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1. The History of Astrology
The earliest farming communities began to establish themselves in the lowlands of the inland plains that stretched away towards the great desert of Arabia. Many settlements came into being in northern Syria, where the upper Euphrates flows through dry steppes. The inhabitants of that area realised they could exploit the great river’s regular seasonal floods to water their gardens. It was very important to know exactly when the flooding would occur so crops could be sown beforehand. The necessity of timing the crops properly gave farmers a sharper awareness of the cyclic movements they observed in the heavens.
Astrologers at that time counted the exact number of days between the regular appearances of stars in the sky. It was when they discovered it took 365 days for the stars to reappear that the idea of the calendar was born. The earliest calendars, however, were based upon the New Moons, which occurred on average 13 times a year and more frequently than any solar methods they were yet to devise. The problem with the lunar calendar, however, was the sequence of the new moons never came out the same as the four seasons in the year. This problem was resolved in Mesopotamia when their astrologers decided to use the rising and setting of individual stars, such as Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern hemisphere, or distinctive constellations, such as the Pleides or Seven Sisters.
Not long after 3500bc, the Sumerians developed their system of writing, which was comprised of 1,500 pictorial signs or glyphs. A numerical system, constructed on a base of 10’s and 60’s worked well for quite elaborate arithmetical functions. Remnants of this system still exist today in the form of our concept of time, where we have 60 seconds to the minute, and 60 minutes to the hour.
The early astrologers also noted the occurrences of eclipses, comets, phases of the Moon, the lengths of each month, and the divisions of the calendar. As well as celestial occurrences, any major storm, flood, or drought was also recorded. The reason why every major phenomenon was considered to be important was because people at that time all felt they were interconnected with the universe.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the Nile was considered the hub of civilisation. The Nile delta seems to have been the route by which the practice of farming was introduced to the Egyptians.Once of the people of the valley ceased to rely on hunting and gathering for survival, and took to farming the land, the rhythm of their lives was established by the annual flooding of the Nile, which deposited the rich silt that all growth depended upon. The farmers had to carefully time their planting, so a reliable signal was needed. The early Egyptians therefore used the concept of astrology to assist them in their farming methods.
The Egyptians noticed one of the brightest stars, Sirius of Sothis, would reappear once a year just before sunrise, after having been blotted out for a period previously by the closeness of the Sun itself. This event was followed very soon by the beginning of the Nile flood. The star’s helical rising became the first day of the Egyptian calendar.
Like everyone else in prehistoric ages, the Egyptians used the Moon to mark units of time, but they were unable to divide the year that ran from one ‘Sothis-day’ to the next in equal moons. They made a calendar of twelve nominal months composed of 30 days each, and threw in the five bonus days at the end of the year to make it a full 365 days. The problem that arose was the Egyptians noticed Sirius rose a day later every four years.
The calendar soon began to slip out of sync with the Sun and the four seasons, not to mention the yearly flooding of the Nile. The result was that it took 460 years for a Sothis-day to come back to its proper coincidence with the star’s heliacal rising. Curiously, the priests in Egypt did nothing about correcting the calendar until quite a late period, which is possibly attributed to their very traditional thinking.
The origin of the 36 star-gods, which the Greeks called decans, is without a doubt Egyptian in origin. Long before the Egyptians had heard of the Babylonian scheme of the zodiac divided into 12 houses, they noticed a different constellation rose up over the horizon behind the Sun at regular 10-day intervals throughout the year. They assigned a god’s name and immense powers over human fates to each of the 36 segments into which they divided the Sun’s path. The decans were the basis for which the Egyptians erected their horoscopes.
The Hellenistic astrologers assimilated both traditions into their own system, on from them the decans would often be found transformed into a 360 degree subdivision of the zodiac.
While the Sumerians were wrestling with the meaning of the cosmos and their place in it, in what is now known as England, builders were trying to construct a three dimensional device to help them measure, record and predict the bewildering activities of the celestial bodies. Although there is still speculation as to how those early builders actually erected Stonehenge, it has been found its layout is Sun and Moon oriented in great and subtly realised detail. The solar and lunar calculations appear to have been based on accurate observations made over many centuries before it was built. In those early times, the builders of Stonehenge were able to find a reliable starter for the year and its seasons, and to predict the lunar eclipses.
