As Above, So Below. Astrology and the Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century New Spain

379 Pages·2007·3.27 MB·English

Department of History and Civilization

As Above, So Below. Astrology and the Inquisition in
Seventeenth-Century New Spain

Ana Avalos

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of
Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute

Florence, February 2007
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Department of History and Civilization

As Above, So Below. Astrology and the
Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century New Spain

Ana Avalos

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of
Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute

Examining Board:

Prof. Peter Becker, Johannes-Kepler-Universität Linz Institut für Neuere Geschichte

und Zeitgeschichte (Supervisor)

Prof. Víctor Navarro Brotons, Istituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación

“López Piñero” (External Supervisor)

Prof. Antonella Romano, European University Institute

Prof. Perla Chinchilla Pawling, Universidad Iberoamericana

© 2007, Ana Avalos

No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or
transmitted without prior permission of the author
A Bernardo y Lupita.
‘That which is above is like that which is below
and that which is below is like that which is above,
to achieve the wonders of the one thing…’
Hermes Trismegistus
Contents
Acknowledgements 4
Abbreviations 5
Introduction 6
1. The place of astrology in the history of the Scientific Revolution 7
2. The place of astrology in the history of the Inquisition 13
3. Astrology and the Inquisition in seventeenth-century New Spain 17
Chapter 1.Early Modern Astrology: a Question of Discipline? 24
1.1. The astrological tradition 27
1.2.Astrological practice 32
1.3. Astrology and medicine in the New World 41
1.4. Institutional environment: teaching astrology at University 48
1.5. The Decline of Astrology 63
Chapter 2. The persecution of Astrology 70
2.1. Astrology and Christian Faith, or Science and Religion 70
2.2. The theological background 74
2.3. The institutional background 81
2.4. The Inquisitorial procedure 87
2.5. Astrology and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World 99
Chapter 3. The Mercedarian Astrologer 104
3.1. Scandalous predictions in Guatemala 110
3.2. Astrology, physiognomy, and politics 127
3.3. Accusation and Defence: the Problem of Free Will 144
3.4. Resolution: inquisitorial censors in action 158
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Chapter 4. The mulatto astrologer and the greatAuto of 1649 163
4.1. A Judicial Astrologer or aJudaizante 168
4.2. An astrologer or a calumniator of the Holy Office 191
4.3. Accusation and Defence: the Blessing of Ignorance 198
Chapter 5. The astrologer’s books 211
5.1. Translating books on astrology 215
5.2. Censoring dangerous books 237
5.3. Circulating books on astrology: an intellectual network 247
5.4. Some uses of astrological knowledge 256
Chapter 6. Foretelling the Future: from Prophecy to Forecast 265
6.1. Astrological prophecies 267
6.2. The Mexican Inquisition and dangerous prophecies 271
6.3. Almanacs and Forecasts 279
6.4. Almanacs’ Censorship in New Spain 287
Chapter 7. Astrology and Other Fields of Knowledge 301
7.1. Astrology and Cosmography 301
7.2. Astrology and Magic 310
7.3. Astrology, Physiognomy, and Chiromancy 317
Concluding remarks 329
Documentary appendices 333
Inquisitorial documents related to astrology.
Documents on forbidden books at the AGN.
Transcription of Friar Diego Rodríguez’s examination of the case against Friar Nicolás.
Bibliography 342
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Acknowledgments
I would particularly like to thank my supervisors, Peter Becker and Victor Navarro, for their
support, and, more importantly, for their trust during the course of my doctoral research. I
would like to express my gratitude to those scholars who shared their expertise and helped
me with important suggestions, and criticism: Antonella Romano, Perla Chinchilla, Darrel
Rutkin, Hans Bödecker, and Charles Burnett. I am also deeply grateful to my father, who
read every draft version of this thesis and encouranged me with his love and understanding.
I would also like to thank the staff of the European University Institute and the Istituto e
Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence for their generosity and hospitality. Particularly, I
would like to thank Stefano Casati for making every working day in the Library a happy one.
I would deeply like to thank Daniel, for his love and care, the most important source of
support over the years; and my family in Florence: Volker Balli, Chiara De Franco, Stephan
Fahr, and Antje Vetterlein. Tayra Lanuza, my intellectual soulmate in this side of the
Atlantic, was a constant source of knowledge and friendship. I would like to thank my
flatmates, from Via Marconi, to Piazza Santa Trinita, all the way up to the hills in Settignano;
my Kung-Fu friends, who helped me to stay sane in the craziest moments of writing this
dissertation; and my friends in Mexico, luckily too many to name, for providing me with all
kind of support during these years.
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Abbreviations
AGCA= Archivo General de Centroamérica (Guatemala City)
AGI= Archivo General de Indias (Seville)
AGN= Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico City)
AHN= Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid)
BNM= Biblioteca Nacional de México (Mexico City)
BNE= Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid)
INAH= Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico City)
BAN= Bibliotheca Astrologica Numerica (Warburg Institute)
DHM= Documentos para la Historia de México
HMES=History of Magic and Experimental Science(Lynn Thorndike)
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Introduction
History of astrology is no longer neglected. Studies on the subject now benefit from a rich
historiographical tradition within various fields, such as history of science, history of art,
intellectual history, and so on. In this opening section, I would like to present a general
overview of the main themes and arguments that serve as a framework for a study on the
history of astrology and the Inquisition in seventeenth-century New Spain. Other
methodological and historiographical issues will be discussed in their corresponding sections.
First, I will show how astrology became a salient object of historical inquiry as the
