Astrology: A History

Astrology: A History, by Peter Whitfield (Abrams, 2001; $35)

Scarcely a culture, ancient or modern, has not produced people who have wondered at one time or another about the order of the universe in which we live and the likely laws that govern it. Their answers often range from pure myth, fantasy, and free association to supposedly universally testable rules that can account for the natural phenomena we all observe. The case of astrology is of special importance because it speaks to the basic human anxiety about the order of the universe and purports to endow its practitioners with the power to predict a person's character and destiny from the arrangement of the planets at the specific moment of birth. This kind of speculation goes back to the earliest texts of ancient civilizations, such as those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. A glance at modern magazines will convince anyone who needs convincing that such astrological speculations persist right up to the present.

Sumptuously illustrated with reproductions of manuscript pages from volumes still found in collections of rare books, Astrology: A History covers the field's documented beginnings in Babylonia, its assignment to the celestial sphere during Greek and Roman times, its diffusion and adaptation in India, China, and the Middle East, its eclipse and reemergence in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, its revival during the Renaissance, and its increasing marginalization as the pure sciences became more widespread and accepted.

Peter Whitfield, an authority on maps and the author of a number of books on different aspects of the history of ideas, touches on some of astrology's great proponents: Greek philosopher Aristotle, Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, Islamic astrologer Abu Ma'shar, medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus, Elizabethan cosmologist and astronomer John Dee. In elaborating how astrology has permeated social and intellectual history, Whitfield looks at the astrological subtext of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for example, as well as Shakespeare's seven-ages-of-man soliloquy in As You Like It. He describes the Zodiac Man--each of the zodiac's twelve signs was thought to influence a different part of the body (a concept first described in Latin poet Marcus Manilius's first century A.D. Astronomicon)--and discusses the development of astrological medicine. Whitfield also explains the astrolabe, a two-dimensional model of the heavens that allowed an astrologer to determine, for any required date, the position of the ascendant zodiac sign.

A reader who is interested in the subject but not necessarily ready to roll up his or her sleeves and start delving into the technical details of astrology can peruse this book with pleasure. For an in-depth history of the subject, one would do better to dust off the century-old volumes of Auguste Bouche-Leclercq, Les Precurseurs de l'Astrologie Grecque (1897) and L'Astrologie Grecque (1899), which are not mentioned in Whitfield's bibliographical note at the and of the book. To read Leclercq's great works, one has to have the patience to cover close to a thousand pages of dense French prose. Whoever goes through that experience, however, will not be disappointed and will appreciate the intricate philosophical questions that the ancients were dealing with.

The questions and evidence first examined by astrology are deceptively simple: Why, for example, do seeds germinate only during the spring, and why do leaves fall in the autumn? Were these phenomena caused by the Sun, which was believed to rotate around Earth? Since the Sun's yearly path coincided rather well with events in spring and fall, could the other planets and the Moon have similar effects?

For the venerable Aristotle and his followers, who laid the intellectual foundations of astrology, all the manifestations of change--in particular, those of coming-to-be and decay--are the by-products of cyclical motions of the celestial bodies and the inclination of the solar path. This inclination, or ecliptic, along and around which all the other planets also seem to move (adjusting for the effects of the planets themselves), would later be elaborated on by Ptolemy. Once the celestial and the earthly realms were connected, it was a relatively small step to use this process to answer such elusive questions as, What kind of life will a child turn out to have? Lucky and wealthy, or destitute? And if it is the latter, could one take any steps to avert this destiny? The answers that succeeding generations provide to such questions are worth studying for what they say about the social history of an era.

Whitfield is right to conclude that the "rationalization" of astrology (using it to make unverified cause-and-effect connections similar in structure to the ones usually made in a scientific statement) took place at the hands of the Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle. Subsequently, Ptolemy formulated astrology as a natural system, a set of physical laws operating without any reference to the mythological gods of Greek antiquity. But Whitfield does not note that astrology's rationalization by the Greeks almost five centuries later is nowhere free of the mythological substratum upon which it was erected. Otherwise, why would Ptolemy (as well as modern astrologers) ascribe to the planet Mars all the maleficence pertaining to the Greek god of war and bloodshed, and to the planet Venus all the beneficence pertaining to the Greek goddess of love and romance?