Table Of Content7
The Dawn of Astrology
A Cultural History of Western Astrology
VOLUME 1: THE ANCIENT AND CLASSICAL WORLDS
Nicholas Campion
A
continuum
Hambledon Continuum is an imprint of Continuum Books
Continuum UK, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEI 7NX
Continuum US, 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © Nicholas Campion 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
First published 2008
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84725 214 2
Typeset by Pindar NZ (Egan Reid), Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall, Great Britain
Contents
Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction ix
1. Distant Echoes: Origins of Astrology 1
2. Prehistory: Myths and Megaliths 15
3. The Mesopotamian Cosmos: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth 35
4. Mesopotamian Astrology: The Writing of Heaven: 51
5. The Assyrians and Persians: Revolution and Reformation 69
6. Egypt: The Kingdom of the Sun 87
7. Egypt: The Stars and the Soul 99
8. The Hebrews: Prophets and Planets 109
9. Greece: Homer, Hesiod and the Heavens 127
10. Greece: The Platonic Revolution 149
11. The Hellenistic World: The Zodiac 173
12. The Hellenistic World: Scepticism and Salvation 185
13. Hellenistic Astrology: Signs and Influences 203
14. Rome: The State, the Stars and Subversion 225
15. Christianity: A Star out of Jacob 245
16. Rome: The Imperial Heaven 257
17. Christianity: The Triumph of the Sun 267
Afterword: Decline and Survival 291
CONTENTS
vi
295
Notes
353
Bibliography
379
Index
Illustrations
Between Pages 180 and 181
1 Venus of Laussel, Museum of Aquitaine, Bordeaux (Alexander
Marshak, The Roots of Civilisation, Moyer Bell Ltd.)
2 a.b.c. Paleolithic eagle bone inscribed with possibly lunar notation,
c. 11,000-13,000 bce (Alexander Marshak, The Roots of Civilisation,
Moyer Bell Ltd.)
3 Stonehenge, megalithic circle, late 3rd millenium bc, Salisbury Plain
(The Art Archive.)
4 Astrological Boundary Stone (Hermann Hunger, Astrological
Reports to Assyrian Kings, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.)
5 Babylonian Birth Chart (Francesca Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes,
American Philosophical Society.)
6 Great Pyramid (Danista Appadoo.)
7 Circular Horoscope Diagram (Otto Neugebauer and H. B. van
Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes, The American Philosophical Society.)
8 Square Horoscope Diagram (Otto Neugebauer and H. B. van Hoesen,
Greek Horoscopes, The American Philosophical Society.)
9 Imperial Propaganda under Augustus (British Museum.)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kathleen Quigley for her role in the gestation of this project,
Tony Morris for his inspiration and decade-long patience, and Crystal Addey,
Roger Beck, Chris Brennan, Joseph Crane, Ronnie Gale Dreyer, Demetra George,
Gary Gomes, Dorian Greenbaum, Rob Hand, Herman Hunger, Lee Lehman,
B.V.K. Sastry and Ed Wright for their comments on the manuscript and, lastly,
my students in the Sophia Centre at Bath Spa University and at Kepler College
for their constant stimulation.
Introduction
No one has ever heard of a collective that did not mobilize heaven and
earth in its composition, along with bodies and souls, property and law,
gods and ancestors, powers and beliefs, beast and fictional beings ... Such
is the ancient anthropological matrix, the one we have never abandoned.1
In the modern West astrology is an accepted if, in some quarters, controversial
feature of popular culture. In some parts of the world, such as India, it remains
as much a part of the prevailing worldview as it was thousands of years ago,
evidence of continuity between the contemporary world and a time when it
was universally accepted that the heavens revealed meaning to humanity. In the
West, perhaps 70 per cent of the adult population reads horoscope columns.
The language of birth-signs is ubiquitous. Most people, well over 90 per cent,
know what zodiac sign contained the sun at their birth and a significant number,
probably between 40 and 50 per cent, identify with their zodiacal character.
Astrology’s use in the political sphere is less than it was before the seventeenth
century. President Reagan’s well-known use of astrology was the exception rather
than the norm. Similarly, its application to finance is restricted. Yet, the fact that
it occurs at all is a matter of high historical interest: how did a pre-Christian,
pre-modern way of understanding humanity’s place in the world survive into
the twenty-first century?
This book attempts to locate the origins in the ancient world of the astrology
practised in the medieval and modern West. It cannot aim to be definitive,
for historical scholarship in astrology is still at a rudimentary stage; there are
thousands of Babylonian cuneiform tablets which have never been catalogued,
let alone translated, an unknown quantity of which may include material about
the stars, while most Greek astrological texts have either not been translated or,
if they have, have not been properly studied. However, I have included areas
which are normally excluded from histories of astrology, including evidence of
interest in the stars from prehistory, and Egyptian and Jewish cultures, as well
Babylonian astrology, which has all too often been ignored in spite of its huge
importance. I have considered Greek philosophy, without which it is impossible
to understand the ideological framework within which astrolog}’ prospered in
the classical world. I have, though, made little mention of India, whose astrology
is linked to the West, but which followed a different trajectory and is awaiting
authoritative treatment. Nor could I consider China, Japan, or the other cultures,
such as those in the Americas, whose astrology was completely isolated from
DAWN OF ASTROLOGY
X
the West. This is, then a history of Western astrology - and a cultural history at
that; I have considered technical developments only in as much as they provide a
framework for our understanding of changing views of humanity’s relationship
with the sky.
