The Fated Sky

Astrology in History

Benson Bobrick

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780743281942
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In a horoscope he cast in 1647 for Charles I, William Lilly, a noted English astrologer, made the following judgment: "Luna is with Antares, a violent fixed star, which is said to denote violent death, and Mars is approaching Caput Algol, which is said to denote beheading." Two years later the king's head fell on the block. "Astrology must be right, " wrote the American astrologer Evangeline Adams, a claimed descendant of President John Quincy Adams, in a challenge to skeptics in 1929. "There can be no appeal from the Infinite."
The Fated Sky explores both the history of astrology and the controversial subject of its influence in history. It is the first serious book to fully engage astrology in this way.
Astrology is the oldest of the occult sciences. It is also the origin of science itself. Astronomy, mathematics, and other disciplines arose in part to make possible the calculations necessary in casting horoscopes. For five thousand years, from the ancient Near East to the modern world, the influence of the stars has been viewed as shaping the course and destiny of human affairs. According to recent polls, at least 30 percent of the American public believes in astrology, though, as Bobrick reveals, modern astrology is also utterly different from the doctrine of the stars that won the respect and allegiance of the greatest thinkers, scientists, and writers -- Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Arab, and Persian -- of an earlier day. Statesmen, popes, and kings once embraced it, and no less a figure than St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian, thought it not incompatible with Christian faith. There are some two hundred astrological allusions in Shakespeare's plays, and not one of their astrological predictions goes unfulfilled. The great astronomers of the scientific revolution -- Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler -- were adherents. Isaac Newton's appetite for mathematics was first whetted by an astrological text. In more recent times, prominent figures such as Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan have consulted astrologers and sometimes heeded their advice. Today universities as diverse as Oxford in England and the University of Zaragoza in Spain offer courses in the subject, fulfilling Carl Jung's prediction decades ago that astrology would again become the subject of serious discourse.
Whether astrology actually has the powers that have been ascribed to it is, of course, open to debate. But there is no doubt that it maintains an unshakeable hold on the human mind. In The Fated Sky, Benson Bobrick has written an absolutely captivating and comprehensive account of this engrossing subject and its enduring influence on history and the history of ideas.

Part One

The universe, eternity, the infinite are typified by the sphere…On a sphere every point is a center, and every point is the highest point, and this explains the puzzle of time and space. There never was a beginning of time, and there never will be an end. Time always is. Any number of trillions of years hence, and any number…past, and you are just as near the end, or the beginning, of Time as now, and no nearer. This moment is the center of Time; this instant is the highest point in the revolving sphere. The same with that other form of Time, Space. There is no end to Space, and no beginning. This point where you now stand, this chair, this tree, is the center of Space; it all balances from this point. Go to the farthest fixed star and…you have only arrived at Here. Your own doorstep is just as near the limit, and no nearer. This is the puzzle of puzzles, but it is so.

—JOHN BURROUGHS, Journals, January 13, 1882

Chapter 1

AMERICA WOULD NEVER have been discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 had it not been for the thought of Arab astrologers in Baghdad in the 9th century A.D. When Columbus set sail on the great western voyage that carried him to America’s shores, he had biblical prophecy to inspire him, Arab astrology to guide him, and various practical aids that three continental astrologers, who were also mathematicians, had supplied: the planetary tables of Regiomontanus; a map drawn up by Paolo Toscanelli; and an ephemeris prepared by Samuel Zacuto, who later made the splendid astrolabe of iron used by Vasco da Gama in his voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. These were all of use to Columbus in his celestial calculations and his navigation of the open sea. He also used an astrolabe and quadrant to determine the altitude of stars, set his hourglass by the transits of the Sun, depended on the North Star to fix magnetic north, and judged the time of night by the constellation of the Great Bear. He overawed the natives of one island by his ability to predict a lunar eclipse, and drew with some success on astrological lore to predict the weather—taking his ships to shelter, for example, in the port of Santo Domingo because an aspect between Jupiter and Mercury seemed to portend a tropical storm. Yet Columbus could not proceed solely by the sky. Knowledge of celestial navigation in Europe was wanting, and so, for the most part, he relied on a magnetic compass to measure his course or direction, and on his own method of “dead” or deduced reckoning to estimate his position on the main.

