somewhat unconvincing case in J. Fontaine's 'Isidore de Seville et l'Astrol-

ogie', Revue des Etudes Latines, XXXI (1953) 271ff.
46 Ed. W. M. Lindsay (1911).

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES
distinction between what we call astronomy and what we call
astrology: they were simply complementary aspects, theoretical and
practical, of the same art, as they had been for Ptolemy. The
distinction drawn by Christians was not made on theoretical, scientific
grounds, but simply against superstition, against anything which
derogated from the omnipotence of God or the freedom of man.
Astrology is simply part of astrologia (or astronomia); but there is some
astrologia which is not lawful for Christians.
The result of this is that although one could learn very little
astrology from Isidore's encyclopaedia, in an important way it contri­
buted to astrology's future. Isidore was bound to treat astrologia in his
work, which began, naturally enough, with the liberal arts. Much of
what he says is taken literally from Cassiodorus, and the rest is equally
third hand, so that much ancient lore is preserved, without any great
understanding. In the course of his sphaera, his description of the
heavens (in Book III), Isidore produces the standard account of comets
as signifying 'pestilence or famine or war' and adds the interesting
detail that it was 'the Stoics' who classified them under more than
thirty different types 'the names and effects of which certain astrologi
have written about'. On the names of the signs of the zodiac Isidore
indulges in some very fanciful 'explanations'; it might not be unfair to
quote his ideas on Cancer (III.71, 26 - entire): 'Cancer they call so
because when the sun comes into that sign in June, it turns back after
the manner of a crab and makes the days shorter. For that animal has
an indistinguishable front end, and in fact moves in both directions,
so that the front becomes the back and the back the front.' Isidore is
brief and definite on a question on which ancient and medieval
astronomers were divided, that of the stars' and planets' light (III.61:
De lumine stellarum, on the light of the stars - entire): 'The stars are
said not to have their own light but to be illuminated by the sun, like
the moon.'
Book VIII is 'On the Church and the Synagogue, on Religion and
Faith, on Heresies, on Philosophers, Poets, Sybils, Magi and Pagans
and their gods.' In Chapter 9 of that book, 'On Magi', is a section on
astrologi (22-27): 'Astrologi are so called because they make predictions
from the stars (astri). Genethliaci are named thus because they consider
the dates of birth, for they draw up the births (geneses) of men round
the twelve signs of the heavens and attempt to predict the characters
of those bom and what they will do and suffer from the courses of the
stars. These are commonly called Mathematici ... but these same
interpreters of the stars were at first called Magi, like those in the
Gospel who announced the birth of Christ; after that they were known
only by the other name, mathematici. The knowledge of that art was
allowed down to the Incarnation (usque ad evangelium fuit concessa), on

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condition that once Christ had come into the world no one from then
on should interpret anyone else's birth by consideration of the
heavens. Horoscopes are so called because they look at the hours of
the births of men in the light of the different fates involved.' There is
here no suggestion that astrology is mistaken, that it does not work,
that it is empty superstition: only that it is no longer allowed. The
conscientious early medieval, Christian, student — monk or priest or
layman - who might otherwise never have known about astrology,
apart from the quacks at fairs along with all the other magicians and
conjurors, was bound, if he was interested enough to read Isidore, or
indeed most of the commentators on St Luke's account of the Star of
Bethlehem, not to be left with a simple and acceptable miracle, but to
be introduced to the fascinating but illicit subject of astrology. The
idea, at least, of a potentially valid science of astrology was kept alive
by the very authorities who condemned it.
But not by the most popular and the greatest of the scientific
authorities of the Middle Ages, Bede (673-735). Known to most of us
as the author of the superb Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,
Bede also wrote a large number of commentaries on Scripture, and
textbooks, including the most important Latin works on the reckoning
of time and on the computus. Nowhere in any of his work is there any
astrology; even the Star of the Magi only calls for a brief comment as
symbolising that art of prophecy in which the Magi, as successors of
Balaam, were skilled enough to know that a great prophecy had been
fulfilled. Just as his Ecclesiastical History made acceptable and normal
the Dionysian reckoning of years from the supposed date of the
Incarnation, which Bede explained and argued for in the De Temporum
Ratione and used in the annals in that book; so his methods for
working out dates, and in particular for finding the date of Easter, on
which the other movable feasts in the Church's calendar depend,
became standard, until the Reformation, at least. Bede was, for the
Middle Ages, the authority on the calendar and the computus.
What was this computus? The Latin word means reckoning, or
computation; but in the special sense in which medievalists use it, it
has no translation, and is best left as it is in Latin. In the words of a
modern editor of Bede's works on time and the calendar, C. W. Jones:17
'Computus ... denoted a body of knowledge and its art, a department
in the curriculum, and all or part of the text-book codex which

47 In his Baedae Opera de Temporibus (Cambridge, Mass., 1943) which gives an account
of the development of the computus to the eighth century, and of the complicated details
of dating equinoxes and new moons. See also W. E. van Wijk, I.e Nombre d’Or: Etude de
chronologie technique, suivi du texte de la Massa Compoti d'Alexandre de Villedieu avec
traduction et commentaire (The Hague, 1936).

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

contained it.' The art was that of computing the calendar, and
especially the date of Easter. Why should anyone want to calculate the
calendar, or such a well-known date? Because there were no almanacs,
no calendars on the walls, no clocks. Time-reckoners there were:
hour-glasses and marked candles and even perhaps clepsydrae, water­
clocks. But these measured how long; they did not tell you when. You
cannot tell the time from an egg-timer, unless you know precisely
when you turned it over; and when, in the ages before clocks and
watches, was different. It is very difficult, but absolutely essential, for
the modem student of the ancient and the medieval world to make the
mental effort needed to understand how men thought and lived and
organised their lives when there were no clocks and no calendars;
when the time and the date meant something very far from what they
mean to us. Time - hours, days, months, years - was not figures or
names, but natural, visible even: the positions of the sun and of the
moon.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote ...

So Chaucer begins the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; and when was
this? When ... 'the yonge Sonne/ hath in the Ram his halfe cours
y-ronne.' And how would you know when that was? You might have
on the church or town hall a zodiac sun-dial, such as can be seen on
the wall of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Then the shadow of
the sun at midday would tell you where the sun was in the zodiac -
when he had run half his course through the Ram, Aries, at the
beginning of April, for example.48 Such dials go back at least to the
second century B.C. and were still being erected in the eighteenth
century.49 And what of the time? We can again get a good idea from
Chaucer:

Our Hoste sey wel that the brighte sonne

Th' arc of his artificial day had ronne
The fourthe part, and half an houre, and more;
And though he were not depe expert in lore,
He wist it was the eightetethe day
Of April, that is messager to May;
And sei wel that the shadwe of every tree

48 There is a difficulty here, in that it is elsewhere implied that the Pilgrimage started in
mid-April, not at the beginning of the month. See Chauncey Wood, quoted in note 50,
pp. 161ff.
49 See Sharon L. Gibbs, Creek and Roman Sundials (Yale, 1976) 94.

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Was as in length the same quantitee

That was the body erect that caused it.
And therefor by the shadwe he took his wit
That Phebus, which that shoon so clere and brighte,
Degrees was five and fourty clombe on highte;
And for that day, as in that latitude,
It was ten of the clokke, he gan conclude,
And sodenly he plighte his hors aboute.
(Beginning of the Man of Law's Tale)

Length of shadows and the height of the sun in the daytime, then; and
the positions of the stars at night; these told you the time. Night-time
too, for the monks needed to know when to say the night office, and
lists of stars were set out to help them.50
Time was natural, months and seasons fitted into agricultural life;
the calendar superimposed on this pattern was that of the Church, the
succession of feasts and fasts that made the liturgical and working
year. Many of these feasts were fixed - Christmas, the Annunciation,
saints' days, and so on - but the greatest feast, Easter, and all that
depended on it - Ash Wednesday and Lent, for example, or Pentecost
- were, and are, movable. That is, they occur on different dates from
year to year. The fixing of the date of Easter was a complicated
problem. Usually in the early Middle Ages the date was promulgated
from Rome, taken in the letters and safe-conducts carried by priests
returning from the City, but it was often necessary for local bishops to
do the job for themselves, and the clergy needed to understand the
business, so the computus became part of the curriculum. Along with
the computus went the necessity for astronomy as a liberal art. And
although Bede himself avoided nearly all astrology - even he says that
the study of the stars can help with weather forecasting - his
successors could not always resist the temptation to warn the student
off 'the folly of the wise men of old' who thought that 'man got his
spirit from the Sun, his body from the Moon, his intelligence from
Mercury' and so on.51

50 See for example a sixth century work in MCH Scriptorum Rerum Merovingiarum, I, 2-
De cursu stellarum, ed. B. Krusch (1885) 854ff. For some interesting observations on
Chaucer and astronomy see Kalenderes Enlumyned Ben They: some astronomical
themes in Chaucer', by J. D. North, Review of English Studies, NS XX (1969) 129ff and
418ff; and also Chauncey Wood, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars (Princeton, N.J.,
1970); and the note by Frank D. Gilliard, 'Chaucer's Attitude to Astrology', in Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVI (1973) 365-6.
51 Byrhtferth's Manual (A.D. 1011), ed. S. J. Crawford, EETS 177 (1929) p. 130. It is just
possible that some scratch dials on church walls which face east or west were calendar,
not time, dials.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

The full calendar with all the feasts and their proper prayers was set
out in the breviary, the priest's prayer book for his private devotion,
the Office (his duty, officium). In the later Middle Ages, developing
from the ninth to the fifteenth century, similar books were compiled
for devout lay men and women. They began in the ninth century as
the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary', a collection of private
devotions to Our Lady set out in eight parts corresponding to the
canonical 'hours', horae, of services: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext,
None, Vespers and Compline. Such books were consequently called
'Books of Hours', and from the twelfth century on they gathered not
only more psalms and prayers but also a calendar, and became what
has been called 'the breviary of the laity'. The first half of the fifteenth
century was the great age for the illustrations of these books of hours,
the best known being those of the Duke of Berry. The calendar
illustrations from his Tres Riches Heures are often used to illustrate
books on astrology: but despite the signs of the zodiac, they are purely
calendrial. They contain all that is needed to tell the date from the state
of the heavens, and have nothing directly to do with astrology at all.
The same is true of zodiac pictures in the stained glass of churches and
cathedrals, and of signs carved in stone or wood on arches or tympana
or misericords. They are to do with time, with the year, and when, as
at Vezelay, for example, they surround Christ in the tympanum of the
central doors, their function is exactly what it had been round Mithras.
They signify that Christ is Lord of time, of the year; they do not
indicate an invasion of the Church by astrology.52
There was indeed before the twelfth century nothing more than a
faint memory of a lost, and illicit, art flickering in the minds of those
with a genuine interest in astronomy awakened partly by the computus
and largely by the simple fascination of the night sky and the seasons,
so much more regularly and consciously observed in those clockless
centuries. They were, broadly, the centuries of monastic culture. Bede
was a monk in the Benedictine house founded by Benedict Biscop at
Jarrow. In Northumbria, converted from Ireland, the learning pre­
served in the Irish schools and that brought from Rome by Benedict
Biscop fused into a tradition which, established at the cathedral school

52 There is, of course, some astrology in the Tres Riches Heures, which was written in the
fifteenth century, after the revival of the art. It is not however in the calendar but in the
'zodiacal man' which is so often reproduced. It is actually derived from medical
astrology, and for it and its like see Harry Bober, 'The Zodiacal Miniature of the Tres
Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry - its Sources and Meaning', Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, XI (1948) 1-34. On the matter of zodiacs in medieval sculpture
etc., see James Fowler, 'On Medieval Representation of the Months and Seasons', in
Archaeologia, XLIV (1873), 137ft, and A. Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of
Chartres Cathedral (Baltimore, 1959) (s.v. 'Zodiac' in Index).

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of York by Bede's pupil Egbert, passed at the end of the eighth century
with Alcuin of York to the continent, to inform Charlemagne's
movement of educational reform and encouragement, the Carolingian
Renaissance.
Charlemagne established his rule over most of continental western
Europe south of Scandinavia except southern, Islamic, Spain. He
desired, partly for genuinely pious reasons and partly from the need
for a literate 'civil service' of clergy, that education (which was almost
entirely in the hands of the clergy) should be revived after the ravages
of centuries of invasion and war had reduced it to a perilously low
condition.5354He called to his itinerant court a number of scholars from
Italy, Spain and England - Alcuin from York in about 781, who became
not only his 'minister of education', as it were, but also his private
tutor. Charlemagne was eager to learn, though he began too late to
achieve real literacy. He did, says his biographer Einhard, learn
grammar from Peter of Pisa, and the other arts from Alcuin: and he
'gave much time and labour to learning rhetoric and dialectic, and
especially astronomy (astronomia); and he tried to learn the art of
computus and with great curiosity and concentration sought to under­
stand the course of the stars.' His interest in astronomy was obviously
genuine: he caused to be made for himself a 'celestial table', a map of
the heavens, in silver, which was, alas, too valuable to survive him
long.51' The result of his and his successors' exhortation and encourage­
ment was less impressive than much written on the 'Carolingian
Renaissance' suggests, but certainly there were more schools and
scholars because of it. A line of 'academic descent', as it were, can be
traced through such ninth century pupils of Alcuin and his generation
as Rhabanus Maurus and Walafrid Strabo and Lupus of Ferrieres, to
Eric and Remi of Auxerre and Hincmar of Rheims, and on into the
tenth century to Gerbert of Aurillac, also Archbishop of Rheims, who
died in 1003 after nearly four years as Pope Sylvester II. The tenth

53 In about 595 the Bishop of Cartagena wrote to Pope Gregory the Great (MGH
Epistolarum, I, pt. 1, ed. Ewald (1887) 60): 'We are compelled by necessity to do what you
say should not be done: you order that no uneducated man may be ordained. But pray
consider whether perhaps it is not sufficient for a man to be called educated if he knows
Christ Jesus and him crucified; if it is not enough, there will be none in this place who
can be called educated: there will indeed be no priest, if none but the educated may be a
priest. Things certainly cannot have improved on the continent of Europe in the even
darker years of the seventh century, not until the spread first of Irish and then
Anglo-Saxon missionaries and the foundation of such houses of monks as Bobbio and St
Gall, and the others which followed in the eighth century such as Reichenau and Fulda.
54 F.N. Estey, 'Charlemagne's Silver Celestial Table', in Speculum, XVIII (1943) 112-117
It was probably modelled ultimately on late antique maps, like Muslim ones such as that
on the vault of the eighth century castle of Qusayr 'Arma in the Transjordanian desert.
Like the latter it would have been a plamspheric projection, from the south, since
Capricorn was the outside, largest, circle.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

century also saw those movements of monastic reform, notably that of

Odo of Cluny, which turned the monks back inward to their vocation
and left the new learning to the cathedral schools such as Rheims and
Chartres and Paris.
New learning? New indeed, from the Arabs. We must begin with
that same Gerbert.55 Not that he was ever a pupil of the Arabs, nor is
there evidence of any Arabic influence in his work. It should not be
said of him as it still is by some that he went to the Arabs for
astrology. That tale begins in the early twelfth century with William of
Malmesbury, who says:56 'There followed (sc. as Pope) Gerbert, of
whom, I think, it will not be a waste of time to set down in writing
what is heard on the lips of all.' Among the gossip is the 'fact' that
Gerbert, after growing up as a monk of Fleury (which he did not), 'fled
by night into Spain, longing especially to learn from the Saracens
astrology and the rest of such arts'; and there he 'surpassed Ptolemy'
in the astrolabe, Alchandreus (? Al-Kindi) on the distance of the stars,
and Julius Firmicus on fate. A little later, William says Gerbert 'was
first to bring the abacus from the Saracens, and gave rules for its use
that are scarcely understood by abacists who sweat over them'.
The truth is less dramatic, but not less significant. In 967 the Count
Borel of Barcelona, duke of the Christian Spanish march established by
Charlemagne and his successor Louis, returned home from a journey
to Rome (to get his bishop of Vich raised in dignity to archbishop) and
Gerbert went with him. He went for the quadrivium, the 'mathemat­
ical sciences'. The Spanish march was Visigothic, and had re­
established, after the expulsion of the Arabs, the old culture of Isidore,
of Boethius and of Cassiodorus. Not only is there only the slenderest
of evidence for Arabic culture there; the Arabic culture in the west
itself, even in Andalusia, was poor enough for the Emir Al-Mansur of
Cordova (from 976 to 1002) to send to the east for a tutor for his second
son. The flowering of Islamic culture in Spain was not until the next
century. It was really for 'mathematics', including and perhaps
especially astronomy, that Gerbert went to Vich. And it was very
elementary stuff. There are references in Letters 17 and 25 to a book
'On the multiplication and division of numbers' by a Joseph of Spain
(neither book nor man is otherwise known), and we have seen how

55 On Gerbert d'Aurillac (or of Rheims) see F. Picavet, Gerbert: un Pape Philosophe (Paris,
1897); and his letters, edited by Fritz Weigle, in MGH, Die Briefe der deutscheu Kaiserzeit,
II (1966), or by J. Havet, Lettres de Gerbert 983-997 (Paris, 1889). It is true that John of
Gorze, a generation earlier, had gone to Arab Spain, to Cordova, but there is no
evidence that he brought much back from his two years there; which is perhaps not
surprising, as his pious biographer tells us he forsook the liberal arts for Holy Scripture
in his youth on his Prior's instructions. See also J. W. Thompson, 'The Introduction of
Arabic Science into Lorraine in the Tenth Century', in Isis, XII (1929) 184-193.
56 De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. William Stubbs (Rolls Series 90, 1887) 1.194.

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complicated William of Malmesbury much later thought Gerbert's

instructions on abacus-reckoning were. There are two references to
astronomy in the Letters. The short Letter 24 is to Lupitus of Barcelona
asking for 'a book on astrologia translated by you'. If the book was
actually an Arabic one on astronomy (astrologia and astronomia are
completely synonymous for Gerbert as Letter 153 shows, where
astrologia is used of Martianus Capella's book, two lines after a
mention of astronomiae subtilitates), it seems certain that Gerbert never
received it, for there is no trace of Arabic astronomy in his works. It
was more likely a book on either the astrolabe or the armillary sphere.
Gerbert certainly knew how to make, and made, a sphere with rings to
represent the circles of the horizon etc.; Letter 134 to Remi, a monk of
Trier, promises such a sphere in exchange for a copy of Statius epic,
the Achilleis. Gerbert mentions the difficulty involved in making it,
and his biographer Richer refers (III.50) to the amazing way in which
Gerbert and his sphere made this 'almost incomprehensible science'
clear to his students. Letter 153 is on the varying length of the day and
night and the climata, simply and without explanation, and is all from
Martianus Capella. So Gerbert's astronomy and mathematics probably
went no further than a grasp of the sphaera and of the armillary sphere
(and possibly of the astrolabe), and of the abacus and its workings.
This, which would have seemed elementary even to Isidore or Bede,
seemed so startlingly advanced to Gerbert's contemporaries that the
legends of his magical powers were invented and grew! Nevertheless
he is symptomatic of, and probably through his teaching also partly
the cause of, a revival of interest in astrologia in the late tenth and the
eleventh centuries.
William of Malmesbury says (wholly wrongly) that Gerbert sur­
passed Julius Firmicus in matters concerned with fate. In another of
his works he tells the story of Gerard, Archbishop of York, who died
in May, 1108. Gerard, described as well-lettered and eloquent, was
guilty 'whether truly indeed or merely according to unfettered rumour
I cannot tell,' of many crimes of lust, and said to be in league with
demons, 'for he used to read Julius Firmicus secretly in place of his
afternoon devotions.' As a result of which and because they found a
book of the evil art under his cushion when he died sitting in his
garden, the canons refused to let him be buried within the minster
church (whither he was transferred later by his successor Thomas,
who was presumably either more enlightened or more charitable).57

57 Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton (Rolls Series 52, 1870) 259.
William's first edition was written in 1125; and a second, revised edition was issued in
1140, in which William removed what Hamilton calls 'offensive personalities', including
this tale of Gerard. It looks a reliable story, however, even if 'hearsay', since William was
writing only seventeen years after Gerard's death and leaves the account of the

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

Who was Julius Firmicus (to whom we have referred more than once
already), that he should have been regarded as an authority in matters
of fate, and be so disapproved of by the pious canons? A number of
other pieces of evidence show that he was known of and being read in
the late eleventh and early twelfth century. His name is mentioned as
an astrological authority in the early twelfth century Philosophin mundi
of Honorius (II.v; PL 172, 59B) - a work itself containing no astrology.
The earliest extant manuscripts of Firmicus are of the eleventh
century.58 There is imitation of Firmicus in an anonymous English
legal author of the early twelfth century, probably a servant of that
same Archbishop Gerard.59 Later in the century but before 1175 the
Englishman Daniel of Morley disputed in Toledo with the translator
Gerard of Cremona on the propriety of astrology; 'and to me Gerard
said, "Have you read Julius Firmicus?" And I said I had'.60 So
Firmicus' Mathesis was certainly around in the late eleventh century.
It was written in the fourth century, possibly in 337 A.D. It has been
left for consideration until now because there is no evidence of its
being known before the eleventh century.61 It is the last ancient Latin
source, and its rediscovery, or the revival of interest in it, coincides
with the arrival in the West of the first Greek learning from the Arabs.
Julius Firmicus Maternus may have been a Sicilian, and some time
after writing the Mathesis, his astrological textbook which now
concerns us, he wrote in the late 340s On the Error of Profane Religion,
against the mystery cults, to which he was probably opposed both as a
Stoic-Neo-Platonist and as a Christian.62 The title Mathesis is the Greek

extra-ecclesial burying in 1140. The tale is repeated by Higden in the fourteenth century
in his Polychronicon; he identifies the book found under the cushion as Firmicus
Matemus.
58 All references are to the Teubner text (see note 30) and for MSS see Vol. II Praef., p. v.
See also Jean Rhys Bram, Ancient Astrology: Theory and Practice (Park Ridge, N.J., 1975),
which is an English translation of Firmicus with an Introduction and some notes.
Unfortunately the translation is frequently wrong and the notes avoid all the real
difficulties.
59 See Firmicus, II, Praef., p. iv.
60 See Valentin Rose, 'Ptolemaeus und die Schule von Toledo', in Hermes, VIII (1874)
348-9. Firmicus was also named and quoted by Marbod of Rennes in the late eleventh
century (PL, col. 1705), which suggests that his work was introduced into England from
Normandy. (See 147 below).
61 W. H. Stahl says in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1971), 622, that it is
mentioned by Sidonius Apollinaris in the late fifth century - and indeed in the Bude
text of his Carmen XXII, Firmicus Maternus is named in the prefatory epistle. But the
name only occurs in a single MS and is almost certainly an eleventh century addition to
the two names already there. It is not included in either the Teubner or MCH texts,
though Mohr, the 1895 Teubner editor, had doubts.
62 Th. Mommsen, 'Firmicus Matemus', in Hermes, XXIX (1894) 468-472; O. Neugebauer,
'The Horoscope of Ceionius Rufus Albinus', in the American journal of Philology, LXXIV
(1953) 418-420. The De Errore Profanarum Religionum was edited by A. Pastorino (2nd
edn, Florence, 1969) and the identity of the authors of the two works, the Mathesis and

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

word |jd9qoi<;, meaning 'learning', in both the usual English senses;

the Latin for it was doctrina. It meant at first learning in the Liberal
Arts, especially in the quadrivium, the 'mathematical sciences'. Later
its scope was restricted to astrologia. By the twelfth century a
distinction had been established between mathesis with a long e in the
middle, and mathesis with the accent on the first syllable and a short e
(the doubt over the quantity of the e is as old as Prudentius, and
indeed the distinction of meanings may also go back to the fourth
century). In Chapter 18 of Book II of his Policraticus John of Salisbury
refers to the 'good mathesis which is pronounced with a short middle
syllable, which nature induces, reason proves and practical utility
approves', and the 'bad mathesis, pronounced with a long middle
syllable': the first is true learning, the second vain superstition.
Firmicus' work is, of course, on mathesis. It has eight books, and is an
ill-sorted compendium of interpretative detail which, as Stahl says,
'best represents popular traditions of the previous four centuries and
bears little resemblance to Ptolemy's quasi-scientific manual of astrol­
ogy, the Quadripartitum'.
Astrology consists of three parts: the mathematical-astronomical
basis from which the chart is derived and which has to be understood
to be able, for example, to dispute over the division into mundane
houses; the astrological 'machinery' - aspects, decans, houses and so
on, and all the agreed 'characteristics' of signs and planets; and
interpretation - when the chart is made and the planets inserted and
the aspects and so on listed, what does it all mean? For the first,
astrologers used 'handy tables', with or without Arabic additions and
refinements, and the sole mathematical basis lay in Ptolemy's Alma­
gest. Firmicus' work, like that of almost all the Arabic and Latin
astrologers of the Middle Ages, takes all that for granted and proceeds
straight to the second and third, with, more often than not, a preface
like Ptolemy's in defence of astrology. Book I of the Mathesis is such a
preface. The second book runs through the preliminary classifications
of signs, planets, houses and so forth; Book III deals with the relations
between the macro- and the micro-cosm, the thema mundi and the
effects of each planet on its own and in conjunction with Mercury.
Book IV treats of the moon, the Lot of Fortune and various refinements

the De Errore, was established by Clifford H. Morre in a dissertation published at

Munich in 1896, Julius Firmicus Maternus, der Heide und der Christ, to which very little has
since been added. It is usually said (without evidence) that Firmicus was converted to
Christianity in the interval between the 'pagan' Mathesis and the later Christian work. It
may indeed be so, but it is by no means impossible that he was always a Christian.
There is plenty of evidence for the mixture of paganism and Christianity in the minds of
men of the fourth (or twentieth) century, and perhaps Firmicus needed to assert his
Christianity after the kind of reception his Mathesis most likely received.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

such as empty and 'full' places and masculine and feminine degrees!
The next book returns to the effects of the Horoscope (the ascendant),
and of the planets in individual signs, and Book VI deals with aspects
and interpretation concerning such particular topics as marriage,
slaves and so on. Book VII continues in the same vein, being, says
Stahl, 'marked by undue attention to sexual and moral deviates' (but
so perhaps is the last book of the Quadrip artit um). Book VIII purports
to be a sphaera barbarica, the Egyptian description of the heavens. In
all this, the mechanics are mostly the same as in other astrologers,
Greek or Arabic, and the interpretation has certain consistencies
running through the idiosyncracies of the author's personal choices.
The whole is jumbled and without any very clear organisation, and
Firmicus Maternus succeeds in being even more complicated, ambigu­
ous and muddled than Manilius - of whom he was certainly not
ignorant even if he does not mention the name but actually says
(Praef. Book II) that no one had written on astrology in Latin except for
some bits of translation by Julius Caesar (?) and by Cicero (pre­
sumably his Aratus), thus claiming to be the first in the field.
There is no need to go to any length to illustrate Firmicus Maternus'
complications and muddle. Anyone feeling the need for examples
might look at what he says about chronocratores, 'lords of times', in
Books II and VI, or rising times, or dodecatemoria, or the dator vitae in
the same Book II.63 He preserves some of the older confusions, with
relics of the octatopos and the muddle over locus and signum (11.14 and
16), and by insisting frequently and finally that every scrap of
'information' must be used in the interpretation, multiplies confusion,
and of course ambiguities! For example, if one adds up all the various
references, there are 114 degrees of the zodiac in which Mars is 'at
home'. His understanding of the mathematics is fairly rudimentary.
He often seems to be assuming that the quadrants - ascendant to
medium caeli and so on - are all equally ninety degrees. It is indeed
typical late antique astrology compiled by a man who was not being
entirely conventional, merely using a familiar literary topos, when he
wrote (Proemium 8): 'I have but a modest intellect and poor power of
expression, and, I must truly confess, little astrological knowledge.'
However, there are two or three peculiarities of Firmicus' worth
dwelling on.

63 Book II, c 25 should be read with Book IV, cc.18 and 19; Firmicus is thoroughly
confused about the dator vitae, the 'giver of life', and the dominus gemturae, the 'lord of
the nativity' - sometimes they are synonymous, sometimes not, and there is more than
one meaning for each. There is a quite spurious clarity about his setting out of
alternative views in IV.19.

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Chapter 29 of Book II is headed 'On antiscia' (sc. signa). By this

Firmicus seems to mean 'reflections', since he says that Antiochus
explained them by saying that since Libra cannot 'see' Aries because
of the earth in between, 'as it were by a mirror it is related by
reflections', each sign or degree both reflecting the other of its pair and
being reflected by it. Our author may have invented the term or at
least first deliberately used it in this sense.61 But he did not invent the
notion, the relationship. As he says, Ptolemy has it; though he seems
to have been wrong about Dorotheus. Firmicus' antiscia are Ptolemy's
PXettovto, 'regarding' or 'looking at' one another (Tetr., 1.15). Ptolemy
explains that degrees equidistant from the tropical signs, Cancer and
Capricorn, are equal in power, and as usual gives reasons why.
Firmicus merely pairs off the signs and the degrees without explana­
tion but the result, though long-winded, is the same. Virgo 17, for
example, is given by Firmicus' calculus as reflecting Aries 13; and both
are 76° from 1 Cancer, and so fit into Ptolemy's scheme. The use and
importance of these reflections for Julius Firmicus are illustrated by a
birth-chart and its interpretation. It is the nativity of Ceionius Rufius
Albinus and can be dated to 14 March, 303 A.D. The analysis keeps
Firmicus busy for four pages of the Teubner text. It emerges from this
that antiscia, degrees and signs, can substitute for one another, so that
a planet at Virgo 17 not only has all the effects and aspects and so on it
has because it is there, but also all the effects, aspects etc., which it
would have at Aries 13, its 'reflection' behaving exactly as it does
65
itself.64

64 Jean Rhys Bram in the Glossary to her translation (pp. 333ff) has: 'Antiscia: Sometimes
known today as Mundane Parallax. Relation between degrees or signs equidistant from
the MC or the IMC. A rare kind of aspect especially favoured by F., who seems to have
invented the term for it.' By 'Mundane Parallax', Mundane Parallel is presumably meant,
but that, being generally concerned with planetary positions, has nothing to do with
antiscia; which are not equidistant from the MC or the IMC but from the tropical signs;
nor is 'it' a rare aspect, but they are in a permanent relationship. But the rest of the note
is fair. The Greek word meant 'casting shadows in the opposite direction' - or at least it
could mean that - and the word was used at the end of the fourth century by the Latin
historian Ammianus in just this sense, of antipodeans. Only in Firmicus has it this
meaning, 'reflection', which is a reasonable derived meaning from the Greek: things in
mirrors do cast shadows in the opposite direction.
65 See O. Neugebauer, op. cit. note 62 above. The details given by F.M. are: Sun in
Pisces, Moon in Cancer, Saturn in Virgo, Jupiter in Pisces ('at the same degree as the
Sun ), Mars in Aquarius, Venus in Taurus and Mercury in Aquarius ('in the same
degree as Mars'). He begins the analysis as follows: 'The father of the subject of this
birthchart ... was exiled, and he himself was exiled for adultery ... Now anyone
knowing nothing of the calculation of reflections, noticing that the Sun and Jupiter are
in the same position in the fifth house from the Ascendant, that is, the House of Good
Fortune, would declare that the father was rich and fortunate and powerful, and other
such about the subject himself; and would be unable to declare anything of his exile and
troubles, unless he transferred his attention to calculating the reflections. You remember
we said that Pisces cast reflections in Libra in Pisces. So the Sun and Jupiter together in

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

The student astrologer reading Firmicus' Latin will stumble, in­

evitably, on the strange word he finds at the end of the first chapter of
Book V: myriogenesis. 'Now, Lollianus, my honoured friend, I do not
want you to expect to see myriogenesis in these books ... For now
everything must be learned step by step, for we cannot reach
myriogenesis by any other way except that our minds have first grasped
the secrets of the beginnings of the art.' Now should the student be a
modem one, he may look the word up. If he thinks, rightly, that it is a
Greek word, and consults Liddell and Scott, he will be told, with
reference to two passages of Firmicus, that it means 'the signs that rise
with Pisces' (sic!). If he then, rightly again, feels that this is nonsense,
and turns to Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, he will read, with a
reference only to Firmicus 8.18, that it means 'multiple generation';
which indeed from its roots it might, but which makes little sense of
our text.*66 So what is myriogenesis? From all the passages in Firmicus it
emerges that it was the title of a work (in thirteen books?) by
'Aesculapius', who was instructed by Mercury (that is, Thoth, the
Egyptian god); that the work was concerned with 'expounding all
birth-charts by the single minutes (of the zodiac) without adding any
planet' (V.l, 36); and that Firmicus in Book VIII is presenting a sort of
elementary myriogenesis, with single degrees instead of minutes
(VIII.18ff). So what we have is an account of the meaning and
influence of each degree (or even each minute in 'Aesculapius') of the
zodiac, irrespective of signs and planets; and this is derived from
Egypt, as the mention of Mercury (and in one or two places, Anubis)
and the context of the sphaera barbarica indicate. It looks as though the
origin is the list (non-astrological) of 360 lucky and unlucky days of
ancient Egypt; when these become degrees of the zodiac, one degree
equals one day, and one minute of arc equals twenty-four minutes of
time, so that a man's fate could be determined to some extent by the
exact minute of his birth, 10.20 and 10.50, for example, being more
than 1' apart. All this may sound a little fantastic, but Chapter XXIII of
Alan Leo's popular Astrology for All (1910) is headed: 'The Character
and Destiny of each Degree of the Zodiac' and has lists beginning:
'Aries: 1° - Positive, forceful, uncontrollable; creates own destiny. 2° -
Enterprising ...' and so on right through the 360°, sign by sign. So in a
sense myriogenesis does mean 'countless births' - 21,600 if each minute

Pisces cast reflections in Libra, in the sign in which it (the Sun) is humbled and
depressed, and in the twelfth house of the chart, that is, of Evil Daemon; which shows
the father to be of base family and decrees a notorious exile for him.' And so on, finding
evil predicted by the antiscia of the signs of the other planets also.
66 The Thesaurus says the same: generatio innumerabiiis; but the Latin could bear a
meaning closer to the correct one than the English 'multiple generation'.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

of arc is counted! - but in the sense of 'countless birth-times'; it is

probably better left in the 'Greek'.67
Lastly, there is the astrologically most interesting part of the
Mathesis, Book VIII, the Sphaera barbarica. Firmicus himself gave the
book that title, at the end of Book VII: 'Now that we have explained all
these things, let all our efforts be turned to expounding the sphaera
barbarica.' The phrase referred in antiquity to any non-Greek descrip­
tion of the heavens, and usually to the Egyptian pattern of constella­
tions. There is, however, more to Mathesis VIII than that.68 At the end
of the first chapter the author lists the intended contents of the book:
that is, all that has been left out of earlier books, except myriogenesis,
which he again says he is postponing. In the order in which he gives
the contents they run as follows; the actual order of treatment is given
by the chapter references in brackets. First, signs 'seeing' and 'hearing'
each other (c.3); the 'measures of degrees' - that is, the size of the
zodiac (end of c.4); where in the heavens to find each degree of the
signs (c.4); and what the effect is of the ninetieth degree, 'called by the
Greeks enenecontameris' (c.2). 'And so when all this is set out we may
the more easily approach the sphaera barbarica and learn the effective
power of the brighter stars.' Chapters 5-17 in fact are concerned with
the paranatellonta, the stars rising with the signs of the zodiac, in
order, beginning with the assertion that this kind of astrology was
unknown to 'many Greeks and all Romans', and undiscovered by
Petosiris and Nechepso: a piece of flagrant dishonesty since these
chapters are based on Manilius V.69 The uncritical copying of 'authori­
ties' is demonstrated by the different rising times of some of these
fixed stars given in later chapters of this same book, derived from
another source. And whether any of this really belonged to a sphaera
barbarica is now beyond establishing: the Greeks themselves were not
clear what was Greek and what was Egyptian or from some other
tradition.70

67 The footnote in the Teubner text to III.l, 2: 'poipoyeveoi<; Salmas.535' etc., refers to
Claude de Saumaise's De anms climactericis of 1648, where he says that the word was
corrupted to pupioyevcoic; by Firmicus; but it is possible that myriogenesis referred to
calculations involving minutes, moirogenesis to those involving degrees.
68 On Firmicus' misuse of this title for all that he crams into his last book, see
Houseman, Manilius, V.xlff.
69 On which it may be worth quoting Houseman's remark that 'some of his statements
are statements made by competent astronomers in other climes and times, but no
competent astronomer ever or anywhere made them all'. Firmicus like Manilius before
him has no idea of astronomy, but follows his source books blindly.
70 Firmicus' own confusion is shown plainly in Book II, c.2, where he writes: 'The
Egyptians call these planets by different names from those used by us and the Greeks:
what we call Saturn, the Egyptians call Faenon, our Jupiter is the Egyptians' Faethon',
and so on, giving the ancient Greek names, with 'f' for 'ph', which are later replaced by

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Chapter 18, entire, runs: Now I shall concentrate on the subsequent

parts of the sphaera barbarica, which to some extent are similar to the
wynogertests: for what myriogenesis says about single minutes of arc,
we shall set out about single degrees. So the exact reading of the
ascendant is to be set down, so that the true degree ascertained by
skilled calculation may cause the apotelesma (the interpretation of the
influences) to be set out properly. If it is done in any other way, the
whole of what may be forecast is clouded with faults and falsehoods.
So now, beginning with Aries, let us set out the powers of the single
degrees and their astrological meanings according to the Sphaera
barbarica. Chapters 19—30 then tell us the astrological significance of
each degree of each sign, beginning with Aries: 'Those who have their
ascendant in the first degree of Aries, if they are favoured by the rays
of benevolent planets, will be born kings and leaders, always leading
their armies successfully. Those who have their ascendant in the
second degree of Aries will be persistent thieves who always use
unnecessary and extraordinary violence in their attacks; such as keep
shifting their residence to places where they are not known. Now if
Mars affects this degree, their ascendant, and the Moon aspects it in
square or opposition, these crimes will be detected and they will be
publicly punished.' Which shows how important it could be to be very
accurate about the degree of the ascendant! The mind boggles at the
idea of this sort of thing being set out for every minute of the zodiac.
At any rate, we have had, despite the expressed intention to keep it for
another time, a sort of poor man's myriogenesis, though Firmicus
includes consideration of planetary influence which should really not
be there.
Only two other things in Book VIII call for remark, the 'nonagesimal'
and the 'seeing' and 'hearing' signs (Chapters 2 and 3). Firmicus says
that the enenecontameris, 'that is, the ninetieth degree', was unknown
to most astrologers, only briefly dealt with by a few, and deliberately
kept secret by Petosiris. It is, however, of great importance since 'from
these (ninetieth) degrees the end of life, death, misfortune, dangers
and happiness and the whole substance of the nativity is gathered.'
The two nonagesimals, 90° angles, are the one from the ascendant and
the one from the Moon's position. One should consider whether they
are in good or bad places and aspects, under good or bad rulers, and
so on So, he repeats at the end of the chapter, 'you will find the kind
of death, the order of life, and the whole nativity.' Only the first of
these, the nonagesimal from the ascendant, is now used at all in

'the star of Saturn' etc., and finally just by the gods' names, as Firmicus found them in
his late sources. But it really has nothing to do with 'Egypt', except perhaps Greek
Alexandria.

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birth-charts: it is still so called, and is the cusp of the tenth house in

the Equal House system, being 'at any time of the day the highest
degree of the ecliptic in the heavens' (M. E. Hone). Firmicus may have
derived the idea of the importance of the nonagesimal partly from the
notion that the quadrants were all of ninety degrees. That he dealt
with the nonagesimal separately from the ascendant at all suggests
that he was aware that that point was not always the medium caeli; but
not necessarily, for he was quite capable of both repetition and
inconsistency. There is however the idea of unequal quadrants also in
c.15 of Book II, where he writes: 'The medium caeli is the tenth sign
from the ascendant, but sometimes, in terms of degrees, the medium
caeli is found in the eleventh sign.' So, if one is working only with
whole signs - and not only are many late Greek horoscopes simply
expressed in terms of signs, with no degrees given, but most of
Firmicus' own interpretations are the same: 'if the Moon is in the
tenth place from the ascendant, that is, in the medium caeli ..(III.13,
9), and so on - if the chart is simply plotted in signs, the tenth from
the ascendant sign is the medium caeli: if the ascendant is Libra, the
medium caeli is Cancer. But, says Firmicus, if you are working in
degrees, the medium caeli may be a degree in the eleventh sign from
the ascendant. By 'sign' here he must mean 'house', for he goes on: 'So
that you may get this clear, count from the degree of the ascendant
through the following signs 270 degrees, and the 271st, wherever it is,
is the medium caeli.' Now if signum meant 'sign' - and all signs are
thirty degrees - this would still be in the tenth sign; but if it means
'house', and the quadrants are unequal, then the 271st degree from the
ascendant could be in the eleventh 'sign', i.e. house. Four chapters
later in the book, however, he describes the twelve houses as exactly
equivalent to signs, each of thirty degrees.
Chapter 3, which follows that on the nonagesimals, is one of the
most curious and most muddled in the whole of the Mathesis. It is
about 'seeing' and 'hearing' signs. 'Seeing' originally meant 'casting
rays upon', and was derived from the very common theory of vision
according to which the eye sends out rays to 'grasp' the object. 'Hear'
meant 'obey, listen to'; the two Greek words used and the Latin audire
have both meanings. The basic idea, then, is the emission and
reception of influence. Precisely the same is behind 'aspect', the Latin
aspectus meaning 'seeing'. On signs which 'see' and 'hear' one
another, most ancient authorities are in agreement.71 But Firmicus'

71 Signs equidistant from the tropical signs Cancer and Capricorn 'see' one another,
those equidistant from the equinoctial signs Aries and Libra 'hear' each other; seeing
and hearing having become mutual influences, it seems, though there is confusion over
'commanding' signs - a notion surviving long enough to be discounted as 'fanciful'
rather than logical by a modern astrologer (Sepharial's New Dictionary of Astrology (1921)

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chapter is quite different, and incredibly muddled. Some of this must

have been due to the scribes who copied an incomprehensible
chapter, but not all. For example: 'Aries sees and hears Cancer equally.
Cancer does not see Aries but hears him. Taurus both sees Leo and
hears him equally, and similarly Leo Taurus. Gemini see Virgo and
hear her a little, Virgo sees Gemini a little and very fully hears them.
Cancer sees and hears Libra equally, but Libra does not see but hears
Cancer. Leo neither hears nor sees Scorpio, but Scorpio sees and hears
Leo equally.' And so on and on in the same disordered and
contradictory fashion. However, if one tabulates the various videts and
audits, it becomes apparent that Firmicus is drawing on two different
systems, one of trigons and one of squares, as the Teubner editors
note (p. 285); so that, moving in an anticlockwise direction in both
cases, in the first case, according to trigons, Taurus sees Leo which
hears him; Gemini see Virgo, who hears them, and so on; and in the
second, according to squares, Taurus sees Virgo, and Gemini see
Libra. The two systems are inextricably jumbled and modified, with
some mistakes, and absolutely no account is offered as to what it
might all mean. It is peculiar to Firmicus Materrius, and he says it is all
excerpted 'from the books of Abraham', though there was almost
certainly no astrological author of that name (but Vettius Valens did
refer to 'books of Abraham' at CCAG, V.2, p. 71). Some astrological
writings may have been attributed to the patriarch, who was generally
credited with an important role in the transmission of astrology from
Seth.72 The relationships of trigons and squares are of course aspects,

93). Manilius, Ptolemy, Dorotheus and the later Rhetorius (CCAG 1.155) all agree, as does
Porphyry in his commentary on Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos (CCAG V.4.208), though he has a
complication in that signs of equal rising times are equipollent, an idea possibly derived
from one understanding of the (now slightly dubious) Greek of Ptolemy, Tetr., 1.15. At
any rate, whatever the meanings of 'seeing' and 'hearing' the diagrammatic relation­
ships are simple: the lines of seeing and hearing are parallels at right angles to each
other:

72 'Abraham' in later authors of the Middle Ages, when the Arabic sources have been
used, often refers to Hipparchus, by a misunderstanding of the Arabic form of his name.