First, some definitions: ‘astronomy’, from the Greek, is simply translated as the
law of the stars; ‘astrology’ as the word (logos) of the stars. Equally, logos as reason,
mind or logic of the stars might take us closer to astrology’s origins in a context
in which the entire cosmos was thought to be a single, living entity all of whose
constituent parts, from the psychic to the physical, and from gods, to planets,
people, plants and minerals, were interdependent and interlinked. To adopt a
useful distinction between astronomy and astrolog)', the former is the study of the
physical universe, the latter of the psychic (in both its soulful and psychological
senses) cosmos. But, cosmos itself comes with its own set of meanings. The Greek
word kosmos may be translated as ‘adornment’, in which sense it is the root of our
word cosmetic. It was an adornment because it was beautiful, harmonious and,
in spite of the unpleasantness which could afflict human life, essentially good.
Cosmos, in this traditional sense, is a subjective thing. It is beautiful, and beauty
is in the eye of the beholder, not as an external observer, but as a participant in
cosmos itself. One cannot stand outside cosmos: to study it is to study one’s self.
As a living creature, humanity is created in the image of cosmos, and by gazing
at it, sees itself. This, briefly paraphrased, is the worldview formalized in the
literature of classical Greece, though with older antecedents, and articulated
precisely in a practical form in the astrology of the Greek-speaking world.
The split between the two words, astronomy and astrology, is a feature of the
modem West; in the classical world, their meanings overlapped. To the Greek
scholar Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the second century ce, there were two
forms of astronomy, one which dealt with the movement of the stars, the other
(which we would call astrology) with their effects or significance. From then
until the seventeenth century, the two words were interchangeable. In ‘King Lear’,
Shakespeare had Edgar refer to his brother Edmund, who had been posing as
an astrologer, as a ‘sectary astronomical’. Other terms Shakespeare might have
used include mathematician (the astronomer Johannes Kepler studied astrology
as part of his duties as ‘Imperial Mathematician’) or Chaldean (both astrology
and astronomy were commonly traced to Mesopotamia). Nor do most non
Western countries employ different words to distinguish traditional astronomy
from astrolog)'. In India both are jyotish, the ‘science of light’. In Japan they are
onntyodo, the ‘yin-yang way’.
The separation between the words astronomy and astrology in any history
which deals with the pre-modern West, earlier than the seventeenth century,
therefore runs the risk of being anachronistic, being more concerned with
modern assumptions than ancient ones. Various solutions have been proposed
to this problem. Edgar Laird suggested the term ‘star study’, Roger Beck ‘star
talk’.2 For working purposes though, we need a modern definition of astrology
which will enable us to discuss its manifestations in different cultures and which
INTRODUCTION xi
extends, in conventional modern terms, from the scientific at one extreme, to the
overtly religious at the other. Astrology is therefore both the study of the ways in
which significance for life on earth is located in celestial objects and the resulting
practices. It may be speculative, but it can also be operative; it involves not only
myth and ritual, but also action. It depends on rationales as various as divine
intervention, celestial influence or the notion of the sky as a script to be read for
signs. It functions through horoscopes, calendars, talismans and purification
rituals. It can claim that the future is entirely knowable or essentially unknowable,
that the world is predetermined or open to manipulation. It can function through
divination - communication with divine entities - or the correlation of terrestrial
events with celestial patterns. It may emphasize the inner or the outer, either one’s
character or the events of one’s life, and can be applied to ultimate spiritual truths
- the ascent of the soul to the stars - or to the trivia of domestic life, runaway
slaves and lost treasure.
Out of this enormous range of styles and applications, we need to distinguish
two other useful categories. Natural astrology assumes only that the stars and
planets exert a general influence on terrestrial affairs, that the future may be only
loosely forecast, and that astrology can say little or nothing about the specifics
of human affairs. Judicial astrology, which found its ultimate expression in
the development of the horoscope sometime between the fifth and second
centuries bce, assumes that the astrologer can reach precise judgements about
matters ranging from the ebb and flow of political events to the details of
individual lives. As the narrative of this book unfolds, the distinction between
these two ways of perceiving the human relationship with the heavens will
become apparent.
But the discussion will always be plagued by problems of definition. So let me
end by facing the problem with one last set of controversial terms: science,
religion and magic. Ancient astrology has been defined as all of these, yet these
categories are frequently treated by historians and anthropologists, as much as
modern scientists, as if they are hermetically sealed. From a historical perspective
they quite clearly overlap and can often not be distinguished. So let me explain
how I am using these terms. Religion I define quite conventionally as the worship
of, or ritual interaction with, divine beings or anthropomorphized natural forces
- nature conceived of as having personality. Magic is the deliberate attempt to
engage with, manipulate or control the future, while science is either the practice
of a discipline with its own rules, or an understanding of the world as primarily
governed by natural processes as opposed to divine intervention.