But it was the stars that led him on. Columbus understood that the world was a globe and believed that by sailing directly west he would eventually reach the shores of Asia (or the “Indies”). He could not know, of course, that America intervened. But it was not the fabled wealth of the Indies that held him most in thrall. For the voyage itself was spurred on by an astrological idea. That idea was the “great conjunction” theory of history, as first set forth in the writings of the Persians, elaborated by the Arabs, and adopted by the Latin West. Columbus had encountered it in the work of the French cardinal, theologian, and astrologer Pierre d’Ailly.

According to this theory, important historical events such as the rise and fall of empires, the birth of religions, and cultural transformations were marked by the “great planetary conjunctions” of Jupiter and Saturn as they revolved through their cycles in the sky. Such great conjunctions occurred once every 960 years—a principal source of our idea of the millennium—as the planets completed a circuit of the zodiac, combining and recombining in the signs. In the course of that round, the two conjoined—that is, occupied the same degree of celestial longitude—forty-eight times. For d’Ailly, human history was explained by the unfolding impact of these conjunctions, according to their scale. Shifts between triplicities or elements (earth, air, fire, and water, by which the signs of the zodiac were grouped) were associated with dynastic change; the greater or near-millennial conjunctions were linked to epochal change as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes and overwhelming floods. In d’Ailly’s view, such great conjunctions had heralded or coincided with the Great Flood, the fall of Troy, the death of Moses, the foundation of Rome, and the advent of Christ. “All astronomers are agreed in this,” he declared, “that there never was one of those conjunctions without some great and notable change in this world.”

D’Ailly’s work had convinced Columbus that the end of the world was near, and that it would be accompanied by the conversion of all heathenkind to Christ. For that reason, he called himself Christophorus (or “Christo-ferens,” as he came to sign his name), “the Christ-bearer,” and conceived himself the agent of God’s work as the world approached its final days. All this he explained in a letter to his royal patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He wrote of the Indies: “These vast realms are peopled with immortal souls, for whose redemption Christ, the Son of God, has made an atoning sacrifice. It is the mission which God has assigned to me to search them out, and to carry to them the Gospel of Salvation.” He took as his text Isaiah 11:10–12—“The Lord shall…recover the remnant of his people…and gather together the dispersed…from the four corners of the earth”—and his historic first voyage itself seemed emblematic of that charge.

On the morning of August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail with three small ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—from Palos, Spain, and steered for the Canary Islands, where he reprovisioned before striking due west. After a difficult voyage of two months with a near-mutinous crew, on October 12 he at length sighted land. At two o’clock in the morning, a gun was fired to give the signal. All three vessels then took in their sails and laid to, “waiting impatiently for the dawn.” Upon making landfall, “the voice of prayer and the melody of praise rose from his ships,” and his own first action was to prostrate himself upon the ground. To Columbus, his journey’s end was heaven-sent. For their part, the natives on the small Bahamian island were not wholly mistaken, perhaps, when they cried out at dawn to their brethren, “Come see the people from the sky.”

Columbus would later say that he owed all he had achieved to the grace of God and “God-given” arts of astrology, geometry, navigation, and arithmetic.

His own heavily annotated copy of d’Ailly’s work, Treatise on the Image of the World, may still be seen in the Columbine Library at Seville.

ACCORDING TO AN ANCIENT TRADITION, common to both Gnostic and Syriac Christians as well as to the Persians and Jews, Adam received the doctrines and mysteries of astrology directly from the Creator, and by knowledgeably scanning the constellations in the skies foretold that the world would one day be destroyed by water, then by fire. As a memorial to those who came after him, he (or his descendants, Seth and Enoch) had this knowledge engraved upon two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone. According to Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian and near contemporary of Christ, the second pillar could still be seen in Syria in A.D. 63.

Astrology is the oldest of the occult sciences. It is also the origin of science itself. From astrology are derived astronomy, calculation of time, mathematics, medicine, botany, mineralogy, and (by way of alchemy) modern chemistry, among other disciplines. Logarithms were originally devised to simplify the calculations necessary in casting horoscopes; the ray theory of vision—the foundation of modern optics—developed from astrological theories of the effect of stellar rays on the soul. For five thousand years, from ancient Sumeria and Babylonia to the present day, the stars have been viewed as shaping, by divine power, the course and destiny of human affairs. Indeed, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the earliest symbol of deity known to us—the cuneiform sign for “god”—was a star (*).

