Sapientia Astrologica: Astrology, Magic and Natural Knowledge, ca. 1250-1800: I. Medieval Structures (1250-1500): Conceptual, Institutional, Socio-Political, Theologico-Religious and Cultural

591 Pages·2019·6.591 MB·English

by  H Darrel Rutkin

Archimedes 55 New Studies in the History and Philosophy
of Science and Technology
H Darrel Rutkin
Sapientia Astrologica:
Astrology, Magic and
Natural Knowledge,
ca. 1250-1800
I. Medieval Structures (1250-1500):
Conceptual, Institutional, Socio-Political,
Theologico-Religious and Cultural
Archimedes
NEW STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY
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H Darrel Rutkin
Sapientia Astrologica:
Astrology, Magic and
Natural Knowledge, ca.
1250–1800
I. Medieval Structures (1250-1500):
Conceptual, Institutional, Socio-Political,
Theologico-Religious and Cultural
H Darrel Rutkin
Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Dorsoduro, Venezia, Italy
ISSN 1385-0180 ISSN 2215-0064 (electronic)
Archimedes
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Preface
Daily newspaper horoscopes are like a text message from
Athena.
—Sophia Joy Rutkin, age 13.
Astrology currently plays a variety of complex and often controversial roles in the
contemporary early twenty-first-century’s increasingly globalized world—East and
West, including Europe and America1—sometimes functioning even in the highest
corridors of power. Nancy Reagan, the wife of Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), the
40th president of the United States (1981–1989), famously used an astrologer from
San Francisco, Joan Quigley, to time a broad range of official activities and
announcements to her husband’s best political advantage. To do so, she used a tra-
ditional astrological practice called “elections,” namely, the choosing of astrologi-
cally propitious times for beginning any sort of venture, many earlier examples of
which will be seen in what follows.2 Apparently, François Mitterrand (1916–1996),
the 21st President of France (1981–1995), also regularly sought astrological advice.3
Despite the virtually ubiquitous appearance of the daily newspaper sun-sign
“horoscope,” an extremely watered down, twentieth-century expression of
1 I avoid the East almost entirely in what follows, due mainly to issues of competence and space,
not lack of interest or widespread expression in either historical or contemporary India and the
Islamic world, China (with its own indigenous ancient system), or other Eastern societies. The New
York Times recently reported (6 January 2015) about astrology in contemporary Sri Lankan poli-
tics: “As Vote Nears, Astrologer for Sri Lanka’s President Faces Ultimate Test of his Skills,” by
Ellen Barry.
2 Joan Quigley, “What Does Joan Say?”: My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and
Ronald Reagan, New York: Birch Lane Press, 1990. Reagan was famously known as the “teflon
president,” perhaps in part due to Quigley’s astrological interventions.
3 Elizabeth Teissier was his astrologer between 1989 and 1994; see Jon Henley, “How Mitterand
Sought Advice from Astrologer,” The Observer, 25 June 2000 (http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2000/jun/25/jonhenley.theobserver2). Controversially, Teissier also earned a PhD in sociol-
ogy at the Sorbonne with a thesis entitled, “Situation épistémologique de l’astrologie à travers
l’ambivalence fascination / rejet dans les sociétés postmodernes,” in 2001. My thanks to Marco
Gentile for bringing Teissier to my attention.
v
vi Preface
astrology’s central structure4—a figure of the heavens coordinated for time and
place, to be extensively discussed in what follows—and its periodic recrudescences
in popular and/or esoteric psychological and religious contexts,5 astrology still
inspires controversy today due to its persistently broad range of societal roles, even
though today, of course, astrology has no purchase among scholars, scientific or
humanistic, and is relegated to aficionados of the art and to believers.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not!), astrology still provokes outcries of outrage, indig-
nation and intolerance. In 1955, for example, at the time of the McCarthy investiga-
tions (often described as “witchhunts”), the dean of American historians of science
and the founder of Isis: An International Review Devoted to the History of Science
and its Cultural Influences, George Sarton (1884–1956) of Harvard University
insisted that astrologers should be arrested and jailed for their beliefs and practices,
due to his profound suspicion that they were preying on society.6 Similarly, in 1972,
Wayne Shumaker (1910–1999),7 a distinguished professor of English at the
University of California, Berkeley, devoted the first extensive chapter of his influen-
tial The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns to
debunking the science, art, and/or practice of astrology, due explicitly to his alarm
at its perceived deleterious effects on his impressionable undergraduates in the
Berkeley of the late 1960s and early 1970s.8
Finally, in its September/October 1975 issue, The Humanist, an organ of secular
humanism in America, published an attack on astrology that included an oath reject-
ing astrology signed by 186 scientists. This provoked a characteristically harsh criti-
cal firebombing (Feyer-bombing!) of their entire enterprise by Paul Feyerabend
(1924–1994), a distinguished and controversial philosopher of science also at UC
Berkeley.9 Feyerabend’s arguments are very interesting indeed and strike a sugges-
tive tone for the study that follows, where far too much ideologically laden and
mostly unconscious assumption, assertion, prejudice and wishful thinking has
passed for critical historical scholarship.
