Astrology

ASTROLOGY. - It is the art of knowing the future by observing the aspect, position and influences of the planets and the constellations.

1. HISTORY

Such an art was the heritage, in varying degree, of all peoples, civilized and primitive, and was, from the very origins, it was closely connected with astronomy, so much so that, in the Mediterranean world, a distinction began to be made only from the 1st century A.D., and only in the 14th century did judicial astrology clearly differentiate itself — that astrology which aimed at formulating judgments on people's characters, at predetermining the fate of an enterprise or of a human being, at interpreting the arcane meaning of natural or extraordinary events — from that which had as its object simply the study of the celestial vault.

Among primitive peoples astrology holds particular importance, though without rising to the rank of a superior knowledge, for lack of the notions necessary for the pseudo-scientific cartography of judicial astrology. Indeed the course of the stars is often closely connected with agricultural practices and with the great hunts or fishing expeditions, which were of the greatest importance for the life of the tribe. Thus, while the celestial vault becomes the object of constant observation, there is a tendency to draw prognostications and auspices from the sky, and peculiar powers of controlling human events are attributed to those celestial natures that are held to be endowed with powers similar to those of men. The Malaya, for example, even have an elaborate system in which the year is divided into favourable and unfavourable periods, depending on the rotation of the days, each connected with divinities, planets and colours; and all savages, in general, are inclined to believe that a child born under the sign of Leo possesses leonine qualities. Even among the primitive peoples of America a system of astrology was undoubtedly in vogue: the Mexican codices include the Tonalamanti, the book of lucky and unlucky days, and there is clear evidence of the existence of a priestly class that devoted itself to divination by observing the stars in Mexico, Guatemala and Peru.

Yet it is in the Mediterranean world that astrology, united with astronomy and religion, had its birth: and precisely, according to the statement of Diodorus Siculus, in the middle valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, there where "an unequalled purity of the atmosphere allows one to see the stars nearer and clearer than is possible elsewhere." The notice of Diodorus Siculus received, in the second half of the last century, singular confirmation, when a series of excavations on the soil of ancient Nineveh brought to light the library of King Ashurbanipal (c. 668-626 B.C.), composed of c. 4000 tablets written in cuneiform characters, containing original texts, astrological predictions and exegetical inscriptions. The doctrinal part of this library refers back to a general work, entitled, from the opening words of its first sentence, "When Anu, Enlil...", and whose author, certainly dating back beyond the 7th century, has remained unknown to us. We are instead informed, by the astrological predictions preserved, of the astronomical knowledge of the Babylonians-Assyrians, and of the objects towards which their investigation was directed. Besides the 7 planets, 270 stars and constellations were known (there exists only one word, in the texts, to indicate both), the symbols of the Zodiac (v.), (from the Epic of Gilgamesh down to the age of the Seleucids and the Arsacids numbering 11, since the Scales were considered the claws of the Scorpion) and the comets. So vast and precise a heritage of astronomical knowledge gave a great impulse to the art of predicting the future from the course of the stars, from the observation of celestial and atmospheric phenomena. And the observations were reduced to a system by the Babylonian priests, who formed a hereditary class whose founder was Eumedmanki, the seventh of the kings before the flood according to the catalogue of Berossus, who, in turn, would have been initiated into the divinatory art by the gods Šamaš and Adad. These priests, who had the precise task of watching the sky from the observatories of Nineveh and of Borsippa, held their divinities to be personified in the planets, and followed the occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses. The predictions therefore had an official character (they mostly concerned the king and the destiny of the country) and were in close relation with religion. The method of astrological investigation included the observation of the intensity and colour of the light of the star or planet at dawn and at sunset, of its connection with other planets, etc. While these data concerned the moon, the sun and Mars, for the remaining ones what was considered was more than anything else their union with other planets; likewise the comets, the meteors, the winds and the storms were placed in dependence on the planets and the stars. The extraordinary simplicity of the language in which the astrological predictions are expressed has led some to think that in these cases Babylonian is the translation of analogous predictions in the Sumerian language (hence of a non-Semitic population), which would push the origin of astrology back to the very threshold of the 3rd millennium B.C.