In ancient Babylon, the astrologers had a respected and well-defined position in the administration of the various states and empires in Mesopotamia. It was their responsibility to give advance notice of each day of the month, which fluctuated from the 29th to 30th, and was dependant on observations of the Sun and Moon around the 14th of each month. A calendar of lunar months was used, with the familiar problem of adjusting for the solar year. The astrologers were also required to determine how many days would be needed to be added in order to keep them in step.
The idea of the zodiac came about when astrologers realised the band of sky they observed covered a segment of at least twelve separate constellations, which could be used to identify twelve equal compartments of the band. Coincidentally, the number 12 is divisible by the Babylonian 60 base number system.
The earliest known horoscope using the zodiac is on a clay tablet inscribed in cuneiform writing, and dated, by modern calculations from the planetary longitudes provide, to 29th April 410bc. Thus, after over 3,000 years of practice, astrology reached its full development for personal horoscopes scarcely a hundred before Alexander the Great’s conquerors brought the tide of Hellenistic culture swirling into the Middle East.
The concept of Earth as a motionless sphere around which the Sun and stars revolve in a stately and regular manner was well established by the 5th century bc. Plato, who lived from 427 – 348 bc was so satisfied with the philosophy of the Sun, planets and other celestial objects revolving around the Earth that he encouraged his students to develop the theory to account for the motion of the other heavenly bodies.
Pythagorus, who lived from 580 to 500 bc, developed his own system of philosophy that had political as well as moralistic aims. He developed novel theories in music, mathematics, numerology, ethics and philosophy. A distinctly eastern element in the Pythagorean teaching was that souls migrated from one life to another until they finally achieved bliss and consummation as fiery stars in the sky.
The ideas of the Pythagoreans underlie the emotional and mystical aspects of the Greek’s developing knowledge of the stars. Greek astrologers by that time had rounded off the Mesopotamian star list by giving each one of the planets names and attributes of a god or goddess. The Sun, Moon, planets, stars and other celestial signals to the human race and as divine in themselves.
In the 4th century bc Aristotle taught there was a practical application of star-lore in, for example, the navigation at sea, and there was a field of theoretical investigation that was concerned with the measurement and calculation of the positions and relative motions of planets and star. What Aristotle referred to as astrology, we now call geometry and mathematics.
In the middle 4th century bc Heracleides Ponticus, another of Plato’s students, postulated that Mercury and Venus might be satellites of the Sun, with the whole group revolving around the Earth. The Alexandrian geomatrician Appolonius Perga, who lived from 262 – 200bc, was of the opinion that if the planets really revolved around the Earth, their paths could not be circular, but would have to describe epicycles and eccentric circles.
In the 3rd century bc Aristarchus of Samos publicly came to the conclusion the Earth turned on its own axis and must revolve around the Sun – a view that was denounced as ‘irreligious’, since it diminished the received idea of the Sun God. Apollo, driving his chariot in glory across the heavens.
Within 30 years of Alexander the Great’s death, a new intellectual movement arrived in the Hellenistic world. Its adherents came primarily from the ruling classes and were nicknamed ‘stoics’. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, taught a widely accepted basis for the fatalism that underlies the individual birth hour contingent horoscope – made possible by that oriental invention, the zodiac.
The brand of astrology that arose from Stoicism was a type of fatalistic astrology, which meant one’s fate is fixed without escape. The Pythagoreans, however, believed the soul remained free after death and could return again and again for a new and perhaps better life.
In the 2nd century bc, the great mathematician geographer and astronomer Hipparchus made a discovery that had apparently eluded the Babylonian astrologers: the precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus made his own direct observations between 146 and 127 both from his home country, Bithynia, and from Rhodes. He therefore concluded correctly the equinoxes must be slipping westward along the ecliptic by at least a degree every century.
In 33bc Octavious purged Rome of its unreliable astrologers and practitioners of eastern magical cults through his ally, Agrippa. When his adversaries Mark Anthony and Cleopatra were dead, however, Octavious (Augustus) felt more secure in his position as leader of the city, and they were allowed to slowly trickle back in.
By trading their privileges for the absolutism of Augustus, the Romans found they had lost any means of political change except by conspiracy and assassination. Finding out the emperor’s date of birth and inquiring from his horoscope when he was going to die was made a crime.
It seems from that time things for the astrologers went from bad to worse. In 8ad Augustus passed a law under which books offending the emperor were burned, and in serious cases, the authors were exiled. In 11ad the death sentence for ‘literary treason’ was added by edict. From 14 to 39ad, under the reign of Tiberious, authors were executed. In 52ad, under Claudius, diviners were expelled from the whole of Italy, following evidence given at a treason trial. It should be noted, however, that Claudius kept Balbillus, his court astrologer, for his own purposes. In 66ad, under Nero, two distinguished Romans were condemned to death for consulting the exiled Egyptian astrologer, Pammenes, by post.
