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7 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.