From the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. onwards astrology began to spread from Babylon: first into Persia (from frequent allusions in Sassanid literature it is gathered that the astrologers made calculations concerning the propitious or unfavourable conjunction of the stars), then into India (whence it passed into all of Asia, especially after the relations between India and Greece, by then mature in this science, gave a more scientific character to the knowledge), and finally into Greece.

Before the Hellenistic age, Greek culture does not seem to have willingly occupied itself with astrology. In the Cretan-Mycenaean age, at least from the results of archaeological research, the symbols of the sun, the moon and the stars do not appear frequently. In the epic only Venus seems to be known, from the frequent citations of Homer. With the beginning of Ionian speculation the teachings, direct or indirect, of the East begin to bear fruit: Thales and his successors knew the system for predetermining, it seems, a solar eclipse, the number of the planets, the name and position of the principal constellations, the division of the day into 12 hours, etc. But these were forms of knowledge in a primitive state, and entirely free, as would be the case throughout the whole classical period, of any attribution of religious meaning to the stars. (Only later, probably through the Pythagoreans, was each planet consecrated to a particular divinity.) At this time, in any case, the name of astrology begins to appear. The school of Pythagoras, and the master himself, are under the influence of Oriental fatalism: here for the first time the idea of the harmony of the cosmos appears, and therefore the possibility of looking favorably upon the idea of an influence of the heavens upon the earth. This is not yet astrology in the strict sense of the term, but it is the beginning of the era in which Oriental religions and astrological beliefs would arrive in Greece in ever more distinct forms. It is in the age of Hellenism that these teachings win over the Greeks. A short time earlier the situation had still been such that Eudoxus, a friend of Plato, denied the "Chaldeans," the astronomers of the Euphrates, all knowledge, although he himself was acquainted with the meteorology and the astrology of the Babylonians. In Theophrastus, on the other hand, a disciple of Aristotle, we discover a profound admiration for the science of the Chaldeans. Astrology became known little by little through the Babylonian Histories of Berossus, the priest of Bel in Babylon. He, having founded a school of astrology at Cos to which famous disciples flocked, wrote a work that he dedicated to Antiochus I of Syria, in which for the first time he presented exhaustively to the Greeks the history of the Babylonian gods and of creation, together with their "philosophy," that is, their astronomy and astrology, which he described as the "wisdom of Bel." Some similar appearance followed this first teaching, and the translation of small Babylonian texts aided the work of Berossus. "The seed fell on fertile ground: astrology, immobilized for long centuries in a hieratic tradition, begins to submit to discussion, troubled and transformed by the inventive genius of the Greeks, and at this time, at the beginning of the 3rd century, from an Oriental religion it becomes a science." A science that finds its support in the philosophical doctrine of cosmic unity, according to which the universe, formed of four or five elements (water, earth, air, fire, ether), is subject to a continuous exchange of actions and reactions among them. In this system astrology is found united with other pseudo-sciences—alchemy, astrological medicine, magic, etc.—that is, with those occult sciences (v. occultism) that would then hold the field until the whole of the Renaissance. Man too, compared to a small world (μικρός κόσμος), is the theater of this process of exchanges, and in certain texts every part of the human body is under the influence of an element or a planet or a celestial body. In this way a mythology is created even more fantastic than that of tradition. The laws of nature, subjected to such influences, are no longer intelligible by reason, but require a particular occult science of the whole, not without a religious coloring. No longer, then, is there any distinction between science and religion, where the unity of the whole is not an order of formulas or a system of laws, but a unity of concrete things.