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which are described and explained as normally elsewhere by Firmicus,

and it looks as though he is here in Book VIII preserving a relic of an
older day before the aspects and the 'seeing and hearing' signs
separated.
It must be stressed that although Firmicus' work is long and very
detailed, if confusing, nobody could actually have practised astrology
with only the Mathesis to hand. To use the book at all one would have
needed to be expert, to sort out his muddles; or unprincipled or stupid
enough to ignore them. And one would have needed to possess and to
understand a set of Tables and the rules for setting out a chart. There
may have been some who could make a considerable impression on
their more ignorant contemporaries with a bit of jargon culled from
Augustine and Macrobius and a good dosing of Firmicus; but is there
any evidence for such men before the late twelfth century? It is clear
that the medical tradition, and perhaps herbals, preserved some
iatromathematica, some of the astrology bound up with medicine; but
although confusion of astrologia with astrology and the inference to the
presence of astrology from descriptions or representations of the
zodiac have led some to see astrologers where there were none, there
is really no evidence for active practitioners of the art before the
mid-twelfth century when Firmicus Maternus' Mathesis emerged from
its obscurity.7374
It was that half-understood farrago which poor Archbishop Gerard
browsed through in his garden and which so horrified his clergy. The
same book lay behind some of the anti-astrological chapter 6 of the
'Book of Ten Chapters' (in verse) of Marbod, Bishop of Rennes, about
the end of the eleventh century.7“1 He set out some 'doctrines', such as:
'Mars, in square aspect with Saturn, and with none of the good planets
in aspect, makes men bold - gladiators, murderers, demoniacs,
thieves, full of all kinds of lust,' which, he says, 'I remember I once
read in the astrologers: Firmicus tries to prove all this with weak
arguments but I think his themata are false.' As so often, however, the
fascination of the erroneous doctrines was stronger than the force of
their rejection or refutation. There was also undoubtedly a cumulative
effect: the revival of interest in astrologia produced more interest in
astrology (a perfectly respectable part of astrologia for all ancient

73 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, from an art history background, were long ago aware
of the absence of astrology in the West in the earlier Middle Ages: 'The assimilation of
Arabic knowledge brought to the Western countries not only a new conception of
astronomy, medicine and other natural sciences, but also knowledge of astrology, which
until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was almost unknown, or at least not practised,
in the West.' Classical Mythology and Medieval Art, Metropolitan Museum Studies IV 2
(1938) 241.
74 PL, clxxi, cols 1704-1707.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

authors), which provoked more caveats and repudiations, which

awakened and stimulated interest; and so on.
Certainly there was increasing curiosity concerning the quadrivium
in general and astrologia in particular in the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, following the work and teaching of Gerbert and others. This
curiosity had to work with the old Latin sources, and views of the
universe were mainly derived from Macrobius and Boethius, with a
strong vein of Platonic cosmology from the Timaeus running through
the whole. Alongside this purely Latin revival there grew the aware­
ness that there was more to be had from the Muslim world to the
south, particularly in the Mathematical arts. At the beginning of the
twelfth century, Guibert of Nogent in his history of the First Crusade
could write, of the prognostications of the fall of Jerusalem: 'The
knowledge of the stars is as poor and rare in the west as it is
flourishing through constant practice in the east, where indeed it
originated.'75
But the revival was slow in its effects. Despite the occasional
mention of Firmicus and Ptolemy (a bit of twelfth century 'name­
dropping' very often) there is really no astrology in such well-known
and widely read encyclopaedic writers as William of Conches, Hugh of
St Victor or Honorius. What they have to say about the stars and about
cosmology is derived from the same old Latin sources. For example,
Hugh's De eruditione docta, Bk II, c.xi, deals with astronomy, de
astronomia:76

The difference between astronomy and astrology is that astron­

omy is so called from the laws of the stars, and astrology is as it
were discourse about the stars: nomos means law and logos means
discourse. So it seems that astronomy deals with the laws of the
stars and the turning of the heavens, the positions and circles,
the courses and risings and settings of the constellations, and
why each is called what it is. Astrology considers the stars with
relation to the observation of birth and death and all sorts of
other events, and is partly natural and partly superstitious. The
natural part deals with corporeal things and their make-up,
things which vary with the constitution of the heavens, such as
health and sickness, storms and calm weather, fertility and

75 Gesta Dei per Francos, VIII.8 (PL clvi, col. 816).

76 PL clxxvi, col. 756. Hugh's dates are 1097-1141. Incidentally, on the word mathesis
Hugh makes a different distinction from that which we saw made by John of Salisbury
(p. 134 above), one also made by other writers: in the De eruditione docta, III, c.4 (col.
753) he says that matesis with a t means vanitas, emptiness, and mathesis with th means
doctrina, learning.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

barrenness. The superstitious part is concerned with contingent

events, and those falling under the free will, and this part the
mathematici deal with.

Which is the whole of that chapter, and it obviously owes as much to

Isidore as to any other source. In Book VI superstitious astrology, there
called horoscopia, is linked with haruspicy and augury among the
magic arts.
There was much magic about at this time, as there had no doubt
been throughout the centuries before.77 There was little distinction
between magic and superstition and belief even in scholars' minds; or
between paganism in its literary and mythological guises and aspects
of Christianity such as the lives of saints, real and legendary, and the
books of miracles and the tales used as exempla in sermons, many of
ancient origin.78 For the Middle Ages generally the Book of Nature was
another book, a revealed 'scripture' of God's making, to be interpreted
in a similar way to the Bible, having many layers of meaning, the
'literal', face value being far less important than the symbolic truths to
be discovered in it. (A not too different remark might be made about
Kepler, as we shall see.) 'Natural science' was 'natural philosophy',
and it was all 'book' learning, from simple description through fantasy
to alchemy and astrology and magic. Many old forms of divination
were revived, or at least were more openly discussed and written
about than in earlier times, the general aim being the discovery of the
future. Among the products were the 'Books of Fate', giving sets of
answers to certain questions, the 'correct' answer being selected in
some random manner,79 and such mixtures of geomancy and other

77 See for example, P. Riche, 'La magie a l'epoque carolingienne', in Comptes Rendus de
VAcademic des Instriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris, 1973, pp. 127-138. Six royal decrees
against magic in the sixty years from 789 to 850, with the condemnations of Rhabanus
Maurus and Hincmar (though they are really only quoting Isidore), with positive
evidence from Ps-Bede and Paschasius Radbert, show that magical practices were
known to be going on, even at court. Though when Riche writes (p. 133): 'Enfin, la
divination astrologique est tres souvent utilisee. Mais, bien que magie et astrologie
soient tres liees, nous n'avons pas a aborder ici les croyances dans la toute-puissance
des astres,' which is all he does say about astrology, it is only a truism plus an
unsupported assertion, unjustifiably extending to earlier ages what is true of the twelfth
and later centuries.
78 On this see J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New
York, 1961) and cf. Chapter 2, 'The Magic of the Mediaeval Church', of Keith Thomas'
splendid Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971) - towards the end of the
chapter he writes: 'The difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the
effects they claimed to achieve than in their social position, and in the authority on
which their respective claims rested.'
79 See T. C. Skeat, 'An early mediaeval Book of Pate-, the Sortes XII Patriarcharum’, in
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, III (1954) 41ff: 'The structure of a "Book of Fate"
remains unaltered whether the enquirer uses dice, a volvelle, geomancy or other
methods for this purpose', (sc. selecting the 'number' of the answer).

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'magics' as the Experimentarius, some of which may be attributable to

Bernard Silvestris.80 The geomancy of that little anthology is typically
twelfth century and pre-Arab - the Arabic 'mansions' were surely
much later additions.
Astrology hovered on the fringes of all this, becoming involved in
ways very similar to those which drew it into herbalism and alchemy
and numerology. Geomancy provided patterns of numbers for the
planets and these patterns found themselves still attached to illustra­
tions in astronomical textbooks, even if the artist or copyist had little
understanding of them and sometimes got them wrong (see Plate III).81
A book which is a mixture of many curiosities, and certainly was by
Bernard Silvestris, is the Cosmographia,n a largely Platonic work
including some astrology, written in the 1140s. There is much less
astrology in this strange work than might at first appear, and the signs
of the zodiac and so on are treated much more mythically and
allegorically than astrologice, even in the sphaera in the first of the two
books. How distant it all is from astrology proper, so to speak, is best
seen in Bernard's characterisation of the planets in Book II, c.5 -
mixtures of myth and astrologia in every sense.83 But the new astrology

80 M. B. Savorelli, 'Un manuale di geomanzia presentato da Bernardo Silvestre da Tours

(xii secolo): L'Experimentarius', in Rivista cntica di storia della filosofia, 14 (1959) 283ff
(incl. text); and Ch. S. F. Burnett, 'What is the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris? A
preliminary survey of the material', in Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du
Moyen Age, XL1V (1977) 79-125. See also note 82: Dronke has something on the
Experimentarius (pp. 5-6).
81 See Panofsky and Saxl, op. cit. note 73 above, 228ff. The illustrations to Michael Scot
in Bodley 266 are copied from the Munich MS Cod. Monac. lat. 10268, of the
mid-fourteenth century. The Arabs apparently took over from the Greek illustrations,
kept the scientific aspects and ignored the foreign, Greek, mythological aspects, and so
produced more accurate figures of the constellations with the stars marked correctly and
marked according to magnitudes. Since the Arabic images were neither Classical nor
contemporary European, the Latin illustrators left them alone and followed the
text-descriptions to make contemporary images. The curious patterns of dots are the
geomantic ones referred to in the text; in Techniques of High Magic, by Francis King and
Stephen Skinner (London, n.d.), those here attached to Jupiter mean acquisitio and
laetitia, 'gain' and 'happiness'. See also Fritz Saxl, 'Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der
Planetendarstellungen im Orient und im Okzident', in Der Islam, III (1912), 151-177, esp.
165ff, 'Die okzidentalen Planetendarstellungen des spätem Mittelalters'.
82 Ed. Peter Dronke, in Brill's Textus Minores, LIII (Leiden, 1978). See also Brian Stock,
Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvestris (Princeton, N.J.,
1972); though there is less astrology in the work than Stock sees there, and pp. 188-196
in particular should be read with a close eye to what Bernard actually says in his Latin
text.
83 For example, Urania and Natura on their way down through the spheres, come 'to the
circle of Mars lying next beneath, and hear the murmuer of water as it were falling in a
steep valley. When they were close enough to look properly, Natura recognised the
river, from its dark, sulphurous banks, as Pirflegeton (fiery Phlegethon), a river flowing
down from Mars' circle. But it happened that then the fiery one (Pirois) the star of Mars,
was in his own proper sign, Scorpio, and being strong in his native powers was sending
his threatening rays on to the fourth sign (signum) and the seventh and seeking the right

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

III Geomantie image of Jupiter copied from a fourteenth-century

illustrated text of Michael Scot
(Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 266 f. 197v)

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

was known, and by the 1140s translations from the Arabic were being
circulated. John of Salisbury, who died as Bishop of Chartres in 1180,
was aware of it, though there is no evidence he had read any of the
new translations. His knowledge and his attitudes were typical of the
mid-twelfth century, the end of the first 'renaissance', based only on
the Latin sources, of which Abelard was the greatest representative in
logic and theology. John's attitude to astrology in his Policraticus
(especially Book II, c.19) is very much that of later churchmen: that the
stars are signs, and signs not only of times but of physical processes
and events, such as the weather and sicknesses; anything attributed to
the stars which derogated from the omnipotence of God or the
freedom of man was superstitious and dangerous. It was especially
dangerous because it was based on natural, true foundations in
mathesis; but alas it led too frequently to mathesis. Equally typically, in
the passage where John is in fact taking such a line against 'judicial
astrology', he presents the reader with a good deal of astrological
detail, including the thema mundi, for example. The chief sources for it
all are Macrobius and Augustine, with some Martianus Capella: John
had done his homework. What his writing displays so clearly is that
fundamental lack of distinction between astrology and astronomy (in
the modern meanings), the acceptance of astrology, in fact, in all but
those senses in which it seemed to introduce fate or other impersonal,
non- divine causation. It is anachronistic to treat John of Salisbury, or
any other medieval or Renaissance opponent of judicial astrology, as a
modem sceptical philosopher or scientist before his time. He was no
more a sceptic than the buyer of saints' relics in the market place, who
also no doubt bought prognostications of all kinds. John was merely
more aware of the theological implications of Isidore's distinctions.
Neither Adelard of Bath nor the Spaniard Gundissalinus (Domingo
Gondisalvi), both John's contemporaries, was really concerned with
astrology, though both were interested in science and belonged to the
first generation of the translators who transmitted the ancient Greek
learning from the Muslim cultures of Spain and Sicily to the schools of
North-West Europe. Adelard indeed travelled in Muslim countries and
himself translated in the 1120s the Tables and Introduction to Astronomy
of Al Khwarizmi, the 'Smaller Introduction' (Isagoge Minor) of Abu
Ma'shar, and in the 1130s a short astrological work of Thabit ibn

moment for a comet, a terrible, bloody long-tailed star, to appear from his circle. They
were fearful of a region full of fury and seething with poisonous airs and hastened to fly
over and out of it to reach the dwellings of the life-giving Sun' (Dronke, p. 130, §11).
Notice that Bernard has the same confusion of signs an houses: the fourth house is the
IMC and the seventh the setting point, both houses of death, disease and so on: only if
Scorpio were the ASC could the fourth and seventh signs from Scorpio be intended here.

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Qurra. But almost all of this, even the Abu Ma'shar, is really
astronomical not astrological and Adelard is, like most similar twelfth
century scholars, interested in all the sciences, which then included
astrology.84 Gundissalinus also translated works from the Arabic,
including the Metaphysics of Avicenna and the Fons Vitae of Ibn
Gebirol, and his astrologia is derived from Arabic sources.85 But apart
from the fact that he reverses the Isidorean distinction between
astronomia and astrologia there is little of relevance to the history of
astrology. In his work as in Adelard's astrology in our sense is
included as part of the whole science without question. Almost the
same might be said of the writings of another Englishman of the
second half of the twelfth century, Daniel of Morley,86 though there is
more astrology there. His work was based on both the older Latin
sources, including Firmicus, and Arabic writers like Abu Ma'shar and
Al Fargani, whose works he studied at Toledo. He is among the first to
introduce into Latin the lunar mansions, no doubt as a fascinating
new piece of 'rhachinery'.
That astrology was accepted and practised in the late twelfth century
is clear from the controversy which surround the various prophecies
produced in anticipation of two eclipses and the conjunction of all the
planets in Libra in 1186.87 The chronicler Roger of Hoveden says: Tn
that year, 1184, the astrologers, both Spanish and Sicilian - and indeed

84 Adelard's early work, the De eodem et diverso, written before 1116, was edited by
Hans Willner in Baeumker's Beiträge, IV.l (Münster, 1903). The whole of what Adelard
says there about astronomy (pp. 31-2) runs to only a dozen lines, but includes: 'If
anyone possess this science he will know not only the present state of things below the
heavens but also their past and future condition. For those higher and divine creatures
(animalia: "ensouled", living beings) are the principle and the causes of lower natures.
And concerning astrologia I should set forth many things no less to be desired than what
has been said above, were it not that they could not be covered in few words, nor
understood by anyone ignorant of that art.' The belief in and interest in astrology was
evident; that the heavens were causes of sublunary effects was almost an Aristotelian
commonplace; and the chief reason for the stars being animalia was that they moved,
without apparently being moved by anything. But it is all part of the general interest in
the new science. The De eodem et diverso was written before any influence from the
Arabs was felt. Even the much later Quaestiones Naturales (ed. M. Müller in Beiträge,
XXXI.2, Münster, 1934) is mainly derived from older, Latin sources and there is little
Arabic learning there.
85 See L. Bauer's edition of the De divisione philosophiae in Beiträge, IV.2 & 3 (1903) and
G.Bülow's of De processione mundi in Beiträge, XXIV.3 (1925). The Neo-platonism of his
sources comes through but very little more than generalities about astrology.
86 Th. Silverstein, 'Daniel of Morley: English Cosmogonist and Student of Arabic
Science', in Medieval Studies, X (1948) 179ff, See also the same author's 'Liber Hermetis
Mercurii Triplicis de VI rerum principiis’, in Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Litte'raire du
Moyen Age, XXII (1955) 217-302, for an anonymous twelfth century work based on both
Latin and Arabic sources.
87 What follows is taken from the Chronicle of Roger of Hoveden: Chronica Magistri
Rogeri de Hovedene, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Series 51,1869), II, 290-298.

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almost all the world's prognosticators, Greek and Latin - wrote much
the same prediction about the conjunction of the planets.' Notice that
the astrologers are still firmly anchored in their Islamic bases in Spain
and Sicily. According to one Chorumphiza there were going to be
great natural and political disasters, to the benefit of the Franks and
the discomfiture of the Saracens, with the generations after the
calamity living a much fuller life; 'whatever others may say, that is my
opinion.' Then there was a William, a clerk to the Constable of
Chester, who reckoned that a great Christian prince was to rise, who
should also be 'numbered among the prophets', because Jupiter
signified prophecy; but since England too would suffer from this
conjunction, 'since as every astrologer knows, this region is under
Saturn, and the Moon is with him ... there is but one remedy, that the
king and the nobles should take counsel, serve God and flee from the
devil, so that the Lord may turn aside these threatened punishments.'
Roger of Hoveden also tells the wonderful story of the lay brother at
Worcester Priory who went into a trance, recited thirty-three terrible
Latin couplets88 on the wrath of God to come, and promptly died.
Comfort was only to be drawn, apparently, from the more sober
predictions of an Arab of Cordova, Pharamella the son of Abdelabi,
whose arguments against all the terrible prognostications were en­
tirely astrological: the good and evil influences cancelled out, he said,
and anyway the days were all wrong, and so on. But, as Stubbs'
footnote says, 'considering the positive way in which the prophecy of
the storm is contradicted (we shall conclude) that this explanation was
written after the dangerous day had passed.' Pass it did, without
major calamity, but the episode illustrates the emergence of astrology
from its centuries of quietude.
It emerged from the Muslim lands, Spain and Sicily especially. And
it emerged because there had been a revival and a growth of interest
in the quadrivium, in the 'mathematical sciences', and in medicine,
over the preceding two centuries. That interest drew first on the old
Latin sources, and only gradually began to include, during the late
eleventh century and the twelfth, the Islamic material, itself mainly
derived from the Greek. The Latin scholars of North-west Europe went
to the Arabs first for the quadrivium and for medicine; and medicine
and astronomia naturally and unavoidably .brought astrology with
them. As Tullio Gregory says,89 Tn the twelfth century astrology was

88 Perhaps the worst (just) is:

hie sonat assidue carmen lacrymabile, Vae, vae,
quantae sunt tenebrae! vae mihi, vae mihi, vae!
89 The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla, Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, XXVI (Dordrecht and Boston, 1975). Tullio
Gregory's article, 'La nouvelle idee de nature et de savoir scientifique au Xlle siecle', is
on pp. 193ff; the quotation is from p. 214.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

one of the physical sciences men had to study - as a physical science,

not as something based on imaginary data - because it really was a
positive science for medieval men.' The point is that the astrological
description of the zodiac and the signs and the planets and their
exaltations and so on was all part of the sphaera, the scientific
description of the universe in the earlier years before the revival of
practising judicial astrology. It was not indeed until such astrology
was established and flourishing as an art that John of Sacrobosco could
in the mid-thirteenth century write a wholly astronomical sphaera.
What kind of astrology, then, was brought into the Latin culture of
western Christendom? Who introduced it, where and when? And how
did astrology find itself in Arabic in the Islamic empire? It is best to
take these questions in the reverse order.
Whether directly because of the closing of the pagan philosophical
schools of Athens in 529 by Justinian, or because the teachers of
Greece had for perhaps a century or more been leaving the intellectu­
ally and spiritually hostile environment of the Christian Empire for the
more liberal court of Persia, by the middle of the sixth century there
had been transferred thither from Greece the scientific and medical
works of Hellenistic scholars and most of the Aristotelian corpus -
mainly, perhaps, for his biological writings, but including also the
logic, the Physics and the Metaphysics, the book 'On the Heavens' and
the one 'On Generation and Corruption' which contains the most
explicit statement of the heavenly causation of earthly events. Two
centuries later the Middle East and much of the Mediterranean world
were under Muslim domination. In 622 the Prophet Muhammad fled
from Mecca, where his teaching had upset the merchant obigarchy, to
Yathrib, later called Medina (the City, sc. of the Prophet). The date
marks the beginning of the Islamic era, dates in which are usually
written A.H., annus Hegirae, the Hegira being the Flight (of Muham­
mad). In the following hundred years the Arab armies with their
expansionist faith had conquered all the Near East except a remnant of
the Byzantine Empire, Egypt and North Africa, Sicily and Spain; and
had crossed the Pyrenees, when their raiders were stopped and sent
back by Charles Martel after the Battle of Poitiers in 722.
Under Islamic rule a new civilisation arose which drew on the older
Persian, Indian and Greek sources; all three affected astrology, but of
the three the Greek were by far the most important - particularly since
they lay behind much of the astrology of Persia and India. There were
two great periods of translation into Arabic of works of Greek science
and philosophy. In the ninth century men like Hunayn ibn Ishaq and
Thabit ibn Qurra translated many medical and scientific books directly
from the Greek into Arabic; and in the following century many more
translations were made, largely from the Syriac or Pahlavi versions, of

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES
the works of Plato and Aristotle, the Commentators on these, the
Neo-Platonists and the great medical authority Galen. To these two
periods belong the two most important founders of Islamic philosophy
and science: to the first Al Kindi, and to the second Al Farabi. The
former was sympathetic to astrology, the latter opposed to it. The
Arabs were bound, in taking over Greek astrologia and Greek medicine,
to find astrology also. What was to be their attitude to it? It may be
very briefly said that the medieval Muslim had a very similar
world-view to that of the medieval Christians, and a very similar
revealed, 'book', religion; and that consequently, and because their
philosophical background also was Greek, their attitudes to astrology
were very much the same as those of Christian scholars and church­
men. Al Farabi, Avicenna, Al Ghazzali, Averroes - all these for various
reasons rejected astrology, or at least judicial astrology; yet it became
part of the Islamic tradition. The reason was that for many Muslim the
wholeness of the universe and the one-ness of wisdom (hikmah)
meant that the sage (hakim) gathered all knowledge into one
penetrative understanding or gnosis of a world which was all symbol,
all allegory. 'Despite the opposition of religious authorities to the
predicative aspect of astrology, its practice has continued far and wide
in Islamic civilisation over the centuries. Many notable astronomical
treatises have astrological sections attached to them and numerous
pages of Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other literatures of the Islamic
peoples are concerned with the interrelation between man's terrestrial
life and celestial influences. But on the highest level, namely in
metaphysical and gnostic works, the powerful symbolism of astrology
has been integrated perfectly into Islamic esotericism. In these works
astrology is revealed to be in its symbolic aspect a means whereby
man rediscovers his own cosmic dimension and becomes aware of his
own angelic and archetypal reality and the influence of this reality
upon his terrestrial existence. This was achieved without in any way
destroying or weakening the direct relation which man possesses
vis-a-vis the metacosmic Reality, which lies at once beyond the
Universe and at the centre of his own being.'90

90 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Science: an Illustrated Study (London, 1976) p. 131;
Science and Civilisation in Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). The author presents Islamic
science in a way which, as Giorgio de Santillana says in his Preface to the latter book
(p. vii), 'may surprise some readers both West and East'. Islamic culture is too often
presented as the indispensable link between Antiquity and our Middle Ages, but the
achievement of its historic mission is implied when it has handed on the texts and
techniques of the Greeks. This is a way of turning a great civilisation into a service
department of Western history. It is the merit of Dr Nasr to have shown convincingly
that the mind and culture of Islam embrace a far wider arc, and that the cultivation of
the Greek heritage is only a phase in the development of an essentially independent
thought'. Both books should be read with as unprejudiced a mind as can be managed,

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

The process of translation from Arabic into Latin began in the

second half of the eleventh century with the medical writings of
Constantine the African, and effectively gave way to translations made
directly from the Greek in the middle of the thirteenth century. During
these two centuries a whole body of astronomical/astrological works,
both Greek and Arabic, were turned into Latin by various scholars.91

and with humility: they help one to see important differences more clearly as
differences, not simply errors.
91 What follows is derived mainly from the following works, and a perusal of many of
the MSS referred to by Haskins, Thorndike and others:
M. Steinschneider, Die europäischen Übersetzungen aus dem Arabischen bis Mitte des 17
Jahrhunderts, Sitz. d. Klass. Akad. d. Wiss. (Wien, 1904/5; repr. Graz, 1956).
Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (London, 1923) II.
C. H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1924).
A. van de Vyver, 'Les plus anciennes traductions latines medievales (Xe-XIe siecles) de
traites d'astronomie et d'astrologie', in Osiris, I (1936) 658ff.
Francis J. Carmody, Arabic Astronomical and Astrological Sciences in Latin Translation: A
Critical Bibliography (Cambridge & Los Angeles, 1956).
Lynn Thorndike, 'The Three Latin Translations of the Pseudo-Hippocratic Tract on
Astrological Medicine', in Janus, XLIX (1961) 104-129.
Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Medical and Scientific Writings
in Latin, revised and augmented edition (London, 1963).
M-T. d'Alvemey, 'Translations and Translators', in Renaissance and Renewal in the
Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
From these writers a list of translations of astrological and related works made in or
before the twelfth century may be made up. They form, or course, only part of any
complete list, which would have to include not only more medicine and mathematics,
but logic, philosophy and theology.
Late 10th century at Fleury (? Abbo) 'Alchandreus' - traditional astrology.
Late 11th century Constantine the African: medical works.
1120-30 Adelard of Bath: Al-Khwarizmi's Tables; Euclid.
1127 Stephen of Antioch: medical encyclopaedia.
1134 Plato of Tivoli: Albuhali, de electione horarum
1136 Plato of Tivoli: Al-Battani
1138 Plato of Tivoli: Ptolemy, Quadripartitum
1136 Hugh of Santalla: Centiloquium
1138 Hermann of Carinthia: Saul b. Bishr, de revolutionibus
1140 Hermann of Carinthia: Abu Ma'shar, Maius Introductorium
1143 Hermann of Carinthia: Ptolemy, Planispherium
1142 on John of Spain: a large number of astrological works
1144 Rudolf of Bruges: Ptolemy, Planispherium
Rudolf of Bruges: ? de astrolabio
1140-50 Dominicus Gundisalvi: Avicebron, Al-Farabi, Al Ghazzali
1140 Raymond of Marseilles: planetary tables; astrolabe
1150-60 Henry Aristippus: Plato's Phaedo and Meno; Aristotle's Meteorologien;
Ptolemy, Almagest (1160)
H69 Pascalis Romanus, at Constantinople: Kyranides (magic) and a dream­
book, Thesaurus occulti
1160s Eugene of Palermo: Ptolemy, Optica
Late 12th century in Sicily, Euclid: Data, Optica, Catoptica
1176 Gerard of Cremona: Ptolemy, Almagest, and many other works. (He is
the most prolific of the translators, but only six out of ninety works
listed by Steinschneider are actually astrological.)

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

The Tetrabiblos and the Centiloquium were translated in the late 1130s,
and Abu Ma'shar, the most widely used Arabic source, in the 1140s.
Although the Almagest was put into Latin from the Greek in Sicily
about 1160, it was unknown in the west until Gerard of Cremona
produced a version from the Arabic in Toledo in 1175. Gerard was one
of the most prolific of all the translators, producing more than ninety
works, of which some half dozen were purely astrological. Of the
translators, Haskins says (Studies, p. 10): 'Besides a large amount of
astrology, inevitable in an age which regarded astrology as merely
applied astronomy and a study of great practical utility, their attention
was given mainly to astronomy and mathematics.' The part of
astrology in the whole picture should not be exaggerated, but certainly
John of Spain, for instance, seems to have specialised in it. He
translated the Centiloquium, two works of Masha'allah, three of Abu
Ma'shar including the Greater Introduction, two of Alcabitius, three
other minor astrological works and the astronomy of al Farghani, as
well as himself composing an Epitome totius astrologie. By 1180 the
Almagest, the Tetrabiblos (in more than one version), the Centiloquium,
sets of Tables (from those of Adelard in 1120 to Roger of Hereford's in
1178), together with Arabic commentaries and a number of other
astrological works, major and minor, were all circulating in Latin.
Some of the copyists may have had qualms of conscience over all this
use of Saracen sources: one wrote after a Latin version of a text of Abu
Ma'shar, 'finished, with praise to God for his help and a curse on
Mahomet and his followers.' But the translations came and multiplied
none the less.
So the Latin scholars and translators went to the Arabs for medicine
and for science, the mathematical arts, which included astrologia,
theoretical (astronomy) and practical (astrology). The mixture of these
last and the balance of interest, to begin with at least, are shown in the
mid-twelfth century concoction by 'an unknown Western writer with a
bias in favour of astrology, who read no Arabic but consulted some of
the Arabic texts in the current Latin translations'.’2 The author was
acquainted with the old Latin sources, Bede and Macrobius, and
probably Boethius, and with contemporaries such as Adelard and
William of Conches; he refers to a liber almanach, some Arabic
planetary names, and the Arabs' Greenwich, so to speak, Arin (their
prime meridian city). His main sources, according to Silverstein, were
Firmicus Maternus, Zahel ben Bishr, Alcabitius and 'others of this
stamp'. Much of it is written in 'a language conventional to the subject
since the tenth century' and despite its editor's opinion of its 'bias in

92 Th. Silverstein, Liber Hermetis Mercurii Triplicis de VI rerum prirtcipiis, in Arch, d'hist,
doct. et lift, du moyen age, XXII (1955) 217-301; p. 217.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

favour of astrology' most of the content is astronomical and such

astrological matter as the rules for finding the horoscope, for example,
is introduced naturally as part of the use of the astrolabe. There is of
course no hesitation in including astrology or in showing an interest
in it.
Among the early translations one of the works which appeared - or
reappeared - in the West was the Centtloquium, falsely attributed to
Ptolemy, which we have already noticed among the late Greek works.93
It is a collection of a hundred astrological aphorisms. There were a
number of such collections circulating in the later medieval centuries,
three of which had this same title: apart from the Pseudo-Ptolemy
there were the Centiloquium Hermetis, which only survives in the Latin
version of Stephen of Messina, and the Centiloquium Bethem (i.e. al
Battani), which also only exists now in Latin. We are now only
concerned with the Pseudo-Ptolemaic version, to which Centiloquium
will henceforth refer. The origins of this work are obscure and at
present probably undecidable. The earliest text is Arabic, and its title
is Thamara. This is a translation of the Greek title, KapiTo^, which gives
its alternative Latin name, Fructus - 'fruit'. Or, of course, the Greek
title is a translation of the Arabic. Richard Lemay seems to believe that
it was compiled at the beginning of the tenth century by Ahmet abu
Ja'far.94 This Arabic text was translated into Latin in 1136 by Plato of
Tivoli, with a commentary attributed in manuscripts to 'Haly' but
probably by abu Ja'far. The work was known and quoted in Syriac in
the thirteenth century, and in Hebrew in the fourteenth; a Greek text
is known in manuscripts from the fourteenth century, which has been
edited by Aemilie Baer.95 There are a number of variants in both the
Greek and the Latin texts - at least one other Latin translation, this
time from the Greek, was made in the fifteenth century. There is no
doubt that the general impression given by the aphorisms is of late
Greek, Hellenistic, astrology. The great majority of them either can be
parallelled in Hellenistic sources or are such commonplaces as might
have been produced by almost any astrologer in the Greek tradition at
any time; none, in fact, can really be traced directly to Ptolemy.
Two only appear to be foreign to Greek, numbers 56 and 60.
Number 56 says: 'In the first tetragon of the moon the moistures of
bodies flow out, until the second, and in the rest they diminish.' What
are these tetragons of the moon? The Teubner note refers to Ptolemy
and to Porphyry, but the passages are not really parallel; they refer to

93 P. 92 above.
94 See Helen Lemay, 'The Stars and Human Sexuality: Some Medieval Scientific Views'
in Isis, 71 (1980) 127ft.
95 Bibl. Teubneriana, in Opera Ptolemaei, 2nd edn, 1961.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

the quarters of the moon, and they cannot be called tetragons, and the
reference to moisture is too commonplace in connection with the
moon to be useful. Now number 60 says: 'With regard to the sick, look
at the critical days and the position of the moon in the angles of the
hexkaidekahedron; for when you find such angles not afflicted, it will
be well for the sick man, if afflicted, the opposite.' So now we have a
sixteen-sided figure for the moon as well. It can be seen at once that if
the circle (of the zodiac) is divided into sixteen parts there are four and
only four squares that can be drawn in the circle to touch the sixteen
points: it is an isometry - if a square is rotated through 221/2° four
times it comes back to the same space, and 22V2° is the full 360° of the
circle divided by 16. Now Ptolemy at Tetr. Ill, 12 mentions 'bendings'
(Kdp-moi) of the moon; and these, according to the Loeb editor,
Robbins (p. 325), who follows 'the anonymous commentator', are 'the
points quartile to the nodes', that is, to caput and cauda draconis. So
this would give one a tetragon; a first tetragon, if it were of the new
moon, with three more for the first quarter, the full moon, and the last
quarter. This is, of course, pure guesswork. Any real answer will have
to wait until there have been enough scholarly publications of all the
texts - Greek, Persian, Indian and Arabic - to enable comparisons to
be made. But at least it is possible that even these two aphorisms are
ultimately derivable from Hellenistic sources. At present it seems
reasonable to suggest that there was a collection of aphorisms like this
one made in late Hellenistic times; such collections, florilegia (the Latin
equivalent of the Greek anthologia, 'a collection of flowers'), were very
common in all subjects, very often for teaching purposes. That
collection, perhaps with the title Karpos, and fathered on Ptolemy, then
passed down through the centuries through the hands of a number of
compiler-revisers of whom abu Ja'far was one, and perhaps the most
important and influential.
The Centiloquium has introduced into the background of these
translations Persian and Indian as well as Arabic astrology. Indeed
Arabic astrology, rather like the Arabian Nights, was a mixture of
Indian and Persian ideas as well as Greek; much that was Greek came
to the Arabs through Persia and perhaps through India too. Indian
astronomy/astrology - they were inseparable on arrival in India before
the sixth century, and remained so - were mainly derived from the
Greeks.96 Most, probably, of Persian astrology was also from Greek

96 Cf. Gauranga Nath Banerjee, Hellenism in Ancient India (New Delhi, 1981), 130: 'From
all these extraneous indications, coupled with the internal reasons of probability
mentioned above, we conclude that the Scientific Astronomy of the Indians should be
regarded as an offshoot of Greek Science.' See also D. Pingree, 'The Indian Iconography
of the Decans and Horas', in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 26 (1963)
232-254; and the same author's The Yavanajataka of Sphujidhvaja, Harvard Oriental

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

sources. It may be, however, that elements of older Babylonian

traditions survived in or influenced Persian and Indian writers; as, for
example, the lunar signs or houses, and perhaps the periods called
ferdariae, which we shall come back to. It is safe to say that Syriac,
Hebrew and Arabic scientists in the Middle Ages were the direct or
indirect heirs of Alexandrian Greek science.97 According to Pingree,
his published Arabic text of Dorotheus' Carmen Astrologicum,98 made
about 800 by al-Tabari, is a version of a third century Pahlavi (Persian)
translation of the first century Greek, the Persian having been revised,
with additions from India, in the late fourth or early fifth century.
The second important thing about Arabic astrology is that the
period of its development and its influence on the West was short.
Before the eighth century the Arabs had virtually no astronomy, only
'a very crude method of telling the time by night by means of the
twenty-eight lunar mansions, and a rough estimation of the seasons
by means of their heliacal risings and cosmic settings'.99 The high
period of scientific development in Baghdad was the late eighth
century and the ninth, and the sciences flourished in Islamic Spain
especially in the tenth century under Abd er-Rahman III and his
successor al-Hakam II. In the next century the translations were
becoming commonly available in the Latin West. The chronological
gap between the science of the Arabs and that of Western scholars is
thus really quite short. This is especially true, perhaps, of acquain­
tance with and knowledge of the astrolabe and of astrological Tables,
which began to be translated, as we have seen, as early as Adelard of
Bath. So far as the astrolabe is concerned, one has to be very wary of
scholars' generalisations. The word itself is Greek, and merely means
an instrument for 'taking the stars'. Consequently any instrument
used in observing stellar positions or altitudes could be so called. By
the tenth century in Western Europe the word was also used of
armillary spheres, systems of rings to represent planetary and stellar
movements, such as were known to Gerbert d'Aurillac. The astrolabe
proper, so to speak, is a projection of the sphere of the universe on a
plane: it should properly be called a planispheric astrolabe, but the
epithet is usually dropped in contexts where the meaning is plainly
understood. It was the most important observational instrument
before the invention of the telescope, and could be used not only for
such observation of heavenly bodies, but for finding the time, or

Series 48, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), and 'The Indian and Pseudo-Indian passages
in Greek and Latin astronomical and astrological texts', in Viator, 7 (1976) 141ff.
97 Cf. J. Millas Vallicrosa, Nuevos estudios sobre historia de la ciencia espafiola, (Barcelona,
1960), esp. c.vii.
98 Dorothei Sidonii Carmen Astrologicum (Leipzig, 1976).
99 D. Pingree, 'ILM at Hay’a’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, III.1135ff.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

latitudes, or heights and distances, and for constructing horoscopes

and calculating the mundane houses. It was certainly known to the
Greeks, probably being invented by Ptolemy (or possibly by Hip­
parchus), and as certainly not known to the Latin Middle Ages until its
reintroduction from Arabic sources in the twelfth century.100 The
astrolabe is important to astrologers not so much (as a number of late
medieval drawings might suggest) for taking accurate observations of
the heavens at a given moment - of a birth, say - which were of less
use than they might have been had there been good chronometers
available, but for calculating from the Tables, which were essential,
what was the horoscope (the ascendant) and how to divide the chart
into its twelve houses.
So the Arabs of the eighth and nineth centuries adopted the Greek
astrology they received from the Persians, the Syrians, and perhaps
the Indians; but not without opposition. Islam might be expected to
be more receptive to astrology than Christianity, with its determinist
view of the Will of Allah - Islam means 'submission', and a Muslim is
one who submits to Allah's will. But their very determinism and their
absolute monotheism left little or no room for any sort of stellar
fatalism, and in fact Arab arguments about the validity or admiss­
ibility of astrology are very similar to the Christian ones of earlier
centuries. The great philosopher-theologians al-Farabi, Avicenna,
Averroes and ibn Khaldun were against astrology; but the encyclo­
paedic al-Kindi and his pupil Abu Ma'shar were astrologers, as was
their predecessor, the first voluminous Arab writer on the subject,
Masha'allah (or Messahalla, in his Latin form). These last two, with
al-Battani, are the most often cited Arabic sources of Latin astrol­
ogers,101 with Abu Ma'shar far and away the most influential. Abu

100 Anyone wanting to see what an astrolabe looked like should visit the Museum of the

History of Science in the Old Ashmolean in Oxford, which has one of the finest
collections in the world. There are good illustrations in Time and Space: Measuring
Instruments from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century, Samuel Guye and Henri Michel,
trans. Diana Dolan (London, 1971), the text of which should be treated with great
caution. The literature on the astrolabe is immense. J. D. North gives a clear account of
its construction, with good illustrations, in 'The Astrolabe', in Scientific American, 230
(1974) 96-106. Two good articles on its history are O. Neugebauer, 'The Early History of
the Astrolabe', in Isis, 40 (1949) and Emmanuel Poulle, 'Les instruments astronomiques
de l'Occident latin au Xie et Xlle siecles', in Cahiers, 15 (1972). The best account of its
principles and uses is Willy Hartner's (trans. Phyllis Ackerman) in A Survey of Persian
Art, ed. A. Upham Pope, III.2530-2564 (London and New York, 1939). See also the same
author's asturlab in Encycl. of Islam, 2nd edn, 1 (1960). For Chaucer's instructions to his
'litel sone Lewis' at Oxford, see R. T. Gunter, Early Science at Oxford, V (Oxford, 1929).
From Hartner and Chaucer-Gunter anyone can make his own astrolabe.
101 The eleventh century astronomer al-Biruni was best known for his tables, though he
wrote astrological works also. His division of astrology, and his attitude, are interesting.
In his Elements of Astrology (Arabic text and translation by R. Ramsay Wright, London,
1934), §515 he divides the art into meteorology, including earthquakes, floods and so on;

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Ma'shar was born at Balkh, a city in what is now northern Afghan­

istan, in 787. The last element of his name, al-Balkhi, is behind the
non-existent Greek 'Palchus' of the appendices to CCAG. The authori­
ties used by these Arab writers are difficult to sort out, since they
themselves were so eclectic, as were no doubt many of the books they
used, and they fathered anything and everything on the Greeks: 'For
them, everything was Greek which carried a Greek name,' says
Ullmann.
The beginnings of a philosophical basis not only for astrology but
also for magic and divination of other kinds, usually practised as
occult sciences, were laid down by al-Kindi.102 He was born about the
end of the eighth century into an aristocratic family (his father was
governor of al-Kurfan under Harun al-Rashid) and was tutor and
physician to that great patron of arts and sciences, the Khalif
al-Ma'mun. He died about 866. His major task and achievement was,
with the translators, the creation of a new Arabic philosophical
language. His own thought depended largely on the Neo-Platonists,
and through them, Plato and Aristotle. He wrote copiously on all
subjects, including astronomy, astrology and the astrolabe. Some of
his works are now lost, and others only survive in Hebrew or Latin
translations. One of the most important of the latter, from our point of
view, is the De radiis, 'On (stellar) rays'.103 In that book al-Kindi seems
concerned to establish a metaphysical basis for magic - that is,
rational, 'good' magic - on a sort of Stoic philosophy of cosmic
sympathy, physically expressed in 'rays' between objects, and
especially between and from heavenly bodies. As he says in Chapter 2
(Alverney and Hudry, p. 221): 'So the diversity of things in the world
of the elements apparent at any time proceeds from two causes,
namely the diversity of their matter (elements) and the changing

plants, and animals and humanity; the individual - life and posterity; the individual -
actions and occupations; and lastly, 'beyond these there is a fifth division where such
origins (as the other sections have) are entirely unknown. Here astrology reaches a point
which threatens to transgress its proper limits, where problems are submitted which it
is impossible to solve for the most part, and where the matter leaves the solid basis of
universals for one of particulars. When this boundary is passed, where the astrologer is on
one side and the sorcerer on the other, you enter a field of omens and divinations which
has nothing to do with astrology although the stars may be referred to in connection
with them.' For a chronological summary see M. Ullman, Die Natur- und Geheimswissen-
schaft im Islam, Handbuch der Orientalistik, Erste Abteilung, Erganzungsband VI, 2
Abschnitt (Leiden, 1972), Chapter V.
102 For a summary of his life and work see G. N. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi: the Philosopher of the
Arabs (Rawalpindi, 1966).
103 Ed. M.-Th. d'Alvemey and F. Hudry, 'Al-Kindi De Radiis', in Arch. d'Hist. Doct. et
Litt, du Moyen Age, XLI (1974), pp. 139 260.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

operation of the stellar rays.' This leads him to a firm stellar

determinism (of exactly the sort condemned as heretical in a Christian
context by Bishop Tempier of Paris in the list of errors proscribed in
1277) and also to an extraordinarily Keplerian statement (ibid, p. 223):
'If it were given to anyone to comprehend the whole condition of the
celestial harmony, he would know fully the world of the elements with
all contained therein at any place and any time, as knowing the caused
from its cause , and vice versa, knowing the cause from what what is
caused. 'So that whoever has acquired the knowledge of the whole
condition of the celestial harmony will know the past and the present
and the future.' This was the teacher who interested the then 47-year
old Abu Ma'shar in astrology. The commonplace as to causation is
clearly repeated in the latter's lntroductorium (and elsewhere in his
works): in comparing medicine and astrology in his preliminary
generalities, Abu Ma'shar writes, 'The doctor studies the changes in
the elements; the astrologus (by which, as is evident from the context
of 'the whole, astrologia', he understands the astronomer and the
astrologer together as one person) follows the movements of the stars
to arrive at the causes of elementary changes.'
Of Abu Ma'shar Duhem says (Systeme, 11.369) that his ’Intro-
ductorium is the work from which, for many centuries, astrologers most
readily borrowed philosophical arguments to justify their art.' Duhem
was wrong about the centuries: two, perhaps, and then Ptolemy and
science take over. But Abu Ma'shar's arguments, largely Aristotelian,
were intended to provide a philosophical basis for astrology. Duhem is
also overstating his case when he says that Abu Ma'shar's arguments
were taken 'almost entirely from the Peripatetics'. In this he is
followed by Thorndike, and he by Lemay.104 Really the great difficulty
lies in deciding how much is from Aristotle and is deliberately
Aristotelian and how much is commonplace and largely accidental. In
almost any age and culture there is a set of ideas, of principles and of
knowledge, which is common to most if not all educated people. In
our own times the basic ideas of animal evolution, of man's place in
nature and of at least early twenties physics, may be taken for granted
in almost any company. In the Rome of the late Republic and early
Empire, Stoicism provided the current philosophical background, as
Neo-Platonism did for Late Antiquity. In the ninth and tenth centuries

104 Richard Lemay, Abu Ma'shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century (Beirut,
1982). The case is greatly overstated both for Abu Ma'shar's Aristotelianism and its
influence. Lemay seems to work on the politicians' principle that if something is said
often and emphatically enough it must be accepted as true; but his text contains more
assertion than evidence. However, the summary of pp. 131-2 is pretty fair: there is no
doubt that abu Ma'shar knew and used his Aristotle well, but he was much more
eclectic and philosophically muddled than Lemay allows.