*
4 For newspaper astrology in the England of the 1930s, see Ellic Howe’s illuminating, Astrology: A
Recent History including the Untold Story of its Role in World War II, New York: Walker and
Company, 1968, 66 ff.
5 See, e.g., Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror
of Secular Thought, Leiden: Brill, 1996.
6 Eugenio Garin provides the reference in his Lo zodiaco della vita: la polemica sull’astrologia dal
Trecento al Cinquecento, Rome: Laterza, 1976, 129 (n. 2) to George Sarton, Ancient Science and
Modern Civilization, New York: Harper, 1959, 61 ff.
7 My thanks to John Heilbron for tracking down Shumaker’s dates.
8 UC Berkeley was famously satirized for precisely this sort of thing as the State University of
Euphoria at Plotinus (colloquially known as Euphoric State) in David Lodge’s splendid novel,
Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, London: Secker and Warburg, 1975.
9 Science in a Free Society, London: NLB, 1978, 91–96. The examples offered here are merely
illustrative. A “thicker” study of these and other responses to astrology in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries would be very interesting, I am sure.
Preface vii
Given its extraordinary adaptive flexibility and striking cultural centrality—in
stark contrast to its current marginality—in numerous societies from Hellenistic
Babylon to the Imperial Rome of Augustus and Tiberius, and from Sasanian Persia,
Abbasid Baghdad and the Byzantine Empire to Renaissance Rome, Early Modern
England, and the rest of Europe,10 the history of astrology as an alternative discourse
of knowledge and praxis, with its alternating periods of legitimacy and otherwise,
can help us construct a revealing mirror (like Filippo Brunelleschi’s perspective
mirror) for capturing and fixing a broad range of insights valuable for understanding
crucial and often profoundly misunderstood features of medieval, Renaissance, and
early modern European intellectual, cultural and political history. The language of
optics (geometrical and otherwise) is instructive, and resonates deeply with astrol-
ogy’s history, as we will see. To employ another comparison, astrology seems to
provide a uniquely revealing backbone to history—cultural and political, religious
and scientific—due to its previous centrality and subsequent marginalization over a
2000-year span of Western history from Augustus’s rule to the present day.
*
Thinking about astrology’s history can also inspire reflection on historical astrol-
ogy, that is, the study of astrological patterns in order to discern the deeper structures
of history.11 Contemporary astrologers point to recent outer planet conjunctions and
configurations as astrological indicators of profound changes in human nature and
society, as we segue more or less gracefully into yet another phase of human exis-
tence.12 They argue that the nature of these changes is indicated by two recent sets of
“great conjunctions”: of Uranus and Pluto in 1965, and of Uranus and Neptune in
1992.13 Discovered in 1781, 1846, and 1930, respectively, Uranus, Neptune, and
10 For Hellenistic Babylon, see Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy,
and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, and her
Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2016; for Ancient Rome, see, e.g., Tamsyn S. Barton, Knowledge and Power: Astrology,
Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994; for Sasanian Persia, see David Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology: From Babylon to
Binaker, Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa et l’Oriente, 1997; for Abbasid Baghdad, see Dmitri
Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and
Early Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th–10th Centuries), London: Routledge, 1998; and for Byzantium,
see Paul Magdalino, L’Orthodoxie des astrologues: La science entre le dogme et la divination à
Byzance (VIIe-XIVe siècle), Paris: Lethielleux, 2006. The others will be treated in what follows.
11 This also relates to themes arising from astrology’s relationship to divine providence and fate, as
we will see in Part II.
12 When I initially wrote this section in 2011, there was an increasing popular interest in some
major changes said to be about to occur in 2012 due to a major cycle ending in the Mayan Calendar.
See, for example, Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, New York: Tarcher-
Penguin, 2006.
13 Richard Tarnas interestingly treats these and other issues of what he calls “archetypal astrology”
in his Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, New York: Viking, 2006, and his
earlier Prometheus the Awakener: An Essay on the Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus,
Woodstock, CN: Spring Publications, 1995. In 2015, astrologers were concerned with the slow
viii Preface
Pluto are the new “outer” planets, although Pluto’s status as a planet has recently
come under attack.14 The discovery of three “new” planets in the modern era also
raises a central issue concerning astronomy and astrology’s dialectical dynamics
throughout history. Only time will tell what ultimate effect Pluto’s demotion from
full planetary to dwarf planet status will have (if any) on astrological theory and/or
practice.
Regardless, the use of astrology to gain insight into the broader patterns of his-
tory also has its own significant premodern history that, while in many respects
continuous with the modern situation, also has significant transformations and/or
ruptures, including that the relevant outer planets under discussion up to and includ-
ing the seventeenth century were primarily Jupiter and Saturn and sometimes Mars.