Violent polemics were not lacking against astrology: Carneades brought all his dialectical arts to bear in order to refute its possibility; Panaetius, on the other hand, broke away from his master on this point and gave his favor to the new science; and even more so Posidonius of Apamea. And the disputes could be said to be closed when, around the middle of the 2nd century A.D., the Tetrabiblos or Quadripartitum appeared, the famous work of Ptolemy, a product of the progress of astrology and mathematics in the school of Alexandria.

In Rome astrology appears at the time of the Punic Wars. It is brought by Oriental slaves, for the most part Greeks. The Roman Senate, a jealous guardian of the city's traditions, opposed astrology, as it did all foreign cults which, beginning in this era, began their infiltration into Italy. The opponents of astrology were especially the haruspices, and numerous are the edicts that forbid the practice of the Chaldean art. Nevertheless astrology makes its way: and at the end of the Hellenistic age Caesar's legions carry everywhere the symbol of the Bull, the zodiacal sign of Venus, the progenitress of the "gens Iulia"; while Augustus allows his horoscope to be published and coins to be struck with the star of his birth, Capricorn. The triumph of astrology may be called complete when the Oriental cults, above all Mithraism, triumph over the ancient Roman religion. Marcus Manilius, in the age of Augustus and Tiberius, wrote the poem Astronomicon; we find astrologers beside the emperors as advisers, famous among them all being Babylon, the astrologer of Nero, who attempted to reconcile astrology and haruspicy. Cicero, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder ranged themselves against astrology, which instead found the favor of Seneca.

Christianity opposed itself strenuously to the Chaldean art, which it combated for moral reasons, as a diabolical art.

Moreover it is obvious that astrology degenerates into a form of superstition when from the position and movement of the stars one wishes to deduce with certainty the occurrence or the course of events that are the product of the free wills of men; it ceases instead to be such when one limits oneself to formulating conjectures taking into account the undeniable influence that the stars have on the earth, on living organisms and therefore, by reflection, on the human soul (v. HOROSCOPE; ZODIAC).

A good soil in which to flourish, astrology found in Islam: Muhammad was the first to teach absolute dependence on God and the complete servitude of man, thus giving rise to an unlimited determinism; not only that, but the stellar cult of ancient Arab paganism made its consequences felt. The abundance of astrological writings in Arabic is prodigious. Theophilus of Edessa, astrologer at the court of the caliph al-Mahdi, affirms that astrology is the queen of the sciences, while Avicenna inveighs against its futility. The positive and Enlightenment tendency of Arab philosophy, which is linked to Averroes, was favorably disposed toward it instead. In Italy we find the University of Padua, with Pietro d'Abano and Cecco d'Ascoli, thoroughly imbued with astrological doctrines, and at the court of Frederick II Michele Scotus professes a mitigated astrologism according to which the stars are the signs of events. Meanwhile, still in the 13th century, Guido Bonatti is famous, who, in the service of Guido da Montefeltro, climbs the tower of S. Mercuriale at Forlì, before every action of war, to interrogate the stars.

Humanism and the Renaissance held astrology in high esteem. «No wonder, when one considers that astrology found its place in the ideal, then professed, of a human nature that lives in full accord and in active exchange of influences with the rest of nature; everywhere in the world energies analogous to those of man are recognized. The human spirit operates with wondrous efficacy and purpose upon its own body; so it acts upon others, and these, in turn, animated among themselves, and the soul of the world upon all. The heavens, therefore, act upon the earth. And this philosophical motif unfolds in a moment of passivity and heteronomy that finds its expression precisely in astrology, which makes human life determined by the stars, a slave to conjunctions and oppositions that are beyond its power». From this moment astrology split into natural (astronomy) and judicial. All universities had a professor of astrology. Nevertheless, opponents were not lacking: Pico della Mirandola, for example, with his Disputationes in astrologiam, which, drawing partly on the authority of the Church Fathers, partly on experience, inveighs against astrology, which «corrupts philosophy, adulterates medicine, weakens religion, produces and spreads superstition, favors idolatry, makes men wretched, anxious, fatalistic, and turns them from free men into slaves and unhappy in all their actions». And other adversaries astrology found in Girolamo Savonarola (Adversus astrologos) and in Geminiano Montanari (L'A. convinta di falso). Nonetheless, Pope Julius II charged astrologers with choosing the day for his coronation, Paul III with determining the best hours for each consistory, and Leo X even placed a professor of astrology at the Sapienza.