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in educated Arab circles the mixture of Aristotelianism and Neo­

Platonism common in the commentators such as Proclus - in some
historical ways as important as the great philosophers themselves, just
as Cicero with his De Officiis is one of the most influential of ancient
'philosophers' - formed the intellectual background to all scientific
and philosophical thinking; and both late Aristotelianism and Neo­
Platonism were influenced by and mingled with Stoicism and Neo-
Pythagoreanism. So that sifting out of all this what is 'the philosophy'
of a given author, unless he himself provides clear and unambiguous
guidelines, is virtually impossible. Abu Ma'shar, at least in his
astrological works, provides no such guidance, and his attributions to
sources are not always to be trusted. The basic justification of
astrology by reference to Aristotle's theory (in the Physics and the De
Generatione et Corruptione) that all sublunar change is caused by
motions in the heavens, could hardly be cited as evidence of great
knowledge of Aristotle - a reading of al-Kindi would be enough. In an
age of aids to teaching and study such as the epitomes and the
florilegia much of Aristotle became the commonplaces of the schools,
Arabic as well as Latin, and some of these schoolbooks may have
existed in Greek first. A somewhat later but fairly representative
example of such a book, the thirteenth century Auctoritates Aristotelis'05
quite baldly states the doctrine we are interested in, citing the De gen.
et corrup., (336-32): 'The movement of the sun and the other planets in
an oblique circle is the cause of the generation and corruption of lower
things.' The most one can say of the earlier Arabic astrology is that its
background was that common Greek philosophical mixture of the age
of the great commentators, and that Abu Ma'shar was at least
consciously aware of the arguments derivable from Aristotle's Physics,
De caelo, etc., and may have been the first, as Duhem says, to put them
together.
He was born in 787 and died almost a centenarian in 886. The town
of Balkh, in Khurasan, contained 'communities of Jews, Nestorians,
Manichaeans, Buddhists and Hindus, as well as Zoroastrians'105 - a
106107
mixture of Greek, Hebrew, Indian and Persian traditions, all found in
his works. His most important astrological works were the Flores
Astrologiae, a collection of brief, useful hints and aphorisms as a sort of
rough guide to do-it-yourself interpretation, translated by John of
Seville; the 'Little Introduction' translated by Adelard of Bath; the De
revolutiontbus nativitatum ;'07 translated by both John of Seville and

105 Jacqueline Hamesse, Les Auctoritates Aristotelis, Philosophes Medievaux, XVII

(Louvain/Paris, 1974).
106 D. Pingree, 'Abu Ma'shar', in Diet, of Scientific Biography, I (New York, 1970).
107 Greek text (of the tenth century) ed. D. Pingree (Leipzig, 1968).

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Hermann of Carinthia in the first half of the twelfth century. There

were many other minor works including two on 'elections' and a (lost)
book of Tables.
Such books of tables of positions and rising times of heavenly
bodies and signs were vitally important. Accurate observation was
always difficult and, to labour a point already made, there were no
clocks, no chronometers. The time might be fairly accurately learned
from a clear sky by observation with an astrolabe, but the construction
of an astrological chart, or 'figure', had to be done by finding the
horoscope (the ascendant) and the positions of the planets from the
tables, and working out the divisions of the twelve mundane houses,
to say nothing of caput and cauda and the mansions of the moon. The
accuracy of the tables depended not only on the expertise of the
astronomer who constructed them but on the accuracy of copyists also;
and the correctness of the figure on the competence and exactness of
the astrologer setting it up. It was no easy task. An educated doctor of
the thirteenth century, Robert le Febvre, using tables made by Henri
Bate of Malines, nevertheless made a number of mistakes in his
calculations.108 What might not a half-educated quack do? Important
fixed stars were included in these tables, for at least two reasons. First,
those rising with a sign of the zodiac, the paranatellonta, might be
observable though the sign itself was not. Second, the Arabs far more
than the Greeks (or modern astrologers) made use of the stars
associated not only with signs but even with degrees of signs in their
interpretations. For example, one is warned in the Flores (fol. 64 of the
1488 Venice edition) to watch out that the Lord of the Year is not
associated with any of a list of twenty-odd stars, each associated with
one of the planets, beginning with two 'in the head of Aries' and
ending with one in Pisces.
That the 'fixed stars' were not fixed, but moving - hence the long­
term change in the position of the equinox, the 'first point of Aries',
against their background - had been known from the time of
Hipparchus, and the precession of the equinoxes given quantitative
meaning in the Almagest. There were two schools of thought: that the
equinoxes would eventually arrive back where they started after 36,000
years; or the 'trepidation' theory, that they first moved one way for a
while and then moved back again, and so on. Ptolemy belonged to the
first (correct) school, and worked out the amount of precession. His
theory became the normal teaching of the Alexandrians. Origen refers
to precession in his arguments against astrology (see p. 54 above) and
mentions a ninth sphere outside the eighth (that of the fixed stars) to

108 See Emmanuel Poulle, 'Astrologie et tables astronomiques au XHIe siecle: Robert le
Febvre et les tables de Malines', in Bulletin Philologique et Historique, (1964), pp. 793-831.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

account for that motion; this ninth sphere must be the sphere of the
ecliptic poles in the planetary hypotheses of Ptolemy. But Theon of
Alexandria in the fifth century says that 'the ancient astrologi' thought
it oscillated through eight degrees, what is later called motus accessus et
recessus, 'a forward and backward movement', trepidation. Proclus
refers to both theories. Ptolemy's view of precession became the
accepted theory of Muslim and Christian astronomers in the Middle
Ages, with 36,000 years the accepted period for the 'Great Year', with
the suggestion of the obviously theologically difficult idea that
everything would then be exactly as it had been before. The Indians,
at least after the fifth century, seem to have preferred the trepidation
theory, and since they knew that the equinoxes had moved more than
25° since ancient times, they allotted various values to the scope of the
oscillation, 27° being common. Some writers managed to include both
theories, which led to yet another, a tenth sphere, to account for the
two movements, as in the Alfonsine Tables.109
It has been mentioned that medieval tables gave the positions of
caput and cauda draconis, the ascending and descending nodes of the
moon (see also pp. 126-7 above) along with those of the planets. By the
time astrology passed in its Arabic dress to the western schools, caput
and cauda had become 'bodies' treated as planets, given their
exaltations and so on, and their periods of influence, as we shall see.
They were known in late Greek astrology,110 and so passed into the
tradition, emerging in Jewish as well as Islamic writers.111112 Such
'materialisation' of the lunar nodes, mere points of the moon's
crossing on the ecliptic, was quite contrary to the letter and spirit of
Ptolemy; but it passed for a while into the western tradition, and the
nodes are still important to some astrologers though not treated as
planets as they certainly were in and after the twelfth century.
Alcabitius, for example, says of caput dragonis:"2 'caput dragonis is
masculine. Likewise it is beneficent and its nature is compounded of
the natures of Jupiter and Venus. And it signifies kingly power and
fortune and (worldly) substance. And some have said that its nature is
to augment, because when it is with indicators of fortune it increases
the fortune, and when it is with bad indicators it increases their
badness.' And then cauda is described as the opposite.
Like the head and tail of the dragon the lunar mansions, which have
been mentioned several times before, were ancient and Babylonian,

109 See P. Duhem, Le Systeme du Monde, II (Paris, 1914) 190ff.

110 See for example Neugebauer and van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes, pp. 143f and 146f.
111 See the interesting Chapter 3 of A. Sharf's The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo
(Warminster, 1976).
112 MS Ashmole 158 (Bodleian Library, Oxford) f. 12v (= 1512 Venice edn).

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

known to Greek astrologers but never of importance to them. They

were assimilated into Indian astrology and probably thence into
Islamic, and it is reasonable to suppose that this ancient lunar zodiac
became important to Muslim (and also to the Jews) for the same reason
that Babylon produced it in the first place: all have or had the Semitic
lunar calendar. There is no simple commensurate way of marrying the
times measured by the moon's motions and those measured by the
sun's in one calendar. The sun gives us a year fairly clearly marked in
temperate regions by the seasons, and especially by the midwinter
and midsummer solstices and the two equinoxes. The moon provides
the month, from new moon to new moon. Alas, neither year nor
month is made up of a whole number of days; nor are there a whole
number of months in a year. So some adjustments must be made.
Those with solar calendars must have leap years or the equivalent to
give the year a whole number of days, and must work with a fictional
month with which the moon gets out of step. Those with lunar
calendars fix the number of months in a year - twelve gives a year of
354 days - and calculate by new moons like the Jews and Muslim, and
then the sun and the seasons get out of step. This means that the
Islamic year is different from and shorter than the Christian one;
though the date of the greatest Christian feast, Easter, is still calculated
by the lunar calendar. Dividing the lunar month has been done in
various ways, the two commonest being into four parts and into three.
The four parts familiar to us are the weeks of the twenty-eight day
month. The three are the nine-day periods known from the eighth
century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod (Works and Days, 810) and perhaps
linguistically preserved in the Latin nundinae, market days, and
nones.113 The old lunar mansions, listed in many Arabic authors and in
Indian and Syrian works, were the twenty-seven or twenty-eight
star-groups, or asterisms, through which the moon passed in a
synodic month of about 27V2 days. Their chief use originally, in India,
was for time measurement, length of time being measured by the
moon's path against the stars and not by its phases. Instead of saying,
'I did such and such two days after the first quarter,' or whatever, one
said, 'I did it when the moon was at so-and-so', naming one of the
mansions.114 They thus had a similar time-reckoning origin to that of
the decans and the zodiac itself. Although they were of some
significance in Hindu and, to a less extent, in Arabic astrology, the

113 It makes sense to assume that the Kalends, the day of 'calling (the order of the days)'
was the day of the priestly announcement of the new moon, the Nones were originally
nine days later, and the Ides (the days of the moon's light - i.e. the full moon) were as
always nine days after the Nones; all suggesting an original lunar calendar.
114 R. Gleadow, The Origin of the Zodiac, pp. 142f.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

difficulty of fitting them properly into the Greek solar astrology meant
that they never really became part of the Western system.115
The twenty-seven of the lunar mansions suggests a link with the
'ninths', novenarii in the Latin. Al-Biruni explicitly says that they were
Indian116 in a section headed Al-nuhbahr: 'The Hindus regard the ninth
part of a sign - 3°20' - which they call nuvanshaka, as very important.
When a planet is in its own domicile and ninth, that ninth is called
bargutan or most important. The table shows the ninths of all the
signs; the lords of the ninths are the lords of the signs concerned ...
This is an entirely Hindu method on which we are all argeed. My
friends have altered the order of the lords of the ninths and have
arranged them in the order of the spheres, but it is better that we
abstain from using it.' This view of their Hindu origin is also, much
earlier, that of Abu Ma'shar. Writing of 'divisions' in the De rev. nativ.
Ill, c.9, he says: 'The division we have just described is used by the
Babylonians and the Persians and the Egyptians; but the Indians and
their neighbours seeing that in one division different things happen
to men, do not calculate the division according to terms as the others
do, but they calculate according to the ninths (to vounaxpaTEi;) so
that the interpretations come out more accurately.' And he adds that
'that word in the language of the Indians means "ninth", and it is of
200' or three and a third degrees; then there will be in each sign nine
ninths, of which each has its proper ruler.' Abu Ma'shar then says that
he has explained more exactly about ninths in his Introductorium; as
indeed he did,117 writing of the novenae which are called noubhairat by
those 'who after dividing the signs into threes to which they allocate
the lords of the trigons, at once divide each sign into nine parts and
measure out three degrees and a third to each part.' And he explains
the allocation of their lordships, e.g. in Aries the first ninth belongs to
Mars, the second to Venus, the third to Mercury, 'and so on in order
until the ninth Jupiter gains as lord.' The four trigons begin the
lordships of the ninths with appropriate planets, 'as the fiery trigon
has Mars first; the earthly, Saturn; the airy, Venus; and the watery, the
moon.' But some astrologers distribute the lordships according to the
order of the spheres. All of which gives a consistent picture, and

115 In 1977, Sybil Leek published Moon Signs: Lunar Astrology (London), a kind of
feminist counterblast to sun-sign masculinity. It begins: 'Sun-sign astrology is all
moonshine'. The book is however concerned with the moon's position in the zodiacal
signs from Aries to Pisces, with traditional detail of its power in each and in the houses,
and its aspects and so on, all from the same old tradition. There is of course a brief
chapter on the head and tail of the dragon, and it is all intended to make up for lack of
attention to the moon by most astrologers.
116 Wright's trans. §455.
117 In Chapter 14 of Book 5; the 1489 edition is quoted but it is the same in later
editions.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

clearly the Arabs thought the ninths came from India.

But did they, originally? As to the name, Pingree118 says the Arabic
nawbahrah is the same as the Pahlavi no bahr or navamsa, and that this
is the doctrina partium novenaariarum Indicarum added by the Persians
at the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. Now
chapter 14 of Abu Ma'shar's Introductorium maius is followed by a
chapter de duodenariis signorum, 'on the twelfths of the signs'. The
Indians not only had navamsas, ninths, but dvadasamsas, twelfths.
These are, of course, the 21/2° dodecatemoria familiar from Manilius on.
This at least suggests that both ninths and twelfths came to the
Indians from the Greeks. We have seen (pp. 121ff above) that among
the muddle about liturgi, 'ministers', Firmicus had three liturgi per
decan, which meant that each was three and a third degrees, exactly a
ninth! It could be, and is perhaps most likely, that the ninths were
originally Babylonian (they look lunar) and they edged into the Greek
tradition, to get sideways into Firmicus, who would have accepted
them even if he hadn't understood them, and possibly through the
Greeks or probably independently were taken into the much more
lunar Indian tradition.
Even less Greek-looking are the ferdariae. The Latin form is
variously spelt ferd-, fard-, fred- and even fridariae (some modern
astrologers refer to 'the fridaries'). The Greek is also variable in form
and declension; and both Greek and Latin are clearly from the Arabic
fardar, fardariya (the plurals are fardarat and fardariyat). Bouche-
Leclercq says119 Saumaise suggested that the word was from the Greek
TTEpioSopiov, periodorion, 'a little period', but the word is unknown
and looks wrong. On the other hand, TTEpioSoq and TTspioSiov,
periodos and periodion, 'a period' and 'a little period' are known and
could correspond to (but perhaps could not become, philologically) the
fadar and the fardariya which are indeed great and smaller periods.
They belong to a section of astrology always entitled 'On the divisions
of times'. These divisions range from world-periods running to
billions of years, to months and days in the lives of individuals. Abu
Ma'shar's lost work, 'The Thousands', was on this subject of the
divisions of times.120 It belongs to the Islamic tradition of Masha'allah
and those Arab astrologers influenced by the Indians, and Abu
Ma'shar's source was probably Arabic and not ancient and Persian as
he claims. The book is concerned with 'the problem of reconstructing

118 Dorotheus, Carmen, praefatio p. xvi.

119 L'Astrologie Grecque, pp. 491ff.
120 See D. Pingree, The Thousands of Abu Ma'shar (London, 1968), from which (pp. 58ff)
the quotations in this paragraph are taken.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

past and predicting future historical events' (Pingree, p. 58), and

although his methods are from Persian, Sasanian astrology 'their roots
lie in methods of calculating continuous astrological influence upon a
native in Greek genethlialogy', and are probably ultimately derived
from the Greek of Hellenistic times.
For Abu Ma'shar, there are four sorts of fardarat, only the last of
which really concerns late medieval astrology. The 'mighty Fardar' is a
period of 360 solar years. The big fardar is 78 years, shared out among
the twelve signs, 12 for Aries, 11 for Taurus, 10 for Gemini and so on
down to one for Pisces. The middle fardar is 75 years; each middle
fardar is ruled by one of the planets (planets taken to include the lunar
nodes) in the order, round the zodiac, of their exaltations, so that the
first is taken by the sun, exalted in Aries; the second by the moon,
exalted in Taurus; the third by caput dragonis, exalted in Gemini, and
so on - the pairs, planet and exaltation, being: Jupiter/Cancer;
Mercury/Virgo; Satum/Libra; cauda dragoms/Sagittarius; Mars/Capricom
and Venus/Pisces. The small fardar is also 75 years, which is divided
into nine fardariyat and distributed to the nine 'planets' according to
the same order of exaltations, Pingree says. But this is not in fact the
order given by Abu Ma'shar in the De rev. nativ. IV, though he
mentions it elsewhere as a method used by 'some astrologers'. The
order in which Abu Ma'shar gives the ferdariae to the planets and
nodes, and the periods he gives to them, are as follows: the first
ferdaria, of ten years, to the sun; to Venus, the second, of eight years;
to Mercury, thirteen; to the moon, nine; to Saturn, eleven; to Jupiter,
twelve; to Mars, seven; to caput, three and to cauda two - a total of
seventy-five. These periods seem to bear no relation to any other set of
periods in Greek astrology and look neat enough to be arbitrary -
seven to thirteen years for the planets and five to the nodes to make
up the total. Abu Ma'shar says that caput and cauda follow the seventy
years of the planets 'because they have no houses' and the others are
in the order they are according to their dignities in the twelve signs;
but the nodes do have houses, and no such relationship of dignities is
discernible elsewhere. It is an odd but deliberate order - the ferdariae
are explicitly called 'first, second' and so on by Abu Ma'shar.
This might be a convenient place to list for comparison the various
orders of planets we have come across, and one or two more.

Old Babylonian (pre-fifth century B.C.): Moon, Sun, Jupiter,

Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars.
Later Babylonian: Moon, Sun, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn,
Jupiter.
'Egyptian': Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
Mithraic: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

Chaldaean = Greek (astronomical): Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun,

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
Greek horoscopes: Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus,
Mercury.
Hindu: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn
(= week days).
Fardarat: Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Mars, Venus.
ferdariae: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.

The order of the Fardarat is the order according to the planets'

exaltations. The last, that of the ferdariae, is also the order given by
al-Biruni for those divisions, with the same periods as Abu Ma'shar.121
It was obviously received into Latin astrology and fixed, since it is
quoted by Pico della Mirandola in his Adversus Astrologiam.122
There is a little evidence that all of this may be Greek in origin.
Ptolemy only gives periods which he regards as 'according to nature'
(Tetr. IV.10; see pp. 91ff above), that is, in years of life, four to the
moon, ten (the commentator says that this is half its period because of
its double nature) to Mercury, eight to Venus, nineteen to the sun,
fifteen to Mars, twelve to Jupiter and the rest to Saturn. This is to take
the planets in their astronomical, Chaldaean order. In the early fifth
century Hephaistion of Thebes123 repeats Ptolemy's list, but then goes
on to another 'division of times' which he attributes to 'some of the
ancient Egyptians'. He begins with a period of seventy-five years,
which is then divided equally among the seven planets, giving each
ten years nine months. Each planet's period of 129 months is then
divided again among the planets according to Ptolemy's 'natural'
division, but giving thirty months to Saturn (naturally!) and then
twenty-five to the moon to make up the 129, with each planet coming
first in its own group of 129. Within each of these secondary, shorter
periods, the days are then allocated to the planets in a more
complicated way. The number of months of each planet is converted
into days, and that figure is divided by 129 to give a figure by which
the planetary month-number is then multiplied to give the number of
days in this last subdivision. So for example, Saturn's thirty months is
converted to 913 days; that divided by 129 gives 7 as the nearest whole
number; so Saturn has 7 X 30, or 210 days, Jupiter 7 x 12, 84 days,
Mars 7 X 15, or 105 days and so on. Coming to Jupiter's period of
twelve months, 365 days divided by 129 gives 2%: so Jupiter has
2% X 12 or 34 days, Saturn 2% X 30, or 85 days, and so on. Now the

121 Wright, §§38-9.

122 Book VII, c.6 (ed. Garin, p. 196).
123 D. Pingree's edition (2 vols, Leipzig, 1973 and 1974); see 1.2, 29.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

complication is typical: the 75-year period is divided into 7 equal

periods of years; each of these into unequal periods of months, and
each of these into unequal but related periods of days; and all these
periods are allocated to the planets. The result is that any given day
could be under the primary influence of one planet, the secondary
influence of another, and the tertiary influence of another, each
modifying the other influences. There is a similar complication in Abu
Ma'shar, who allocates each fardariya again in smaller periods to each
of the planets. Of course, the more variables to be taken into account
in judging a figure, the greater the chance of — and excuse for — error;
but it was probably most of all a love of complexity and obscurity for
their own sakes which led to such subdivisions, so sensibly avoided
by Ptolemy. Two more small pieces of evidence might be added to the
similarities in structure and ideas between late Greek divisions of
times and Abu Ma'shar. First, a Byzantine astrologer giving very
simple rules for finding the planet of the day just by counting from a
particular date, gives the seven planets in the same ferdariae order;124
and second, the first century A.D. Neo-Pythagorean wonder-worker
and astrologer Apollonius of Tyana used the same order in his book
'On Planets'.125
It is very unlikely that Abu Ma'shar invented any of this; and his
immediate sources were surely derived from Indian and Persian
works, themselves heavily dependent on the Greeks. The system of
Abu Ma'shar and other Arabic astrologers seems to be an amalgam of
older traditions, and this it was that passed into Latin astrology. It was
really late Greek astrology, from the first four or five centuries of our
era, coloured by its passage through Persian and, to a lesser extent,
Indian hands, which most filled the minds of the medieval astrologers,
and only rather less the restrained art of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos. Not
only were they attracted by all the new and strange Arabic terms -
they revelled in hylegs rather than 'prorogators' and so forth - and also
by the fashionable names, but the differences in emphasis may have
made the Arabs' astrology more exciting. In Greek astrology, from
Dorotheus on, the answering of questions became more important
than the analysis of character from a birth chart, the determinations of
'times', especially the length of life, more important than anything
else. To some extent this was even true of Ptolemy, despite his
avoidance of what he regarded as unnatural refinements, and his
'scientific' approach: he spends much time, and goes into detail, with
examples, on the aphetic places and the length of life. And Arabs too

124 See CCAG, X, Appendix, under Cod. 1265, fol. 3.

125 So Ullmann, op. cit. (note 101 above) 346, note 2.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

were interested in answering questions, such as 'When will be the

best time to start on such and such - a journey, say, or some
enterprise?' Or conversely, given the time and place of such a
'beginning', 'Will it have a good or bad outcome?' Three aspects of
this sort of practice, still common enough in contemporary astrology,
might be dealt with briefly here. They are progressions, elections and
transits, the last two being really parts of the first. All of them are
found in Greek astrologers, and were introduced to the Latin West
through the Arabs.
A progressed chart is one in which there has been a 'revolution of
the nativity': the elements of the chart - the planets, etc., and the
Ascendant and the Medium caeli - are turned round through an angle
corresponding in some way to the length of time from birth to the date
for which prognostication is required, and then from that new chart's
interpretation and from comparison with the natal chart, information
is obtained about the subject now or in the immediate or distant
future. If a person should wish to know whether the next year would
be prosperous or the opposite, or whether next Thursday would be a
good day for some particular act, it would not be very helpful simply
to draw up a chart of the positions of the heavenly bodies for the
beginning of the year or for next Thursday. Such a chart would bear
simply a chronological and universal relation to the person concerned.
In a progression, all really depends on and is derived from the natal
chart, the person's own beginning. So now the question is, how far
round to turn the natal chart to represent the passage of time between
the subject's birth and the time under consideration? This clearly
suggests that one of the commonest forms of enquiry will concern the
subject's length of life: when is death to be expected? And also, what
kind of death? In slightly more sinister vein, the enquiry might
concern someone else's death; even the ruler's - which was of course a
question rulers discouraged others from asking!
This sort of prognostication is a special kind of progression called a
'direction'. A point of the zodiac A is directed to another point B, and
the number of degrees travelled to get from A to B is then converted
into time, years, according to some rules. When the enquiry concerns
length of life, A is the position of the prorogator or hyleg (the common
Latin form of the Arabic haylaj). So first one has to find the aphetic
place, the place of the prorogator. That might be the Ascendant or the
Medium caeli, or the beginning of one of the houses - the tenth,
seventh and ninth begin favoured. The planet in that place at the
moment of birth is the dominus vitae, the lord of life, or the dimissor,
prorogator, or hyleg, and is also called, from the Arabic again, the
alcohden. The point from which the prorogator starts is the aphetic
point, where life is 'unloosed' (the meaning of the Greek). Next we

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have to see how far it has to go, through what influences, until it
meets with the anairetic point, the point of destruction. Then the
number of degrees round the zodiac it has traversed must be
converted into time as years and months and even days. This is the
complicated procedure described in detail by Ptolemy in Book III.10 of
the Tetrabiblos and by Dorotheus and then by most late Greek
astrologers. The time-conversion involved first converting arcs of the
zodiac, the ecliptic, into arcs of the equator; or in other words degrees
of oblique ascension into degrees of right ascension. This process is
described in the Tetrabiblos but needs the tables in the Almagest (II.8)
for the calculations.
Other Greek astrologers than Ptolemy also spent much time on
katarchai, 'beginnings'. Given that something began at such a time,
what are its prospects? Or conversely, and these enquiries are
'elections', given that such and such an enterprise is to be undertaken,
when will be the best time to start? This latter kind of enquiry became
increasingly common in the courts of Renaissance princes and we shall
see something of them in the next chapter. Both these problems
require a turning of a natal or other 'beginning' chart - called a radical
chart - that is, a progression. The commonest formula among modern
astrologers for measuring the time round the zodiac is to take 'a day
for a year': that is, to calculate the progressed chart for a date as many
days ahead of the original birth date as the number of years the
subject has lived. The new sidereal time is calculated to give the new
Ascendant, Medium caeli and houses. This seems curiously arbitrary,
but those modem astrologers who use the method simply say that it
works, though no one knows why. Ptolemy might have been happier
with what looks more like his 'natural' methods, counting 13V2 days as
a year, the figure being arrived at by dividing the year by the sidereal
month, according to Edward Lyndoe.126 The Greeks and the Arabs
were just as arbitrary and confusing in their methods. One ancient
way was to count each degree of right ascension as equivalent to one
year of life; this is what Ptolemy describes in Tetr. III.10, after rejecting
as simplistic and random the idea of simply taking into account the
risings of each degree of the ecliptic. Abu Ma'shar describes the matter
differently in the opening chapter of the De rev. nativ.: 'The sun being
in a certain house at the moment of birth, and moving in the zodiac
and passing through 360°, and returning through 365 and a bit days,
the one born is then one year old and the second year begins. On the
second return, the third year begins, and so on. So in the revolution of
the year we must set up the Ascendant and construct the twelve

126 Everyman's Astrology, rev. edn (London, 1970) 85ff. He says the method was invented
by the German astrologer E. H. Troinski in 1951.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

houses and set out the positions of the planets. For the Ascendants
change in the revolutions of the times, as do the positions of the
planets. The radical Ascendant and planets show us the first year, and
then the second house signifies the second year, and the third house
the third year, and the fourth house the fourth year and so on. Since
the sign of the revolution and the Ascendant of the revolution and the
houses of the planets all change, the things which happen to men
differ. So Abu Ma shar is taking houses, or signs, since tottoc;, topos is
ambiguous, as years, so that once round the zodiac is twelve years. He
says so explicitly in II.3, where he is following Dorotheus Book IV: Tn
the revolution of the years you must look at the radical Ascendant and
reckon each sign as one year, and where you arrive at, that is the sign
of the revolution; and the lord of that sign is the chronocrator which is
called in Persian salchodaes.' Then that sign and the radical Ascendant
are compared in every possible way, including all that affects their
decans, their terms, their ninth parts and even their degrees. In Book
VIII of his Introductorium Abu Ma'shar lists no fewer than 97 degrees
of special significance.
In the course of turning the radical chart to its progressed position,
the planets, caput and cauda and so on will all be carried round, and
thus pass through positions occupied in the radical chart by others.
These entries into others' positions, ettepPooek;, 'entries upon', in the
Greek and ingressus or ingressiones in the Latin, are transits, which are
thus consequences and parts of a progression. These transits have the
merit of being exactly calculable and having a sort of reality, since in a
given period one planet will naturally pass through places in the
zodiac previously occupied by another; so they remain of importance
in all later theories of progressions. They are dealt with by Dorotheus
in Book IV of the Carmen Astrologicum, 186-235 (see also the Greek at
Pingree, pp. 379ff). Ptolemy has a mention of them in Tetr. IV.10:127
'We must also pay attention to the ingresses which are made to the
places of the times ... particularly to the ingresses of Saturn to the
general places of the times, and to those of Jupiter to the places of the
year', and so on. Abu Ma'shar at the beginning of Book V of De rev.
nativ., 'On the transits of the planets,' says: 'The entry of the planets,
in the revolution of the years, upon their radical places and the radical
places of the others, have certain ineffable128 significations of good and
evil consequences. Therefore we must look at their places. For a planet
comes back many times in the revolution of the year to its own radical

127 Robbins, 452-3. The footnote is surely wrong, and the interpretation there given
makes no sense of the passage.
128 The word in Greek is dnroppqrouq; which can mean 'unspeakable, ineffable', or
'secret, esoteric', or of course, all of these.

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degree and many times to its sign, if not actually to the degree. When
in the revolution of the year it comes back to the degree in which it
was in the radical chart, or into the term in which it was, then is
significance will be complete (or: perfect); and if the planet in the
revolution of the time is in a certain sign, and then recurs in its radical
place, this too will have its signification. When it comes back into the
place of another planet, it should be examined in three ways.' First one
has to mix the significations of the two planets, or the same planet at
different times and therefore differently aspected and so on. Second,
one must balance the characters of the two, whether they are
beneficent or the opposite, and whether in good or evil places. And
third, 'one must look at the sign in which the planet was in the radical
chart and treat it as the Ascendant and interpret accordingly.'
On the difficult and vexed topic of house division discussion is
again postponed until the next chapter, since it was after the
Renaissance that the modern methods and positions were established.
The problem is fairly easily stated. The houses - the mundane houses,
to give them their proper name, to distinguish them from the
planetary houses, for example - are the framework within which the
zodiac and all the stars and planets revolve.129 Twelve in number from
antiquity, the first house is the house of the Ascendant; houses I to VI
are beneath the horizon, with the signs which are rising in turn; VII to
XII are above the horizon, containing the signs moving round east to
west to the setting point. Now these are in effect 30° divisions of the
ecliptic, along which lies the zodiac circle of the twelve signs, turning
once every twenty-four hours. Since the ecliptic is inclined to the
equator, at any latitude between the equator and the Arctic (or
Anarctic) circle the signs will take unequal lengths of time to rise and
set. These unequal periods are listed in tables of 'rising times' for
given, different latitudes, or 'climes' (climata) as the Greeks called
them.130 Now the problem of house division is this: two points, the
Ascendant and the setting point, are fixed since they are the points
where some point of the zodiac is rising above and another is setting
beneath the horizon, which of course varies with the latitude. So three
circles are involved, the equator, the ecliptic and the horizon, each
with its own poles. To divide any of these one can draw lines, great
circles, through the poles - longitudinal lines. One must run through
the Ascendant to give the first house, and one through the setting
point to give the seventh. But what about the five in between, to give
the six houses above the horizon and the six below? By what rule does

129 See pp. 25ff above.

130 See Neugebauer and van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes, in the list of terms under
climata.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

one draw those? And which reference system of the three is the one to
use? If any, indeed, for one can use none of those three, but instead
divide the Prime Vertical, the circle through the observer's zenith and
the east and west points of the horizon. Obviously any set of
longitudinal divisions will cut all three circles, equator, ecliptic and
horizon; and houses are divisions of the ecliptic. Their beginnings, or
cusps, have some significance, and it also matters a good deal in
which house planets find themselves. So since different systems of
house division may alter the locations of planets in the houses,
consistency at least if not uniformity of practice would seem to be
desirable. Unfortunately there is not nor has there ever been a
universally accepted method of house division.
The ancient and medieval world was as confused over the question
as the present. To add to the confusion, Vettius Valens in Book II
calculates his houses not from the Ascendant but from the Lot of
Fortune, and some of the horoscopes he quotes are constructed in this
way; in which odd practice he appears to have been following
Critodemus. Ptolemy gives no indication of how to make the division,
though he refers to the houses as quite understood, and he puts the
cusp of the first house five degrees before the Ascendant. A number of
ancient and medieval astrologers do the same, including Rhetorius,
according to the horoscope of 428 A.D. quoted by Neugebauer and van
Hoesen;131 this horoscope is a little curious, in that it has an unequal
division of the second and fourth quadrants (houses IV to VI and
houses X to XII) but equal division of the other two. Al-Biruni seems
to have the same five 'dead' degrees at the beginning of the house;
and his method of determining house division on the astrolabe
produces unequal houses (Wright, p. 205): 'Place the degree of the
ascendant on the east horizon, the point of the ecliptic on the west
horizon is the cusp of the seventh house. Then look at the meridian;
what has arrived there is the sign and cusp of the tenth house (the
Medium caeli). If what you find is also the tenth sign from the
ascendant, the angles are erect.' This means that the quadrants are 90°
divisions. 'When they (sc. the angles) are succedent, the point
indicated on the astrolabe will be in the eleventh sign from the
ascendant, although it must be written down as the cusp of the tenth
house. E.g. if the cusp is in Aquarius, the house will be formed of
Aquarius and so many degrees of Pisces, while if the cusp is in the
ninth sign, the angles are cadent, and the house is formed of Aquarius
and so many degrees of Capricornus.' Alcabitius also has unequal
houses, as appears from his Introductorium:™2 'Now that with God's

Ibid., p. 138; using CCAG, VII.1, pp. 221ff.

132 Bologna, 1473, in the chapter De esse zodiaci accidentali.

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help we have been through the essential nature of the zodiac, let us
now go over the accidental nature also. For the zodiac is every hour
figured thus: it is divided into four parts by the equator and the
meridian, and each quadrant is divided into three unequal parts
according to the ascension times of the ascending sign. In this way the
circle is divided into twelve parts which are called houses. They are
also called cusps. This process is set out in Achaziz, that is, the Book of
the Course of the Stars. Now the beginning of the division is the
Ascendant, the start of which is on the equator in the east.' The book
he refers to has not survived. So, there were ways of constructing
mundane houses with unequal divisions, and there seems to be little
evidence in late Greek or medieval astrology for much use of a simple
'equal house system', despite the statement of Koch and Knappich133
that it was commonly used because it demanded no mathematics, and
the belief of many modern astrologers (among whom it is the
commonest method used) that it was the most ancient method.
The differences in the ways of calculating the division of the ecliptic
into the mundane houses are typical of the variability which character­
izes the art at every stage of its history. At no point is there a clear
body of accepted learning with generally acknowledged rules. The
reasons for this are no doubt many. Astrologers might claim, as many
have, that in a subject so vast, with so many - almost countless -
influences at play, and such complexity of people and things influenced,
certainty is never possible and differences of method and interpreta­
tion are inevitable. There is certainly no simple and clear description
possible of Tate Greek astrology', only a collage of pieces of pictures,
sometimes with obvious connections, but often seemingly uncon­
nected. The same is true of the body of astrology possessed by the
Western schools in the thirteenth century. What was passed on to
them by the Arabs was essentially late Greek astrology. It is very
difficult to determine the contributions to the tradition actually made
by the Arabic astrologers. One way might be to look at modem
astrological books and sift out what clearly came from the Arabs. But
examination of a number of textbooks and dictionaries yields little or
nothing,134 especially if one removes from the haul Arabic names for
older, Greek ideas. It seems likely that whatever their origins and their
connections with Greek astrology, the 'ninths' and the lunar mansions

133 Walter Koch and Wilhelm Knappich, Horoskop und Himmelshauser, Teil 1 (Goppingen,
1959) 49.
134 Besides M. E. Hone's textbook, already used several times, there were considered:
John and Peter Filbey, Astronomy for Astrologers (1984); H. E. Wedeck, Dictionary of
Astrology (1973); J. Mayo, Teach Yourself Astrology (1964); Sepharial, A New Dictionary of
Astrology (1931); Charles E. O. Carter, Principles of Astrology (1925); Maurice Wemyss,
The Wheel of Life, 5 vols (n.d.; late 1920s); and older works by Alan Leo.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

were introduced (though not invented) by the Arabs; and the

emphasis on certain aspects of astrology rather than others was altered
to some extent, though the Latin astrologers followed their own needs
and interests too. The liberal use of Arabic terminology in the early
years was restricted as acquaintance wth the Greek grew in the
thirteenth century. Nevertheless it remains true that the transmission
of that whole body of astrological lore which was developed from
Greek times through the Middle East and India, was the work of the
Arab scholars and their translators; and that by the thirteenth century
it was all in the hands of Western astrologers in Latin for the first time
in some seven centuries. It is however most important to remember
that this astrology was received at the same time as and as an integral
part of a whole scientific corpus, including the astronomy of the
Almagest. We shall return to this point at the end of the chapter, for it
may be that the seeds of the apparent death of astrology in the late
seventeenth century were contained in the very movement which gave
it its second birth.
Those who read and assimilated this newly received science,
including astrologia, were mostly churchmen; not priests necessarily,
though many were, but at least in minor orders.135 They were clerici,
'clerics'. Our words 'clergy' and 'clerk' are both derived from this same
Latin word, since in the Middle Ages all clerks were clergy: 'clerical'
still preserves both senses. Almost all medieval scholars were church­
men; in the long line of Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages the
only layman was the Irishman Erigena in the ninth century. Before the
twelfth century, most learned clerics were monks, but by the time the
city and cathedral schools had grown and been formalized and the
universities begun in the thirteenth century, most were secular clergy
or belonged to one of the two new orders of friars, the Franciscans or
the Dominicans. So it was the Church, in a sense, which received and
accepted the new science, including astrology. Why was not astrology
rejected as it had been in late antiquity?
In the earlier centuries the Church was fighting superstition and
idolatry, and concerned to differentiate its beliefs and practices from
the religion and, until and except for St Augustine, the philosophy of
the pagan world about it. By the thirteenth century the ancient and
superstitious practices of ordinary folk had been absorbed into
Christian patterns of living, and differences very much blurred, as
some intelligent contemporaries saw and deplored. Paganism had
officially disappeared; society was Christian. Of course, these divi­

135 There are seven orders: the first four, from ostiarius to acolyte, are the minor orders
and they were preliminary grades as it were, not subject to all the rules, including
celibacy, applicable to the three major holy orders of subdeacon, deacon and priest.