This framework of historical astrology was taken very seriously indeed for well
over a millennium, from its origins in Sasanian Persia through its rise in Abbasid
Islam and full flowering in Western Europe from the fourteenth through seventeenth
centuries. The formerly broad cultural acceptance of such a view (to be developed
below) also points to a striking historical transformation.15
*
In this study, I focus on the construction of astrology’s centrality and its later
marginalization over the extensive period from ca. 1250 CE to ca. 1800 in
conceptual, institutional, socio-political, theologico-religious, and cultural
respects. Throughout, my focus will primarily be on astrology’s configurations
within natural knowledge (particularly within the disciplines of natural philosophy,
mathematics and medicine), but I will also treat astrology’s often illuminating
relationships to both theology/religion and magic. Although my principal focus
will be on conceptual structures, I will also devote significant attention to astrolo-
gy’s characteristic disciplinary configurations and institutional foundations as well
as to its socio-political and cultural expressions.
To ground this analysis, I will offer an interpretive framework—constructed flex-
ibly enough, I hope, to be subjected easily to refinement and revision—that orga-
nizes a vast amount of evidence and highlights a rich problematic for further
moving multiple squaring of Uranus in Aries with Pluto in Capricorn, especially since (strikingly)
Pluto’s entry (or “ingress”) into Capricorn in 2008 corresponded closely to the global financial
meltdown and subsequent great recession, whereas Uranus’s ingress into Aries in Spring 2011 cor-
responded (once again strikingly) with the revolutionary development of the Arab Spring and
subsequent dramatic transformations in the region.
14 For Pluto’s current status, see the article by Mason Inman, “Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers
Rule,” 26 August 2006, on the National Geographic website: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/
news/2006/08/060824-pluto-planet.html
15 Some of the themes in this preface and several others may be found in Anthony Grafton’s marvel-
ous and insightful, “Starry Messengers: Recent Work in the History of Western Astrology,
Perspectives on Science 8 (2000): 70–83. See also his and William R. Newman’s “Introduction:
The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe” to Secrets of Nature:
Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Newman and Grafton (eds.), Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001, 1–37.
Preface ix
scholarly research. There are many significant and more-or-less understudied areas
to explore. Fortunately, there is no lack of sources in many languages and in many
cultural and historical periods. Only when these sources have all been catalogued,
edited, analyzed and integrated will we be able to tell astrology’s history fully.16 In
the meantime, I hope to show that it still well repays the effort to organize what we
now know and to place it into an explicitly constructed integrated framework in
order to sharpen our understanding and orient future research.17
I have repeatedly found that astrology—at least during the period under discus-
sion here—benefits greatly from being studied over a long duration. In this way, the
larger patterns are more easily and effectively discerned by being cast into sharper
relief, much like the aerial surveying of an archeologically rich district in the late
afternoon. At that time, the angle of the sun causes the resultant extended shadows
to more fully reveal underlying deeper patterns that are often hidden to a normal
viewing perspective. With this framework and orientation, we can then dig more
knowledgably, as it were, and thus more effectively explore a broad range of deeper
archeological structures.18
My understanding has developed as a series of approximations, with different
types of evidence regularly inspiring new questions and thus further refining my
interpretations. I have no doubt but that the articulations—fragments—soundings in
this study will themselves be subject to further refinement and revision as collective
scholarly endeavors both expand our knowledge and bring it into sharper focus.19
16 Following in the finest scholarly traditions of Franz Cumont’s CCAG and the Warburg Institute,
the indefatigable David Juste is doing his best to single handedly rectify this situation, with, among
other things, the recent publication of the first two volumes of his survey of extant Latin astrologi-
cal manuscripts in the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Latinorum (CCAL). The first volume is
entitled, Les manuscrits astrologiques latins conservés à la Bayerische Staatsbibliothek de Munich
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011) as number 81 in the series Documents, Études et Répertoires. The
second volume is Les manuscrits astrologiques latins conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale de
France à Paris (2015, no. 84). Although there is much excellent scholarship in many languages
over its entire history, there does not yet exist a fully satisfactory overall history of astrology in any
language. For examples of reasonably useful recent attempts, see S. Jim Tester, A History of
Western Astrology, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987; Peter Whitfield, Astrology: A
History, New York: Abrams, 2001 (with my review: Journal for the History of Astronomy 34
[2003]: 335–36); Kocku von Stuckrad, Geschichte der Astrologie: Von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart, Munich: Beck, 2003; and Nicholas Campion, History of Western Astrology, 2 vols.,
London: Continuum, 2009. Much more of the scholarship on the history of astrology will be
explored in what follows.
17 The lack of such a framework accounts for many of the weaknesses in Robert S. Westman’s
Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011) as I will discuss further below. Although my monograph was not originally
designed or conceived as a response to Westman’s study, it will partially serve as one de facto, both
implicitly and explicitly.
18 I hereby gesture, of course, to Michel Foucault’s suggestive concept of the archeology of
knowledge.
19 For example, the recent groundbreaking study of Babylonian astrology by Rochberg, Heavenly
Writing, and now Dag Nikolaus Hasse’s equally groundbreaking Success and Suppression: Arabic
Science and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016),
which treats astrology valuably along with philosophy and medicine.