But these were the last glimmers. With the development of the experimental method astrology began to lose ground, and by the early 1700s it was completely neglected. A revival was attempted by occultists at the end of the 18th century, but precisely in this period the discovery of two new planets, Uranus and Neptune, overturned all astrological postulates, marking its end.

The principal forms of astrology cultivated by the Greeks in the 1st century, the same ones later, not without some change, flourishing until the late Renaissance, were, according to Nallino, the «system of interrogations», to satisfy the needs of daily life; the «system of elections», to determine the propitious moment for the beginning of an action; and the «system of nativity», directed at knowing the future events of persons, peoples, cities, etc., by studying the influence of the constellation and the planet that at a particular moment was on the eastern horizon, according to the indications of the astrolabe. Such an operation was called «ascendant» or, in Greek, «horoscope» (v.). In casting the horoscope one had to observe carefully in which sign of the zodiac (v.) the planets appeared, their influence varying from sign to sign, and which constellations and planets then dominated the sky.

Mario Camozzini

2. ASTROLOGY AND THE CHURCH

To form a correct judgment on astrology and to understand the reasons for the Church's intervention and the condemnations it issued, one must distinguish two kinds of astrology, natural and judicial. Both have as their object the foreseeing and predicting of future events; but, while natural astrology is founded on the research and the logical and scientific conquest of the physical laws of the universe, judicial astrology claims to determine the influences of the celestial bodies upon terrestrial beings and especially upon man, formulating, by means of certain rules, conclusions about the various fates of individuals and peoples by simply considering and calculating the configuration and the position of the planets at certain determined hours of their life (e.g., birth, marriage, commerce, wars, etc.). It thus enters the field of morality and religion, inasmuch as it teaches that this influence is a determining and decisive element upon history, upon life, upon actions and therefore also upon the very economy of the eternal salvation of men. "The astrologers," testifies St. Augustine, "claim that there is in the sky the inevitable cause of sin: it is Venus or Saturn or Mars that made us perform this or that action, thus wishing that man, who is flesh and blood and wormlike pride, be without guilt, and that the guilt fall upon him who created and governs the sky and the stars" (Confess., IV, ch. 3).

Now the Church, while it has never had nor ever will have anything to say against natural astrology, because true science will never find anything in its researches that is against religion, could not fail to intervene, and indeed energetically, against judicial astrology, because the latter ended up by denying on the one hand the free will of man and on the other the providence and the salvific will of God, throwing souls into the grip of a desperate fatality.

Even the pagans themselves, who at the state of scientific knowledge of that time could hardly know and were hardly able in this field to mark the limits between true science and superstitious imposture and therefore called astrologers indiscriminately by the various names, considered equivalent, of astronomers, astrologers, mathematicians, planetarians, genethliacs, Chaldeans, Babylonians, had words of indignation and contempt for the cults of judicial astrology. "Mathematici genus hominum potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax" (Tacitus, Hist., I, 22). And Cicero: "Contemnamus Babylonios et eos qui ex Caucaso, coeli signa servantes, numeris et motibus stellarum cursus persequuntur; condemnemus hos aut stultitiae, aut vanitatis, aut imprudentiae" (De divin., I, 19). In the same sense, but for higher motives, Sacred Scripture: "Do not turn to mediums or consult fortune-tellers, lest you be defiled by their contact: I am the Lord your God" (Lev. 19:31). "Do not be afraid of the signs of the sky, which the Gentiles fear, for the rites of the peoples are vain" (Jer. 10:2; cf. also Is. 47:13).