Astrological terms permeate our language: conjunction, opposition, forecast, aspect, lunatic, venereal, disaster, influence—as in influenza, since all epidemics were once ascribed to celestial effects; we speak of “mercurial,” “saturnine,” or “jovial” temperaments; and people thank their “lucky stars,” or consider a person “ill-starred” if his luck is bad. The Hebrew word mazzal means “sign” or constellation; so “Mazzal tov” (the colloquial “Congratulations!”) really means, “May you have good stars!” The term fall is astrological, for the fall or autumn equinox marks the descendant of the zodiac year; and revolution is taken from an astrological calculation called a “solar return.” The star-shaped halo that once encompassed the Roman emperor’s posthumous image—according to the belief that he ascended to heaven as a star—was later transformed into the halo of the Christian saint. The pharmaceutical symbol Rx—commonly said to be an abbreviation for the Latin verb recipere (from which we get recipe or compound)—is derived from the ancient symbol for the Roman god Jupiter, based on the “Eye” of Horus, an Egyptian god with magical healing powers.

ASTRONOMY STUDIES THE heavenly bodies in order to formulate the natural laws that govern them and to understand how the physical structure of the universe evolved; astrology describes the influence of those bodies upon human character and life. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reputedly remarked, “Astrology is astronomy brought down to earth and applied to the affairs of men.” It is an applied science, insofar as it is based on astronomy; an exact science, insofar as its judgments are based on mathematical calculations; and an empirical science, insofar as its deductions are based on data gathered over the course of time.

Its method is a horoscope, which is a map or diagram of the heavens cast for a particular moment of time, and read according to well-established rules. Those rules, if properly applied, are free from the elements of chance or divination; moreover, they are substantially based on a written tradition that derives its authority not just from dogma and belief, but from thousands of years of observation. The idea at the heart of astrology is that the pattern of a person’s life—or character, or nature—corresponds to the planetary pattern at the moment of his birth. Such an idea is as old as the world is old—that all things bear the imprint of the moment they are born.

Whether this is true or not may be subject to debate. But the belief that it is has proved to have enduring power.

Astrology in modern times has undergone a remarkable resurgence, and is now (as Carl Jung predicted it would) knocking again at the doors of academe. Astrologers are attempting to verify traditional doctrine by scientific methods and in general to meet the demand of Johannes Kepler (one of its true believers) that they “separate the gems from the slag.” In a number of countries, including England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States, astrology is once again being taught at the university level, for the first time since the Renaissance. In England, courses in the subject are now offered at Brasenose College, Oxford; Bath Spa University College; the University of Southampton; and the University of Kent. It can also be studied at Cardiff University in Wales, the Bibliotheca Astrologica in France, the University of Zaragoza in Spain, Dogus University in Turkey, Benares Hindu University in northern India, and at Kepler College in the United States, among other schools. Scholarly journals such as Culture and Cosmos (A Journal of the History of Astrology and Cultural Astronomy), the Dublin Astrologer (The Journal of the Dublin Astrological Centre), and Apollon (The Journal of Psychological Astrology), have begun to establish themselves, while the prestigious Warburg Institute in London recently created a “Sophia Fellowship” for astrological research.

For the past thirty years or so, polls have shown that from 30 to 40 percent of Americans (or about 100 million people) “believe in astrology and think their lives are governed by the stars.” An estimated ten million people have paid an astrologer to cast their horoscope, while almost everybody seems to know their own “sign.” Astrology columns are carried by most of the nation’s daily newspapers and hundreds of magazines, and can be found on numerous Internet sites. Yahoo alone lists about 1,700 of the latter, while Amazon.com counts 3,155 books on the subject in print. Most large bookstores today devote an entire section to the field. According to one recent estimate, there are some 15,000 full-time and 225,000 part-time astrologers today in the United States.

There can be no doubt that the subject maintains an unshakeable hold on the human mind.