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sions are simplistic and somewhat unreal. Paganism and Christianity

had lived together in the fourth and fifth centuries, often in the same
individual's life and mind. Paganism only disappeared by vanishing
into Christianity. The antique gods survived not only in the heavens
but as literary figures, and, as both, as art forms — of this there will be
more to say when we come to the Renaissance. But at least in the
thirteenth century the Church did not feel separated from a secular
world of a different sort: it was the world. Nor was it called upon to
cope with problems like those of late antiquity, which had been a
world of turmoil, of transition, in which nothing appeared firm or
unalterable save the Church itself. The western world of the high
Middle Ages was, or appeared to be, a firmly established Christian
world: Christendom, in which men did not need to seek refuge in
ideas of Fortune or in astrological Fate, since their safe home was the
Church.
For the centuries of the growth of this Christendom the philoso­
phical background of the West was Augustinian and hence Neo-
Platonist. The Platonic tradition was challenged by the discovery of
Aristotle in the twelfth century. For the early Middle Ages, Plato and
Aristotle were only the revered names of the two great ancient
philosophers. Apart from the minor logical works of Aristotle, the
writings of neither were directly known. The story of the absorption of
Aristotle by the western schools does not belong to this book,136 but it
is fairly common knowledge that the great philosopher-theologians of
the thirteenth century - Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham
were the most important - were all Aristotelians. Aristotle's ideas on
what constituted scientia, that is, knowledge, were generally accepted
in the schools, and for two hundred years or more Aristotelianism was
the background philosophy of educated men. And Aristotle, as we
have seen, said that all sublunary change was the result of and
dependent upon motions in the heavens.
Ail of this meant that astrology could be and would be accepted as
part of astrologia, as a science properly belonging to the Aristotelian
scheme of things, to the whole scientific picture. It played an
important part in medicine, and meteorology and alchemy, as well as
in such semi-magical pursuits as all forms of divination and the
making of amulets, for example. What had to be preserved through all
this was the freedom of man's will, his responsibility to God. His
physical make-up might be subject to the influences of the heavens,
but never his personal being, his will. This was not always an easy
distinction to preserve, and there were those in the Church who felt
136 The best short introduction to the history of medieval Christian philosophy is F. C.
Copleston's A History of Medieval Philosophy (London, 1972), which has a good
bibliography.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

that 'a non-Christian philosophical naturalism' (Copleston, op. cit.,

p. 207) was abroad in the schools, and in 1277 Bishop Stephen Tempier
of Paris over-hastily issued a list of 219 condemned propositions, not
in any particular order,137 and anathematized all who held any of them.
They included teachings of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes and even
Aquinas, and six of the errors were clearly concerned with astrology.
The six condemned propositions are (the first number is Mandonnet's
and the second that of the original list):

94 (195) That fate, which is a universal disposition, proceeds

from the divine providence not immediately but by the media­
tion of the movement of the heavenly bodies ...
104 (143) That by different signs in the heavens there are
signified different conditions in men both of their spiritual gifts
and of their temporal affairs.
105 (207) That in the hour of the begetting of a man in his body
and consequently in his soul, which follows the body, by the
ordering of causes superior and inferior there is in a man a
disposition including him to such and such actions and events.
This is an error unless it is understood to mean 'natural events'
and 'by way of a disposition'.
106 (206) That anyone attribute health and sickness, life and
death, to the position of the stars and the aspect of Fortune,
saying that if Fortune is well-aspected to him he will live, and if
not, he will die.138
154 (162) That our will is subject to the power of heavenly bodies.
156 (161) That the effects of the stars on free will are hidden.

The desire to avoid the error contained in these last two possibly led
to the creation of a dictum which became a universally used
conscience-saver: sapiens dominabitur astris, 'the wise man will be
master of the stars'. This saying, in various forms, is usually said to
come from the Centiloquium, and is sometimes attributed to the
Almagest; it is to be found, in fact, in neither.139 A fair illustration of

137 They were edited in a more logical arrangement by P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant,
lie Partie: Textes in4dits (Louvain, 1908) 175ff.
138 The Latin here is: quod sanitatem, infirmitatem, vitam et mortem attribuit position!
siderum et aspectui fortunae, dicens quod si aspexerit eum fortuna, vivet, si non aspexerit,
morietur. I have taken the language to be technically astrological and fortuna and
aspexerit to refer to the Lot of Fortune and to aspects.
139 There is an interesting discussion of the maxim in Appendix 4, 'Homo sapiens
dominatur astris', in G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers (Liverpool, 1952)
175-177.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY
the normal educated churchman's attitude to astrology, perhaps, is
given in a letter of Berthold of Regensburg, written about two years
before his death in 1272. In it he says:140 'As God gave their power to
stones and to herbs and to words, so also gave he power to the stars,
that they have power over all things, except over one thing. They have
power over trees and over vines, over leaves and grasses, over
vegetables and herbs, over corn and all such things; over the birds in
the air, over the animals in the forests, and over the fishes in the
waters and over the worms in the earth; over all such things that are
under heaven, over them our Lord gave power to the stars, except over
one thing. Over that thing no man has any power nor any might,
neither have stars nor herbs, nor word nor stones nor angel nor devil
nor any man, but God alone. And he will not exercize his power, nor
have any authority over that thing. It is man's free will (friiu willekilr =
liberum arbitrium, "free choice"): over that no man has any authority
except thyself.'
But it was an uneasy arrangement. In the thirteenth century
churchmen varied in their attitudes to astrology, from more or less full
acceptance to a qualified rejection. It is very important to remember
that no one questioned the validity of astrology. It could be criticized
as too complicated and too difficult to be possible, and parts of it,
notably 'judicial' astrology - genethlialogy and the attendant judg­
ments of the affairs of men - might be rejected as wrong. But that it
was all possible, everyone accepted. In particular, what might be called
scientific or natural astrology was more or less universally acceptable:
that is, the uses of astrology in medicine and in meteorology and in
alchemy. Since the changes of the sublunary world were caused by
heavenly movements, physical changes like chemical reactions and
bodily diseases, and the weather (like the tides, always accepted as
caused by the moon's movements) were clearly linked to the move­
ments of the stars and planets, and no one could expect to alter the
natures of metals (with their ancient links with the planets) or to cure
diseases or to understand and forecast the weather and related
phenomena, storm and flood and earthquakes and so on, without a
knowledge of astrology. This was not superstition; it was good
science. So far as meteorology was concerned, it was probably entirely
academic. The two classes of men most concerned in practice, farmers
and sailors, went on forecasting (at least in the Middle Ages: things
may have changed in the seventeenth century) by their old, empirical

140 F. Pfeiffer, Berthold von Regensburg: vollständige Ausgabe seiner Predigten (Vienna
1862) 1.50.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

and more or less successful methods. Scholars argued over meteor­

ology, including the causes of earthquakes and the aurora borealis, for
example, though they never experienced the one nor saw the other. It
was all in books, written by and for academics.141 This was of course
no more than typical of medieval patterns of thought and behaviour in
science as in most spheres. What was in books was always more real,
and more important, than what might be seen in the world; the
universal always more true than the particular.
Robert Grosseteste, the great scholar who was Bishop of Lincoln
from 1235 to his death in 1253 - in his vast diocese lay the University
of Oxford, of which he had been a member and chancellor - fully
accepted astrometeorology and the use of astrology in alchemy and
medicine, even if in his later years he became more strongly hostile to
judicial astrology. In his early work 'On the Liberal Arts'142143
Grosseteste
had written: 'Natural philosophy needs the assistance of astronomia
more than that of the rest; for there are no, or few, works of ours or of
nature, as for example the propagation of plants, the transmutation of
minerals, the curing of sickness, which can be removed from the sway
of astronomia. For nature below (natura inferior) effects nothing unless
celestial power moves it and directs it from potency into act.' There
are, it seems, three legitimate, even necessary, kinds of astrology:
meteorological, alchemical and medical. Just before he became Bishop
of Lincoln he wrote the nearest we have to a summary of his thinking,
his Hexaemeron.™3 In that work his arguments on astrology are
thoroughly Augustinian. He says (c.9) that even if for the sake of
argument we posited that 'the constellations have a significance and
an effect on the works of free will and on events called fortuitous and
on man's behaviour, yet it would not be possible for an astrologer
(aliquem mathematician) to judge concerning these things.' First,
because sufficient accuracy of observation and calculation is not
possible, and second, because of the impossibility of distinguishing
between twins (cf. Aug., Civ. Dei. V.3-9). But in fact free will is not
under the stars, but only under God (c.10), and all, freedom, provi­
dence, prayer, would have to be rejected 'if the stars held sway, as
astrologers pretend' - but notice the Latin: si valerat constellacio, sicut

141 See Stuart Jenks, 'Astrometeorology in the Middle Ages', in Isis, 74 (1983),
pp. 185-210.
142 De artibus liberalibus, ed. Ludwig Baur, 'Die philosophischen Werke des Robert
Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln', in Cl. Baumker's Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philoso­
phie des Mittelalters, IX (1912). The edition includes his De sphaera and the later very
popular De prognosticatione temporum, 'On weather-forecasting'.
143 Robert Grosseteste: Hexaemeron, ed. Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben, O. F. M.
Cap, Auctores Britanninci Medii Aevi, VI (London, 1982). A hexaemeron ('six-day period')
was a commentary on the Genesis creation story.

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fingunt astronomi: astronomus is clearly synonymous with mathematicus.

His summary is (c.ll) that 'judges such as these are misled and
misleading, and their teaching is impious and profane, written at the
direction of the devil.' Robert Kilwardby, the anti-Thomas Dominican
Archbishop of Canterbury, took a similar line in his De ortu scientia-
rum, written about 1250.144145 He accepts the Isidorean division of
astrologia and rejects the superstitiosa part, judicial astrology, while
accepting natural astrology, which deals with the effects of the stars on
health, the weather and so on. He quotes Gundissalinus on the same
division, and then realises that he has misquoted, since Gundissalinus
used the names the other way round; so he added the interesting note
(§76): 'It should be noted that although what we have said is different,
and the proper way of taking 'astronomia' and 'astrologia', yet some­
times the name of the one is used for the other, just as happens with
scientia and sapientia, which are taken properly different, but some­
times one is used for the other.'
In contrast, one of the great thirteenth century thinkers, Roger
Bacon, wholly accepted astrology. What he says of the subject is to be
found especially in Part IV of the Opus Maius and in the Secretum
Secretorum.'*5 His editor Bridges says (p. lx) that 'the influence of the
stars over human life was a belief almost universally held by all
instructed men from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century; and
abundant traces of it are visible throughout the seventeenth, not to
speak of still later times,' and he remarks in a footnote to a passage
where Bacon more than hints at the possibility of foretelling when
Antichrist would come (pp. 268-9): 'It may be said on the whole that
so far from belief in astrology being a reproach to Bacon and his
contemporaries, to have disbelieved in it would have been in the
thirteenth century a sign of intellectual weakness.' Over-strongly put
perhaps, but Bridges was broadly correct. Bacon's use of the terms
astronomia and astrologia is much that of Gundissalinus: he defines
astronomia as 'practical astrologia', and says (p. 242); 'The true mathema-
tici, which is what we are here calling astronomi and astrologi, because
they are so called indifferently by Ptolemy and Avicenna and many
others ...' He explains the ambiguities of the term 'house', domus, and
also the difference between the 'fixed' zodiac, the 30° divisions from
the 'first point of Aries', and the moving zodiac, the signs in the sky.
He adds a note on the usefulness of the mansions of the moon ('A

144 Ed. Albert C. Judy, OP. (London & Toronto, 1976).

145 The ‘Opus Maius' of Roger Bacon, ed. J. H. Bridges (1900; 2nd edn reprinted
Frankfurt-am-Main, 1964). Roger Bacon: Opus Maius, Vol. I, trans. R. B. Burke (Phila­
delphia, 1928). Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, fase. V, Secretum Secretorum, ed.
Robert Steele (Oxford, 1920).

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

mansion is the space of the zodiac which the moon crosses in a day',
p. 384) for astrometeorology and for critical days in medicine. In his
introduction to the Secretum Secretorum, he dabbles in geomancy's
connections with astrology. He has an interesting note on the planets'
natures and effects: 'It should be known, of the signs and of the
planets, that they are not in their natural substances hot or cold, dry or
wet, but they have the ability to heat or cool, to dry or to wet; just as
wine is not naturally hot and dry, but cold and wet, yet it heats and
dries; and it makes drunk but is not itself drunken; and so with
countless other things.'
The Dominican Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus, of Cologne, like
his contemporary Bacon, fully accepted astrology into his scientific
world-picture.146 His 'prescribed texts' for astronomy included the
Almagest with Gerard of Cremona's translation of the commentary of
Geber, Latin translations of Masha'allah and other Arabic writers, and
books on the astrolabe; and for astrology, the Quadripartitum (the Latin
for Tetrabiblos) and John of Spain's Abu Ma'shar, etc. He clearly also
knew his Firmicus Maternus. His greatest pupil was Thomas Aquinas,
whose views on astrology were clear and consistent, as might be
expected. In Summa Theologica la, q.115, a.4, the question asked is,
'Whether the heavenly bodies are the cause of human acts.' It is
known that they affect the body (and hence the organs of the soul,
such as the eyes), and therefore the intellect is affected indirectly and
by accident (indirecte et per accidens). In the response to the third
objection Thomas writes: 'Very many man follow their passions,
which are motions of the sensitive appetite, alongside which passions
the heavenly bodies can work; few men are wise enough to resist
passions of this kind. And therefore astrologers, as in many things,
can make true predictions, and this especially in general; not however
in particular, for nothing stops any man from resisting his passions by
his free will. Therefore the astrologers themselves say that "the wise
man is master of the stars" (sapiens homo dominatur astris), inasmuch as
he is master of his passions.' He says much the same in the Summa
contra Gentiles III.84; and in his commentaries on Aristotle's De caelo et
mundo and De generatione et corruptione, he is purely Ptolemaic in his
astronomy and has the same attitude to astrology. He also explains
that pure circular motion would not produce change, it is the obliquity
of the ecliptic which does that.
Henri Bate of Malines, who lived in the second half of the thirteenth
century and died some time before 1310, took a similar but slightly
more sympathetic line - sympathetic to astrology, that is. He trans­
lated the De revolutionibus annorum mundi, 'On the revolutions of the
146 See Albertus Magnus and the Sciences, Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A.
Weisheipl, O.P. (Toronto, 1980).

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years of the world', of Abraham ibn Ezra and was translating

astrological works for the papal court in Orvieto towards the end of
the century.147 He wrote his own introduction to and commentary on
ibn Ezra, who incidentally thought very little of Abu Ma shar: If you
come across a book of Abu Ma'shar on the conjunction of the planets,
don't take any notice of it; no sensible man would agree with it.'
About 1302 Henri Bate wrote a Speculum, a sort of stmt, including a
Book XII on Fate, for the Bishop of Utrecht, Guy de Hainault. His
authorities for that book included Calcidius, Augustine, Boethius,
'Hermes' and Firmicus; and specifically on astrology, Ptolemy, Avicen­
na and Abu Ma'shar. The scientist and clock-designer Richard of
clearly accepted astrology as a science, as is shown in
Wallingford148149
his Exafrenon pronosticacionum temporis, which 'is an exposition of
basic astrological principles', written before 1326; it 'shows no taint of
the astrological determinism which the theologians feared would
undermine the doctrine of free will', and 'no suggestion of respect for
the pagan deities associated with the planets in the literature and
iconography of the time.' Wallingford was obviously influenced by
Grosseteste, but his chief source is John of Seville's translation of the
Maius introductorium of Abu Ma'shar. The Exafrenon was translated into
English by a contemporary of Chaucer in the late fourteenth century.
On the other, anti-astrological side, the Mertonian mathematician
Thomas Bradwardine, who was called to be Archbishop of Canterbury
during the ravages of the Black Death in 1349 and died a few months
later, in his large work De causa Deiw aimed to show that 'it would
perhaps be very fitting and most profitable if Theologians and good
Catholics were not ignorant of Astrology and other such sciences',
because they were necessary for the explanation of Scripture, and also
for demonstration of their errors and the defence of man's freedom. He
uses astrologia in a general way, mainly to refer to astronomy; he
seems to accept natural astrology, he nowhere discusses genethlialogy
or elections, and he generally takes an Augustinian line as on, for
example, the Star of Bethlehem. He knows, however, his Ptolemy and
his Abu Ma'shar. Later in the fourteenth century Henry of Langen­
stein150 thought in much the same way, accepting medical and

147 See G. Wallerand, Henri Bate de Malines (Les Philosophes Beiges XI) (Louvain, 1951).
148 See J. D. North, Richard of Wallingford, 3 vols (Oxford, 1976); the Exafrenon is in Vol. II
(Exafrenon apparently means a work in six parts; it has six chapters). North includes
(III.277ff) an extremely valuable glossary of Latin words. The quotations in the text are
from North.
149 Thomae Bradwardini Archiepiscopi olim Cantuariensis De Causa Dei ... libri tres, etc., ed.
Henry Savile (London, 1618).
150 Nicholas H.Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle Ages. Henry of Langenstein
(d.1397) on Genesis (London, 1976). It is actually an account of the hexaemeron part of
Henry's commentary on Genesis.

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meteorological uses of astrology, but writing a number of anti-

astrological tracts (probably sparked off by the discussions of the
comet of 1368) the arguments of which very much recall those of
Grosseteste.
The general acceptance of 'natural' astrology - the use of planetary
influences in medicine, alchemy and meteorology - is not surprising,
given the universal belief in Aristotle's physics. It would have been
unscientific to have rejected such astrologia. We shall not here be
concerned with alchemy, the story of which is interestingly parallel to
that of astrology, though in some ways simpler. The emergence of
chemistry from alchemy and the disappearance of the latter are more
simply accounted for than the apparently analogous emergence of
astronomy and the (at least temporary) disappearance of astrology.
Alchemy had always been more a practical than a theoretical science
despite many magical and quasi-religious accretions: hypotheses not
only could be but had to be tested in the crucible. Astrologia was a
wholly theoretical science until very modem times; the only test of a
hypothesis was observation and measurement to see whether it fitted
what was seen, whether it 'saved the phenomena', in the ancient
Greek expression. It is true however that alchemy and astrology both
disappeared from the educated world (and alchemy had never be­
longed to any other) at about the same time and many of the causes
were common; of this more will be said in Chapter VI. For now, it
need only be noted that the associations of planets and metals
established in Alexandrian Egypt ensured astrology's close links with
alchemy, the main object of which was the transmutation of base
metals into precious, and one aspect of which was the whole science of
alloys and the like, including of course the rather shady business of
fakes and counterfeits. It was all very scientific with a basis in ancient
doctrines of the elements which also formed part of Aristotelian
physics; so on one in the later Middle Ages or Renaissance ever
questioned the validity of the association, whatever his views on the
whole.
Astrometeorology, or the forecasting of the weather and of natural
disasters by reference to events in the starry heavens, was and is
almost the oldest and surely the most persistent part of astrology.
From the earliest days of 'proto-astrology', the omen-literature of the
first millenium B.C., certain conjunctions or eclipses or occultations of
planets, and especially comets, were associated with storm and flood,
drought and burning heat, and earthquakes. The development of the
science of astrologia made possible long-term forecasting of such starry
events and their consequences, and such prognostication became and
remained part of astrology not only in times when astrology was
favoured and widely practised; even in ages of its disrepute popular

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almanacs always contained, as they still do, weather forecasts. It is true

that apart from the almanacs of later times this was, in and before the
Middle Ages, largely a bookish exercise, practical weather prediction
being the province of those most concerned, country men and seamen.
Tales were told of most astrologi no doubt, as certainly of Bonatti,
about their failures in forecasting the immediate weather prospects
and their ensuing, usually soaked, discomfiture, though not many
went so far as the innkeeper who told the eighteenth century almanac
writer Partridge that he could always rely on the weather being
precisely contrary to what was predicted in Partridge's almanac. But it
must be remarked that farmers and sailors included, as they still
include, much 'astrological' lore in their weather forecasting, and
many would swear more by the state of the moon than by the satellite
pictures of anticyclones. That the heavens, and especially the sun and
the moon, are connected with the weather is obvious, if it be only in
the calendrial, seasonal sense. And it may be that before very recent
times of satellites and computers, astrological weather-forecasting was
no less accurate, or no more inaccurate, than any other way of
attempting the near impossible.151 Comets were and remain special
cases. The extraordinary weather-spasms of this spring (1986) have by
many been set down to Halley's comet. Comets' influence spread itself
much more widely than the weather, of course, to include disasters of
most kinds, both personal and general, including wars and the deaths
of princes.152 Comets were carefully but variously classified and given
curious names, and allocated to planets, whose natures they shared,
and their effects in the different signs were listed. Ptolemy has little or
nothing to say of them, but the Pseudo-Ptolemy of the Centiloquium
had nine types, and the commonest source-book for the thirteenth
century was 'Haly's' commentary on the Centiloquium (according to
Steinschneider actually written by Ahmed ibn Yusuf). Comets had
effects on the air and produced vapours, dry or wet, hot or cold,
according to their natures. Almost all their effects were noxious: war,
pestilence, famine, flood or drought and above all death. The treatises
on comets are generally speaking more 'scientific' than astrological

151 Perhaps Britain particularly, and even N.W. Europe, was the most difficult area to
cover accurately with such forecasts as were possible. Dr G.Herdan, the late medical
statistician in the University of Bristol (better known, perhaps, for his Language as
Choice and Chance), once argued from a statistical analysis that one could forecast
tomorrow's local weather in three ways: it will be as it is today; it will be as it was on
the same date last year; or it will be as the Meteorological Office says it will be; and the
error would be the same in all three cases.
152 See Latin Treatises on Comets between 1238 and 1368 A.D. edited by Lynn Thorndike
(Chicago, 1950). It is curious that Mark Twain was impressed that he was bom in
November, 1835, with Halley's comet in the sky; he died in April, 1910, with the comet
back again. But then so did thousands of others.

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and indeed the late thirteenth century one of Gerard (of 'Silteo') is
very critical of judicial astrology in ways which point forward to
Oresme and Pico, while asserting the values of 'natural' astrology - an
ambivalent attitude met with in many later authors.
Without a comet to account for it, the Black Death, which arrived in
Europe in 1347 and swept across the continent for three years,153 while
it was most commonly seen as God's wrath visited on a depraved
world, was also provided with astrological credentials. The official
statement of the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris presented
to the king in 1348 reported that 'on 20 March 1345, at 1 p.m., there
occurred a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the house of
Aquarius. The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter notoriously caused
death and disaster while the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter spread
pestilence in the air (Jupiter, being warm and humid, was calculated to
draw up evil vapours from the earth and water which Mars, hot and
dry, then kindled into infective fire). Obviously the conjunction of all
three planets could only mean an epidemic of cataclysmic scale'
(Ziegler, p. 38). Ziegler is surely right (p. 22) when he says that 'the
monstrous dimensions of the disaster ... forced its victims to seek
some proportionately monstrous explanation', so that normal medical
explanations of epidemics from Galen or the Arab Razes were largely
irrelevant. But the natural tendency was to look for astrological causes
of changes in the atmosphere since astrology and medicine were
joined before Ptolemy's time, and corruption of the air was the most
commonly suggested immediate cause of the Plague and its spread. A
treatise of 1348 states the principle plainly: 'all corruptions of the air
are reduced to celestial causes'.154 Various conjunctions, and an eclipse
of 1345, were alleged to be causes, and it seems that only Gentile da
Foligno and Konrade of Megenberg rejected such explanations and
tried to suggest physical and physiological causes. Gentile was best
known for his consilia, his 'case-books', which were truly in the

153 The best single work on the Black Death (with an excellent bibliography) is Philip
Ziegler's The Black Death (London, 1969) cited here from the Pelican Books edition of
1970. He makes a finely pertinent observation on contemporary ideas of the causes on
p. 24: 'Enjoying as we do the immense superiority of a generation which has devised
means of mass destruction more effective even than those afflicted by nature on our
ancestors, it is easy and tempting to deride their inability to understand the calamity
which had overtaken them.' Anna Campbell said something similar earlier in her
important The Black Death and Men of Learning (New York, 1931) 8. Her book has a good
general account of the fourteenth century treatises and of the attitudes of and effects on
men of learning. See especially Chapter V for astrology; but notice that while the author
recognises the lack of distinction between astronomy and astrology at that time, she
herself nevertheless divides her scholars in a modern fashion.
154 See K. Sudhoff, 'Pestschrift aus den ersten 150 Jahres nach der Epidemie des
"schwarzen Todes" 1348', in Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin (Leipzig, 1911) V.42.

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Hippocratic tradition. His was one of the six treatises on the Plague
written in 1348.
More typical of medieval medical theorists, perhaps, was Arnald of
Villanova, who died in his seventies in 1313. His works, in the Basle
edition of 1585, are classified as Medica and Exotica, and the exotica are
subdivided into Chymica, Astronomica and Theologica. The one book
on astrology is 'On judgments of sicknesses, according to the move­
ment of the planets, for the not inconsiderable assistance of doctors'.
Earlier in the volume (823C-E), in a medical work 'on preserving one's
youth', Arnald claims that Hippocrates showed that astrology was a
significant part of medicine; and although there was no necessity
involved in stellar influences, these influences did dispose and
'habituate' evertything. Yet 'the wise man will master the stars by his
rationality': vir sapiens dominabitur astris sua rationabilitate. The twin
and related sciences of astrology and medicine are both needed by the
doctor, under the grace of God. The work De iudiciis infirmitatum
contains an outline of astrology, with explanations from Aristotle's
physics of, for example, the natures of triplicities; he rather glosses
over terms, as needing more effort than is justified by their im­
portance; his houses are unequal, but it is not clear what system he is
using; and, not surprisingly for a doctor, he has two chapters on the
moon. As an example of the kind of use to which it was all put, he
says in c.10: 'If the Ascendant should be in a "obile" sign, and the
moon in the same sort of sign - namely Aries, Cancer, Libra or
Capricorn - and the Lord of the Ascendant likewise, the sickness will
be over quickly, for good or ill.' Astrologers were also needed to
advise on times to carry out operations, and on the gathering and uses
of herbs. Medicine was the only truly empirical science invented by
the ancient Greeks, and despite the growth of theories and schools of
thought, in all ages, must remain empirical at the bottom. Since
doctors needed to be as exact as they could in their applications of
astrology, especially in their timing, medical men played an important
part in the technological developments of the later Middle Ages.155 Not
only, perhaps, of the Middle Ages: astrological influence on medicine
persisted until the nineteenth century.
The links between medicine and astrology were nowhere more
obviously stressed than in the University of Bologna, one of the oldest
universities and medical schools in medieval Europe. Italy then as for
centuries later was a collection of city states, with more or less
unbroken tradition links with antiquity; and an educated laity,

155 Lynn White Jr, 'Medical astrologers and late medievaltechnology', in Viator, 6 (1975)
295-308; the introduction is very wide of a number of marks, and grossly exaggerates
the importance of Martianus Capella.

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including city governors, whether oligarchic and mercantile or aristo­

cratic, played a much greater part in society than north of the Alps.
The Italian universities were different in their origins and constitu­
tions from those of north-west Europe, and much more independent
of the Church, though none of course was wholly so in an age when all
learning came under the Church's scrutiny and guardianship. Their
function was to educate men for the professions, especially law and
medicine. A student of medicine was bound to study physics; the
understanding of physiology (the 'study of nature') demanded it. So
the doctor was bound to be a 'physician' - un physicien, in French, a
physicist; the French for the English 'physician' is me'decin. He also
had to study astrology. The Professor of Astrologia taught a four year
course.156 His duties included answering, free, enquiries from students
within a month of being asked, and publishing his almanac for each
year, with planetary movements and conjunctions etc., particularly for
the use of doctors of medicine. In the early fifteenth century, for which
we have details, the course was a curious one, including the somewhat
difficult Theorica planetarum, 'Theory of the Planets', in the first year,
and the introductory Sphaera in the second. The Almagest waited until
the fourth year, with 'the rest of the Quadripartitum'. From the reaction
of the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris in 1348 to the request
from Philip IV for a statement on the Black Death, and the slightly later
and similar statement from Montpellier, we may assume that astrology
played the same part in French medical schools and there too, as at
Bologna, alongside of Euclid the student read Sacrobosco's Sphaera
and Ptolemy (including of course the Centiloquium) and their commen­
tators. The subject was astrologia or astronomia, without distinction. In
Bologna the professor taught astrologia until the middle of the
fourteenth century, and thereafter astronomia, according to the statutes,
but as Bartolotti says (p. 11), 'the material was always the same'. The
seventeenth century professor Bonaventura Covalieri published in
1639 a Nuova pratica astrologica on Keplerian lines, and even in 1799
the professor was still required 'Conficiat tacuinum astronomicum ad
medicinae usum' - to make an annual almanac for medical use.
Naturally, in the study of astrologia, the mechanics of the universe
have to be understood at least in outline before astrology can be
described or practised. The description of the universe in astronomical
terms was done, as it had been in antiquity, in a Sphaera, a book 'On
the Sphere'. By far the most popular textbook in the schools was for
centuries - despite would-be rivals by such scholars as Grosseteste,
Peckham and Campanus — that by John of Holywood, usually known

156 See the early pages of Ettore Bartolotti, La Storia della Matematica nella Universita di
Bologna (Bologna, 1947).

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as John Sacrobosco. His Sphaera was traditional, largely Latin in its

sources, fairly simple, and clear. As Thorndike says,157 he 'welded
together Macrobius and Ptolemy and frosted it over with Alfraganus,
and his book stayed in style for five centuries.' It was written in the
first quarter of the thirteenth century. What it covered is described in
the Proemium (Thorndike's translation): 'The treatise on the sphere
we divide into four chapters, telling first, what a sphere is, what its
centre is, what the axis of a sphere is, what the pole of the world is,
how many spheres there are, and what the shape of the world is. In
the second we give information concerning the circles of which this
material sphere is composed and that supercelestial one, of which this
is the image, is understood to be composed. In the third we talk about
the rising and setting of the signs, and the diversity of days and nights
which happens to those inhabiting diverse localities, and the division
into climes. In the fourth the matter concerns the circles and motions
of the planets and the causes of eclipses.' Since chapter 4's matter on
'the circles and motions of the planets' takes up only forty-three lines
of Thorndike's Latin text, one can see why students needed the
Theorica planetarum at least with, though scarcely before, the Sphaera.
Sacrobosco's book is wholly astronomical, in the modern sense,
though he does refer, having described the zodiac, to the fact that 'by
Aristotle, in On generation and corruption, it is called the "oblique
circle", where he says chat, according to the access and recess of the
sun in the oblique circle, are produced generations and corruptions in
things below.' Commentators might remain within the purely mathe­
matical limits of the original, or enlarge into astrology as the writer
pleased. One anonymous commentary of the late thirteenth or early
fourteenth century158 uses astrologia and astrologus as the generic terms,
and then distinguishes the communia of a science which must be
known to understand the propria. The Sphaera covers the commuma,
that is, what we should call astronomy and the 'propria of the art are
the things which are known through those things which are common,
or which follow on the knowledge of those things such as are the
conjunctions of planets and the culminations of centra and the
wonderful effects following from the aspects of the planets and many
other things which need deeper discussion in their special places.' So
the 'common ground' is astronomy and much that is described as
'proper' is astrology. The earliest commentaries in Thorndike, which

157 Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators (Chicago, 1949). The
book contains the Latin text of the Sphaera and an English translation as well as texts of
the commentators.
158 Thorndike, 456ff.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

are late thirteenth century, contain a good deal of astrological matter,

and clearly an elementary textbook needed very little explaining on the
astronomical side. The provenance and the dates of the commentaries
testify to the lasting and widespread influence of Sacrobosco; and it
did provide an entirely astronomical basis for expansion by any
teacher interested in mathematical astronomy rather than astrology.
The professors at Bologna were of course committed by the statutes
of their appointment to the practice of some astrology. The first name
in the list of professors given by Bartolotti is that of Guido Bonatti,
one of the best known of thirteenth century astrologers. Alas, much
that is 'known' about him is guesswork or apocryphal; in particular,
he may or may not have studied and taught in Bologna in the 1230s -
there is no firm evidence beyond tradition. He was born at Forli some
time before 1220 and died towards the end of the century. He wrote a
twelve-book treatise De astronomia which dealt with astrology, with
'revolutions' (progressions) and elections and so on. The astrology is
purely traditional, with the common confusion over house-division,
for example; all in the same thirteenth century Arabic-Latin mould.
Bonatti seems to have been in a number of Italian cities, including
Florence and Bologna, and to have been attached to more than one
prince, including Guido de Montefeltro, if Villani's Life is to be
believed.159 Villani, quoting Benvenuto de Imola's De divinatoribus,
c.20, is the only authority for the story of the tentative reconciliation of
the feuding Guelfs and Ghibellines at Forli about 1282. The Guelfs
were the supporters of the Pope against the Emperor, whose sup­
porters were the Ghibellines, to which party Montefeltro and hence
Bonatti belonged. The idea was that Forli should be solemnly
re-founded and new walls built, and that at an astrologically deter­
mined auspicious moment a leading Guelf and a leading Ghibelline
should cast in the first stones for the new walls. All was ready, and the
two parties assembled, but when Bonatti gave the signal that the
crucial moment had arrived, the Ghibelline cast in his stone but the
Guelf hestitated and then refused to co-operate because Bonatti was a
Ghibelline and was obviously 'fixing' it for his own side's advantage.
Bonatti is to be seen in Dante's Inferno, Canto XX.118, but very much
only in passing. In describing the diviners who were being punished
for wanting to pry into a future belonging only to God by having their
heads turned on their shoulders to face backwards, Dante simply says:
Vedi Guido Bonatti, vedi Asdente, 'I saw Guido Bonatti, I saw Asdente'.
The latter was a notorious soothsayer of Parma. It looks very much as

159 In Rerum ltalicarum Scriptores, XXII, ii, ed. Mezzatinti (1903). Villani it is who says
that Guido of Montefeltro 'used the advice of this very skilled astrologer in all his
actions'. Villani also remarks of Bonatti's book that 'in it he treats the subject of
astrology so clearly that he seems to be desirous of teaching it to women'.

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though the Florentine Guelf Dante has Bonatti in Hell rather because
of his attachment to the Ghibellines than because of his astrology.
Three lines earlier Dante had introduced an even more notable, and
earlier, astrologer: Michael Scot: 'That other, who is so small about the
flanks, was Michael Scot, who truly knew the game of magic frauds';
and certainly he was concerned with geomancy among other forms of
divination. There is no knowing why he was thin-legged! Again
however there are more fables than hard facts. He was a fairly typical
thirteenth century savant, interested in more or less anything 'scien­
tific'. He was probably born in Scotland toward the end of the twelfth
century - in 1217 he translated al Bitrugi's Sphaera in Toledo - and in
the 1220s he was well enough established and known at the papal
court (not, it seems, only as an astrologer) to be appointed to the
Archbishopric of Cashel, which he declined because he knew no Irish,
and to be recommended in 1227 to the Archbishop of Canterbury by
Pope Gregory IX as a scholar and one who had 'added a knowledge of
Hebrew and Arabic to his wide familiarity with Latin learning'. From
about that time until his death about 1236 he was attached to the court
of Frederick II in Sicily, where he wrote his few astrological works,
which seem really to be all one work160 including the widely read Liber
introductorius. Both Frederick and Michael Scot appear to have been
more interested in all kinds of scientific questions than in astrology,
but both of course would accept astrology as an established part of
contemporary science, practically useful and even necessary. The
evidence for Frederick's interest is thin, however. Two things link the
emperor with astrology: his marriage and his foundation of the new
city of Victoria, and only the first rests on good authority. In 1235
Frederick married Isabella the sister of Henry III of England but,
Matthew Paris informs us under that year, 'he refused to know her
carnally until the fitting hour should be told him by his astrologers
...', which caused a little offence. It may indeed have produced a son,
Jordanus, but the only certainly known son was Henry, born in 1238.
Since Matthew Paris, though not the most trustworthy of historians,
was in fact intimate with both King Henry and his brother Richard,
Earl of Cornwall, the story has to be believed. There is however no
overt connection with Michael Scot.
In 1247 Frederick besieged Parma, and decided to build a new city
over against Parma, which he called Victoria. The chronicler Rolandino
of Padua, who had been a Bologna student, says:161 'He built over
against the city (of Parma) almost before the gates another city, which

160 See c.XIIl of C. H. Haskins' Studies in the History of Medieval Science (Cambridge
Mass., 1924).
161 Rolandini Patavini Chronicon, ed. P. Jaffe, MCH Scriptores, XIX (1866; repr. 1963) 85.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

he named Victoria. And because he knew that the great men of ancient
times had regard to the Ascendant when they wished to found cities,
and themselves drew the perimeters of the cities with a plough, which
is why they are called 'cities' (urbes; Varro is the authority: the
boundary was marked with the curved tail of the plough, called urvus
or urbus), he began himself to mark out his new city when Aries was
in the Ascendant; both because that is the sign of Mars, said to be the
god of war, and because in its setting it was in opposition to
ascendant Libra, the sign of Venus, which was said to be the planet of
Parma and its good fortune. So he seems to have thought that the
fortune of the citizens of Parma, opposed to him, would begin to set.
For in astrology and other such subtle arts the first house is given to
the doer of a deed, the seventh to his opponent. But I think that he did
not remark that the fourth sign from the Ascendant was Cancer, and
the fourth house denotes buildings, houses and cities, and so his city,
begun under such an Ascendant, would necessarily be cancerous.'
Rolandino may have studied astrology at Bologna, and it does look as
though he is here showing off his knowledge. What is significant is
that there is no mention of astrology or astrologers in seven other
sources for the story of the founding of Victoria, including the
generally reliable Ghibelline Annates Piacentini and Salimbene, gossipy
and anti-Frederick though that author was. It is of course certain that
Frederick believed and was interested in astrology, and Michael Scot's
astrological work was written for him, and although it may be going
too far to say 'he would undertake no important enterprise without
first consulting the stars',162 he certainly used both Michael and his
successor Theodore as his astrologers, as the same Rolandino else­
where tells us.163 And as Haskins says (op. cit., p. 290), Scot's account,
in his Liber Introductorius 'of the wealth and position of the astrologer
and his mode of life reflect the influence and position of the profession
in the Italy of the thirteenth century'.
That book, Michael Scot tells his readers at the beginning, was
written by 'the astrologus of the Emperor Frederick' - the astronomer
royal, as it were - 'for student beginners and those not over-burdened
with intelligence.' It is a large work, full of detail, well illustrated in
the manuscripts and wholly traditional.164 He says, interestingly, at
f. 41v of Bodley 266, that 'there are in each sign many images and

162 Thomas Curtis van Cleve, The Emperor Frederick ll of Hohenstaufen (Oxford, 1972)
308.
163 Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, VIII, i, Rolandini Patavini Cronica Marchie Trivixane, ed.
A. Bonardi (1903), Book IV, c.xii. (Also in MGH: see note 161 above.)
164 References here are to MS Bodley 266, a fifteenth century copy of the fourteenth
century Munich MS 10268.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

mansions, not only of the moon but of the other planets. If mansiones
is to be taken with ceterorum planetarum (as well as ymagines), are they
mansions in the same sense as lunar ones? That is, are they distances
covered by planets in a given unit of time? Or is it just a reference to
decans, dodecatemories and so on, all allocated to planets? He lists
some of his authorities (f. 65r) as Ptolemy, Alexander, Demetrius,
Theodosius, Dorotheus, Ja'far, Thebit ibn Qurra, al Fargani, Em­
pedocles (?; the MS has eppedotes),165 Euclid and Aristotle. The
horologium and the astrolabe are necessary, he says, to the astrologer to
establish the hour and the Ascendant, and also to calculate the houses:
Scot gives directions for these on f. 183r. The horologium was certainly
not a clock (clocks were not known until the late fourteenth century)
but was probably a sundial: portable sun-'dials' - some were cylin­
drical - were made from the ninth century on. So a dial would be used
to establish the time of day, and the stellar positions found from
tables; and the astrolabe would be used at night. The work is a
completely integrated mixture of what we should call astronomy and
astrology, since there was absolutely no distinction within the science
of astrologia for Scot or his readers. The account of the saltus lunae, the
'moon's leap', the adjustment of the moon's nineteen-year cycle to
keep it in step with the sun, ultimately taken largely from Bede, is
followed by a section on calendary intercalculations, mnemonic verses
on the signs of the zodiac (obviously regarded as calendar markers,
their original and continuing use, as is shown in so many pictorial
representations), descriptions of constellations and the planets, and
then, logically enough, an account of the planetary houses, their
exaltations, their terms, and by association the divisions of the zodiac,
and so to the mundane houses, and so on. The lists of planets and
their effects generally include the head and tail of the dragon, and the
lunar mansions are introduced more than once. It is a long work, but it
does cover a good deal of the ground.
Roger Bacon thought very little of Michael Scot as scientist or
linguist, but he had a great respect for another thirteenth century
astrologer, a contemporary of Bonatti, Campanus of Novara, to whom
he refers in 1267 as one of the few good mathematicians of his time.
Campanus, who died in 1296, was really a mathematician and
astronomer first, and his interest in astrology seems to have been in
that aspect of the subject. He wrote a Sphaera and a Theorica
planetarum, 'Theory of the Planets' (not the one commonly used in the

165 At f. 8r Scot has the 'definition' Deus est intellectualis spera cuius centrum est ubique,
circumferentia vero nusquam, 'God is an intellectual sphere whose centre is eveywhere
and whose circumference is nowhere'. This is given in Hamesse's edition of the slightly
later florilegium, Auctoritates Aristotelis (p. 299) under the name of Empedocles.