When Christianity appeared and the practices of judicial astrology persisted tenaciously, ecclesiastical tradition shows us the Fathers and the councils always hostile to these kinds of superstition. It suffices to cite St. Augustine: "In my deeds, in my sins, I do not accuse fortune, I do not say: 'destiny did this to me,' I do not say: 'Venus made me an adulterer, Mars made me a thief, Saturn made me avaricious'" (Enarrat. in psalmos, 40, 6). "This man [the converted astrologer], seduced by the enemy while he was a believer, was for a long time an astrologer, seduced and seducer, deceived and deceiver. He enticed, he deceived, he uttered many lies against God, who would have given men the power to do good and not to do evil. It is not my personal will that commits adultery, but Venus; it is not the personal will that commits murder, but Mars; it is not God who makes the just man, but Jupiter; and many other sacrilegious absurdities. How many Christians he carried off their money! How many bought lies from him!" (ibid., 61, 23). One may add the anathemas launched by the Council of Toledo in 447 (Denz-U, n. 35) and by the Council of Braga of 561 (ibid., n. 239); the condemnation by Sixtus V with the bull Caeli et terrae Creator of 5 January 1566, taken up and expanded by the bull of Urban VIII Inscrutabilis iudiciorum of 31 March 1621.

The condemnations did not change the state of things; the disputes at the University of Paris, which in 1210 and 1215 prohibited the Metaphysics of Aristotle which was being interpreted in favor of astrology (H. Denifle, op. cit. in bibl., pp. 70-79) and the later condemnation, of 1277, of several propositions favorable to the same doctrine (ibid., p. 543 ff.) as well as extinguishing it, kept the controversy all the more inflamed; and the field of the professors continued to be divided into two opposing camps. It must be noted, however, that some of them, though favorable to astrology, nevertheless remained on this side of the line that divided them from superstition.

St. Thomas knew how to follow a more moderate and almost divinatory middle way, which would later also be followed by Dante. His doctrine, set forth in the Sum. Theol. (1ª, q. 65, a. 4; q. 70, aa. 1, 3; q. 115, aa. 3, 4, 6; 1ª-2ᵃᵉ, q. 9, a. 5), in the Summa contra gentes (III, qq. 84-85), in the De sortibus and in the De iudiciis astrorum, can be gathered into these points: 1) the influence of the celestial bodies is exercised on the intellect and the will only indirectly and mediately, through the varied participation that the lower powers (sensitivity), which are bound to the bodily organism, offer to that influence; 2) however, the intellect suffers the repercussion of every kind of disturbance that is produced in the imagination, in the instinct, in the sensory memory, while the will always retains the power to resist and oppose the passions; 3) the wise man knows how to dominate even the stars; 4) inclinations, having their seat in the organism, can under the influence of the stars in turn influence the character of individuals and bring it about that one is more prone, for example, to anger or to concupiscence; 5) the influence of the stars varies with the varying dispositions of the subject who undergoes it; 6) it could be that when astrologers guess the future, this does not happen by pure chance, but because they have obeyed a kind of subconscious instinct, "instinctu quodam occultissimo, quem nescientes humanae mentes patiuntur" (Sum. Theol., 1ª-2ᵃᵉ, q. 9, a. 5, ad 3); 7) in all cases, it must always be held that the will remains free to follow or not the influence of the stars in its actions. Man therefore retains his responsibility intact.

This is philosophical and theological doctrine to be held so as not to fall into the heresy that denies freedom and Providence. As for the theoretical part, that is, the reality of the influence of the celestial spheres, it must be said that, as it stands, it is no longer admitted by science. It remains true, however, that there exists a relation between the material part of our being and the environment in which we live and that the stars exercise upon us, by means of their mass, their temperature or their radiations, a certain action more or less defined or definable. With this we are far from the pretentious body of doctrine of the astrologers, who wish to establish precise relations between celestial phenomena and all the actions of our life.