Claudius Ptolomy, who lived from 100 to 170ad, was without a doubt the greatest astronomer of the Graeco-Roman world since Hipparchus. Ptolomy lived and worked at Canopus near Alexandria in Egypt, in an observatory provided by the University of Alexandria. He was a far more scientific observer and compiler of natural data than anyone before him. His encyclopaedia of astronomy, the Almagest, remained unaltered and unchallenged as the standard work of reference for nearly one and a half thousand years.
Ptolemy wrote a handbook of astrology, the Tetrabiblous (or Quadripartitus), acknowledged as the scientist who knew more about the structure of the universe than anyone else in his period, Ptolemy’s authorship and the calm and reasonable style he wrote ensured that in this book he gave astrology the supreme seals of scientific approval.
Ptolemy’s stand was moderate: he argued since we knew the Sun and Moon influence life on Earth, and since the weather was influenced by the stars, if one had all the necessary facts, it might be possible to influence their influence on our lives.
In the 5th century when the Roman Empire collapsed, education went to ruin with it. Bands of Germanic tribes were on the move, and whole provinces where falling under their control. Established ideas were under challenge by the completely new way of thinking that could not tolerate deviation or dissent: the Christian church had come out of the underground. In the church’s eyes, astrology was compromised by its long association with the ‘pagan’ way of life.
By 711, the entire southern sphere of the Graeco-Roman world disappeared under a new religion, Islam, a new empire, the Caliphale, and a new common language, Arabic. In 764, Caliph al-Mansur, the founder of Baghdad, called in the Jewish astrologer Jacob ibn Tarig to help him to set up a school of astronomy, which became very famous.
Jews in the Muslim world could not avoid discussing the implications for Judaism in the new Islamic philosophy fashioned from the 9th century onwards. It is for that reason they took a much greater interest in the mystical and occult tradition in Judaism. Enriched with ideas derived from the teachings of the Pythagoreans and other sects concerned with the nature and destination of the human soul, this tradition found expression in writings put together and known as the Cabala, meaning ‘things received’. Astrological concepts pervaded all these writings, since elements of both astrology and Cabalism drew on shared roots in the hermetic tradition of the Graeco-Roman world.
Consequently, when Jews began to flee the intolerance of the Muslim sects and the Christian re-conquerors, astrological ideas found their way back into Europe and the dark ages would soon be coming to an end.
In its earliest period, the Christian church saw astrology as a pagan system of ideas. Potential converts with a pagan background, most of whom had accepted astrology, were told astrologers received their predictions from demons.
In the 5th century a sect, known as the Priscillianists, in Spain mixed Christianity with hermetic concepts. Priscillianists identified the signs of the zodiac with the Old Testament patriarch and gave the planets the names of angels.
The dark ages in Europe, which lasted from 400 to 900 ad, were times marred by clan warfare, invasion of the Huns, Viking raids, and the loss of Spain to Islam. Cultural and living standards sank, especially in the West. By the year 1000, the worst seemed to be over, and the middle ages and the rise of western monasticism, centres of learning, were beginning to appear.
When Muslin Spain went into decline in the 13th century, Italy became the great centre of astrology. Padua and Milan universities had chairs of astrology early in the century.
Nicolas Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died after a busy life as a cleric and physician in Poland and Prussia. He wrote the book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, without the benefit of observation by telescope, and the work set out to show that Ptolemy’s system of astrology could not be a true picture of the universe.
Copernicus did not make a scientific discovery. All he did was demonstrate rationally to the reading public that what we see of the movements of the planets and the rising and setting of the fixed stars could be explained in a far more satisfactory way than Ptolemy had done. He postulated that if the planets, including the Earth, orbited around the Sun at the centre, and if the Earth was turning on its axis, the problems created by the old view could be solved.
Michel Gauquelin, a statistician at the Centre National de Rechorche Scientifique in France, set out to test the claims of astrology by painstaking analysis of groups of real people for their character categories according to the planets at their birth. There is statistical evidence that planetary positions in a parent’s chart are more than likely to be repeated in their child’s chart.
In summary, astrology is a science that has developed over at least the past 6,000 years. There have been numerous contributors to the science, dating back through ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Greaco-Roman Empire, Judaism, Islam, and then moving into Europe.