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

schools after the 1240s to supplement Sacrobosco; that was probably

Gerard of Cremona's, as Regiomontanus said). Campanus' Theorica
includes instructions for making an equatorium, a simple armillary
sphere used in teaching. He was and is best known for his edition of
Euclid and his commentary on the important mathematical work of
Leonard Fibonacci of Pisa. Campanus' works were unoriginal, per­
haps, but important for late medieval education. The editors of his
Theorica planetarum, Benjamin and Toomer166 have doubts about the
authenticity of astrological works ascribed to Campanus. Toomer in
his biographical article says that 'a method of his for dividing the
heavens into the twelve "houses" is mentioned by Regiomontanus
and others, but no such work survives that can definitely be assigned
to him.' There seems to have been a manuscript with a Latin title
which means, 'A little work on the twelve signs of the zodiac, with a
special method of erecting a chart of the heavens by division of the
prime vertical,' in the eighteenth century, but if so, it has not yet
turned up.167 It is the kind of subject that would have interested
Campanus, who seems fairly aloof from judicial astrology. He quotes
the Isidorean distinction, and accepts that astrologers need first to
study the theory, which is what interests him, before proceeding to
'judgments'. Whatever Campanus' ideas on house division, in the next
generation Andalö di Negro, Boccaccio's teacher, who died in 1334,
wrote yet another Introductorium in which the horizon and the
meridian are the framework, and the houses are equal in unequal
quadrants. Andelö is much more an astrologer than an astronomer,
and deals with such purely astrological matters as the Lot of Fortune,
for example, and lists of lucky and unlucky hours and their association
with the planets.
At this time, early in the fourteenth century, when popes and
bishops and the courts of princes all had their astrologers, one of
them, astrologer at the court of Florence, who had lectured at Bologna
on the Sphaera and on Alcabitius, was burnt at the stake as a heretic
on 16 September 1327: Cecco d'Ascoli.168 Cecco may have been the son

166 Theorica Planetarum, ed. F. S. Benjamin and G. J. Toomer (Madison, Wisconsin/

London, 1971); see also Toomer's article in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York,
1971), III.
167 Histoire Litteraire de la France (Paris, 1847), XXI. P. C. F. Daunou refers to eighteenth
century bibliographers, but no reference is given for the manuscript.
168 What follows is largely based on two works of Giuseppe Boffito: 'Perche fu
condannato al fuoco l'astrologo Cecco d'Ascoli?' in Studi e documenti di storia e diritto, XX
(1899) 357-382; and 'il "De principiis astrologie" di Cecco d'Ascoli, novamente scoperto
e illustrato', Ciornale storico della Letteratura Italiana, Suppl. 6 (Turin, 1903). Lynn
Thorndike, 'More light on Cecco d'Ascoli', in Romanic Review, XXVII (1946), 293-306,
adds very little, in fact; he uses Ernst Mehl, 'Zum Prozess des Cecco d'Ascoli', in
Festschrift für Georg Leidinger (1930) 179-186, but that, like most of the earlier work
considered by Boffito, is largely informed guesswork.

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of a Salernitan doctor. He was certainly much concerned with

medicine and begins his commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco
thus: 'A doctor must of necessity know and take into account the
natures of the stars and their conjunctions ..He studied and taught
in Bologna, lecturing there from 1324 on the Sphaera in the second year
course and on Alcabitius in the third year and writing commentaries
(incomplete) on both. The first is in Thorndike's book already cited,
and the second is the De principiis astrologiae (a title a little difficult to
translate, since principia are principles, foundations and beginnings).
On 16 September 1324 the Dominican Inquisitor in Bologna, Lamber-
tus de Cingulo, found Cecco guilty of offences against the faith, and
sentenced him to acts of penance, fined him heavily and confiscated
his astrological books, and forbade him to teach astrology. In 1326 he
was in Florence with the duke, but was burnt the following year,
apparently for teaching the same errors, and his works were con­
demned on 15 December of that year. So much is fairly clear from later
(seventeenth century) manuscript evidence. Marsilio Ficino, Pico della
Mirandola and Villani, closer to Cecco's time, are all agreed that Cecco,
known as a magician as well as an astrologer, applied his astrology to
the birth and death of Christ, and to the coming of Antichrist and the
end of the world; and perhaps also implied that astrological necessity
ruled not only men's wills but all the future.
What is the evidence of Cecco's works? There is no other contem­
porary evidence. Apart from his astrological works he also wrote a
long satirical poem in the vernacular, L'Acerba, which Boffito uses to
support his interpretation. There were other works lost or not yet
traced such as two he refers to in his commentary on the Sphere: a
commentary on Hippocrates' Airs, Waters and Places, and a book on
'Wonders in Nature' which might, as Thorndike suggests, be the De
mirabilibus mundi ascribed to Albertus Magnus. To return to the extant
works, one great difficulty is that it is impossible to be sure that the
texts of Cecco's commentaries as we have them are not emended texts
altered to satisfy the ecclesiastical authorities. There are places where
it certainly looks as though Cecco has added a note of conformity to
what remains a very provocative text. For example in the commentary
on the Sphere the text in Thorndike reads (pp. 180-181): 'Another thing
you must know is that according to our faith, the true faith, that circle
made in the zodiac by the rays of the planets, although it is the cause
of life, yet it is not the cause of our will nor of our intellect except by a
disposition (dispositive: shades of Tempier and 12771), and this I hold
and truly believe, although other astrologers hold the contrary, saying
that all things generated and corrupted and renewed in this lower,
generable and corruptible world have efficient causes in the higher,
ungenerable and incorruptible world, and they prove it thus ...' And

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

there follows a syllogistic proof of their position, followed by the

sentence: 'I shall destroy that argument in my commentary on the
Centiloquium, first proposition, where is the place for it.' Similarly in
the discussion on the eclipse at the Crucifixion, briefly dealt with by
Sacrobosco at the end of the Sphaera, Cecco states the question
formally as a quaestio disputata or quodlibetalis:™’ 'Whether (utrum) the
eclipse which happened during the Passion of Christ was natural or
(an) miraculous; and it seems that (videtur quod) it was neither natural
nor miraculous.' Cecco shows on good astronomical grounds (as did
Sacrobosco) that it could not have been natural, at the time of the full
moon. He then argues that it was not miraculous either, for then there
would have to have been a change in the heavenly workings, or their
complete overthrow, 'but if the universe cause were changed or
overthrown, all that is caused would be universally wrecked and
changed.' But neither of these things seemed to have happened,
170 Then, after much discussion of others' explanations of
therefore, etc.169
the eclipse he writes: 'Therefore I say in reply to the question that the
eclipse at Christ's death was miraculous and against (or: beyond -
praeter) nature, and occured only because of God's absolute power,
because God when he wishes can alter the order of nature; "wanting"
and "being able" are the same for him (velle et posse convertitur in
ipso).' Which is all good scholastic argument but leaves one wondering
what the actual discussion in the classroom was like!
There may have been complicated political motives behind the
execution of Cecco, compounded with city rivalries. It is possible that
his second judge, the Franciscan Bishop of Aversa, Accursius, re­
garded him as a supporter of Louis of Bavaria and the breakaway
Franciscans insisting on the absoluteness of poverty, under Michael of
Cesena and, later, William Ockham - Cecco is said by Villani to have
assisted Louis. But it is probable enough that his teaching at Bologna
was heretical, and the combination of causes brought about his death
rather than his imprisonment. Or like others later, he may have been
what the Church called contumacious: Villani says he was a vain man
and 'of worldly life', di mondana vita. The same authority also suggests
personal motives of Accursius and of Dino of Florence, who was 'the
great cause of the death of Cecco, falsely condemning his said book ...

169 Masters in the medieval university had, on occasions laid down in statutes, to
'dispute' questions before their fellows and students. The set occasions when the master
produced the questions he intended to dispute produced quaestiones disputatae,
'disputed questions'. On a number of other days he had to argue on questions 'from the
floor', as it were - 'any question at all', which is what quaestio quodlibetalis means.
170 Cecco is using the old scholastic modus tollendo tollens, from the Aristotelian logic
taught in the Arts faculties: if p then q; but not q, therefore not p.

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per invidia, through jealousy'; but as Villani adds, this does not prove
Cecco innocent of heretical teachings.
Whatever the truth of it, it cannot now perhaps be known. And
whatever the heresies in his attitudes and his comments, the actual
astrology of Cecco's works is very much in the late medieval tradition
and he was, it seems, also acquainted with various forms of magic and
divination, all of which he believed could give information on the
future, though astrology was the most reliable way. It is such a
marvellous way of knowing the future that it makes man divine, and
like the angels, and it enables the doctor, 'if he knows the beginning
of the sickness rightly to judge whether it is caused by hot, cold, wet
or dry matter, and whether it will be a mortal illness or the patient will
recover, and this without even examining the sick man himself!'
Cecco's commentary on Sacrobosco is mainly astronomical, and the
astrology is extraneous; but the notes on Alcabitius are of course
largely astrological, with a good deal of medical matter included. His
sources include all the great names of thirteenth century astrology, but
include also Dorotheus, presumably at second hand through Masha'allah
or Firmicus Maternus. His medical interest leads him to list the planets
and their plants, which are very much in the ancient Greek tradition:
Sun and heliotrope; Moon and paeony; Saturn and sempervivum, or
houseleek; Jupiter and agrimony; Mars and fennel (?); Venus and
all-heal (panacea); Mercury and verbena (?). Cecco has an interesting
note on caput and cauda: 'Caput and cauda are intersections of circles
and are not stars positioned in the heavens like Draco itelf... They are
called nodes, and move 3'2" westwards each day. Caput is composed of
the natures of Jupiter and Venus, and cauda of Saturn and Mars. They
have the same sorts of effects here below as the seven planets.' The
objection is raised that the planets affect us by their light, but the
nodes have no light, therefore etc. To which Cecco replies: 'I say to
this argument that the secrets of the heavens are hidden in the
particular but the astrologer argues from the actual effect', which is
exactly the argument of modern astrologers in similar circumstances.
Lastly, it is interesting that Cecco apparently preferred trepidation (of
10°) to regular precession of the equinoxes, though otherwise he is
traditionally Ptolemaic.
By the end of the fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth
century, the courts of Europe, lay and ecclesiastical, were fairly thickly
strewn with astrologers. They were consulted by everyone; but how
much notice was actually taken of them, how many princes or bishops
actually altered course on the advice of such pilots, it is very hard to
say. One gets the impression that their function was not so much to
answer the questions 'What?' or 'Whether?' but rather 'When?' The
task was generally to discover the favourable time for some enterprise;

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and of course to cast the natal charts of princes and their offspring. As
G. W. Coopland writes in his edition of Oresme's Livre de divina­
tions,m commenting on a French scholar's remark that the Emperor
Charles V made Thomas de Pisan his favourite astrologer, and always
consulted him and always obeyed him: 'It is precisely of the last point
that we are in inevitable ignorance; of the consultation we may have
knowledge, but scarcely of the obedience.' It was however a period in
which the lay nobility were as interested in and as convinced of the
validity of divination of all kinds, including astrology, as any of the
credulous masses of the uneducated; and certainly no one doubted the
value of astrology to medicine. It is true, as Coopland says (p. 6) that
superstition 'was clearly widespread and mischievous. We need not
stress too heavily evidence drawn from the titles of the books collected
by Charles V in the great library installed by him in the Louvre. The
lines of demarcation as between the various provinces into which the
study of the universe was later to be so profitably divided were not yet
laid down, and a work whose title would appear to indicate a treatise
on magic might include much that we should call physics and
mathematics. More significant is the fact that such men as Oresme and
the great Gerson thought it urgent to write in condemnation of the
dependence on soothsayers that existed in the highest places.' One
might legitimately wonder at that 'profitable division', but the
wholeness of late medieval learning, it cannot be stressed too often,
included much magic and divination and astrology without distinc­
tion. When men like Oresme or Peter d'Ailly wrote of astrology, even
when they were critical, they used the astrological writers as authori­
ties exactly like the rest and treated their works with exactly the same
respect.
Nicole Oresme, who taught theology in Paris from 1358-1361 and
died in his sixties as Bishop of Lisieux in 1382, wrote, in Paris, both a
short Latin Tractatus contra judiciarios astronomos and a longer work in
French substantially the same as the Latin book, the Livre de
divinations; the texts of both are in Coopland's interesting work.
Oresme classified astrology under six heads. First, what we call
astronomy, which is 'speculative and mathematical, a very noble and
excellent science'. Second, 'the qualities, the influences and the powers
(physical or natural) of the stars, the signs, the degrees' etc., such as
heat and cold, wetness and dryness. This is a speculative but natural
science which can be known, though predictions are made on an

171 G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers (Liverpool U.P., 1952), p. 184,
footnote 27. There is also interesting matter in Oresme's Livre du Ciel et du Monde, ed.
Albert D. Menut and Alexander J Denomy, and translated by Menut (Wisconsin U.P.,
1968).

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

out-of-date basis since precession has altered the state of things and
their effects. Third comes 'the revolutions of the stars and the
conjunctions of planets' and so on, and here there are three kinds of
predictions. One, from major conjunctions, of great events, as plagues
and famine, floods, great wars, deaths of princes, the appearances of
prophets and the beginnings of new religious sects; these can be and
are known, but only in general, and details cannot be known. Two,
weather predictions — very unreliable; Oresme suggests that farmers
and seamen are better at it. And three, medical predictions and
information on humours and so on, which is fine so far as concerns
the sun and the moon, but less reliable when the other planets are
involved. The fourth division of astrology is genethlialogy, the fifth
interrogations and the sixth elections. These belong to Fortune, as the
first three to Nature; and they constitute, of course, judicial astrology.
Of the fourth, Oresme says (Coopland's translation, p. 57): 'The fourth
part, of nativities, is not in itself beyond knowledge, so far as the
complexion and inclination of a person born at a given time are in
question, but cannot be known when it comes to fortune and things
which can be hindered by the human will.' And since it is so often
wrong in practice (he obliquely refers to Augustine on twins) 'I say
that this part of astrology cannot be known and the rules written down
on it are not true.' Likewise, but more shortly, he rejects the last two
divisions as having no rational foundation and no truth in them.
Which all looks very clear and rational; but there is less certainty
and clarity than there seems to be. In chapter 15 Oresme says,
commenting on the idea that the heavens are a book of God's creation,
'wherein are written the fortunes of kings', that 'what is to happen in
the future is not written in the sky, except in so far as from congruent
movements we may know future constellations which are, or will be,
cause or signs of various inclinations and diverse fortunes', which
seems to open the astrological door pretty wide, 'saving always the
freedom of the human will'. And he goes on to write of the three
'noble ends' of astrology: to know 'great matters'; to learn of the
Creator; and, less important, 'to ascertain certain dispositions of this
lower and corruptible nature, whether present or to come, and nothing
beyond that.' The same doubts and ambiguities are found in the
writings of his follower Peter d'Ailly who, like Oresme, taught at Paris
and thus became very much involved in the attempts to heal the 'Great
Schism' in the papacy (at one time there were three 'popes') which
was ended only in 1417 with the Council of Constance and the election
of Martin V. In the process d'Ailly became Archbishop of Cambrai and
a cardinal, but in 1417 he retired to carry on with his astrology for the
three years remaining to him. The astrological section of his De falsis
prophetis is derived from Oresme, but in his Vigintiloquium, a book

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 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

showing 'the agreement of astronomical truth with theology', written

about 1410, he grants that since the stars alter the atmosphere and so
on, and these things influence men's characters and behaviour,
astrology has its uses; saving, of course, man's free will. But even of
this he says in his prologue, 'although the will is not compelled, yet
the body is altered by the powers of the heavens, and then the soul
which is united to the body is strongly disturbed and effectively
moved, though it is not compelled.' Astrology becomes superstitiosa
when it is used to foretell 'free' future events. It is the errors of
superstitious and bad astrologers which bring astrology into dis­
repute. Neither Oresme nor d'Ailly, nor indeed Jean Gerson, who
wrote a tract against judicial astrology for the Dauphin in 1419, made
any distincton between astrology and astronomy, or questioned the
validity of astrology - only whether it worked, or whether it was licit.
But at the beginning of the fifteenth century there are more doubts
around, and more criticisms being voiced, even within the framework
of superstition and magic which formed the general background.
It is true that men were, throughout the Middle Ages, all over
Europe (and beyond), more open to beliefs in what now would be
regarded as superstitious, or fanciful, or even nonsensical ideas, at
the same time as they advanced rational thought in theology and
philosophy and even in mathematical science. They did not make the
kinds of distinctions we are so educated to make that we do so
without thinking, and without realising how modern and how local
and perhaps how tentative they are: between science and fantasy, facts
and theories, books and experience, between, even, religion and
superstition. Not that we do this all the time or very well or
consistently, nor that some of us never do it at all; politicians
generally, and arguably many of their electors, confuse these and other
such categories most confoundedly. But although history is always
written from the point of view of the victors, in the history of ideas
there ought to be no such concept as victory, which smacks of
arrogance. At any rate, the understanding of the history of ideas
demands that one approach each time from the preceding age.
Knowledge of what comes after is needed to appreciate the move­
ments, the directions, to see the small beginnings as significant. But
one must always then make the effort to see even those beginnings in
context, as their contemporaries saw them. Otherwise there is no
understanding how they ever occurred then and there among those
thinkers, unless one is to believe in some directing Spirit of Progress.
For the thousand years of this chapter and for most of the time covered
by the next, astrology, in our sense, was as it had been for Antiquity
an integral part of the Liberal Art of Astrologia - or Astronomia,
whichever one cared to call it. What happened to or was said about

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astrology in this period was never a consequence of anyone antici­

pating modem attitudes.
The Middle Ages began with the rejection and virtual disappearance
of astrology in the West, and closed with its almost universal
acceptance. It disappeared partly because of the disapproval of the
Church. Only partly, because ecclesiastical disapproval could not have
achieved it alone. The Church disapproved of the pagan Liberal Arts,
which in the quadrivium included Astrologia. They survived, not
because of Boethius or Cassiodorus, much less because of Martianus
Capella, but because they were bound to: there was no substitute. Of
course, what really survived was the late antique form of education,
consisting for almost everyone simply of Grammar and Rhetoric. So
much was essential for a Church with Scriptures and a Latin liturgy.
Essential though it was, it all but disappeared in the West, north of the
Alps at least, in the seventh and eighth centuries. It was this collapse
of education, and in particular the collapse of higher education, of the
quadrivium, which really made the survival of astrology impossible.
The faint memory of astrology was preserved in the works of those
very churchmen, Augustine and Bede and others, who condemned it;
but little more than the name and the memory. There was no astrology
in Western Europe from the early sixth to the late twelfth century. It is
striking that in all G. G. Coulton's works on medieval life and the
medieval church there is no mention of astrology of sufficient
importance to be noticed in the (very full) indexes. Nor is astrology
referred to in early medieval admonitory or minatory sermons, though
demons and their evil misleadings of men are there. The thirteenth
century Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his long Dialogue on Miracles, has
much to say of superstitions and demons and necromancy, including
the information that there were 'many scholars from different countries
studying the art of necromancy' in Toledo (Book V, c.4), and that some
religious houses had resident necromancers who, having of course
given up the wicked practice, could nevertheless be prevailed upon to
use their art for good purposes (e.g., Book V, c.18); but nowhere does
he mention an astrologer. If he knew anything about astrology at all,
he regarded it as a science and nothing to do with miracles.
It returned to the West from within Astrologia. Astrologia could only
be reintroduced from and through the Arabs, since there were no
Latin textbooks. The desire and search for the quadrivium were older
than the translations from the Arabic, and then the Greek; the
beginnings lie in the ninth and tenth centuries with the slow revival
of the schools and the growth of the numbers of scholars who might
be interested. But the first 'renaissance' was wholly Latin: Gerbert
d'Aurillac went to Catalonia for the quadrivium, not for Arabic
learning, and the revival of philosophy which culminates in the great

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precursor and maker of Scholasticism, Peter Abelard, sprang from

Priscian and Boethius, not directly from Aristotle. When the trans­
lations of works of medicine, mathematics, science and philosophy
began to be used in the Latin schools from the late eleventh century
on, they were received by a scholastic world which was ready and
eager for them. Among them came astrologia, received and accepted in
the thirteenth century because it was, as it had always been, a Liberal
Art, a science, part of the late antique Aristotelian-Stoic-Neo-Platonist
world picture, which became the world-view of Islam and of Christen­
dom. The Church found astrology included and, provided God's
omnipotence and man's freedom were preserved against the fatalistic
determinism of some astrologers, had no reason to reject it. The later
thirteenth century and the fourteenth was a time when men were
interested in anything and everything, in all strange new sciences, real
or pretended (a distinction then impossible to draw). It was also a
period of more widely spreading education among laity as well as
clergy, and of growth of the importance of the vernaculars alongside of
Latin, as is shown both in literature and in the-numbers of vernacular
chronicles. Men's attitudes changed, for a great number of reasons.
The 'rationalism' of the schools (and of political thinking) - Ockham
and Wyclif are among the great names - changed men's ideas on the
Church. So did the Black Death, which left the Church in a very
exposed and far from easy relationship to its flock. And perhaps above
all the towns became more important: Stadtluft macht frei, 'city air
makes you free' was not only socially true, but to some extent
intellectually also. By the late fourteenth century there was in all
educated centres a greater spirit of critical adventurousness than at
any time for over a thousand years. Within astrologia, as within
alchemy, really lay two subjects, overlapping and merging: what we
would call sciences - astrology and chemistry - which were the
preparatory ground for the others, the arts of astrology and alchemy. It
may be that the separation of these sciences from the arts, and the
gradual disappearance of the latter were due to the exercise of the new
critical spirit on the practices in the two fields, and that the crucial
point was that the development lay in the sciences because that was
where the results were achieved, while the 'arts' seemed still to be no
more successful than they ever had been. The widening of this
separation, its effect on astrology and the attempts of astrologers to
make their art respectably scientific, are part of the matter of the next
chapter.

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A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

IVa Vezelay, tym panum over the west doorway showing the zodiac
 THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

IVb Detail of Cancer from the Vezelay zodiac

203
 VI

Renaissance and Enlightenment:

The Second Death of Astrology

This chapter could begin with as simple a fact as the last. The
Renaissance happened when and because the Turks captured Con­
stantinople in 1453. The Greek scholars then took up their beloved
manuscripts and fled to Italy, and so the West became aware at first
hand of the Ancient Greek World, for the first time. They then rejected
the wasted years between, the Middle Age, and the modern world was
born. Alas for so neat an explanation, the Greek Manuel Chrysoloras
returned, after having visited Italy on an embassy from Constan­
tinople, to take up a municipally paid lecturship and teach Greek in
Florence in 1396; and between 1404 (the Phaedo) and 1435 (part of the
Symposium), Bruni translated five of Plato's works and his Letters.
Mussato and Petrarch and the early Humanists take us back to the
early fourteenth century, and in the thirteenth there were proto­
Humanists north and south of the Alps with changing attitudes to the
ancient classics. Indeed, it was because the Florentine scholars were
avid for classical learning already that Chrysoloras was tempted back
as a teacher, to be followed by others, including his nephew. It is
possible to argue that there was so much continuity between the late
medieval thirteenth century and the 'Renaissance' fourteenth, that
there was really no Renaissance at all, just continuous change
proceeding at different rates in different fields of activity and in
different places. Yet something did happen. The Europe of the late
sixteenth century is different in fundamental ways from that of the late
thirteenth; and we did end up with a threefold, not a twofold, division
of European history.
The last fact, the fact that we can have a chapter entitled 'The Latin
Middle Ages', is indeed very significant. No medieval man, however
great his admiration for the ancients in comparison with those of more
recent times, but only a new man of the Renaissance could have
invented the term medium aevum, the 'Middle Ages'.1 The ideas that

1 R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954) 240-1, quotes
Richard of Bury (1281-1385) on the ancient authors and 'their successors' who 'are barely
capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners, and of acquiring those things

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

the writers of antiquity formed a world — a pagan world - which it was

possible to penetrate and with the great men of which one could
converse' through what they wrote; that then there was a period
when that world was largely lost, or only parts of it assimilated; and
that only now can we, not humbly but proudly, associate with them
and recreate that cultural world; these ideas are at the core of the
literary Renaissance from Petrarch's time on. It is very important to
realise that it is true of this movement, and of all those that followed or
accompanied it down to but not including the scientific movement in
the North Italian universities in the sixteenth century, that it con­
cerned only an elite: a never large number of men in a handful of
Italian cities; and many of those scholars, philosophers and artists
were peripatetic, attracted by patronage or driven by politics from city
to city. The same is perhaps less true north of the Alps, where there
was a different kind of continuity. If the Italian cities and their
education had always been more secular, and so their attitudes to
literature, and indeed to paganism, different from those of the North,
it was nevertheless the North which produced those fourteenth
century movements gathered under 'Nominalism' which led to the
separation of theology from philosophy, and metaphysics from
science, which made room for that individualism in theology and in
science that is so fundamentally important in the sixteenth century.
The philosophical movement of the Italian scholars was in a
different direction. With the exception of Pomponazzi the return to
antiquity meant the return not only to Plato, but to the Neo-Platonists
and the Neo-Pythagoreans, and to the Stoicism of Seneca. It also
meant a return to the Fathers, Greek and Latin, to Augustine perhaps
especially, but also to the Neo-Platonic theology of the Pseudo­
Dionysius. Just as the Fathers had found in Platonism and Stoicism
congenial philosophical ground, so too did these fourteenth and
fifteenth century thinkers. Such influences naturally led to the integra­
tion of theology and philosophy, so that discussion of the nature of
man meant establishing his position in the Creation with relation to
God and the angels and not just in the 'chain of being'; and also to a
sometimes overt Platonic rejection of the reality of the physical world

as pupils which the ancients dug out by difficult efforts of discovery.' Yet it is true for
Richard as for his twelfth century predecessors that the awareness of 'modernity' (from
mo do, 'now') and even of inferiority is merely the awareness of the newness of what is
happening, and the sometimes only literary modesty of the dwarfs on the giants'
shoulders. The veteres antiqui, 'old ones, ancients', who included the Christian Fathers as
well as the pagan authors of antiquity, still began, not at some theoretical time in the
past, but a few years ago. Compare particularly Chapter 14, 'Classicism', of Ernst Robert
Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London,
1953).

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

of sense. The introduction into this sort of picture of man and the
universe of Hermetism and the Cabalah produced the extraordinary
world-picture of Pico della Mirandola, which was — quite under­
standably - to get him into serious difficulties with the Inquisition,
and as naturally led to his vast anti-astrological work. His criticism of
astrology was criticism of it as a false science, within his scheme of
things: astrology implied that man was within and part of and even in
some way subservient to the sensible world, which was anathema to
one who set man alongside God, above and potentially beyond all the
rest of Creation. We shall look in detail at his Disputationes, but it is
important to notice that his attacks on astrology are not those of a
modern, rationalist, humanist, but arise out of convictions that no one
now would wish to defend.
It was of course possible to accept the newly arrived Platonism and
keep astrology. As we have seen, Platonism was one of the roots out of
which the Greeks' acceptance and development of Middle Eastern
protoastrology grew, because of Plato's late attitudes to the heavens
and the planets and their permanence and beauty and divinity. The
first of these Renaissance Platonists, who was indeed responsible for
the most important early translations of Plato and the Neo-Platonists
and of the Corpus Hermeticum, was Marsilio Ficino. Before Ficino, the
chief philosophical influences on the Humanists were the Latin
authors Cicero and Seneca, which meant a strongly ethical, rhetorical
and Stoic outlook emerged, as indeed in Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).2
Incidentally, Salutati divided the Senecas into two, as brothers, but
gave the prose, including the philosophical Letters, to the elder, and
the poetry, the Tragedies, to the younger. His De nobilitate shows his
relatively low opinion of medicine and indeed of Physica in general.
'One of the reasons seems to have been that he associated physica with
the schoolmen' - quite correctly, as we shall see. Consequently he had
little time for astrology; and in any case his reading of Augustine
would have put him off. Nevertheless, his reading included Abu
Ma'shar, the Alfonsine Tables, Bonatti, Campanus' Theorica Planeta­
rum, Peter of Abano's Conciliator, and Ptolemy's Geography, Almagest
and Quadripartitum, and the Centiloquium, so he was not uninterested
in astrologia.
Ficino's attitudes were ambivalent, and changed during his lifetime
time (1433-1499), but in general he may be said to have been against
superstitious, judicial astrology, while still much interested in astro­
logical medicine. His philosophy was Augustine-Platonist, and much
else, but this meant that for him 'Philosophy' or wisdom was a

2 See B. Ullmann, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua, 1963). The quotation is from
p.89.

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

seamless garment, inseparable from theology. So man's knowledge of

God and himself and truth and reality was all of a piece, in which a
judicial astrology that subordinated man to the heavens could have
little part, except at the purely physical level. Hence he could be and
was interested in iatromathematica, and 'he regarded his work on this
"astrological science" as a serious problem, if difficult to succeed in;
but not failing in his science for which he should feel ashamed. Both,
opposition to traditional astrology and work on a new iatromathemat-
ical method, surely belonged inseparably to his life's work.'3 For
Ficino the planets might physically determine at birth the abilities,
strengths and weaknesses, of a man's body, but it was then entirely up
to the individual what he made of those possibilities and became.4
Ficino's philosophy made room for a very great deal in his typically
Renaissance eclecticism. He could and did draw on 'Thomism,
Augustinianism, Ockhamism, Epicureanism, Ciceronian humanism,
the Hermetica, Plato, the Neoplantonists, the Orphica, the Chaldaean
Oracles, the Platonising Arabic and Jewish thinkers who had been
translated in the Middle Ages, particularly Avicenna and Avicebron,
but also including Averroes and many others, and not to forget the
Scriptures.'5 It is scarcely surprising that he vacillated in attitudes to
astrology!
The impact of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputationes adversus
astrologiam divinatricem,6 and indeed the influence of Pico, were very
great, despite the shortness of his life: he died at thirty in 1394. But as
Robert S. Lopez says:7 'Pico was outstanding thanks to his prodigious
learning, his noble birth, his inherited wealth, his celebrated hand­
someness, all enhanced by the most desired aspect of that age -
youth!' His twelve-book attack on judicial astrology came, in 1394, at
the time when astrologers were really in their heyday in the Italian
Courts. There existed then 'a kind of contest for the confidence of
princes; a contest in which were brought into play all the subtle
intrigues of which the courtiers of that time were capable. The
apparition of a comet, the terror aroused by an earth-tremor, were
occasions for getting oneself noticed, occasions when the most

3 Hans Baron, 'Willensfreiheit und Astrologie bei Marsilio Ficino und Pico della
Mirandola' in Kultur - und Universalgeschichte: Festschrift für Walter Goetz zu seinem 60
Geburtstage (Leipzig/Berlin, 1927) 147-170; p. 150.
4 Cf. Emst Cassiser, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig/
Berlin, 1927) 120.
5 Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist
Thought (2 vols, London, 1970) 504.
6 Edited with an Italian translation and notes by Eugenio Garin (2 vols, Florence, 1946,
1952).
7 The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance (Charlottesville, 1970) 24.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

reputable astrologers might fall into disgrace, and the most obscure
find their fortune.'8 They were occasions, of course, when an astrol­
oger, whose normal tasks were to produce birth-charts for princely
offspring, cast election-figures for important occasions, and in some
courts to publish annual prognostications, really had to take a chance.
Any such striking event, not only in the sky, but in the weather, for
example - a freak and devastating storm, perhaps - called not only for
explanation but more importantly for prognostication: what did it
mean? It had to mean something: throughout the period, at least until
the late seventeenth century, the physical world was still seen as
having layers of meaning, as signifying more than appeared to the
senses. It might be possible for academic astrologi to write later about
such things, and show by their charts that it was, of course, all
foreseeable; but actually getting the foreseeing right at the time, before
the events, was to say the least more difficult. The errors of astrologers,
excused so entirely plausibly by Ptolemy in the Tetr. (1.2), bulk very
largely in Pico's attack.
Pico's own philosophy was developed out of that of his most
important teacher, Ficino. One tradition that Ficino could not draw
upon was the Hebraic. Pico was a good Hebraist, and interest in the
Jewish Cabalah was, according to Trinkaus (op. cit.), one of the two
additions made to Ficino's thought. The other was the 'Neo-Platonic
and mystical nature of the so-called Averroist doctrine of the possible
intellect as universal rather than intellectual', which he assimilated
from the Paduan teaching of Elia del Medigo. These together with
Ficino's Platonic synthesis aided him in his construction of an
integrated vision of God and man and the world, in which all was
animated from God, through the angels and the heavens to man,
whose potentialities, explicitly presented to him by God, were
virtually infinite, divinity itself seeming scarcely beyond his grasp.
There was little doubt of a very Platonic rejection of the reality of the
body: 'Nor should we measure our condition according to weak body,
for this man is not that weak and earthly thing which we see, as is
written in the Alcibiades, but he is soul, he is intellect, which exceeds
every circuit of heaven, every course of time' (Heptaplus c.7). It follows
that a materialist astrological determinism had to be rejected, and
since it was so universally accepted, rejected firmly and convincingly
and finally. Hence the twelve books of the Disputationes.

8 Benedetto Soldati, La Poesia astrologica net Quattrocento (Florence, 1906) 76. Modern
authors write of 'the apparition of a comet' in this way, I suspect, because they are
discussed at such length by astrologers: but were they really so common and so striking
in those days? The few comets I have seen in more than 60 years have been
disappointing objects, in binoculars.

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

What Pico attacks in these books is not all astrologia, but 'that which
foretells things to come by the stars' (Proem).’ The work is against
divinatory astrology, for the reasons explained; and consequently
what we have referred to as 'physical astrology' is scarcely referred to -
it would have been as acceptable to Pico as to any of his contempor­
aries. Divinatory astrology includes judicial astrology of all kinds:
natal charts, progressions, elections, 'interrogations' (the answering of
questions, finding lost people or things, and so on), all the uses of
astrology to discover what is hidden, the stock in trade of every
astrologer of the period. Pico puts all these practitioners together, from
the most professional to the merest quack, and attacks indiscrimin­
ately: he frequently asserts that they are only really interested in
wealth and self-advancement. It is, of course, the scorn of the aristocrat
with great inherited wealth, and scarcely an accusation against
astrology. Commoner, and much more justified, is the argument from
the disagreements among astrologers themselves: some consensus on
important matters of method might be expected among those who
practice an ancient art, even if there might be differences of interpreta­
tion. Pico reverts to this, relevantly and rightly, again and again, and
sums it up briefly in VIII.2, which begins: 'from this various and
manifold variety of opinions, it can easily be perceived how uncertain
divinatory astrology must become'.910 On the consequent errors of
astrologers, their frequent mistakes in interpretation, Pico rejects
Ptolemy's excuses from complexity and simply asserts - entirely
properly within his own scheme of the universe - that the reason they
are wrong so often is that 'the astrologer consults signs that are not
signs, and examines causes that are not causes' (III.19). That these
astrologer's 'signs and causes' seem to make sense of chance events (a
perennial problem for those with an all-embracing picture of the
world, including the Christian) is of course explicable on different
principles in Pico's own system for dealing with freedom and
determinism (cf. IV.4).
Naturally Pico attacks the whole apparatus of minute and not so
minute divisions of the zodiac - decans, dodecatemories, terms,
fridariae, novenarii, and so forth - partly as artificial divisions of the
natural wholeness of the heavenly circle and partly as areas where
astrologers obviously disagreed so much among themselves. Of

9 All references are to Garin's edition. Despite the apparent clarity (and modernity) of
Pico's distinction between astronomic and astrologia in the Proem, he uses the terms, and
astronomi, astrologi, with all the usual ambiguities throughout the work; but the
beginnings of the modern difference are there - one can at least see which word is going
to mean what.
10 'Ex hac autem tam varia tamque multiplici opinionum varietate quam incerta reddatur
astrologia divinatrix facile est perspicere'.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

course, he knew that Ptolemy too had rejected most of these sub­
divisions: but one of his accusations is that astrologers are often such
bad astrologers on their own grounds, in that they rely on muddled
Latin sources instead of the comparatively scientific Ptolemy (Proem.
and elsewhere). And it is true that the most popular authority in
astrological matters in the fifteenth century was probably Manilius,
after his rediscovery by Poggio in 1416, with Firmicus Maternus
always there also. We shall see that the more learned astrologers were
themselves worried about this, and reacted into attempts to become
more 'scientific', more Ptolemaic. But Pico's attacks on the divisions of
the heavenly circle into houses and so on, and his arguments on the
impossibility of regions of the sky affecting issues below - even if
celestial bodies could: they were at least there, as bodies — have some
vagueness about them, for neither Pico nor his contemporaries were
yet sure what was 'up there': they had not yet reached the very
sophisticated notion that these bodies were simply moving in an
empty and possibly infinite space. However, the undoubted artifici­
ality of the degree - why should there be 360 of them? - enabled him,
with other reasons (III.7), to reject progressions of all kinds: 'a degree
for a year' was obviously arbitrary and therefore nonsense; and as we
have seen, astrologers still have to admit that the only reason they can
adduce for it is that (as they claim) it works.
Book V is concerned to show that the idea of the 'great conjunctions'
signifying major historical events is wrong. Partly, he argues on the
same ground as that on which he rejects houses and aspects. Why
should different regions in the sky produce different effects, since all
the sky is the same? And how is it that 'rays' are presumed to affect
one another? Rays might affect things below on which they fall, but
they cannot affect other rays. If rays have always the same powers
whatever part of the sky they come from, and cannot affect one
another, then aspects are irrelevant and no aspect can be weaker or
stronger than another, much less vary in benevolence or malevolence.
And since all the planets and all the stars are always present in the
heavens at every moment, why is one nativity different from another,
or one conjunction considered 'great'? It is not difficult for Pico to
show that astrologers have in practice differed widely on the interpre­
tations of the great conjunctions, and mostly been wrong (he would
have enjoyed the disarray of the optimistic astrologers after the
outbreak of war in 1939). And how, he asks, can the effects of these
conjunctions persist for such long periods, when the actual coming
together of the planets - even in 'great' conjunctions involving the
slow-moving Saturn and Jupiter - occupies so short a time? How can
astrologers indulge in their common practice of explaining important
historical events, in retrospect, as due to this or that conjunction years

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earlier? Book VI follows these objections with the very plausible a

fortiori argument that if astrologers cannot get the large things right,
how are they to be trusted in the little? If indeed events in the
sub-lunary world are determined, or at the least signified - pre­
signified, indeed - by celestial movements and positions, one would
expect important events involving cities and nations, famine and war,
to be clearly signed. But from what the astrologers have to tell us the
clarity is not there; so why should one expect the tiny details of
individual lives to be as clearly sign-posted in the heavens as the natal
chart suggests? Of course, they are not, and it is easy for Pico to
deploy all the ancient arguments against the inconsistencies of the
astrologers.
More important, perhaps, and just as traditional, are the objections
based on astrologers' disagreements on three matters, to be added to
those on house division. They cannot agree on the relative importance
of conception and birth. Pico misrepresents Ptolemy on his question
(VIII.3) but his arguments are ancient and often repeated. He adds that
in any case the seed is already formed before conception, and if there
is an important moment it is that of the formation of the seed,
whenever that is. Second, astrologers are far from unanimous on the
influences of the fixed stars, even the paranatellonta (VII.9). It is an
objection that goes back to Seneca (see p. 53 above). And incidentally
there is the matter of unseen, and therefore unknown planets, and
their possible influences (VIII. 1), an idea Pico derived, according to
Garin, from Favorinus (apud Aulus Gellius XIV. 1; and cf Seneca,
Quaest. Nat. VII.13). Last, there is the difficult problem of the fixed or
moving zodiac (VIII.2). The precession of the equinoxes means that
'the first point of Aries', the point where the sun crosses the equator
on its-way north, the spring equinox, is no longer in Aries at all. Now
does the division of the zodiac begin at that point, into twelve 30°
sections, the first section being called Aries, whatever the constella­
tions which actually occupy those 30°; or does one give the 30° around
the constellation to each of the signs, and accept that the zodiac is
moving round the heavens? It is a question that still exercises
astrologers, as it always must those who hold to the zodiac at all; and
it is difficult to see that there can be any other ground for decision
other than experience - which works better?
Which is true for all the ambiguities Pico rightly fastens upon -
rightly, though of course to perceive and state an ambiguity is not
logically to refute the system which includes it. At the beginning of
Book IX, however, he launches an attack on divinatory astrology as a
whole. 'Three things,' he says, 'must necessarily be grasped if true
forecasts are to be made about the future.' Notice that he writes 'are to
be made' not 'were to be made': si vera ... praedicenda sunt, not sint.