With regard to medicine, on the other hand, the Church was much more generous in concession, permitting the exercise of astrology with regard to medicine as well as navigation. This we can gather from the Summa caietona (one of those compendia that served for the practice of the confessional, Venice 1572, but reprinted several times): "... de astrorum autem iudiciis circa corporales effectus (puta sanitatis vel infirmitatis, fertilitatis vel sterilitatis, pluviae vel siccitatis) nulla est quaestio, quia haec abque peccato hunt; quoniam effectus quaeruntur et reducuntur in suaa causa naturales" (p. 25).

Some have wished to see in the journey of the Magi, prompted by a star, a confirmation of astrology. But this cannot be; both because in astrology a particular star is never given a special meaning with regard to human destiny, but rather determined stars and constellations are considered in their reciprocal positions, and above all because the star of the Magi moved with them, disappeared and reappeared, and stopped over the dwelling of Jesus.

Celestino Testore

3. ASTROLOGY IN SACRED ART

Although adverse, as already seen, to every kind of superstition, and in particular to the fatalism inherent in astrological doctrine, the Church did not prevent the elements of the astral world from completing the mirror of human life, and from appearing in the decorations of sacred buildings. Already the miniatures of the Chronographer of 354 had presented astrological allegories of classical inspiration, reproduced again and again, with slight variations, in the following centuries. The art of the Middle Ages then came both to represent astrology personified, in the form of a richly dressed woman, holding astronomical instruments (astrolabe, compass) in her hand, her gaze fixed on high, alone or in the group of the Liberal Arts, and to compose complexes of symbolic figurations, such as the year, surrounded by the months, to which the signs of the zodiac correspond, and by the days, to which the planets correspond. Famous documents of these compositions are the mosaic pavement of the cathedral of Aosta, the frescoes of the baptistery of Parma and of the cathedral of Lucca, those of the church of the Eremitani in Padua, of the chapel of the Sacrament in the Malatesta temple of Rimini, of the Sala del Cambio in the Palazzo Pubblico of Perugia, etc.

Moreover, after the entry of the images of the planets into sacred art—that is, of the very personifications of pagan deities who determine the fate of mortals—was facilitated by the position taken by St. Thomas Aquinas with regard to astrology. The medieval encyclopedic spirit even managed to coordinate, in the reliefs on Giotto's campanile in Florence, the seven planets not only with the seven liberal and mechanical arts, but also with the seven virtues and the seven Sacraments; not very differently did the author of the fresco representing the Triumph of St. Thomas in the Spanish Chapel in Florence. The apex of the development of this iconographic theme is reached by the mosaics in the dome of the Chigi Chapel in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome, depicting, after designs by Raphael, God the creator of the firmament, amid the symbols of the planets, each of which is guided by the angel of its moving order.

4. THE A IN PASTORAL MEDICINE

Dopo che rapporti fra medicina e a. si erano stabiliti fin dai tempi di Galeno, che volle formulare leggi regolanti i misteriosi rapporti tra rivoluzioni d'un astro e determinate malattie, questa scienza entrò francamente nel campo astrologico nel medioevo, dopo che l'influsso arabo improntò di sé il pensiero occidentale. Alle varie parti del corpo si riconobbero corrispondenti e patroni i segni zodiacali; ai pianeti, caratteri umorali e qualità benigne o maligne, che vennero attribuite anche alle various reciprocal positions assumed by those; the moon had the office of transporting the astral influences from heaven to earth. With these elements, complicated by many other secondary ones, it was believed lawful to formulate diagnoses and prognoses, to prescribe cures, on the sole basis of the hour in which the illness had arisen, in order to know the state of the sky at that instant and draw the horoscope from it, as for births and other events. Medical a., without doubt, proved harmful to the progress of medicine, though one must recognize in it an obscure intuition of the effects that cosmic and perhaps also astral waves and influences have on human health; until the seventeenth century it had a flourishing life and an ephemeral revival with mesmerism. - See Pl. XXII.

Adalberto Pazzini