THE BIBLE IS RICH with astrological allusion. It opens with the pronouncement that the “lights in the firmament of the heavens” were established in part “for signs,” and in Psalm 19, for example, we read: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.” According to rabbinical tradition each of the twelve tribes of Israel represented a zodiac sign, and the astrological symbols for the four fixed signs—a lion, a man, a bull, and an eagle—were carried as totems in the Egyptian desert by the Hebrew host. These same symbols made up the composite creature we call the Egyptian Sphinx, and in accordance with Ezekiel’s vision came to stand for the four great Christian evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Of the twelve precious stones that adorned the breastplate of Aaron as high priest, Josephus wrote, “whether we understand by them the months, or the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the Zodiac, we shall not be mistaken.” The seven-branched candlestick, he tells us, also symbolized the seven planets, and the twelve loaves of shewbread in the temple the twelve signs. It is said that each of the twelve disciples of Christ likewise stood for (or embodied) a sign—an idea that was carried over into medieval romance, where the twelve knights of King Arthur’s Round Table (a symbol of the zodiac) also stood for the twelve astrological types. The idea that those types together constitute a complete circle of humanity is also carried over into our jury system, which is supposed to ensure that a man is properly tried by a representative assessment (or complete cross-section) of his peers. That means, in theory, that they will combine their experience to perfect the judgment of a case. The Hindus also say twelve is the number of completeness, which is why the Bible tells us that at the age of twelve, Jesus was able to confute the doctors in the temple, because his knowledge was already complete.

Throughout antiquity, the constellations and planets were honored by shrines and temples of learning. There were twelve great Mystery religions, “each one paying homage to or deriving its authority from a zodiac sign.” The rites of Aries, or the Celestial Ram, so Manly Hall tells us, “were celebrated in the temple of Jupiter Ammon in the Libyan desert; the rites of Taurus in the Egyptian Mysteries of Serapis, or the tomb of the Heavenly Bull; the rites of Gemini in Samothrace, where Castor and Pollux—the Dioscuri—were worshipped; the rites of Cancer in Ephesus, where Diana (goddess of the Moon) was revered; the rites of Leo in the Bacchic and Dionysiac orgies of the Greeks,” and so on.

The ecclesiastical calendars of all known religions are also linked astrologically with the major phases of the Sun and Moon. Passover, for example, begins on the first full Moon after the vernal equinox; Easter Sunday, which marks the end of Lent, is usually the first Sunday after that;^* the Christian Sabbath is the day of the Sun; and the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, starts at sunset on the day of the new moon closest to the autumn equinox. The first day of Ramadan is set by the new Moon in Libra, which begins the most holy period for Moslems of fasting and prayer. In Vietnam, the New Year begins at the time of the first full Moon after the Sun enters Aquarius and is termed Tet. Hanukkah is set by the new Moon in Capricorn, and Purim by the full Moon in Pisces. Christmas was “coopted by the Church from pagan celebrations at the winter solstice, which was also the festival of the Persian Sun god Mithras. The rebirth of the Sun god was thus replaced in Christianity by the birth of God the Son.”

The names of the days of the Western week, of course, are those of the star-gods, as derived from Roman and Norse mythology. Sunday is the Sun’s day; Monday the Moon’s; Tuesday the day of Tiw, the pagan god of war, akin to Mars; Wednesday belongs to Woden, akin to Mercury (in French, Mercredi); Thursday to Thor, or Jupiter; and Friday to the goddess Freya, or Venus (in French, Vendredi). Saturday is Saturn’s day and rounds out the cycle.

Our seven-day week itself derives from a convergence around the 2nd century B.C. of the Sabbath cycle of the Jews, in which the seventh day was held to be holy, and an astrological week based upon the planets (which included the Sun and Moon) according to which each day was ruled by one of the seven planetary gods. Each hour of each day was also so ruled, hence the cycle of planetary hours. Following Egyptian practice, there were twenty-four hours in a day, but before clock time they were not all of equal length: the twelve daytime hours were equally divided from sunrise to sunset, the twelve nighttime hours from sunset to dawn. In sequence, the hours belonged to Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, in an endless circle, with each one in turn serving as regent or ruler for that day. This was the Ptolemaic order of the planets, according to their perceived speed and distance from the earth.

The planets also gave us the seven liberal arts, and, by number and type, the seven deadly sins: sloth (Saturn), pride ( Jupiter), anger (Mars), gluttony (the Sun), lust (Venus), avarice (Mercury), and envy (the Moon). Like the signs, the planets inspired worship and adulation, and each of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, according to one scholar, arose in homage to one of the planets then known. The Colossus of Rhodes was an altar to the Sun; the temple of Diana at Ephesus to the Moon; the Great Pyramid at Giza to Mercury; the hanging gardens of Semiramis to Venus; the mausoleum of Halicarnassus to Mars; the temple of Olympian Zeus to Jupiter; and the Pharos of Alexa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Benson Bobrick
• Astrology in History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index