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'The first is this, that the hour of the beginning of whatever matter is
being considered is reliably ascertained (ut hora ... fideliter teneatur).
The second, that we grasp the exact condition of the heavens and
position of the stars at that hour. The last, that what that position of
the heavens and stars effect, we should understand by arguments that
are true, or at least not fallacious, from being observed in experience'.
The rest of the book shows without much difficulty that the required
accuracy is virtually impossible anyway, and that astrologers have
always been content with the inaccuracies of their Tables, un­
supported by observations. There was, of course, a vicious circle from
which the astrologer could not escape: the only way to establish the
time at all accurately was to observe the heavens, and assume the
Tables to be correct. Having used the state of the stars to establish the
time, one could scarcely then use the time so found to establish
accurately the state of the heavens. When a picture shows an
astrologer holding up his astrolabe to the stars, is he finding the time,
to look up the ASC and the MC and the houses in his Tables, or
finding the Ascendant and so on, to look up the time and discover the
positions of the planets and the nodes from the books? It need hardly
be added that the modern astrologer could safely answer all Pico's
charges on this score, were he properly equipped. Book X shows that
the rationes of the astrologer are not true, that the art is not properly
rational; and Book XI that it is not based on experience and
observation. It is worth remembering that at this time as for centuries
before, experimentum meant 'experience', which of course included
experimentation - but astrologia could only be observational, never
experimental. The last book goes back to a point made at the
beginning of the work, and produces what for the Renaissance
humanist was the damning argument that astrology was not derived
from the Classical Greeks and Romans but from the Egyptians and
Chaldaeans. The Greeks themselves provided this ammunition,
though they were in this, as we have seen, mistaken; mathematical
astrologia was a Greek creation.
Although many of Pico's arguments are the traditional ones, used
over and over again from Augustine onwards, the whole was indeed a
massive attack, and its great value as a storehouse and summary is
shown by the use made of it by all later controversialists on both
sides. Its effect was restricted of course to those in his own world and
to the astrologers. It had no effect on the common beliefs of men - nor
even, perhaps, of popes and princes - and there is no evidence of its
converting any astrologer from his creed. But then, whenever have
such controversial books had such effects? The best they can achieve is
to clarify and sharpen up debate, and it can reasonably be argued that
Pico's Disputationes did that.

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The effect of Pico's work can be seen as late as the beginning of the
seventeenth century in the textbook of the only interesting astrologer
to emerge from Renaissance Italy, the Dominican Tommaso Campanella
(1568—1639). His work is thus entitled in the 1629 edition (given as
from Lyons on the title page, though the British Library Catalogue
says probably not Lyons'): 'The six books of Astrology of Campanella
of the Order of Preachers, in which Astrology, from which all the
superstition of the Arabs and the Jews has been eliminated, is dealt
with on physical principles {physiologice), according to Holy Scripture
and the teaching of Saints Thomas and Albert and the great Theo­
logians, in such a way that it may be read with great profit without
coming under suspicion from the Church of God.' He takes further
precautions in the heading to the table of contents: Tn the Preface we
show how scientific Astrology {Astrologiam physicam) is to be separated
from the superstitious; by it neither are divine providence and power
to be overthrown, nor the freedom of the human will; and we shall
show that Astrology is partly true knowledge {scientia), partly con­
jecture, and partly supposition {suspicio), like medicine; and how one
should proceed in it, and that the stars work in lower things in a
fourfold manner; and what authorities should be used.' The 'fourfold
manner' is explained on p. 9: 'The stars work in lower things by heat,
light, motion and aspect.' Campanella's good sense is shown in his
attitude to the 'terms' of the zodiac (p. 41). They are the last and least
of the 'dignities' (decans and so on), and are too small to have been
discovered in experience, so there is much argument about them
among astrologers. Although he gives a table of 'Egyptian terms,' he
says, 'I confess I am not sure about them.'
When he comes to deal with the horoscopus, the Ascendant (p. 118),
he says, 'Although it is extremely difficult (so much so that it is
regarded as impossible by Pico, and by Saint Ambrose) nevertheless it
is absolutely necessary to be sure of the degree and minute of the
horoscope.' This major problem makes the erection of a birth-chart
very difficult, since all the rest depends on the establishment of the
Ascendant. The second problem is of course, how to divide the zodiac
into mundane houses. Campanella is brief, though far from clear; he
claims it is Alcabitius' method, which seems to be 'rational enough'.
He settles on equal quarters of 90°, it seems, though it cannot have
worked as he describes it. The first runs from the Ascendant 'to the
zenith or Medium Caelum' including what are presumably equal
houses XII, XI and X; the 'or', seu, must surely mean that the zenith is
taken, which can be the Medium Caelum - one cannot simply identify
the two, as Campanella must have known. The second, however, he
says runs 'from the Medium Caelum to the setting point', with houses
IX, VIII and VII; the third from the setting point to the Imum Caeli (VI,

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V and IV) and the last the three remaining houses between the IMC
and the Ascendant. The houses are described, as traditionally, as
angular, those next to the ASC and so on, succedent, those in the
middle, and declining, those adjoining the next, setting-end cardinal.
But he says (p. 32) that 'astrologers are by no means yet agreed on the
way in which a figure should be erected'. All these difficulties lead to
what is still called 'rectification', though now it is only needed when
there is much doubt about the date and time of birth. The known
dates of accidents, illnesses, journeys and so on are 'calculated
backwards', as it were, to reach a figure which accommodates them all.
He is clear enough on precession and the zodiac (p. 22): 'So the
equinox does not begin as it once did at the beginning of Aries but in
Pisces, so that now it is marked as 2° Pisces.' And he adds that
astrologi call the vernal equinox 'the first point of Aries'. Lastly, and
very importantly, he expresses simply the astrologers' answer to those
who thought (and indeed think) that Copernican Heliocentrism was
bound to give the death-blow to Astrology (Book I, c.2, art. 1, 3):
'Whether the sun moves or stands still, it is to be supposed a moving
Planet by us, considering the matter from our senses and our
description; for the same happens whether it moves or the earth.' In
other words, what matters to the astrologer is their relative position, as
with all the planets; their angular distances seen from here.
There is magic in Campanella's other works, based on Ficino's, and
there is magic in Pico as well as Ficino. One of their sources was a
curious work called Picatrix.11 This became 'the book of magic'. It
circulated widely in the fifteenth century, when magic and astrology
and religion and various occult sciences were inextricably mixed in the
minds and practices of men.12 As D. P. Walker says, the two streams of
magic, the 'natural, spiritual' kind, which shades off into psychology
and musical and poetic theory, and demonic, which became overtly so
in Agrippa of Nettesheim, for example, separated to some extent in the
fifteenth century to come together at the end of the sixteenth 'in the
planetary oratory of Paolini and the magic practised by Campanella'
(op. cit., p. 75). Picatrix, or 'the Picatrix’ as it is also known, was an
Arabic compilation probably of the late twelfth century, which was
translated into Spanish in 1256. From this Spanish version, it seems,
the Latin version circulating in the fifteenth century was made. It was
introduced into the West in the work of Ibn Khaldun, who died in
1406: all the Latin manuscripts are fifteenth century or later. It is

11 A number of reconstructions have been suggested of the possibly Greek name lying
behind this strange word, but it does not matter here. There is no edition of the work,
but there is a long extract edited by V. Perrone Compagni in Medioevo, 1 (1975) 237-337.
12 See, as well as Keith Thomas, op. cit., D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from
Ficino to Campanella, Studies of the Warburg Institute 22 (London, 1958).

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described in those manuscripts as 'a book of ancient secrets of the

philosophers intended only for the wise to use for good' (Compagni).
It is divided into four books and is very largely concerned with
astrological magic. Book III describes, along with many other necro­
mantic ideas, 'how it is possible to converse with the spirits of the
planets'. After much astrology it states clearly 'these are the things
without which it is impossible for anyone to come to the practice of
this scientia, and all are found in the books of astronomia.' There is no
reason here to follow the story of astrology's involvement in magic in
succeeding centuries,13 though it is an interesting story in its own
right. The object of all this is stated by Nauert (op. cit., p. 234): 'Writers
on magic and astrology regarded the magus not as an ordinary man,
but as one of a small elite of wise men, able to become (as Francis
Bacon later wrote of the scientist) “masters and possessors of Nature".
For the making of a magus astrology was universally acknowledged to
be necessary, since earthly things such as images and talismans and all
potent substances were intimately bound up with the states of the
heavens, and the sky was now peopled with spirits and very much of
the antique apparatus of gods and demigods.'14
If Ficino's and especially Pico's 'philosophy' - which included all
knowledge - lifted men out of the world of sense as far as or even
further than was possible, and set him in a spiritual world of gnosis
and mystery, the philosophy, sharply separated from theology, of
Pico's almost exact contemporary Pietro Pomponazzi of Mantua
(1462-1524), set man firmly in the physical world. Pomponazzi taught
at Padua, Ferrara and Bologna, and belonged to the North Italian
Scholastic, Aristotelian tradition. Trinkaus (op. cit., pp.53ff) attributes
to him 'the remarkable assertion of an autonomous, naturalistic vision
of man.' His sort of 'humanism' has a considerably more modern ring
to it than that of the literary and Platonist Renaissance; though of
course the word 'humanism' is not misused as it is now to mean a
narrow, rationalistic atheism. As Peter Laven says15 'It must be
13 See Charles G. Nauert Jr, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Illinois, 1965);
and also the works of Frances Yates, especially Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(London, 1964). Frances Yates correctly describes Picatrix as 'A most complete textbook
for the magician, giving the philosophy of nature on which talismanic and sympathetic
magic is based together with full instructions for its practice.' And add the fascinating
La Zodiaco della Vita: la polemica sulT astrologia del trecento al cinquecento (Bari, 1976).
Translated as Astrology in the Renaissance: the Zodiac of Life, by Carolyn Jackson and June
Allen (London, 1983).
14 It may be worth a note, since some readers may look for his name in a book such as
this, to say that Nostradamus (1503-1566) is irrelevant to any history of astrology. He did
practice astrology, it is true, but only as a quack and among other forms of occultism. He
is now really only known for his 'quatrains', a series of nearly nonsensical verses some
of which can be interpreted' to seem relevant to later ages and even our future: but
nonsense is always capable of any interpretation.
15 Renaissance Italy (London, 1966) 197.

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remembered that even the Popes were Christians.' Pomponazzi

derived from Aristotle and Cicero more than Plato (though there may
have been influence from Republic IV and Protagoras') the idea that 'it is
the moral life, rather than the life of the intellect or the life of the
producer' (these are the three intelligences classified by Aristotle) 'that
is distinctively human.' On such Aristotelian views, with a separation
of philosophia from theology which recalls Boethius, man is a physical,
mortal being, and personal resurrection, the reunion of soul and body,
impossible according to philosophy, though known for certain by
revelation. If man was as the Christian Aristotelian saw him to be,
natural magic and astrology were both parts of a reasonable view of
the world, with the usual Christian reservations; which was in the
tradition, of course, of Albert the Great and Aquinas. From this
standpoint the burden of Pomponazzi's criticism of Pico was that Pico
was unscientific; as indeed he was. After expressing the almost
universally accepted caveat about man's freedom - 'that is what
Ptolemy meant when he said, the wise man will lord it over the stars' -
he goes on to defend the astrologers against Averroes and Pico, who
either misunderstood them or simply got the subject wrong: 'and
certainly in their books I have found nothing but a haughty and
impudent presumption (arrogantiam et petulantiam): they contain
nothing good but their style.'16 According to Pomponazzi, and the
same is true of Girolamo Cardano (1501-1573), another Pavia-Bologna
teacher and mathematician, whom we shall notice further when we
come to house division and its problems. Nature acts like a god -
indeed, God acts in and through nature, and it is argued that what is
good, including good magic and so on, is produced by God as efficient
cause, and what is evil, including demonic magic and superstitious
astrology, is produced by ourselves as deficient causes. Clearly, while
looked at from where we are, the views of Pico and Pomponazzi may
seem to have very much in common, to be of their time, not ours, the
differences between them are fundamental. In particular, while Pico'
view of the world has no need, almost no room, for physical science,
Pomponazzi's contains it as an essential ground.
Those engaged further south in the literary, humanist Renaissance
of the fourteenth century had little understanding of and not much
respect for the late medieval universities of the North, despite the
travels of many of them. Much has been said then and since, by
antipathetic and not too well informed critics, of the sterile logic­
chopping of the schools. But for the last half-century or more it has
been known that the origins of what is now (with some vagueness)
called 'scientific method' go back not to Francis Bacon, not to Galileo,

16 Petri Pomponazzi philosophi et theologi ... opera (Basileae, 1567) 264, 267.

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but beyond, into the Middle Ages, and ultimately to such works as
Cicero's and Boethius' Topics and thence to Aristotle, especially to the
Posterior Analytics - a work recovered in the West in Latin in the
twelfth century. It was precisely the apparently dull medieval method
of teaching by the lectura, the 'reading' (hence the title 'Reader') of
auctoritates, ancient or even contemporary authorities, and comment­
ing on them, which produced the Commentaries: the great theological
works of the thirteenth century either were or grew out of commentaries
on the Sententiae (the 'Sentences', i.e. opinions) of Peter Lombard, a
collection of excerpts from theological authorities. Discussion of
methods of arriving at scientia, knowledge, arose out of commentary
on the logical works just mentioned - the more advanced fare of the
better Arts faculties. Roger Bacon had already in the thirteenth century
emphasized the necessity for the use of mathematics in all enquiry
into the physical world; and mathematics belonged also to the Arts as
well as to the medical faculty. It belonged to the medical faculty by its
attachment to astrologia: we shall return to medicine later, but for
longer than the period covered by this book no one would have
studied medicine without including some study of astrologia. And it
must always be remembered that even when it appeared most
dominated by auctoritates medicine had always to be an empirical
science. Given all this, it is really in these late medieval universities
that one would expect the beginnings of modern science to be
perceptible. And indeed thus it is.
Near the beginning of the fourteenth century Peter of Abano had
described in his Conciliator, 1310, the two kinds of demonstration, or
proof, derived from the Aristotelian tradition.17 There is demonstration
of effects through causes, demonstratio propter quid, 'because of what?',
and demonstration of causes from effects, demonstratio quia, 'this
because'. Both are, of course, really the same and inextricable, but
facing different ways, as it were; 'the way up and the way down are
one and the same', as Heraclitus wrote. Now the way in which we try
to understand and explain the world we live in is to note effects, to
abstract to causes - since we do not know causes in any direct or
occult way - and then to explain the effects, to describe them anew
and differently, because of and in the light of the now understood
cause. And then we can subordinate causes to one another and form a
kind of hierarchy, and our understanding and power of explanation,
and hence our power over nature, grow. It follows from all this that, in
opposition to the Thomist tradition, the mind must know particular,

17 What follows is mainly dependent upon: Peter Laven, Renaissance Italy (London,
1966) and J. H. Randall Jr, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science
(Padua, 1961).

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singular things directly, in order to abstract to causes. This is, of

course, the Nominalist, Ockhamist, position, and one which is bound
to separate scientific philosophy, philosophia naturalis, from theology
and even metaphysics: an essential 'liberation', perhaps, for the
development of modern science, though it might now with hindsight
be argued that the separation became too wide for comfort. The
process just described is a kind of elementary sketch of the 'scientific
method', and Randall says (p. 21) that 'the transformation of the
demonstrative proof of causes into a method of discovery is precisely
the achievement of the Paduan theory of science', or knowledge. The
same problems of method were bound to and did arise in the medical
faculty, especially in the context of diagnosis. It was one of the greatest
achievements of the ancient Greeks that the Hippocratic schools of
medicine invented the only truly empirical science of antiquity.
Theoretical discussion of its methods was advanced at the beginning
of the fifteenth century by such men as Jacopo da Forli (died 1413) and
Ugo Benzi of Siena (died 1439), and arrived at much the same
conclusions as the physicists. They, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, along with military engineers with their new and very
practical interest in ballistics, transformed ideas on motion from the
curious (mistaken) qualitative notions of Aristotle to quantitative
ideas of velocity, acceleration and (almost) inertia, vis insita among
other terms, and most important perhaps it was all based on
observation of what happened, experimentation, and measurement (cf.
Laven, c.8).
For two centuries and more the University of Padua became the
centre of this development of empirical science. It was a slow process
since it involved the rejection of Aristotle, and emancipation did not
come suddenly. In accordance with the medieval tradition, reinforced
as it was now by Renaissance respect, Classical authorities could really
only be rejected when accommodation ceased to be possible ('When X
said such-and-such, what he really meant was ...') and demonstrably
false statements had been exposed: for example, the notion that a
missile such as a cannon-ball moved in a straight line so long as the
'push' of the air kept it going and then dropped by its 'natural'
downward motion to the ground. It took a long time to show that it
was from the start subject to both its impetus forward, diminishing
because of resistance, and its constant gravitas, its heaviness, its
downward movement, in varying proportions. Towards the end of the
sixteenth century the description of the 'inductive method' had
become explicit at Padua in the work of Zabarella, and he influenced
Galileo, who arrived at the university in 1592. All that was lacking
from this picture was the mathematics. Number-mathematics, arith-
metica, led in Italy largely from Neo-Pythagoreanism into theosophical

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speculation with no connection with science. The rediscovery of the
great Greek mathematicians of the Hellenistic age led to the geo­
metrical, Pythagorean-Platonist mathematics of Kepler, for example. It
is sometimes a surprise to those who actually look at what Newton
wrote to discover that the Principia Mathematica is very largely in
geometric terms. The ancient Greeks of course were driven that way
by their extremely cumbrous system of writing numbers; and real
mathematical development in physics had to wait for the transfer of
geometry to algebra in Descartes' coordinate geometry and the
Leibniz-Newton invention of the calculus, to deal with continuous
change algebraically. But the need for mathematics and mathematical
development was felt in the sixteenth century.
It may seem strange to have got this far without serious mention of
the Reformation, which was a Northern movement and which indeed
increased the division of Europe into North and South, still so very
evident. The relationship of the Reformation to currents of ideas,
especially those which concern us here, is far too complex for anyone
yet to have seen their way even moderately clearly through it. But it
can be said that Reformed theology widened, from the other side, the
gap between empirical science and theology, between this world and
the other, between physics and metaphysics. It must be added that
no-one in these centuries (and few perhaps ever since) believed that
truth, certain truth, could ever be established and known from 'facts':
Truth remained as it had been since Plato and Augustine, meta­
physical or revealed.
Of the relationships between the new science and astrology some
instances may be given. Johannes Peuerbach, the teacher of Regio­
montanus, published in Nuremberg in 1474 his Ephemerides ad XXXII
annos futuros, 'Ephemeris for the next 32 years'. Ephemeris merely
means 'daily', and an ephemeris is a book of tables of the positions of
sun, moon and planets each day for so many years. In the case of slow-
moving bodies positions might only be given for longer intervals, and
calculation is needed to establish all the positions for a given date. So
Peuerbach sets out an introduction on how to use his tables, in the
course of which he explains how to work out the retrogradations of
planets. He also explains that the 'superior' planets, Saturn, Jupiter
and Mars are 'oriental' when the sun is moving away from them after
conjunction. Venus and Mercury are oriental when they precede the
sun in the morning, and occidental when they follow the Sun in the
evening. 'Accidents of this sort,' he goes on, 'are noticed by two
syllables or and oc placed at the heads of the five columns. So much
then for their motions and the effects that follow them.' Now all of this
introduction is purely astronomical and scientific; but he immediately
goes on: 'What great benefits these matters provide for doctors'

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practice in so many ways, and for nativities of men, and their

"revolutions" (i.e. progressed charts), for alterations in the weather, for
beginnings of undertakings, commonly called "elections", and for
innumerable other civic uses, will be fully explained later in appro­
priate commentary.' 'Civic' uses because the Ephemerides are meant,
perhaps largely, for mariners; and the 'innumerable other uses'
presumably refers to the making of talismans and other less reputable
pursuits. At any rate the one-ness of astrologia is still very evident.
One of the great names in the history of science is that of Francis
Bacon, first Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans. Born in 1561,
Cambridge educated and a Gray's Inn lawyer, a Member of Parliament
for 34 years until he became Lord Chancellor in 1618, he was disgraced
for bribery in 1622 and died in 1626. His most important works were
his Essays, the last edition of which he published in 1625; the
Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum, 'New
Instrument' (1620). His New Atlantis was published posthumously in
1660. He has often been likened, from his Essays and his life, to his
favourite, Seneca; but in our context he is rather Boethius. He was an
immensely learned man, who absorbed not only the ideas of his age
but also the currents of thought. Like Boethius he perceived the needs
of the time, and putting all this through the mill of a fine mind he
produced much to satisfy the needs and direct the currents. He
ordered and refined and made explicit much of the theory of attaining
to knowledge of the physical world, the ultimate aim of such
understanding being mastery of the natural world for the good of man.
How, then, did he stand with regard to astrology?
In the Historia vitae et mortisw he says (Vol. V, p. 221): 'Inquire into
the length and shortness of men's lives according to the time of their
activity; but so as to omit for the present all astrological and
horoscopical observation.' Which, apart from that 'for the present',
seems fairly unequivocal. But the works to look at are the Advancement
of Learning (Vol. IV), and the Novum Organum. (The name means 'new
instrument' and refers to the Organon, the collective name for
Aristotle's logical works, since they were for Aristotle not philosophy,
but the necessary tool or instrument of the philosopher.) In Book III of
the Advancement of Learning (pp. 349ff), Bacon wrote: 'As for Astrology,
it is so full of superstition, that scarce anything sound can be
discovered in it. Notwithstanding, I would rather have it purified than
altogether rejected.' Purified, that is, of all 'tradition' that is 'not based
on reason or physical speculations.' He goes on: 'I do not hestitate to
reject as an idle superstition the doctrine of horoscopes, and the

18 The Works of Francis Bacon .. ed. Spedding, Ellis and Heal (14 vols, London,
1857-1874).

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distribution of houses; which is the very delight of astrology, and has

held a sort of Bacchanalian revelry in the heavenly regions ... The
doctrines of nativities, elections, inquiries, and the like frivolities,
have in my judgment for the most part nothing sure or solid, and are
plainly refuted and convicted by physical reasons.' Again notice the
slight mitigation of a sweeping judgment, 'for the most part'. The
purification is then explained, the ground rules, as it were. Five
things are listed. 'Let the greater revolutions be retained, but the
smaller revolutions of horoscopes and houses be dismissed.' This
really follows as a consequence of the next three. His second point is
that the heavenly bodies affect the more tender, the more sensitive
bodies, as humours, air and spirit. To which another editor” adds in a
footnote, 'But if celestial bodies act upon humours, air and spirits, and
these in turn affect solid bodies, it follows that they also act on solid
bodies.' Third, they affect masses, large numbers, rather than indi­
viduals; the amount of 'influence' on an individual is so small as to be
negligible. Fourth, this influence works over long periods, rather than
short, obviously for the same reason; 'and therefore predictions of the
temperature (i.e. weather) of the year may possibly be true; but those
of particular days are rightly held of no account.' Perhaps not by every
purchaser of almanacs! Fifth, 'that there is no fatal necessity in the
stars; but that they rather incline than compel.' That so much is
admitted is explained by what he says next: 'I hold it for certain that
the celestial bodies have in them certain other influences besides heat
and light; which very influences however act by those rules laid down
above, and not otherwise. But these lie concealed in the depth of
Physic, and require a longer dissertation.'
Astrology thus purified and restricted is called 'Sane (i.e. healthy)
Astrology'. It would contain, within the limitations just set out, the
following:20 firstly, 'the doctrine of the commixture of rays'; that is,
conjunctions, oppositions, and at least the major aspects. Secondly
(and thirdly, but they can be run together), the distances, and hence
the relative strengths of influence, of the planets; and their positions -
culminations, and so on. Fourthly, the retrogradations and the stations
(the points where they stand still in changing their direction) of the
planets, and eclipses of heavenly bodies. Fifthly, the natures of the
planets and the stars, and hence their differences. And lastly, the
traditional interpretations of all these things where they seem to
accord with sound sense and are not contradicted by or inconsistent
with what is scientifically known. The uses of such sane Astrology

” The Works of Francis Bacon ..ed. Basil Montagu (17 vols, London, 1825-) III.130.
20 References now are to Montagu's edition. What immediately follows is still from
III.130.

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would be for the prediction of 'comets, ... meteors, inundations,

droughts, heats, frosts, earth-quakes, fiery eruptions, winds, great
rains, the seasons of the year, plagues, epidemic diseases, plenty,
famine, wars, seditions, sects, transmigrations of people; and all
commotions or great innovations of things natural and civil' (p. 132). It
could also be useful with much less confidence and with no pretence
as to exactitude of times, for a restricted number of 'elections': for
example, for horticultural and agricultural actions like grafting and
sowing and planting, the moon is particularly important. And he
generalises into the open-ended statement that 'perhaps there are
more of these instances to be found in civil matters than some would
imagine'. The practical way in which one arrives at this sane Astrology
is fourfold: by experiments in the future, and by checking on past
experience, by sifting traditions, and by the use of 'physical reasons'.
Lastly, Bacon dismisses as 'wild astrology' all the semi-magical uses
connected with seals and talismans and amulets and so on.
In the Novum Organum Bacon appears more dismissive. In the first
book, of Aphorisms, XLVI says that 'all superstition is much the same,
whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment,
or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which
are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much
more common.' And at the end of LXII he says, 'There are, therefore,
three sources of error and three species of false philosophy; the
sophistic, empiric and superstitious.' But the following aphorism
makes it clear that (as the 'retributive judgment' above suggested)
superstition includes theology and religion, where mistaken, and such
philosophy as Platonism. The distinctions between what is 'science'
and what is not are still not clear, and there is still plenty of room for
astrology even in the scheme of things described so influentially by
that arch-prophet of modem science, Francis Bacon.
There is one aspect of 'natural astrology' not mentioned by Bacon in
all of this: medicine, iatromathematica. Medicine, or physic, as it was
called in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has been astrol­
ogy's oldest and most constant associate. Astrologers always regarded
the doctor as their nearest point of comparison, because of the
fundamental similarities of the two 'arts' - artes, that is, 'skills'. They
had virtually begun together, in Greece, and their history was, from
the astrologer's point of view, similar. They were both arts depending
on the observation of what actually happened in experience (experi-
mentum), and the framing of hypotheses to explain and interpret those
experiences. In both cases, the numbers of 'facts' and the complexities
of man and human life were both an embarrassment and explanation
of error. The greatest distinction between them, and it contributed
greatly to astrology's decline, was that in medicine it was possible

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actually to handle the 'subject', the patient. Operations on the living,

sometimes of an almost modern character, and dissections of dead
animals and, early and late, humans, told the doctor a great deal about
how the body worked, and physiology and anatomy developed greatly
from the early seventeenth century onwards. In astrologia hypotheses
were never verifiable: they could merely be shown to be more, or less,
preservers of what was observed - for example, any idea of concentric
spheres had to be rejected almost as soon as it was formulated in
Plato s school, because it could not 'explain' the variations in the
apparent brightness of the planets, at a time when any change in the
heavens, in their real luminosity, for example, was wholly unaccept­
able; or, if they were astrological hypotheses, such as that the
conjunction of Saturn and Mars was evil, then appeal had to be made
to the traditions of astrology distilled from the past experience of
astrologers. This was neither easy in ages when records were ill-kept
or not kept at all, nor always very convincing. Nevertheless, medicine
and astrology remained closely associated, and to the seventeenth
century at least some knowledge of astrologia was a necessary part of a
doctor's training.
No doubt there were various kinds of astrological medicine; one
outline is given by Carroll Camden, Jr, who also gives a list of
sixteenth century supporters of the art.21 According to astrologer­
doctors, there were two kinds of diseases, acute, which never lasted
more than a month and were usually of less than a week's duration;
and chronic, which went on for much longer than the month. The first
kind were to be judged according to the positions and aspects of the
Moon; the second depended on the Sun. There were four classes of
'critical days': decumbitures, that is, the date and time of the patient's
taking to his bed, marked on the chart by the position of the Moon at
that instant; the crises, familiar from fevers, especially malaria; and the
judicial and intercidental days, found astrologically. When the Moon
moved into the same degree as the decumbiture, in the next following
'house', that was a judicial day; and when the Moon was in the degree
sextile to the position of the decumbiture, that was an intercidental
day. The 'houses' in this scheme were eight (memories of the
octatopus?), each of forty-five degrees, beginning with the degree of
the Moon's position at decumbiture. Each of the cusps of the houses,
as the Moon moved through them, also marked a crisis; at least, four
of them were important crises, the cusps of the third and fourth
houses, the cusp of the second house quartile to the decumbiture, and
the decumbiture itself; the other four gave the doctor judicial days. All
this seems pretty detailed, without any observation of what is actually

21 'Elizabethan Astrological Medicine', in Annals of Medical History, NS II (1930) 217-226.

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happening to the patient. Indeed, H. G. Dick,22 says as much: 'The

astrological Physician would diagnose the disease, predict its course,
and prescribe for it on the basis of his prediction - often merely by
casting a horoscope for the patient unseen.' England's 'greatest
exponent of mystical, magical and astrological medicine' was Robert
Fludd (1574-1637), and 'today the best compendium of the pseudo­
science' is W. Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647) (Dick, pp. 306, 310).
Fludd was a considerable figure. His controversy with Mersenne was
rightly described by Frances Yates as the first major confrontation
between the Renaissance 'naturalists' and the new Mechanical Phil­
osophy, and Kepler took very seriously the difference between his
own and Fludd's mathematical philosophy.
The transition from belief in an ancient geocentric universe - the
universe of our senses: which was why the mathematical hypothesis
of heliocentrism was rejected in antiquity and later - to the acceptance
of a Copernican heliocentric one took a very long time. (I have serious
doubt about whether my grandfather, who was bom in 1870 and
schooled only until he was nine, really believed the earth went round
the sun.) In 1556 Robert Recorde (c.1510-1558), who wrote the first
arithmetical textbook in the vernacular, The Ground of Artes, published
his Castle of Knowledge, a textbook of the mechanics of astronomy. It is
wholly geocentric; but then elementary textbooks of mathematical
astronomy still are. What is interesting to us about this book is the
Address to the Reader, or preface, in the course of which he writes:

So was there never anye greate chaunge in the worlde, nother

translations of Imperies, nother scarse anye falle of famous
princes, no dearthe and penurye, no death and mortalitie, but
GOD by the signes of heaven did premonish men therof, to
repent and beware betyme, if they had any grace. The examples
are infinite, and all histories so full of them, that I think it
needeles to make any rehersall of them more; especially seeyng
thei appertain to the Iudicial part of Astronomy, rather than to
this part of the motions, yet shall it not be preiudiciall anye
waies, to repeat an example or twoe ... But who that can skyll of
their natures, and coniecture rightlye, the effect of them and their
menacynges, shall be able not only to avoide many incon­
veniences, but also to achieve many unlikelye attempts; and in
conclusion be a governoure and rulare of the stars accordynge to
that vulgare sentence gathered of Ptolemye:

22 'Students of Physic and Astrology', in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences, I (1946) 300-315; the quotation is from p. 303.

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Sapiens dominabitur astris
The wise by prudence, and good skyll,
Maye rule the starres to serve his will.
And later he adds '... without it (sc. Astronomy) physicke is to be
accompted utterlye imperfecte.' There is no more astrology in the
book, which is wholly concerned with the mechanics of the heavens,
but the object of the exercise is clear.
Two of the important names in the process of introducing Coperni­
can cosmology into England were Thomas Digges (died 1595) and
Thomas Bretnor (fl 1607-18). According to Francis R. Johnson23 Digges'
addition of Copernicus to his father's Prognosticon in 1576 included for
the first time the idea of an infinite, star-filled universe. 'He was the
first modern astronomer of note to portray an infinite, heliocentric
universe, with the stars scattered at varying distances throughout
infinite space.' The change from a finite, geocentric world to an
infinite universe with a heliocentric planetary theory, however diffi­
cult conceptually, was generally made in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; the first Copernican Tables were those of Erasmus Reinhold
in 1551, and such tables had soon replaced those which had been used
for four centuries before. But as has already been mentioned, this
'scientific revolution' made no difference to the astrologers. An
astrologer's chart or figure is always centred on the subject, individual
or otherwise, and what it pictures, and what is interpreted, is the
positions round the subject of certain points in the heavens - the
ascendant, the setting point, the houses, caput and cauda Draconis, for
example - and the locations of Sun, Moon and planets in that scheme.
This is to set out a figure, nowadays usually circular but in our period
almost always square, with all these things at the correct angular
distances from one another round the subject at the centre; and this
picture is the same whether one's cosmology is Ptolemaic or Coperni­
can. Johnson quotes (p. 252) an example from Bretnor of a 'Copernican'
astrological prognostication; it begins: 'This Brumal Season, com­
monly called Winter, and usually taken for the first quarter of our
Astronomical yeare, tooke its beginning the 11 of December last: for
then (according to old dotage) did the Sun enter the first scruple of the
cold and melancholicke signe Capricorne, or rather according to verity
this earthly planet entering the first minute of Cancer, and furthest
deflected from the Sunne's perpendicular raies, did then receive least
portion of Sunshine, and greatest quality of shadow.' And in another
place Bretnor points out that 'the Sun in Aries' and 'the earth in Libra'
are equivalent, though the second is the right way to put it.

23 Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England. A Study of the English Scientific Writings

from 1500 to 1645 (New York, 1963) 164f.

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The best-known name - and deservedly so - among these late

sixteenth century astronomer-astrologers is that of the Elizabethan
polymath, John Dee. W. C. Dampier rightly wrote of him in 1929:24
'The prevailing confusion between magic and science is well seen in
the person of John Dee (1527-1608), who spent much time in astrology,
alchemy and spiritualism, but was also a most competent mathemati­
cian and an early supporter of the Copernican theory. He wrote a
learned preface to an English translation of Euclid, published by
Billingsley in 1570. When Pope Gregory XIII corrected the erring
calendar by ten days in 1582, Dee was employed by Elizabeth's
Government to report on the means of adopting the reform, and it was
only the adverse opinion of some Anglican Bishops that caused a
delay in England of 170 years.' This reminds us that astrologia was one
of the most practical sciences of the age. Apart from the astrology, the
almanack forecasts and so on, it was essential for calendar making and
time-keeping, for medicine and all uses of herbs, and rules of health,
for horticultural and agricultural practices, for navigation and for
cartography. A man like Dee was of great importance in society, quite
apart from any personal reputation he might establish as a magus; it
has much less to do with magic than one might imagine. It also meant
that instrument-makers were an essential element in the development,
since greater accuracy was always demanded. Dee stands early in the
process. He travelled on the Continent, and between 1547 and 1550 is
thought to have visited Louvain, Brussels and Paris, and this 'made
him acquainted with the foremost Continental mathematicians, among
whom the designing, description and use of instruments in the service
of geodesy, cartography, dialling, gunnery etc., was taken for granted
as part of their work.'25 Apart from this, Dee was a considerable
scholar with wide interests, as is shown by his enormous library.26
'Dee was not merely an alchemist and spiritualist, but a really learned
man, and one who had done his best, by petitions and otherwise, to
stimulate interest in the rescuing of MSS from the dissolved monastic
libraries and to induce the sovereign to establish a central national
collection of them' (James, p. 3). His library was sold some time after

24 Sir William Cecil Dampier, A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy and
Religion (Cambridge, first edition 1929; last revised edition 1948; repr. 1966). The last
(paperback) edition has a valuable postscript and reading list by I.Beernard Cohen. It is
still a valuable as well as a very readable work, even as having 'an evil career which did
not end even with Copernicus and Newton'. The quotation in the text is from p. 144.
25 E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge,
1954) 170.
26 See Supplement 1 to the Translations of the Bibliographical Society (Oxford, 1921): 'List
of manuscripts formerly owned by Dr John Dee. With Preface and Identifications by
M. R. James.' Dee's 1583 catalogue was published in his diary by J. O. Halliwell, The
Private Diary of Dr John Dee (Camden Society XIX, 1842).

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1625, and among the purchasers were Ussher, Cotton, Selden, Digby
and Ashmole. As James says (p. 10), 'had it survived intact it would
have been a first-class repository of medieval science books excluding
medicine . Not entirely: five of the MSS listed by James are wholly or
partly medical. 'Alchemy, astrology, astronomy, physics, geometry,
optics, mathematics are all very copiously represented; and Dee
appears to have given special attention to collecting the works of two
great writers, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lull ... History, British and
English, is perhaps the subject best represented next to Natural
Science. One Welsh MS occurs.' In his catalogue are to be found,
among nearly fifty astrological works, all the great names of the history
of the subject, including the Greek of Vettius Valens, and at the other
end, as it were, Nicolas Oresme's Liber divinationum.
A scholar-scientist indeed; and a practising astrologer, for his
sovereign and others, much consulted. His astrology was part of his
astronomia, and 'improved' by science in a manner that much recalls
Ptolemy's attitude.27 His system was based on rays emanating from the
planets, etc., which implied the relevance and importance of astron­
omy - for planetary distances, for example - and optics. A good deal
was derived from Roger Bacon. 'Astronomical and physical principles
serve Dee's astrology chiefly by making possible a computation of the
strength of the rays or species emitted by celestial bodies at divers
times and places' (op. cit., note 27, p. 88). For example, the mora, the
time above the horizon, of a planet is greater than that of the
paranatellonta, the stars rising at the same time, because of the
planets' eastward motion; but the morae of retrograde planets are of
course shorter, and therefore their influence is diminished. In Aphor­
ism XXI Dee says (the translation on pp. 130-131 of Shumaker is
slightly inaccurate; I give my own): 'Every seed (semen) has potentially
in itself the whole and unchanging order of each act of generation, to
be unfolded in the way in which the nature of the place of the
conceiver and the power of the surrounding heaven which falls upon
its work and conspire together.' Which is almost a one-sentence
summary of the second chapter of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos I! In the
thirteenth Aphorism Dee makes an impossible demand: 'The true
sizes not only of the earth's globe, but also of the planets and of all the
fixed stars should be known by the astrologer.' But the attitude is
there, though he does often support even what are recent original
discoveries by quotation from old authorities, because innovation is
still felt to be wrong!

27 See John Dee on Astronomy: Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558-1568), Latin and English,
ed. and trans, with general notes by Wayne Shumaker, with an introductory essay by
J. L. Heilbron (Los Angeles, 1978).

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Among the men who were purchasers of Dee's books were men who
belonged to that circle of savants from which emerged the Royal
Society - Sir Kenelm Digby, for example, was a founding member. In
the first half of the seventeenth century there arose a number of
groups of men who gathered, very often in private houses, round
particular learned men to discuss the latest intelligence in a large
number of fields, including the new science. It happened across
Europe, not only in the capitals, but in provincial cities also, as far east
as Poland, and from Sweden to Italy.28 Alongside and overlapping
these groups went constant correspondence: 'Mersenne, Boullian and
Gassendi had correspondents everywhere in Europe, with whom they
discussed eclipses, longitudes and the length of the meridian' (Man-
drou, p. 185). Geographically, the correspondents of Nicolas Peiresc of
Aix-en-Provence covered from Madrid to Schleswig-Holstein, from
London to Aleppo. Some of the groups, all of which met often and
regularly, called themselves 'academies', such as the Accademia dei
Lincei, which called itself that, in Rome, in 1609, but suffered from the
condemnation of Galileo in 1632 and soon disappeared. One of the
interesting things about these groups is that their members came from
all the professions, and they were outside the universities. Their chief
problem was censorship. It was a period of increasingly oppressive
orthodoxy, both political and religious - Protestant and Catholic. Only
two countries really offered anything like freedom for the new thought
of the age and new uncensored publication of it, Holland (the United
Provinces), and England. But in France the rise of the Jansenists and
the Port-Royal from the 1630s gave some opportunities for opposition
to the Jesuit-State alliance and for the exchange of ideas and for
publication; the Port Royal Logique of 1650, for example, is quite clear
about the illogicalities and the unscientific nature of astrology, as clear
as Diderot and the Encyclope'distes of the early eighteenth century.
The first truly scientific society, which early placed itself under royal
patronage, was the Royal Society in London, which received its Royal
Charter in 1662. It was actually founded two years earlier, and grew
out of a group of men who had met for some years at Gresham
College, in London; so it too was apart from the universities, though it
soon included university men, and most of its early fellows were
professional men - perhaps the least likely, from the viewpoint of its
later membership and activities, was Sir Christopher Wren. It was the

28 For a general sketch of the 'republic of letters' in the early seventeenth century see the
most interesting From Humanism to Science 2480-1700, by Robert Mandrou, trans. Brian
Pearce (First French edition, 1973; trans., Hammondsworth, 1978) pp. 183f. If it is
somewhat parochially French, it is an excellent corrective to the strong English bias of
most that has been written here and in the United States.

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 RENAISSANCE and enlightenment

model for the French Academie des Sciences, founded in 1666, but it
had three great advantages: it was free to pursue its multifarious
interests without interference from Church or State and it regularly
published, as it always has, its Proceedings. These gave it continuity
and public standing, and its membership and presidents gave it
prestige; and the fact that there was a subscription for membership,
largely to pay for its publications, gave it economic independence of
patronage. Philosophical and literary pursuits were excluded from its
aims, which were from the beginning firmly anchored in practical and
profitable technical arts and skills, such as architecture and navigation
and mechanical invention. 'Among the founders the first place was
held by chemists, physicians and astronomers. Locke, a physician,
joined the society in 1668. The mathematicians and astronomers
Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley were accompanied, from 1671, by
Newton, who soon came to occupy an important position in the
society' (Mandrou, p. 269). Despite the Royal Society's explicitly
Baconian programme for science, there was another side to it: it was
not only concerned with 'improving the useful- arts, ... (but) also to
reviving ancient skills and secrets of which had been lost and the
virtues of which would be tested by experiment' (idem, p. 268), such
as, obviously, alchemy. Charles Webster truly writes, in a more
general context:29 'From the historical point of view it is impossible to
disregard the sources of evidence suggesting that non-mechanistic
modes of scientific expression remained intellectually challenging to
natural philosophers of all degrees of ability into the age supposedly
dominated by the mechanical philosophy. It is therefore questionable
whether the rise of science was associated with a total decline of magic
as it was understood in Western society in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.' 'Such figures as Aubrey, Ashmole and Plot
preserved to a remarkable degree the outlook of the natural magicians
of the Renaissance, and central to their scientific activities were
alchemy and astrology' (idem, ibid., p. 64). These men, and other early
members of the Royal Society like Beale and Henshawe and Boyle all
privately practised astrology, and all were dead before 1700, to be
succeeded by unbelievers.
It is well-known that Newton was much concerned with the
investigation and recovery of ancient Egyptian-Chaldaean esoteric
understanding of the universe, and spent much time on it - regarding
it, probably, as being as important as his scientific work or his work at
the Mint. But his attitude to astrology is easily summed up: he evinced
no interest in it whatever, either of support or rejection. We know

29 From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982)
11. A fascinating book.

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nothing of his attitude. A favourite story of present-day astrologers

has been exposed as a canard by I. Bernard Cohen.3031 The astrologers
say that when Halley spoke disparagingly of astrology, Newton mildly
rebuked him: 'Sir, I have studied these things - you have not.'
Quoting David Brewster's Memoirs of the life ... Newton (Edin., 1855,
vol. II, p. 408), Cohen writes '... when Dr Halley ventured to say
anything disrespectful to religion he invariably checked him with the
remark, "I have studied these things, - you have not."'
To return to the Continent of Europe, there were very few lasting
scientific societies to emerge from this period; the French Academie des
Sciences survived after it began regular publication of proceedings
from the later 1660s - an essential condition of continuity, divorcing
the life of the Society, which is long, from those of its members, which
are short. But there were of course growing numbers of scientists and
mathematicians, some great - the greatest by far, and arguably the
greatest of his or many generations, being Leibniz, who, like Newton,
ignored astrology. As did, of course, free-thinkers and rationalists like
Diderot and the Encyclopedistes: 'Astrology' does not feature in their
great work, nor is it mentioned under 'Astronomy'. But there are three
other reactions relevant to us: Gassendi's science, Kepler's new,
mathematical approach, and that of Morin the French astrologer, who
attempted to turn out the traditional Ptolemaic art in a new dress to
suit the new age; and failed. All of which involves juggling a little
with our times, but it seemed more logical, and it is all within that
indefinable period of 'Enlightenment' which produced the modern
world.
Gassendi's Franciscan friend and correspondent, Marin Mersenne,
seems to have taken what was probably a very common seventeenth
century attitude. He did not write on astrology but in his La Verite' des
Sciences3' Book II, c.l, is headed: 'Of the division, and diverse species
of Mathematic: of their usefulness, and necessity, and that Philosophy,
jurisprudence and the other Arts cannot attain their perfection without
them.' In the course of this chapter he writes (p.243): 'Doctors,
Chymists and Cabalists also need Mathematics, for Paracelsites would
not be able to understand the book which Paracelsus wrote de ente
astrorum (On the nature of the stars) nor his great Astrology which is
in the tenth volume of his works, nor the Astronomy of infernal things
("choses infernales", second word italicized: what are they? Does it
simply refer to "these lower regions" as in Gassendi below? But it is
infernales not inferieures.), if they had not studied Mathematics.' Which

30 Isis, XXXIII (1941) 60-61. 'Query No. 99: Isaac Newton - an advocate of astrology?'
31 Marin Mersenne, O.F.M., La Verite des Sciences: Faksimilie-Neudruck der Ausgabe Paris
1625 (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1969).

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

is all he says here of astrology, but the way it is referred to suggests he

regards it as among the normal and respectable activities of a scientist.
Gassendi himself produces for the first time what looks like a truly
modern 'scientific' attitude; perhaps not surprisingly - his same
attitudes and ways of thinking led him both in right directions in
science and in what many in the contemporary Catholic Church
thought were wrong directions in religious matters. Pierre Gassendi,32
as he was and is known, though apparently he always signed himself
Gassend' in the French style, b.1592, d.1655, was a canon of Dijon,
and taught at Paris, as Professor of Mathematics (= astronomy) in
1645. His principle of knowledge made him an anti-Cartesian; a
principle he shared with Mersenne and indeed Hobbes. It was that
no-one could know anything beyond his own capabilities: ut suas ultra
facultates nemo sapiat. 'When men move from this, let them not trust
that they can penetrate the secrets of nature, because they lack the
capability of knowing them no less than the capability of creating
them.' (Opera Omnia, Book I, p. xi). So metaphysics as a clear,
deductive science is impossible. He was a Copernican, as might be
expected, whose science included right ideas on inertia, and weight
and pressure, for example.
He knew his astrology and all the main sources, ancient and
medieval, very well, down to the fine details of numbers and
nomenclature. He asks, in Book VI of his Syntagma philosophicum, 1.1,
pt. 2a, Sectio II, which is entitled 'On the effects of the stars', 'what
effects do the stars produce in these lower regions, and how?' It is
agreed that the first effect is light, especially the Sun's; and then
warmth and dryness - cold and wet come from the earth. And these
produce secondary effects such as times and seasons. And these are
obvious: but they are also indiscriminate and general, so what
happens here and now rather than then and there is purely accidental.
The future may be known from causes - spring means flowers will
bloom - or signs - dawn light means the sun will rise. If astrological
prediction is neither of these it is not praenotio (foreknowledge) but
conjectio (guesswork). True knowledge of the future is God's alone. He
suggests three reasons why the stars are not causes. The precession of
the equinox has altered the rising times of the signs and relations with
the Sun, and so on, but the seasons remain the same even under the
new heavens. Second, for example, Sirius which is said to be a great
cause of heat for us (the 'dog days') is for our Antipodeans a cause of

32 See Dictionary of Scientific Biography, V (New York, 1972) 284ff; and Opera Omnia:
Faksimilie-Neudruck der Ausgabe von Lyon 1658 in 6 Bänden mit einer Einleitung von Tullio
Gregory, Band I (Stuttgart, 1964).

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great cold! And what about regional variations in general? And lastly,
if the stars were causes they should always be right: but ...
astrological predictions are mostly wrong and always unreliable.
This is followed by a full and accurate description of traditional
astrology mainly from ancient sources down to and including Firmicus
Maternus, and that by objections, from the usual authorities, including
Pico della Mirandola, of course. Here he asks, what about Thales
cornering the oil market from predicting the weather? The answer is
that Thales was scientist enough to do it without astrology, that there
wasn't enough exact astronomy about at that time for him to do much
forecasting, and 'that anyway it was well-enough known that Thales
was laughed at for his Astronomy not only by others but even by his
own servant-girl', and astrologers don't observe, like Thales, they rely
on Tables. He says pithily at one point astrology is not a true art but
pure gambling. He even rejects medical astrology, on the grounds of
the universality and general effects of the heavens. He then spends
some time rejecting all genethlialogy, progressions, transits, revolu­
tions and so on. One of his chief grounds for objection is Pico's, the
arbitrariness of it all: the degree is arbitrary as a division of the circle,
so what of 'the degree for a year' theory? 30° is an arbitrary space, not
a 'house' in the heavens. He sums up the reason for astrology's
continuance thus: Tn no age have men not been greedy to know the
future, and in none have there been wanting imposters to boast that
they know it.' There is an interesting and sympathetic reference to an
idea (of Lucas Guauricus) that there might have been two Ptolemies,
one who wrote the Almagest and one who wrote the Quadrip artitum, so
strongly is the contrast beginning to be felt. There are, of course,
causes why men are as they are and do as they do, but they lie in men
themselves and in this world, not in the stars. The only way to
discover what influences there are on the earth from the heavens is the
scientific way, through Observantia nempe sive Experientia. Gassendi is
anti-Morin throughout, of course: Morin had foretold that Gassendi
would fall ill and die at the end of July or the begining of August in
1650 - a prognostication Morin refers to in his (posthumously
published) Astrologia Gallica (1661; p. 747b). Gassendi died in 1655, a
few years before Morin. But first another, great scientist.
The superficial view of Kepler, derived from hundreds of popular
histories of modern science or astronomy - even highly reputable ones
- is of the great modern astronomer who took Brahe's and his own and
others' observations, and by dint of hard mathematical thinking
untrammelled by Ptolemy and Aristotle and the Past hammered out
his laws and came to the shocking and conceptually revolutionary
conclusion that heavenly movements were not all circular, as Authority
had always insisted, but that the planets moved round the sun in

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ellipses. Which is in a curious way true yet a travesty of the truth. To

move from Gassendi to Kepler is to move from the ambience of a
modern mind to that of Renaissance man, even to the early period of
Ficino, despite the fact that Kepler was only twenty-one years
Gassendi's senior, but removed by a century from Ficino.
To begin with, and most important, Kepler (1571-1630) was not
really an astronomer at bottom, certainly not an observer, but a
mathematician.3334 Not a mathematician of the modern, Leibniz-Newton
kind, but a Ficino-mathematician, of the Neo-Platonist, Cabalistic
type. His aim was really to produce a closed, coherent mathematical
world that would allow for almost a priori demonstration of the
Copernican theory and of heavenly changes, including of course, the
novae which were so important in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries in showing that the superlunary world was not
unchanging. The basis for all this construction really lay in theories of
harmony ultimately going back to Pythagoreans and Plato and the
Neo-Platonists, and set out with all its musical and many of its
cosmological ramifications and details in Ptolemy's Harmonicorum libri
III.3* One of his own most important works, particularly from our point
of view, is his Harmonica Mundi (Frisch, vol. V, 1864).
He first studied at Tübingen University from 1591 where he first
became interested in astrologia under Maestlin. Then he taught at
Graz, and existed largely on his astrological practice - in which he was
no charlatan; he fully accepted astrology, and it was the mathematics
of it that fascinated him: hence all his work on aspects. From
1598-1601, when Tycho Brahe died, he studied with that great
observer - a somewhat reluctant instructor of a curious young
mathematician, to begin with at least. His interests in astrology
became more and more in its mechanics, and in how it all fitted in
with the rest of his world. The bases for his work were twofold,
theological and mathematical. In the Mysterium Cosmographicum
(Frisch, vol. I, 1858) he noted that God created quantity, and hence the
regular solids, the day before He made the heavens: 'For quantity was
created in the beginning, with body, the heavens on the second day.'
On which he noted in 1621: 'Rather, the ideas of quantities are and
were coetemal with God, and indeed God himself; and they are still
there in our minds (souls: animis) as exemplars, made in the image of
God (even his essence), on which gentile philosophers and the doctors
of the Church agree' - a truly medieval attitude! He goes on in

33 There are several editions of his works: I have used Johannis Kepleri astronomi Opera
Omnia, ed. C. Frisch (Frankfurt, 1858—).
34 Publ. Oxford, 1682, ed. Johannes Wallis; facsimile (New York, 1977) as vol. LX in the
Second Series - Music Literature, in Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

Mysterium Cosmographicum: 'What plane figure can there be between

solid orbs? Surely solid bodies must be there. Now behold, reader,
here is discovered the matter of all this little work.' There are only five
regular solids (Euclid). 'To help the memory I shall describe my ideas
in words. The Earth is the circle, the measure of all (by "circle" he
must here mean the circle's solid, i.e. the sphere). Circumscribe the
earth with the dodecaedron: its circle will embrace Mars. Circumscribe
Mars with the tetraedron: its circle will embrace Jupiter. Circumscribe
Jupiter with the cube: this circle will embrace Saturn. Now inscribe in
the Earth the icosaedron: its inscribed circle will be Venus. Inscribe
Venus with the octaedron: its inscribed circle will be Mercury.' And
that is why there are that number of planets! Later, of course, this
scheme was modified; but the fundamentally closed universe, of
harmony etc., remains. Into all this he fits his aspects and house
division and so on. At one point in his consideration of aspects he is
led to the idea of two sets of five aspects of 36° as more rational than
the two sets of 30°. Much of the aspect-material is set out in his book
on the nova of 1604 (Frisch, vol. II, 1859). He rejects, however, all
'superstitious' astrology of the professionals: divisions in the zodiac
and the heavens are man-made, not natural, and the stars are always
signs, not causes, and all that can be said of influences in houses and
in different aspects must be derived from experience, it must work. All
these man-made divisions are arbitrary, but they are of course, with
their names, necessary to any astrological practice; provided one
remembers that they do not actually exist 'out there', as it were. Caput
and cauda draconis 'do not represent a natural division, but only
geometric or arithmetical points'. The names of the signs are arbitrary,
however necessary, and since they have no natural qualities ('Why are
Taurus and Capricorn feminine signs?') the 'elemental' values of the
triplicities are equally unreal. But there is one significant triplicity, of
Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, in which the 'great conjunctions' of Saturn
and Jupiter recur. This leads Kepler to a consideration of 800-year
periods of history - he is not at all sure that the world will last into the
period 2400 A.D. on! Behind all this is a wider and firm belief in
perfectly right means of divination - divine signs, dreams and so on,
all admitted and described in Scripture - which should not be rejected,
provided they are divine signs and do not arise in the course of
nature, in which case they are to be examined in the usual way. After
all, the nova of 1604 did appear with a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter
and Mars, which did not look accidental! On the other hand nothing
very special seemed to happen on the historical stage, so ...?
Kepler and Jean-Baptiste Morin are almost complementary to one
another as thinkers. Kepler in a sense wants to look back to a
Neo-Platonist, or rather Neo-Pythagorean world of number-forms and

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solid mathematical figures, all fitting into a harmony that made sense
of the whole: a view of the world as has been said that Ficino and Pico
would have wholly sympathised with. Morin wants to look forward -
in very much his own way — into the next age, to produce a logical,
coherent whole into which astrology fits with (corrected) modem
scientific ideas and practice as part of the whole pattern, which
includes a proper form of divination. But Kepler belongs to the future,
and his training and experience and even ways of looking at problems
are modern. Whereas Morin's whole background - his geocentrism,
his anti-Cartesian, anti-Gassendi 'science', his alchemy and astrology
- keeps him firmly facing backwards. He could not avoid belonging to
the past any more than Kepler could avoid, even had he tried,
belonging to the future.
Morin was bom in Frankfurt in 1583 and died in 1659. His vast
Astrologia Gallica was published two years after his death.35 He says he
was a doctor, an alchemist and an astrologer. His chief authority in
astrology is Ptolemy, always described in superlatives - ipse astrologo­
rum princeps, among other things: 'the prince of astrologers'. His chief
opponents, whom he attacks consistently, are Descartes, Gassendi -
his confrere in religion: Morin was an abbe - Ficino and of course
Pico; he includes among these a few contemporaries, but also Plotinus
and Epicurus, whose physics was revived by Gassendi, and by
implication Copernicus, since he remained firmly geocentric. On page
191 of Astrologia Gallica he says categorically: 'Besides, we have
demonstrated that the earth does not move in a great orbit, but is fixed
in the centre of the World'; and it is by no means the only place he is
so clear. The work is set out, with much preamble, in twenty-six Books
of varying length - none very short! The first sixteen are intended as a
theological-philosophical framework on which can depend the rest,
the actual astrology. It is interesting in passing to notice that when he
comes in Book XXII to 'Directions', he describes it as: 'This book is the
most important and the most divine of all Astrology.' It has, in the
past, given much trouble to astrologers, but he has it all sorted out and
settled. He makes precisely the same claim to have got it all right at
last in a fair number of places! The last book of all, Book XXVI, is
concerned with attacking the Arabic 'authorities' and their accretions
to astrology, described as 'false, fraudulent and Diabolical'.
From Book I to Book IX he attempts a deductive scheme on what
were Boethian principles beginning with the existence of God, when
he is Anselmian, and anti-Descartes, and bringing us to an under­
standing of the metaphysics of the universe, and of physics, including

35 Hagae-Comitis, 1661. Not, so far as I know, lately reprinted.

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causation, and matter, notion and time. Book VI, ostensibly on Motion
and Time, is actually all concerned with motion with a useless short
section on time tacked on at the end. With Book IX we move into
astrologia, with Sectio 11 on the physical natures of the planets, and a
long passage on comets. After a brief excursion into the historical
background, he deals in Books XI—XV with the effects of the heavens
on the sub-lunary world, with the proper natures of the planets and
some of the major fixed stars (since for Morin all heavenly bodies are
composite, physically, he has no problems with change in the
heavens, as traditional Aristotelians had done), with 'first physical
causes' and with the 'essential dignities of the planets'. And then we
are into astrology. But before we leave these early books it is worth
looking at his general defence of the art against the arguments of
Alexander de'Angeli, who was Prefect of the Jesuits in Rome, as he
sets it out in the Praefatio apologetica.
The Jesuit makes five objections. One, that there are no clear and
genuine principia fundamenta, 'basic principles'. It is hard to say
whether de'Angeli is looking for Cartesian clarity or, more likely,
principles for a Boethian deductive science. In either case it is a
modern demand. Two, astrologers never completely answer criticism,
but are always shifting their arguments: it is all 'Yes, but ...' with
more complications. This is really another very modern view: what is
objected to, underneath, is the apparent non-refutability of the
astrologer. Three, they, the astrologers, are very often simply wrong;
with the implication that if their principles were sound and their rules
good empirical ones, they ought not to be. Four, many astrologers do
not know their business, have not studied it properly, and are
ignorant deceivers whose objects are ambition and money, not true
divination and guidance. And last, that the authority and the learning
of astrology's opponents, past and present, may be contrasted with the
ignorance of the astrologers.
Morin's replies are fairly foreseeable, but they are, as much of the
book is, very personal. One gets the feeling that Morin feels himself
isolated, as a real, educated astrologer, both from the new world
unfolding round him and from the vast majority of contemporary
practising astrologers, and that he is therefore defending himself as
much as his art, throughout the work, so personally involved does he
become. To de'Angeli's first objection the work as a whole is an
answer: and Morin does not hesitate to say that the Prefect's objection
would have been a good one and valid had it not been for himself and
his book: now it is no longer true. Ptolemy is his great authority -
Astrologorum Archidux - and of course a good one from the 'scientific'
point of view, as we have seen. Girolamo Cardano is an authoritative
Commentator for Morin - again a reasonable choice, of a good

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mathematician. Both Ptolemy and Cardano err, as must be expected.
The same might be said of the developers of all the sciences. To the
second objection Morin replies personally. He says he took up
astrology late, at the age of forty, having previously been doctor to a
bishop. Presumably he was led by a pretty normal path from medicine
to astrology. He had then studied the art for ten years, and was
convinced of its validity and truth, and now he, Morin, knows the
answers to problems that previous generations of astrologers in their
ignorance have shilly-shallied round.
To three, that astrologers are often wrong, Morin really produces
Ptolemy's answers. He points out that there is bad theology as well as
bad astrology, and errors through ignorance are as common in
medicine (the old comparison), politics, navigation and so on: all are
artes conjecturales, arts dependent on instructed and experienced
conjecture. Which seems fair, except that, as we shall have to point out
more forcibly later, these other arts had, even by the time of
Jean-Baptiste Morin, made considerably more evident progress in the
value of their conjectures than had astrology. - In the course of this
section, Morin quotes, from Aquinas, sapiens dominabitur astris, still
happily attributing it to Ptolemy's Centiloquium. Four produces the
example of one Nebulo in Paris as an example of just such an ignorant
quack as de'Angeli refers to; but as Morin reasonably replies, is that
the fault of the genuine astrologer like himself? There are quacks in all
professions. For the last objection, on authority and learning, Morin
really repeats his reply to the first. Reason, he says somewhat
portentously, though he obviously believes it, outweighs all authority:
and he, Morin, has now produced astrological reason, as it were. Now
it can easily be seen that this is all really merely a statement of
objections, some stronger than others, and a contra-statement, largely
personal, from Morin. No-one who disagreed with Morin, or whose
world-view was antipathetic, was likely to be influenced one way or
the other. It was all in fact largely irrelevant, but it does demonstrate
that astrology was still worthy of the time and effort of high Roman
clergy.
Book XVII of Astrologia Gallica is concerned with the division of the
mundane houses. Morin insists that they are not entirely man-made,
arbitrary divisions of the sky: since the cardines - the ASC, the MC,
the setting Point and the IMC - are all actual, natural and determinable
points in the heavens, then at least so are the four quadrants natural,
whatever may be said of the other divisions. Having said that the
horizon and the meridian divide the whole into four equal quadrants,
he points out that there are various ways of going on from there, and
therefore astrologers are divided into sectae, 'parties' almost, on this.
He asserts - by now a little predictably - that now all will be well since

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he will settle the problem. He rejects Firmicus and Cardano, and says
he learned the true method in Paris in 1622, a method handed down
through the cabala from no less an authority than Adam. The rest of
Astrologia Gallica, except for the last book, which is purely polemical,
is simply an outline of Morin's astrology, cleared on Ptolemaic lines of
many of the accretions from the medieval revival - almost all, as we
have seen, themselves derived from ancient authors - and much more.
The important thing about the astrological books is that they are
wholly traditional, and indeed might have been written at any time in
the four centuries before Morin, had an astrologer set out to 'return to
Ptolemy' (plus the Commentator) and tried to follow it through. All
Morin's industry and prolixity produced in the end only yet another,
differently wrapped, de astrologia.
So let us return to house division. The mathematical and mechanical
details will not concern us. The point of taking this topic at some
length is that it is still not settled, it is a crucial part of the whole of
'personal' astrology, and may be taken as the type problem - one
which really, one would have thought, ought by now to have been
resolved, at least empirically, after two and a half thousand years of
practice, even if it was incapable of resolution on theoretical grounds.
That it is not, may be made quite clear by our modern reference work,
Margaret E. Hone's Modern Textbook of Astrology (revised edition
1968), p. 124: 'Up to the present time, there is no unanimity, even
among the most thoughtful and careful astrologers, as to which of the
many systems is best'; and one can get no guidance in the matter, 'as
there is no book on it'. This was written in 1968: despite the hundreds
of books written by astrologers even in the present century there was,
she says, no book on so essential a problem! She was in fact, wrong:
there is and was one,36 but it is not a helpful, rather a muddling book.
She was also wrong, but by no means alone among the writers on
astrology who are or were professional practitioners, in saying that the
'equal house system' - simply dividing off the mundane houses in 30°
steps from the ASC - is the oldest form, common for its simplicity,
later rejected for more complicated but mathematically 'justifiable'
systems. But she could be right about the number of possible
variations of systems: 'A mathematician has arrived at the total of
fifty-four different methods' (p. 141). It is possible that all of these
could be found by a full analysis of all those charts and systems and
astrolabe-methods described by past astrological writers and in many
anonymous MSS. After all of which it is not surprising that she
concludes by saying (p. 281): 'It would be dogmatic to insist on the

36 W. Koch and W. Knappich, Horoskop und Himmelshiiuser, Teil I, Grundlaven und

Altertum (Goppingen, 1959).

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

rightness of any one system of house division to the exclusion of all

others, when there is no topic on which astrologers disagree more
heartily. The list of methods and of astrologers having 'a method'
gathered from Morin and elsewhere is a long one: the 'Hermetic',
equal house system; Porphyry, Rhetorius, Vettius Valens, Firmicus
Maternus, Eutokios of Askalon (fl. early sixth century A.D.), Alcabitius
and Massa'allah, Guido Bonatti, Campanus, Regiomontanus, Cardano
and Placidus de Titis (died 1688); plus the many medieval texts from
the twelfth century on, which simply give rules for finding the cusps
of the houses (the dividing lines) on the astrolabe — very varying rules,
with usually no explanations - as is done by Michael Scot. Ptolemy
gives no rules though he does of course refer to and use the mundane
houses. He, probably, and Rhetorius, and al Biruni, and a few others,
allow for five 'dead' degrees preceding the 25° of each house.
Critodemus may have used a curious variant also found in Vettius
Valens 11.41, with traces in other writers, in which the houses are
divided from the Lot of Fortune rather than the ASC. Add to all this
the fact that, as we have seen a number of times, in ancient authors
especially, there is great confusion in the terminology between 'houses'
in various senses and 'places' and 'signs' and even 'twelfths', which
indicates also some confusion of ideas.
And all of this in one of the most crucial areas of astrological theory
and practice. Crucial, because it is the system of mundane houses
based on a real point, the ASC, which anchors the chart, as it were, in
time and place, fixes it on a subject, and allows all that interpretation
which is the point of the whole exercise.37 More or less by the way,
although in earlier centuries there are considerable variations in the
'contents', as it were, the meanings, of the mundane houses, at any
rate, from the sixteenth century to the present there is general
agreement, so that in practice the agreement among astrologers
appears greater than it is. The main lines of the problem are easily
described. If the ecliptic were not 'tilted' at 231/2° to the equator, there
would be no problem. All the signs of the zodiac would rise and set at
equal intervals, and an 'equal house' system would be normal and
correct. But alas, the 'obliquity of the ecliptic' (which gives us most of
what is interesting in our world, from the seasons on) means that
different signs rise and set at different times, so that since the
mundane house system evolved from a primitive and natural four
quadrants through the octatopos to the twelve-house system in the

37 I cannot resist the temptation to mention, for those who may at present be thinking
that while horoscopes for humans may be all right, horoscopes for your pet dogs are
slightly ridiculous, that Morin in Book XXV, c.l writes of the state of the heavens circa
nascentem hurtc hominem vet equum, 'around this man at his birth, or this horse'.

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early centuries of mathematical astrology in Greece, dividing the

quadrants has been a problem. The houses are the framework, fixed
on the subject by the ASC, within which the zodiac and all in it turns.
Therefore the problem is to divide some 'natural' circle by great circles
through its poles so that these lines also divide the ecliptic, the zodiac;
but which circle, how divided? Since the late sixteenth century there
have really only been three or four serious contenders: but they are
different. Since your conjuncton of Saturn and Mars at your birth
means something very different if it is in the eighth house from what
it would in the seventh - in the former case it will concern religious
beliefs, and so on, or journeys; in the latter, your death! - it could
matter a good deal where the cusp between the two actually is.
Astrologers attempt to get over such practical difficulties by the use of
overlaps and double influences, but it is then difficult to know where
the lines are in the 'grey' areas: in one system only about the middle
ten degrees of a house was quite clearly one house rather than the
next. Yet in modem times, with all the practice and experience, we still
have 'no topic on which astrologers disagree more heartily'.
So astrology died, like an animal or plant left stranded by evolution.
It was not killed. It had argued with the anti-astrological thinkers ever
since its beginnings, and survived. It had survived because in an odd
way even those who were most vehement in their attacks actually
accepted it: it fitted in with their world-picture. With some, like
Ficino, it fitted well, and with others, like Pico, it didn't. But
throughout the period to the seventeenth century it remained a
genuine possibility, to be accepted or rejected in this or that form, or
all of them, but always part of astrologia, astronomia, as a whole. Then
the world changed, under and round it and over it, and left it behind.
There was no need for any 'authority' to condemn it, no real need for
anyone to attack it any more. They did, of course, and the debate, if
one can so dignify it, went on throughout the seventeenth century.
That it was, in educated circles, dead in the eighteenth century is clear
not only in its absence from the interests of Newton and his society,
and those of the lively circles in London round, for example Samuel
Johnson, but also from the fact that the attacks now came not from the
natural philosophers but from the satirists, like Pierre Bayle and Swift.
It is also demonstrable in a slightly indirect way. In a list of nearly
forty astrological writers given by Robert A. Peddie in Notes and
Queries3* which covers the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, only three are named for the eighteenth century: one early,
Samuel Penseyre, 1726; and two late, G. Mensforth, 1785, and J. Worsdale,

38 'A Bibliography of Astrology': Notes and Queries, 7th series, November 1891.

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 RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

1798. In the newly emergent United States, although it all happened a

little later, the picture was the same.39 Serious astrological works were
introduced about the middle of the eighteenth century, and even then,
although 'natural' astrology - concerned with medicine, agriculture,
meteorology and some sorts of 'elections' to do with sailing times -
was received with some sympathy, judicial astrology was more
sceptically assessed and was of very much less interest and impor­
tance. As Leventhal sums it up (p. 64): 'Astrology in eighteenth
century America was clearly a subject in a state of decline. It did not
have the prestige or importance it had had in Renaissance Europe. Its
primary vehicle was the lowly almanac, the literature of the semi­
literate. No learned tracts were written about it in the colonies, and
those which mentioned it in passing are found only early in the
century.'
Almanacs, which varied from the 'lowly' to the base, were indeed
almost the only instrument of survival for astrology through the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: a situation not unlike that
of Late Antiquity, with a less and less understood art in the hands of
amateur 'professionals' and charlatans. There is a parallel, too, be­
tween the two periods in that in the eighteenth century, as in the early
Middle Ages, astrology was deprived of its educated underpinning.
The world of learning did not provide that constant contact with and
supply of ideas from developments in astronomy which were necess­
ary to the maintenance of a 'properly' based astrology. No art can
survive if the understanding of its basic principles is lost: it cannot
continue to live on unthinking imitation. Of course, the reasons for
this loss of provision were very different in the two cases. The
fundamental reason in the earlier period was, in the words of Samuel
Johnson, 'Ignorance, Madam; pure ignorance.' The reason in the
eighteenth century was that the world of learning had changed.
Astronomy was at last separate from astrology. The subject astrologia
was gone. It is hard, and may indeed be impossible, properly to define
the difference between astronomy and astrology. It sometimes seems
to be simply assumed that whatever is 'scientific' is astronomy, and
whatever is 'unscientific' is astrology. But this raises more difficulties
than it solves. No matter. Many ultimately undefinable distinctions are
daily drawn and profitably used, and some are of very great import­
ance. There is still, now as in the eighteenth century, a distinction
between astronomy and astrology recognised by most people and clear
except for the narrow 'grey' area between. When one discourses on the

39 See Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment. Occultism and Renaissance
Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1976). Chapter 2 is concerned with
Astrology.

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 A HISTORY OF WESTERN ASTROLOGY

possible interpretations of a natal chart, that is astrology. And it has

been so since the late seventeenth century.
The change in the background of educated ideas of the world was
the result of the developments in the North Italian schools, particularly
Padua, as has been described (in the early part of this chapter,
particularly pp. 218-9). That 'Paduan revolution' could not have
happened without the new logic and the new texts of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. These texts, or the great majority, came from
and through the Arabs, on the second 'wave' of what began as the
Twelfth-century Renaissance, the same movement that introduced the
new, revived, Greek astrologia. That same movement of recovery and
rediscovery led in one direction to the full development of Renaissance
Astrology, and in the other, over a much longer period, since the first
was really only a matter of transmission and acceptance, as part of a
larger and harmonious world-picture, whereas the second involved a
great deal of thinking and the gradual rejection of what had been for
many centuries the assumed and authoritative background of ideas, it
led to that separation of science and metaphysics, and of astronomy
from astrology, that we have seen left astrology dying.
Throughout the period of its life described in this book, one of the
chief defences of astrology has lain in its comparison with medicine;
the comparison must go back to their beginnings, in the same places
and milieux. It is, or rather was, a very natural one to make. Ptolemy
says (Tetr., 1.2; Robbins, p.15): 'Every science that deals with the
quality of its subject-matter is conjectural and not to be absolutely
affirmed, particularly one which is composed of many unlike elements.'
Whenever astrology was attacked on the ground that astrologers so
often got things wrong - and it was over and over again used in the
attack - the reply included a reference to the sister-art of conjecture,
medicine. In the early centuries, this was a very plausible appeal. Both
arts were new; both largely empirical, with a factual basis - a sick
man; a 'subject' in place and time - and having theoretical bases.
There were 'schools' of medicine, disagreeing with one another as
heartily as any astrological sects. Neither art was very successful in
practice, in neither was diagnosis clear and simple. And both could
claim, as Hippocrates' maxim said, vita brevis, ars longa, 'Life is short,
the art is long'. Experience would show the way. It did, of course,
eventually. Medicine is still a 'conjectural art'. Diagnosis is informed
conjecture; practice is informed trial and error. But even by the
seventeenth century it was clear that medicine was improved and
improving, with greatly increased and constantly increasing under­
standing of the working of the human body and of the material causes
which act on it. There is no need now to dwell on the improvement in
medicine since the seventeenth century. It would be foolish now for

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an astrologer to seek justification of his art by appeal to the 'parallel' of

medicine: it would merely lay bare for all to see the causes of its own
demise. It was only with the beginnings of a rejection in the later
nineteenth century of all Western rational thinking in favour of the
utterly foreign unreason (not irrationalism) of the East, that astrology -
of a sort - was revived. Both processes, of rejection and of revival,
have continued at an increasing pace, for all kinds of reasons, but that
does not concern this book. We have brought the story of Western
Astrology down to its second death, at the end of the seventeenth
century. Only the servant-girl's laughter rings through the eighteenth.

243
 INDEX
NOTE: Writers known by forename and place are normally entered
under the forename, e.g. Isidore of Seville

Abelard, see Peter Abelard Alchandreus, 82, 152«.

Abenragel, 82 Alchemy, 145, 176
Abraham, 141, 141 n. Greeli and, 17, 21, 24, 92
see also Hipparchus during the Renaissance, 226,
Abraham ibn Ezra, 181-82 227, 229, 235
Abu Ja'far, Ahmet, 154, 155, thirteenth-century astrology
192 and, 178, 179, 183, 201
Abu Ma'shar, 159-61, 167, 168, Alcibiades (Plato), 208
181, 206 Alcuin, 112, 130
birthplace of, 157-58 Alexander, 192
De revolutionibus nativitatum, Alexandria, 36, 43, 54, 76, 156,
160-61, 164, 166, 170, 171-72 161-62
Isogoge Minor, 147, 148, 160 alchemy in, 183
Maius Introductorium, 152«, Egyptian, Greek and Babylo­
153, 159, 164, 165, 171, 182 nian astrological traditions
"The Thousands," 165-66 merged in, 22
Achaziz (Book of the Course of the as home of Greek astrology,
Stars), 174 3, 24, 49, 50, 80, 83
Achinapolus, 16 as intellectual capital, 12, 19,
Adelard of Bath, 147-48, 152«., 57-58
153, 156, 160 Vettius Valens in, 46
Advancement of Learning Al-Farabi, 151, 152«., 157
(Bacon), 220 Al-Farghani (Alfraganius), 148,
Adversus astrologiam (Pico della 153, 188, 192
Mirandola), 167 Alfonsine Tables, 162, 206
Ages of man, planets and, Al-Ghazzali, 151, 152«.
86-87 Al-Khwarizmi, 103, 147, 152«.
Agrippa of Nettesheim, 214 Al-Kindi, 131, 151, 157, 158-59,
Ahmed ibn Yusuf, 184 160
Ailly, Peter d', 197, 198-99 Alliaco, Petrus de, see Ailly,
Al-Balkhi, 91«. Peter d'
Al-Battani, 152«., 154, 157 Almagest (Ptolemy), 3, 57, 85,
Albertus Magnus, 181, 194, 213, 103«., 113, 170, 175, 177,
216 181, 187, 206, 232
Al-Biruni, 157«.-58«., 164, 167, charting based on, 134
173, 239 climes listed in, 43
Al-Bitrugi, 190 equinox in, 161
Albuhali, 152«. quadrants of zodiac in, 71-72
Albumazar, see Abu Ma'shar rising times of signs in, 74,
Alcabitius, 153, 162, 173-74, 75
193, 194, 196, 213, 239 translation of, 152«., 153
245
 INDEX

Almanacs, 109, 113, 153, 183- Aries, see Zodiac

84, 187, 221, 226, 241 Aristarchus, 6, 11
Al-Sufi, 106-107 Aristophanes, 13
Al-Tabari, 156 Aristotle, 51, 118, 151, 177, 192,
Ambrose, St., 119, 213 201, 215, 232, 236
Ammonius Saccas, 54 Abu-Ma'shar and, 159
Anaximenes, 59 al-Kindi and, 158
Andalö di Negro, 193 Cassiodorus on, 124
Angelis, Alexander de, 236-37 De caelo et mundo, 150, 160,
Anselm, St., 235 181
Anthology (Vettius Valens), De generatione et corruptione,
46-49 59-60, 150, 160, 181, 188
Antichrist, 180, 194 evangelical tracts of, 58
Antipater, 16 four elements of, 52, 59-60,
Antiscia, 136 64
Antiochus of Athens, 88, 95, gods in the heavens and, 16
136 influence on scholars of the
Aphetic houses, 84-85, 87, 88, Middle Ages, 176
168, 169-70 logic of, 102, 103, 195«, 220
Apollonius of Tyana, 168 Meteorologia, 67, 115, 152«.
Apologeticum (Tertullian), 56, naming of planets and, 18
112 physics of, 6, 68, 183, 186,
Apostolic Constitutions, 55 218
Apotelesmatica (Hephaistion of Pliny's reliance on, 114
Thebes), 66, 90 Posterior analytics, 217
Apotelesmatica (Ptolemy), see Ptolemaic system and Aris­
Tetrabiblos totelian system, 3
Aquarius, see Zodiac Aristoxenus of Tarentum, 21
Aquila, 55-56, 89 Arnald of Villanova, 186
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 176, 177, Aspects, 64, 80, 89, 134-35, 136
181, 207, 213, 216, 217, 237 defined, 33-34
Arabic learning and astrology, Firmicus Maternus on, 140-42
21, 100, 122, 131, 147-75 Kepler on, 234
charting and, 134 Ptolemy on, 66
commentaries of, 93 Astrolabe, 131, 132, 152«., 154,
Gerbert dAurillac and, 132 156-57, 158, 161, 173, 181,
influence on the West of, 192, 212, 238, 239
142«., 143, 147-75, 181, 189, Astrologia Gallica (Morin), 235-
200, 242 38
lunar mansions, 14, 82, 83 Astrological geography, 42, 69,
Marsilio Ficino and, 207 85, 149
Morin's attack on, 235 Astrologie greque, L' (Bouchö-
Picatrix, 214 Leclercq), 1, 27
superstition in, 231 Astrology as a secret art, 48, 51,
Aratus, 30, 43, 135 139
Archimedes, 114 Astrology for All (Leo), 137-38
246
 INDEX
Astrometeorology, 128, 176, Confessions, 108, 109
178-79, 181, 198, 208 Contra Faustum Manichaeus,
in almanacs, 183-84, 221, 241 111-12
Francis Bacon and, 220, 221, John of Salisbury and, 147
222 link between philosophy and
as oldest and most persistent theology for, 101
part of astrology, 183-84 Oresme and, 198
Thales and, 232 paganism and, 99, 175
Astronomic (Manilius), 30-44 Renaissance interest in, 205,
Astronomy as related to astrol­ 206, 207, 212
ogy, 91, 102, 145, 154, 197, study of philosophy by, 58
215, 227 Augustus, Emperor, 50
by Abu Ma'shar, 159 Averroes, 151, 157, 177, 207,
beginnings of astrology's 208, 216
reliance on astronomy, 11 Avicebron (Ibn-Gabirol), 148,
Cassiodorus and, 123 152«., 207
the Church and, 55-56 Avicenna, 148, 151, 157, 177,
distinctions between, 143-44, 180, 182, 207
209«., 230, 240, 241-42
the Greeks and, 18, 19, 20 Babylon, 36, 43
Glycas and, 97 Babylonian astronomy and
Hugh of St. Victor on, 143-44 astrology, 11-20, 49, 56, 82,
in Indian writings, 155 117, 156, 162, 163, 165, 207,
Isidore of Seville on, 19, 124- 212, 229
25, 180, 193 day of creation worked out
lack of distinction between, by, 119«.-20«.
in Middle Ages, 124-25, dodecatemoria, 27-28
132, 147, 148, 149-50, 151, Epic of Creation, 120-22
153, 180, 181, 182, 183, hemerologies of, 83
185«., 187, 188-89, 192, 199- introduced to Greek world,
200, 209«., 240 12, 15, 19, 22, 23
Martianus Capella and, 115«. Lot of Fortune and, 27, 28, 85
medicine and, 61, 96 lucky and unlucky days, 14,
Pliny and, 114 15, 88
Ptolemy and, 57 lunar mansions of, 82
the Romans and, 103-4 Manilius' reliance on, 89
Seneca and, 114 omens of, 13, 14, 15
Vettius Valens and, 47 planets in, 31, 166
Astronomy for Astrologers Ptolemy on, 60, 64, 73
(Filbey), 174«. quadrants of, 36
Auctoritates Aristotelis, 160 Romans and, 53
Augustine, St., 52-53, 55, 124, on Saturn, 9, 87
142, 176, 200, 219 zodiac of, 15, 20, 25, 27, 36,
Bradwardine and, 182 81
City of God, 108, 109-11, 113, Bacon, Francis, 215, 216, 220-
179 22, 229
247
 INDEX

Bacon, Roger, 180-81, 192, 217, Bologna University, 186-87, 189,

227 191, 194, 195, 216
Bartolotti, Ettore, 187, 189 Bonatti, Guido, 184,189,206,239
Basil, St., 124 Bonaventure, St., 176
Bate, Henri, of Malines, 161, Book of the Course of the Stars
181-82 (Achaziz), 174
Bede, 112, 117, 119«., 122, 126, Bouchä-Leclerq, Auguste, 1, 27,
129-30, 132, 153, 192, 200 28, 73«., 84, 86, 116, 165
"Beginnings," see Katarchai Bradwardine, Thomas, 225
Benjamin, Francis Seymour, Bretnor, Thomas, 225
193 Bridges, John Henry, 180
Benvenuto de Imola, 189 Byzantine astronomy and
Benzi, Ugo, 218 astrology, 92-97, 168
Bernard Silvestris, 145
Berosus, 13, 15, 16, 23, 60-61 Cabalah, 206, 208, 233, 238
Berthold of Regensburg, 177-78 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 51, 135
Beruni, see Al-Biruni Calcidius, 114-15, 182
Birth charts, see Horoscopes Calendars, 104, 119«., 184, 192
and genethlialogical astrol­ Augustine on, 108«
ogy Church's, 126, 128-29, 226
Black Death, 185-86, 187, 201 constellations associated
Black Death and Men of Learning, with, 20
The (Campbell), 185«. Egyptian, 12, 19, 76
Body and astrological influ­ lack of, 82
ences, 38, 46, 47, 86-87, 97, lunar, 11, 117, 163
116, 117, 118-19 lunar-solar, 14-15
astrological medicine, 61-64, of Mesopotamia, 11
92, 95 see also Time reckoning
"dog days," 7 Camden, Carroll, 223
Dorotheus on, 89-90 Campanella, Tommaso, 213-14
influence of sun and moon, Campanus of Novara, 187, 192-
28, 128 93, 206, 239
Ptolemy on, 79, 81 Campbell, Anna, 185«.
signs of the zodiac and body Cancer, see Zodiac
parts, 23, 61, 112 Capricorn, see Zodiac
Boethius, 103, 123«., 131, 200, Cardano, Girolamo (Cardan,
201, 216 Cardanus), 216, 236-37,
Arithmetica, 123«. 238, 239
Consolation of Philosophy, Cardinal points, 25-26, 28, 36-
115«., 123«. 38, 45, 90, 111, 214, 237
Morin and, 235, 236 Carmen astrologicum
as source for Latin scholars, (Dorotheus), 156, 171
143, 153, 182 Carter, Charles Ernest Owen,
Topics, 217 174«.
Boffito, Giuseppe, 193«., 194 Cassiodorus, 102-103, 122-24,
Boll, Franz, 116 125, 131, 200
248
 INDEX

Castle of Knowledge (Recorde), Comets, 22, 31, 66-67, 147«.,

224-25 183, 184-85, 207, 208«.,
Cato, 49 222, 236
Catoptiva (Euclid), 152«. Commentarii in Somnium
Cecco d'Ascoli, 193-96 Scipionis (Macrobius),
Centiloquium, 92, 93, 152«., 153, 117-20, 122
154, 155, 177, 184, 187, 195, Compagni, V. Perrone, 215
206, 237 Computus, 126-28, 129, 130
Centiloquium Bethem, 154 Conciliator (Peter of Abano),
Centiloquium Hermetis, 154 206, 217
Chalcidius, see Calcidius Confessions (Augustine), 108,
Chaldean astronomy and 109
astrology, see Babylonian Consolation of Philosophy
astronomy and astrology (Boethius), 115«.
Charlemagne, 130 Constantine the African, 152
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 127-28 Constantinople, 93-94, 95, 96,
Chorumphiza, 149 98
Christian Astrology (Lilly), 124 Constellations, see Decans
Christianity and astrology, 132, Contra Faustum Manichaeum
133, 134«., 142, 150, 153, (Augustine), 111-12
175-83, 216, 231 Coopland, George William, 197
acceptance of astrology, 95- Copernicus, 214, 224, 225, 226,
97, 178, 180-82, 183, 193, 231, 233, 235
201, 236-37 Coplestone, Frederick Charles,
Augustine's attacks on, 108- 176-77
12, 124 Copts, 82
the calendar and Christian Cornelius (praetor peregrinus), 50
feasts, 128, 129 Cos, 16, 17, 23, 61
execution of Cecco, 193-96 "Cosmic sympathy" between
opposition to astrology, 54- man and the universe, 59,
56, 108-12, 113, 124, 125-26, 159, 233
147, 159, 175-80, 182-83, Greek belief in, 18, 23
200, 209, 228 Muslims and, 151
Pico della Mirandola's writ­ Stoic belief in, 32-33, 52, 53,
ings, 209, 213 56, 60, 68-69, 158
revival of interest in astrol­ Cosmographia (Bernard Silves­
ogy, 143-44 tris), 145
Chronocratores, 28, 41, 77, 83, Council of Laodicaea, 55
88, 89, 104-106, 135, 171 Council of Nicaea, 55
Chrysippus, 52 Covalieri, Bonaventura, 187
Cicero, 15, 50, 51, 52-53, 58, 69, Cramer, Frederick Henry, 50, 51
117-18, 135, 160, 206, 207, Crassus, 51
216, 217 Critodemus, 49, 173, 239
City of God (Augustine), 108, Cumont, Franz Valery Marie,
109-11, 113, 179 17-18, 45
Cohen, I. Bernard, 230 Cynic school of philosophy, 51
249
 INDEX

Dampier, Sir William Cecil, 226 De mirabilibus mundi (Albertus

Daniel of Morley, 133, 148 Magnus), 194
Data Euclid), 152n. Democritus, 15
De artibus liberalibus (Grosse­ De nobilitate (Salutati), 206
teste), 179 De officiis (Cicero), 160
De astrologia (Varro), 123 De ortu scientiarum (Kilwardby),
De astronomia (Bonatti), 189 180
De caelo et mundo (Aristotle), Depressions, see Exaltations
150, 160, 181 and depressions
Decans, 22, 64, 89, 93, 121«., De principiis astrologiae (Cecco
134, 165, 171, 192, 213 dAscoli), 194
Dorotheus' use of, 90 De radiis (Al-Kindi), 158-59
explanation of, 20 De rerum natura (Lucretius), 51
Manilius on, 40, 42 De revolutionibus (Saul Ben
origin of twenty-four hour Bishr), 152
day and, 20 De revolutionibus annorum mundi
personification of, 116 (Abraham ibn Ezra), 181-82
Pico della Mirandola's attacks De revolutionibus nativitatum
on, 209 (Abu Ma'shar), 160-61, 164,
plants associated with, 24 166, 170, 171-72
Ptolemy on, 73 Descartes, Rene, 235, 236
as time measurers, 43, 56, De temporum ratione (Bede), 126
163 Deterministic view of astrology,
De causa dei (Bradwardine), 182 115, 144, 147, 194, 199, 207,
De divinatione (Cicero), 15, 50, 221
51, 52 al-Kindi and, 159
De divinatoribus (Benvenuto de Campanella on, 213
Imola), 189 Church's view of, 55-56, 97,
De doctrina Christiana (Augus­ 108, 111, 125, 175,82, 201
tine), 110 as hard astrology, 2-3, 50
Dee, John, 226-28 Islam and, 157
De electione horarum (Albuhali), Neo-Platonism and, 53-54
152«. Pico della Mirandola's attacks
De eruditione docta (Hugh of St. on, 208, 209
Victor), 143-44 Pomponazzi on, 216
De falsis prophetis (Peter dAilly), Ptolemy on, 2-3, 70
198 rejection of, 3, 50, 53-54, 55-
De fato (Posidonius), 52-53 56, 108, 111, 125, 175-80,
De generatione et corruptione 182, 198, 208, 209
(Aristotle), 59-60, 150, 160, Romans and, 50
181, 188 Stoics and, 32-33, 52, 68-69,
De iudiciis infirmitatum (Arnald 70
of Villanova), 186 Dick, Hugh Gilchrist, 224
De mensuris et pondexibus Dictionary of Astrology
(Epiphanius), 55-56 (Wedeck), 174«.
Demetrius, 192 Digges, Thomas, 225
250
 INDEX

"Directions," 169-70 alchemy and, 24, 183

Disputationes adversus astrologiam gods of, 21
divinatricem (Pico della horoscopic astrology, 12, 46
Mirandola), 206, 207-13 Lot of Fortune and, 28
Dodecatemoria, 27-29, 40-41, 44, twelve signs of the zodiac,
56, 64, 71, 72, 73, 90, 135, 19, 23
165, 192, 209 "Elections," see Katarchai
Dorotheus of Sideon, 80, 88, Elements, 1, 33, 47, 52, 56,
89-90, 136, 156, 168, 170, 59-60, 61, 64, 94, 104
171, 192, 196 Eleutherius, 91«.
Dragon (caput draconis; cauda Elia del Medigo, 208
draconis), 120-22, 155, 161, Empedocles, 61, 192
162, 171, 192, 196, 225, 234 Enencontameris, see Nonagesi-
Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie, mals
159, 160 Enneads (Plotinus), 53-54
Ennius, 30
Eclectic school of philosophy, 50 Enuma Anu Enlil, 13
Eclipses, 5, 7, 11, 13, 22, 42, 69, Ephemerides ad XXXII annos
93, 96, 108, 148, 183, 185, futuros (Peuerbach),
188, 195, 221 219-20
Egbert (Bede's pupil), 130 Epictetus, 60
Egypt, ancient, astronomy of, Epicurean school of philosophy,
14, 40, 41, 49, 76, 77, 89, 50, 51-52, 207, 235
116, 135, 138, 164, 167, 212, Epinomis (Plato), 16
213 Epiphanius, 55-56
attribution of days to gods Epitome totius astrologie (John of
by, 83 Spain), 153
Babylonian astronomy and, Eratosthenes, 114
15, 27, 56, 82, 229 Erigena, John Scottus, 117, 175,
calendar originating from, 176
12, 19-20 Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville),
dodecatemoria doctrine, 27 124-26
god of astronomy, 21, 23, 137 Euclid, 3, 152n., 187, 192, 193,
iatromathematical systems 226, 234
of, 63 Eudoxus, 11, 15, 16, 114, 119n.
lists of lucky and unlucky Eugene of Palermo, 152n.
days of, 28, 88 Eusebius, 54
mundane houses in, 25 Eutokioso of Askalon, 239
Newton's interest in, 229 Exafrenon pronosticacionum
planetary names and, 18, 166 temporis (Richard of
Ptolemy's reliance on, 60, 64, Wallingford), 182
73-74, 78-79, 90 "Exaltations" and "depres­
Salmeschianiaka and, 22 sions," 67, 73, 78, 94, 121,
Egypt, Hellenistic, astronomy 150, 162, 166, 167, 192
and astrology of, 22, 25, Experimentarius (Bernard Silves­
27, 43, 45, 49, 56, 166 tris), 145
251
 INDEX

Fardariae, see Ferdariae Gentile da Foligno, 185-86

Farnell, Lewis Richard, 13, Geography (Ptolemy), 206
17-18 Gerard, Archbishop of York,
Farnese Globe, 106 132, 133, 142
Favorinus, 211 Gerard of Cremona, 133, 152n.,
Ferdariae (fardariae; fredariae; 153, 181, 193
fridariae), 156, 165, 166-67, Gerard of Silteo, 185
168, 209 Gerland, 103
Fibonacci, Leonard, 193 Gerson, Jean, 197, 199
Filbey, John, 174n. Ghazali, see Al-Ghazali
Filbey, Peter, 174n. Gleadow, Rupert, 15, 19
Firmicus Maternus, Julius. 76, Glycas, Michael, 95-97
88, 103, 113, 119n., 120, Gondisalvi, see Gundissalinus
132-42 Goold, George Patrick, 38
ages of man and the planets, Greek astronomy and astrol­
86 ogy, 6, 11-29, 32, 46, 112,
background of, 133 169, 200, 212, 240, 242
decans and, 116, 117 Arabs and, 151, 155-56, 157.
Mathesis, 133-42, 143n., 147 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168,
On the Error of Profane 174, 175
Religion, 133 as basis of Western astrology,
on slaves, 80 1, 10, 94, 95, 135, 150
as source for later astrology, Centiloquium, see Centiloquium
148, 153, 165, 181, 182, 196, deterministic viewpoint, 2-3
210, 232, 238, 239 horoscopes and genethlialog­
sources used by, 95 ical astrology, 12, 19, 29,
Flores astrologiae (Abu Ma'shar), 45-46, 50, 168, 170
160, 161 katarchai, 170
Fludd, Robert, 224 lists of days fit or unfit for
Fons vitae (Avicebron), 148 certain activities
Fredariae, see Ferdariae (hemerologies), 82, 83
Frederick II, 190-91 medicine and, 222
Fridariae, see Ferdariae planets in, 49, 50
Ptolemy's centrality to, 3
Galen, 151, 185 rationality behind, 18, 59
Galileo, 216, 218, 228 Romans and, 49, 50
Gassendi, Pierre, 228, 230-32, see also Ptolemy
233, 235 Gregory, Tullio, 149-50
Garin, Eugenio, 211 Gregory the Great, Pope, 112
Geber, 181 Grosseteste, Robert, 179-80,
Gemini, see Zodiac 182, 183, 187
Germinus, 113 Guibert of Nogent, 143
Genethlialogical astrology, see Gundissalinus (Domingo
Horoscopes and Gondisalvi), 147, 148,
genethlialogical astrology 152n„ 180

252
 INDEX

Harmonica Mundi (Kepler), 233 Horace, 119

Harmonicorum libri III Horoscopes and genethlialog-
(Ptolemy), 233 ical astrology, 106, 115m.,
Haskins, Charles Homer, 153, 177, 178, 197, 214, 224,
191 241-42
Hebrew astronomy and astrol­ Arabs and, 157, 166, 167, 168,
ogy, 152m. , 160, 162, 190, 169, 170
206, 207, 208, 213 Augustine and, 109m., 110,
al-Kindi translations of 111
Hebrew, 158 Francis Bacon and, 220, 221
Centiloquium and, 154 the Church and, 55-56
Greeks and, 156 Firmicus Matemus and, 136,
lunar calendar and, 163 137, 139, 140
zodiac pictured in synagogue Greeks and, 12, 19, 29, 45-46,
pavements, 104 50, 168
Heliodorus, 72, 80, 88 Isidore of Seville and, 125,
Henri Bate of Malines, 161, 181- 126
82 katarchai and, 88-89, 90, 92,
Henry Aristippus, 152«. 111, 170
Henry of Langenstien, 182-83 Macrobius and, 118
Hephaistion of Thebes, 66, 80, in Manilius' work, 30, 44
90, 167 Oresme on, 198
Heraclitus, 59, 217 origins of, 12, 15-16
Herbs, see Plants and astrolog­ Pico della Mirandola on, 207,
ical influences 208, 209, 210-22, 213, 232
Herdan, Gustav, 184m. Plotonius on, 53-54
Hermann of Carinthia, 152m., Ptolemy and, 68, 69, 70, 78-
161 79, 85, 86, 87, 113, 170, 173
Hermetic school of philosophy, Romans and, 50, 51, 103, 109
20-29, 43, 46, 154, 182, 206, Horoscope of the moon, see Lot
207, 239 of Fortune
Herodotus, 83 Horoscope of the world, see
Hesiod, 82-83, 88, 163 Thema mundi
Hexaemeron (Grosseteste), Hours, Books of, 129
179-80 Houses:
Hipparchus, 11, 18, 29, 31, 43, lunar, see Mansions of the
71, 114, 141m., 157, 161 moon
Hippocratic school, 15, 16, 23, mundane, see Mundane
61, 95, 108,186, 194, 218, houses
242 planetary, see Planetary
Historia vitae et mortis (Bacon), houses
220 Housman, Alfred Edward, 27,
Hone, Margaret Ethelwyn, 140, 30, 33, 35-36, 38, 39, 40,
174m., 238-39 138m.
Honoius, 133 Hugh of St. Victor, 143-44

253
 INDEX

Hugh of Santalla, 152«. Jacopo da Forli, 218

Humours, 61-62, 63-64, 69, 90, Ja'far, see Abu Ja'far, Ahmet
198, 221 James, Montague Rhodes, 227
Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 150 John of Sacrobosco (Holywood),
Hyginus, 103 150, 187-88, 189, 193, 194,
Hyleq, see Aphetic houses 195, 196
Hypsicles, 49 John of Salisbury, 120, 134,
143»., 147
Iatromathematica, see Medicine John of Seville, 93, 160, 182
and astrology John of Spain, 152«., 153, 181
Ibn Gabirol, Solomon ben Johnson, Francis Rarick, 225
Judah, see Avicebron Jones, Charles William, 126
Ibn Khaldun, 157, 214 Judaism and astrology, see
"Inceptions," see Katarchai Hebrew astronomy and
Indian astronomy and astrol­ astrology
ogy, 122, 155, 162, 164-165 Judicial astrology, 150, 197, 224
Arab astrology and, 157, 160, Campanus and, 193
168, 175 the Church and, 178, 180
Babylonian astrology and, Gerard of Silteo on, 185
156 Gerson on, 199
Greek astrology and, 150 Grosseteste and, 179
lunar mansions in, 82, 103 Islam and, 151
order of the planets, 167 John of Salisbury on, 147
"Ingresses," see Transits Marsilio Fidno and, 206, 207
Institutiones (Cassiodorus), 102- Oresme on, 198
103, 122-24 Pico della Mirandola on, 209
"Interrogations," see Katarchai in United States, 241
Introduction (Paulus Alexan- Julian of Laodicea, 91
drinus), 88, 91 Jupiter, 9
Introductorium (Alcabitius), 173- see also Planetary order;
74 Planetary periods
Introductorium (Andalö di
Negro), 193 Kabbalah, see Cabalah
Isagoge Minor (Abu Ma'shar), Katarchai ("beginnings," "elec­
147, 148, 160 tions," "inceptions," "in­
Isidore of Seville, 100, 122, 123, terrogations"), 88-92, 161,
124-26, 144, 147, 148 168, 169, 170-71, 189, 198,
distinction drawn between 209, 220, 221, 222, 241
astrology and astronomy Augustine on, 111
by, 19, 124-25, 180 Dorotheus on, 89-90
Etymologiae, 124-25 Greeks on, 89-91
Islam and astrology, 151, 157-60 origins of, 88
see also Arabic learning and Kepler, Johannes, 18, 144, 187,
astrology 219, 224, 230, 232-35
Ivo of Chartres, 112 Kilwardby, Robert, 180

254
 INDEX

Kitto, Humphrey Davy Findley, Nechepso and Petosiris on,

65 23, 41-42, 84
Knappich, Wilhelm, 174 Ptolemy on, 42, 81, 84-85, 87
Koch, Walter, 174 Romans and, 50-51
Konrade of Megenberg, 185 Lilly, William, 224
Kroll, Wilhem, 46, 49 Liturgi ("ministers"), 116-17, 165
Kyranides, 152«. Livre de divinacions (Oresme),
197-98, 227
Lactantius, 112 Loci, see Mundane houses
Laistner, Max Ludwig Wolfram, Logicjue, 228
112-13 Lopez, Robert Sabatino, 207-208
Langdon, Stephen Herbert, 121 Lot of Fortune (horoscope of the
Language as Choice and Chance moon), 80, 85, 91, 94,239
(Herdan), 184«. Andelö on, 193
Latin Middle Ages, 98-203 calculating the position of,
Latin translations of Greek and 28-29, 39-40
Arabic astronomical/ Dorotheus on, 90
astrological works, list of, Firmicus Matemus on, 134
152-154 Greek horoscopes and, 45
Laven, Peter, 215-16 in Nechepso-Petosiris, 23
Laws (Plato), 16 origin of, 23, 27, 28
Le Fevbre, Robert, 161 Ptolemy on, 29, 87, 94
Lemay, Richard, 154, 159 Vettius Valens on, 47, 173
Lenaz, Luciano, 116 Lots, 27-29, 39-40, 47, 56, 80, 94
Leo, see Zodiac Lucan, 41, 45
Leo, Alan, 137-38, 174«. Lucretius, 50, 51
Leventhal, Herbert, 241 Lull, Raymond, 227
Liber divinationum (Oresme), Lunar mansions, see Mansions
197-98, 227 of the moon
Liber introductorius (Michael Lunar nodes, 121-22, 155, 162,
Scot), 190, 191-92 166
Liberal arts, 101-3, 128, 131«., Lupitus of Barcelona, 132
134, 187, 199, 200, 201, 217 Lundoe, Edward, 170
Cassiodorus on, 123
Isidore of Seville on, 125 Macrobius, 78, 114, 115, 117-20,
list of, 101 122, 142, 143, 147, 153, 188
Marianus' encyclopedia of, Magic, 18, 24, 50, 197, 199, 200,
117 216, 226, 229
the Quadrivium, 101, 102, alchemy and, 17, 183
103, 131, 143, 149 al-Kindi and, 158
the Trivium, 101, 102, 113 Babylonian medicine and,
Life/death prognostications, 66, 60, 61
77, 167-68, 169, 177, 194 Francis Bacon on, 222
Francis Bacon on, 220 Cecco d'Ascoli as magician,
Manilius on, 41-42 194, 196

255
 INDEX

Church and, 108,109,112,113 acceptance of link between,

Egyptian medicine and, 23, 178, 179, 182-83, 186-87,
60, 61 194, 196, 217
geomancy and, 144-45, 190 Aquinas on, 181
Greeks and, 1, 21 Babylonians and, 23, 60
in Hermetic literature, 21 Centiliquium on, 92-93
katarchai and, 88 Dorotheus on, 89-90
moon and, 62-63 early linkage between, 16, 17,
numbers and, 83, 91-92 185
Picatrix, 214-15 Egyptian god Thoth linked
Maius introductorium (Abu with, 21, 23
Ma'shar), 147, 152«., 153, Greeks and, 16, 17, 23-24, 60-
159, 164, 165, 171, 182 63, 218
Manilius, 12, 28, 30-48, 52, 89, Kepler on, 232
113, 135, 138, 165, 210 Manuel Comnenus on, 96
Mansions of the moon, 14, 81- Oresme on, 198
84, 89,162-64,174-75,191-92 Peter the Deacon and, 95
Roger Bacon on, 180-81 Pico della Mirandola on, 206,
Daniel of Morley and, 148 207
explanation of, 81-82 Ptolemy on, 60, 63, 79
lucky and unlucky days University of Bologna's link­
linked to, 82-83, 88 age of, 186-87
origins of, 82, 117, 162-63 Meno (Plato), 152«.
Ptolemy and, 83-84 Mensforth, George, 240
telling time by, 156, 161, 163 Mercury, 9
Manuel Comnenus, 95-96, 97 see also Planetary order; Plan­
Marbod of Rennes, 142 etary periods
Marriage of Mercury and Philol­ Meroe, 75, 76
ogy, The (Martianus Mersenne, Marin, 224, 228,
Capella), 115-17 230-31
Mars, 9 Mesopotamia, see Babylonian
see also Planetary order; Plan­ astronomy and astrology
etary periods Messahallah, see Masha'allah
Marsilio Ficino, 194, 206-7, 208, Metals and astrology, 24-25, 56,
214, 215, 233, 235, 240 178, 183
Martianus Capella, 103, 114, Metaphysics (Avicenna), 148
115-17, 132, 147, 200 Meteorologia (Aristotle), 67, 115,
Masha'allah, 24, 153, 157, 165, 152«.
181, 196, 239 Michael Scot, 145«., 146, 190,
Mathesis (Firmicus Matemus), 191-92, 239
133-42, 143«., 147 Middle Ages, Latin, 98-203
Mayo, Jeff, 174«. "Ministers," see "Liturgi"
Maximum of Tyre, 82 Minicius Felix, 55
Medicine and astrology, 109, Mirandola, see Pico della Miran­
129«., 142, 149-50, 176, 219- dola, Giovanni
20, 222-24, 226, 237, 241 Mithraism, 48, 104-108, 166
256
 INDEX
Modem Textbook of Astrology Campenella on, 213-14
(Hone), 140, 174n., 238-39 Centiloquium on, 93
Moon, 13, 64, 67, 79, 83, 87, difficulties in calculating,
119, 120, 128, 134, 178, 222, 172-74, 189, 237-40
225 Dorotheus on, 90
in Babylonian astronomy, 28, explanation of, 25-27, 172-73
165 Firmicus Matemus on, 135-
Centiloquium on, 92-93, 155 139-40
Egyptian division of the sky Frederick II and, 191
and, 77 Kepler and, 232, 234
Egyptian god Thoth and, 21 Macrobius on, 120
Hephaistion of Theves on, 90 Manilius and, 36, 37-39, 41,48
katarchai and, 90, 91 Morin on, 237-38
lucky and unlucky days and, origins of, 25
82, 88-89 Pico della Mirandola on, 210,
lunar calendar, 11, 117, 163 211, 232
magic and medicine and, 61, Ptolemy on, 64, 71, 72, 86,
62-63, 186, 198, 223 88,93
motion against the star­ Myriogenesis, 137-39
sphere, 9 Mysterium cosmographicum
Rhetorius on, 94 (Kepler), 233, 234
saltus lunae, 192
time between new moons Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 151
(lunar month), 7, 8 Natural History (Pliny), 114
time measured by, 11, 14, 84, Naturales quaestiones (Seneca),
117, 163 211
time to go around the ecliptic Nauert, Charles Garfeld, 215
(sidereal month), 7, 8 Nebulo, 237
weather forecasts and, 184 Nechepso-Petosiris, 20-23,
in zodiacs on Roman coins 41-42, 49, 60, 66, 76, 79,
and gems, 104 84-85, 114, 138, 139
see also Lot of Fortune; Lunar Neo-Platonist school of
nodes; Mansions of the philosophy, 4, 53-54, 78,
moon 114, 118, 133, 148n., 151,
Morin, Jean-Baptiste, 230, 232, 158, 159-60, 176, 201, 205,
234-38, 239 206, 207, 208, 233, 234-35
Muller, Johann, see Regiomon­ explanation of, 53
tanus opposition to astrology, 53-54
Mundane houses (loci), 29, 36, Neugebauer, Otto, 12, 18, 29,
45, 46, 47-48, 56, 134, 193, 45, 46-47, 74, 75, 76, 86,
216, 225 173
Arabs and, 161, 169, 171 New Dictionary of Astrology, A
astrolabe and, 157, 192 ("Sepharial"), 174n.
Augustine on, 111 Newton, Sir Isaac, 18, 219, 229-
Francis Bacon on, 220-21 30, 233, 240
Roger Bacon on, 180 Nicetas, 96
257
 INDEX

Nigidius Figulus, 41, 44-45, 89, Old, Walter Gom, see "Sepha-
110, 113 rial"
Ninths, 164-65, 174-75, 209 Omens, 13, 14, 15, 23, 53
Nominalism, 205, 218 On Diets, 15
Nonagesimals (enencontameris), On Planets (Apollonius of
138, 139-40 Tyana), 168
North, John David, 182«. On the Ascendant (Hypsicles), 49
Nostrodamus, 215«. On the Error of Profane Religion
Ncruenarii, see Ninths (Firmicus Matemus), 133
Novum organum (Bacon), 220, On the Nature of Man, 61
222 Optica (Euclid), 152«.
Number symbolism, numerol­ Optica (Ptolemy), 152«.
ogy, and numerological Opus maius (Bacon), 180
magic, 56, 65-66, 83, 91-92, Oresme, Nicole, 185, 197-99,
118, 145, 218, 233, 234 227
Nuova practica astrologica Origen, 54, 161-62
(Covalieri), 187 Origines (Isidore of Seville),
124-26
Objections to astrology, 1-2, 3, Orosius, 112
96, 97, 128, 133, 142, 153, Orphism, 16, 48, 83, 106, 207
189-90, 199, 231-32, 236-37,
240-41, 242 Padua University, 208, 215, 218-
of Francis Bacon, 220-21 19, 242
by the Christian Church, 54- "Palchus," 91«, 158
56, 108-12, 113, 124, 125-26, Panaetius of Rhodes, 50, 51, 52
147, 159, 175-80, 182-83, Panofsky, Erwin, 142«.
200, 209, 228 Paolini, 214
as deterministic, 3, 50, 53-54, Paracelsus, 230
55-56, 108, 111, 125, 175-80, Paranatellonta and synanatel-
182, 198, 208, 209 lonta, 29, 42-44, 45, 93, 116,
execution of Cecco d'Ascoli, 117, 138, 161, 211, 227
193-96 Partridge, John, 184
of Gerard of Silteo, 185 Pascalis Romanus, 152«.
of Marsilio Ficino, 206-7 Paulus Alexandrinus, 41, 64,
by Muslims, 151, 157 72, 74, 75-76, 77, 80, 88, 91
of Oresme, 197-98 Peace (Aristophanes), 13
of Origeni, 161 Peckham, John, 187
of Pico della Mirandola, Penseyre, Samuel, 240
208-12 Peripatetic school of
political, 49-51, 84, 95, 169, philosophy, 51, 159
195, 228 Persian astronomy and astrol­
in Roman Empire, 49-51, 95 ogy, 150, 155-56, 157, 160,
Ockham, William, 176, 195, 201, 164, 165, 166, 168, 171
207, 218 Persius, 41
Octatopos, 26, 46, 135, 223, 239 Peter of Abano, 206, 217
Octavius (Minicius Felix), 55 Peter Abelard, 147, 200-201
258
 INDEX
Peter the Deacon, 95 Plato of Tivoli, 93, 152«, 154
Peter Lombard, 217 Plautus, 30
Petosiris, see Nechepso-Petosiris Pliny the Elder, 16, 22, 49, 50,
Peuerbach, Johannes, 219-20 114
Pfister, Friedrick, 24 Plotinus, 53-54, 115, 118, 235
Phaedo (Plato), 152«, 204 Pluto, see Planetary order; Plan­
Phaenomena (Aratus), 43 etary periods
Pharamella, son of Abdelabi, Poggio, 210
149 Policraticus (John of Salisbury),
Pharsalia (Lucan, 41, 45 134, 147
Philosophia mundi (Honorius), Political hostility to astrology,
133 49-51, 84, 95, 112, 169, 195,
Physics (Aristotle), 150, 160, 228
183, 186 Pompey, 51
Picatrix, 214-15 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 205, 215-16
Pices, see Zodiac Porphyry, 53, 154, 239
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Posidonius, 32, 50, 52-53, 60,
167, 194, 206, 207-13, 215, 69, 113, 114, 119
216, 232, 236, 240 Posterior analytics (Aristotle), 217
Pingree, David, 91«., 156, 165- Praefatio apologetica (Alexander
66 deAngeli), 236
Placidus de litis, 239 Precession of the equinoxes,
Plague, 185-86, 187, 201 54, 71, 161-62, 196, 197-98,
Planetary houses, 25, 34, 72, 211, 214, 231
89, 91, 134 see also "Trepidations"
Firmicus Matemus on, 120 Principia Mathematica (Newton),
Manilius and, 39 219
Ptolemy on, 77-78, 88 Principles of Astrology (Carter),
Rhetorius on, 94-95 174«.
Planetary order, 4, 18-19, 31, Priscian, 201
46, 73, 106, 166-67, 168 Priscillianists, 112, 124
Planetary periods, 86-87 Proclus, 15, 160, 162
see also Ferdariae Prognostica, 97
Planispherium (Ptolemy), 152«. Prognosticon (Digges), 225
Plants and astrological influ­ "Progressions," 169-70, 171-72,
ence, 17, 24, 56, 62-63, 64, 189, 209, 210, 220, 232
92, 142, 145, 178, 179, 186, Propitious times for acting, 23,
196, 226 62, 81, 82-83, 93, 169, 181,
Plato, 17, 65, 118, 124, 151, 186, 189, 190, 191, 193, 196,
152«., 158, 176, 207, 208, 200
215, 216, 219, 222, 223, 233 Babylonians and, 24, 60,
Timaeus, 15, 16, 114, 143 88-89
Symposium, 204 Cato and, 49
translation of works of, 204 lucky and unlucky days, 15,
see also Neo-Platonist school 60, 88-89
of philosophy the moon and, 90
259
 INDEX

Prorogatores, see Aphetic houses Randall, John Herman, 218

Ptolemy, 10, 11, 18, 47, 59, 118, Raymond of Marseilles, 152«.
123, 131, 143, 157, 162, 180, Razes, 185
182, 187, 188, 192, 216, 224- Recorde, Robert, 224-25
25, 239 "Reflections," 136
Almagest, see Almagest Regiomontanus, 193, 219, 239
on Babylonian astronomy Reinhold, Erasmus, 225
and astrology, 60, 64, 73 Reiss, Ernst, 22, 23
on body and astrological in­ Remi of Auxerre, 117, 130
fluences, 79, 81 Renaissance and Enlighten­
Centiloquium falsely attributed ment, 204-43
to, 154, 237 Rhetorius, 91, 94-95, 173, 239
comets and, 184 Richard of Wallingford, 182
on decans, 73 Rising times, 74-76, 135, 172
on deterministic view of Robbins, Frank Egleston, 86-87,
astrology, 2-3, 70 155
geometry and, 103 Roger of Hereford, 153
Harmonicorum libri III, 233 Roger of Hoveden, 148-49
horoscopes and genethlialog- Rolandino of Padua, 190-91
ical astrology, 68, 69, 70, Roman attitude to astrology,
78-79, 85, 86, 87, 113, 170, 49-53, 103-4
173 Rostovtzev, Mikhail Ivanovich,
on influence of the planets, 80
41, 42 Royal Society, 228-29, 240
on Lot of Fortune, 29, 87, 97 Rudolf of Bruges, 152«.
on mansions of the moon,
83-84 Sacrobosco, John, see John of
Morin and, 235, 236, 237, 238 Sacrobosco
on mundane houses, 64, 71, Sagittarius, see Zodiac
72, 86, 88, 93 Salmeschiniaka, 21-22
Pico della Mirandola and, Salutati, Coluccio, 206
209, 211 Santillana, Giorgio de, 151«.
on planetary houses, 77-78,88 "Sabiens dominabitur astris,"
tables of, 45 177, 181, 186, 216, 225, 237
Tetrabiblos, see Tetrabiblos Sarton, George, 18
on the zodiac, 33, 61, 64, 71, Sasanian astronomy and astrol­
72, 73, 74, 83, 87 ogy, see Persian astronomy
Pythagorean school of and astrology
philosophy, 9, 16, 17, 33, Saturn, 9
56, 59, 65, 160, 168, 205, see also Planetary orders;
218-19, 233, 234-35 Planetary periods
Saturnalia (Macrobius), 118«.,
Quadripartitum, see Tetrabiblos 119
Quadvirium, see Liberal arts Saul ben Bishr, 152«.
Quaestiones naturales (Seneca), Saumaise, Claude de, 116,
53, 114 138«., 165
260
 INDEX

Saxl, Fritz, 142«. Stephen of Messina, 154

Sceptic school of philosophy, Stoic school of philosophy, 2,
50, 51 17, 23, 51, 64, 88, 113«.,
Scholastic philosophy, 102, 176, 118, 119, 133, 159, 160, 201,
177, 181, 201, 207, 215, 216, 205, 206
217 acceptance of astrology, 50
Scorpio, see Zodiac belief in "cosmic sympathy"
Scot, Michael, 145«., 146, 190, of man and the universe,
191-92, 239 32-33, 52, 53, 56, 60, 68-69,
Scylax of Halicarnassus, 50 158
Secretum secretorum (Bacon), comets and, 125
180, 181 rejection of astrology, 50
"Seeing" and "hearing" signs, superstition and, 114
34-35, 138, 139, 140-42 Stones and astrology, 17, 24,
Seneca the Younger, 2, 5, 53, 56, 92, 178
114, 205, 206, 211, 220 Stubbs, William, 149
Sententiae (Peter Lombard), 217 Summa contra Gentiles
"Sepharial" (pseud., i.e. Walter (Aquinas), 181
Gom Old), 87, 174«. Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 181
Servius, 119 Symposium (Plato), 204
Sicily, 61 Synanatellonta, see Paranatellonta
Significatores, see Aphetic and synanatellonta
houses Syrian astronomy and astrol­
Silverstein, Theodore, 153-54 ogy, 157, 163
Slavery, 80, 135 Sun, 5-6, 14, 64, 119, 120, 192,
Somnium Scipionis (Cicero), 117- 196, 198, 225
18 astrological medicine and, 223
Sophist school of philosophy, body parts and, 62
16 Greeks and, 12-13, 17
Speculum (Henri Bate), 182 solar calendar, 163
Sphaerae, 30-31, 32, 113, 125, sun-dial, 127-28
132, 145, 150, 187 weather and, 184
Sphaera barbarica, 14, 22, 43, zodiac and, 77, 104-6, 117
116, 135, 137, 138-39
Sphaera graecanica, 14, 22 Tabari, Mohammad ibn Jarir,
Sphaera (Al-Bitrugi), 190 see Al-Tabari
Sphaera (Campanus of Novara), Tables, 36, 43, 75-76, 123, 134,
192 142, 153, 156, 157, 162, 164,
Sphaera (Sacrobosco), 187-88, 170
194, 195, 196 of Alfonsine, 162, 206
Stahl, William Harris, 134, 135 of Al-Khwarizmi, 147
Star of Bethlehem, 96-97, 109, of Bate of Malines, 161
111-12, 125-26, 182 of Copernicus, 225
Steinschneider, Moritz, 184 of Peuerbach, 219-220
Stephanus Philosophus, 95 of Ptolemy, 45, 74, 85
Stephen of Antioch, 152«. unreliability of, 11, 212, 232
261
 INDEX

Tables (Al-Khwarizmi), 147 Thrasyllus, 50, 114

Taurus, see Zodiac Tiamat, 120-22
Teach Yourself Astrology (Mayo), Tiberius, 50
174n. Timaeus (Plato), 15, 16, 114, 143
Tempier, Stephen, 159, 177, 194 "Time-lords," see Chronocratores
Terms, 73, 76-77, 90, 192, 209, Time reckoning, 20, 21, 22, 42-
213 43, 76, 82, 106-8, 126-29,
Tertullian, 56, 112 156, 161, 168, 226
Tetrabiblos (Ptolemy), 56, 60, Paulus Alexandrinus on, 41
63-88, 92, 93, 94, 113, 135, "The Thousands" on, 165
136, 152n., 155, 167, 168, zodiac for, 14-15, 43, 56, 79,
170, 171, 206, 208, 227, 232, 127, 163
242 see also Calendars
on comets, 66 Toomer, Gerald James, 193
on deterministic astrology, 70 Topos, see Mundane houses
on foreknowledge through Tractatus contra judiciaros as-
astrology, 2-3, 57 tronomos (Oresme), 197
Latin translations of, 153, 181 "Transits," 169, 171-72
on Lot of Fortune, 29 Transits and Planetary Periods
medicine and astrology in, 63 ("Sepharial"), 87
on numerology, 65 "Trepidations," 161-62, 196
on the zodiac, 64, 71, 72, 73, see also Precession of the
74, 83, 87 equinoxes
Teucer of Babylon, 43 Trinkaus, Charles, 208, 215
Thabit ibn Qurra, 147-48, 150, Trivium, see Liberal arts
192
Thales of Miletus, 1, 59, 232 Ullman, M., 158
Thema mundi (horoscope of the Uranus, see Planetary order;
world), 94, 97, 118, 119-21, Planetary periods
134, 147
Theodosius Boradiotes, 96 Van Hoesen, Henry Bartlett, 29,
Theodosius of Tripolis, 192 45, 46-47, 74, 75, 76, 86, 173
Theon of Alexandria, 162 Varro, 123
Theophrastus, 15, 17 Venus, 9
Theorica planetarum (Campanus see also Planetary order; Plan­
of Novara), 192-93, 206 etary periods
Theorica planetarum (Gerard of Verity des Sciences, La (Mer-
Cremona), 192-93 senne), 230
Thesaurus occulti, 152n. Vermaseren, Maarten Jozef, 104
Thierry of Chartres, 103 Vettius Valens, 33, 44, 45, 46-49,
Thomas Aquinas, see Aquinas, 74, 86, 91, 141, 173, 227, 239
St. Thomas Victorinus, Bishop of Pettau,
Thomas of Pisan, 197 119
Thorndike, Lynn, 159, 188, 194 Vigintiloquium (Peter dAilly),
"Thousands, The" (Abu 198-99
Ma'shar), 165-66 Villani, 189, 194, 195-96
262
 INDEX

Virgil, 119 Babylonians and, 25

Virgo, see Zodiac Roger Bacon on, 180-81
Vitruvius, 15 beginning of the, 94, 119-20
body parts allocated to signs
Walker, Daniel Pickering, 214 of, 23, 61, 63, 112
Weather, see Astrometerology Campanella on, 213, 214
Webster, Charles, 229 Cecco dAscoli on, 194
Wedeck, Harry E., 174n. for character analysis, 14
Weinstock, Stefan, 83 Cosmographia on, 145
Wemyss, Maurice, 174n. definition of, 9
Wheel of Life, The (Wemyss), of Dendera, 19, 20
174«. for divination, 15
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Egyptians and, 19
Ulrich von, 13 Firmicus Matemus on, 120
William (Clerk to the Constable 137-38, 142
of Chester), 149 fixed or moving, 211
William of Conches, 153 on Homestead stone, 106
William of Malmesbury, 131, house division and, 172-74
132 Isidore of Seville on, 125
William of Ockham, see Kepler on, 234
Ockham, William Manilius on, 31, 33-36, 37,
Works and Days (Hesiod), 82-83, 39, 40, 44
163 numerology and, 65-66, 92
Worsdale, John, 240-41 Origen on, 54
Wyclif, John, 201 Pico della Marandola on,
209-10
Yates, Frances, 224 plants associated with signs
of, 24, 62
Zabarella, 218 Ptolemy on, 33, 61, 64, 71,
Zahel ben Bishr, 153 72, 73, 74, 83, 87
Zeno, 57, 59 in Roman art, 104, 105
Ziegler, Philip, 185 as time measurer, 14-15, 43,
Zielinski, Tadausz, 119 56, 79, 127, 129, 163, 192
Zodiac, 25-29, 61-66, 71-77, 81, twelve signs of the, 14, 19,
82, 89, 117, 121n„ 150, 155, 65-66, 76-77, 115, 192, 193
161, 166, 169-71, 188, 239-40 Vettius Valens on, 46, 48
Alexandrian Greeks and, 19 VtSzday, 202, 203

263
 About the Author
JIM TESTER died while this book was in production, but not before
he had been able to send a fully revised typescript to his publisher.
He belonged to the generation whose school days came to an end
with the outbreak of war, and so it was after service in the war-time
Navy that he resumed his interrupted studies and went to univer­
sity, graduating with a First in Classics from the University of Lon­
don. He went immediately to Bristol as a lecturer, and retired as
Senior Lecturer in Classics in 1982. The influence of astrology on
life and thought in the classical world was a constant and intriguing
point of reference in his work, which ranged over medieval Latin
and philosophy, New Testament Greek, and the late Roman period.
Largely discounted in orthodox approaches to these subjects, he
sees it as considerable and far-reaching, and this history is his
considered view of its development in Western society. He called
it 'a' history because in his opinion too little work has been done
on the subject for 'the' history to be written, but it is the first
thorough survey of its subject.
 Whether science or art, astrology—predicting life’s events by observing the
movement of the stars—has confounded and fascinated man for centuries. Now,
esteemed British classics scholar Jim Tester has written an exceptional
single-volume account that will come to be regarded as the quintessential historical
treatment of astrology.
. A History of Western Astrology begins by tracing the roots of astrology to the Greeks
of the fifth century B.C. Developed by the intellectuals and physicists of the time,
astrology was from its inception closely aligned to mathematics, astronomy,
and respected scientific thought. In fact, until the fall of the Roman Empire destroyed
the centers of learning and study, astrology continued to be believed in as a matter
of course by most knowledgeable people.
Origin ally astrology was simply ignored by the Church, but in the Middle Ages
Christian writers—among them St. Augustine—turned against their earlier beliefs
and attacked the pagan science, seeing no place for it in a divinely inspired
religious society. By the Renaissance, astrology had been out of intellectual favor for
hundreds of years. But with the renewal of classical education and thirst for
knowledge, students and academics once again were free to explore and expand the
boundaries of their curiosity.
As the Age of Enlightenment dawned, belief in astrology continued on for a time, until
it once again collapsed. The history of western astrology, then, is a journey up and
down the line of time, characterized by waxing and waning popularity and a
unique fight for its place in the intellectual field of ideas.
A fascinating scholarly study that is eminently readable and enjoyable,
A History of Western Astrology is a brilliant examination of the entire turbulent past
of a controversial science. • •