result of crucial changes in the historiography of the Scientific Revolution from the 1960s
onwards. This new historiography reflected both on the flexibility of previously fixed
categories such as reason and faith or rationality and superstition, as well as on the
boundaries between different fields of knowledge. Astrology was thus not considered
anymore as a superstitious belief, but as a field whose transformations during the seventeenth
century played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern disciplinary boundaries.
Secondly, I will show how this change of narrative about the Scientific Revolution
shifted the attention from the texts to the various contexts in which this entity called modern
science was developed. As opposed to an internalistic analysis, this externalistic approach
focuses on the study of different sites of knowledge, such as laboratories, universities,
museums, or, in this case, the inquisitorial courtroom. Moreover, what this emphasis on
context shows is that knowledge is not transmitted from one place to another in a
unidirectional way. Rather, knowledge is adapted and creatively transformed in every
different context.
1. The place of astrology in the history of the Scientific Revolution
As early as 1917 Franz Boll published his Sternglaube und Sterndeutung; Die
Geschichte und das Wesen der Astrologie, regarded as the best introduction to history of
astrology. And almost a century has passed since George Sarton asserted in his Introduction
to the History of Science that ‘the historian of science cannot devote much attention to the
study of superstition and magic, that is, of unreason, because this does not help him very
much to understand human progress.’1 When talking specifically about astrology, Sarton
referred to it as a ‘superstitious flotsam of the Near East’. Otto Neugebauer, one of the most
prominent scholars of the history of astronomy and mathematics in Ancient Greece, reacted
immediately to Sarton’s affirmation in his famous letter to Isis, “The Study of Wretched
Subjects” (1951). He underlined that a great number of scholars have worked “to recover
countless wretched collections of astrological treatises from European libraries, and they
succeeded in giving us an insight into the daily life, religion and superstition, and
astronomical methods and cosmogonic ideas of generations of men who had to live without
the higher blessings of our own scientific era.”2
In the last decades, astrology has without doubt gained more and more attention by
historians of science. To ascertain this, one needs only to look at recent bibliographies on the
history of science, including entire biographies on medieval, renaissance, and early modern
astrologers.3 The question that is perhaps necessary to ask here is how astrology became a
1 Sarton, George. Introduction to the History of Science, Baltimor, Williams and Wilkins, for Carnegie
Institution of Washington, 1927-1947, 1:3, p. 19. Quoted in Debus, Allen G. “Science and History. The Birth
of a New Field” in Stephen McKnight.Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press; 1992, p. 16.
2 Neugebauer, Otto. “The Study of Wretched Subjects” inIsis. 1951; 42(2):p. 111
3 Kassell, Lauren. Medicine and magic in Elizabethan London. Simon Forman : astrologer, alchemist and
physician. Oxford : Clarendon press, 2005. Dooley, Brendan. Morandi’s Last Prophecy and the End of
Renaissance Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press; 2002; Grafton, Anthony.Cardano's
cosmos : the worlds and works of a Renaissance astrologer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1999; Geneva, Ann. Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind. William Lilly and the Language of the
Stars. Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1995; Smoller, Laura. History, Prophecy, and the Stars.
The Christian Astrology of Pierr d'Ailly (1350-1420). Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1994; D. Parker
Familiar to All: William Lilly and Astrology in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1975., C.H. Josten (ed.)
Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) : his autobiographical and historical notes, his correspondence and other
contemporary sources relating to his life and work. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966. For some interesting
data about publications of journals and books on astrology see: I.W. Kelly, G.A. Dean, and D.H. Saklofske
“Astrology: A Critical Review” in Grim, Patrick. Philosophy of Science and the Occult. Albany: State
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salient object within history of science. In other words, why is it no longer described by
historians as if it were “some kind of irrational disease suffered by western culture, which
subjected it to bouts of insanity of varying intensity, until mental equilibrium was eventually
restored after the scientific revolution”.4 The revision of some elements of the traditional
narrative of the Scientific Revolution was certainly one of the reasons why the role of
astrology during the Renaissance and early-modern period started being revaluated. In the
other direction, this revaluation of astrology, and other previously neglected subjects led to a
re-formulation of the concept of Scientific Revolution.
The term scientific revolutions is generic and describes changes that occur with a
certain frequency; it has made an enormous impact on the intellectual world since the
publication of Kuhn’s classic The structure of Scientific Revolutions. In contrast, the term
Scientific Revolution (or even preceded by the article The) is not generic, but specific and
refers to a particular episode in the history of science. It conveys the idea that there was a
period in history, from Copernicus (1473-1543) to Newton (1642-1727), when the human
view of the world changed radically and brought about what we now call modern science. As
a conceptual tool for speaking about this process, the term was coined by Alexander Koyrè in
the 1940s, when he described the Scientific Revolution as “the most profound revolution
achieved or suffered by the human mind”.5 In 1949 the term gained considerable currency
through the publication of Herbert Butterfield’s series of lectures The Origins of Modern
Science. He considered that the Scientific Revolution “outshines everything since the rise of
Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes [...It
is] the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality.”6
The idea ofrevolution as a radical and irreversible reordering, as the point of origin of
a new state of affairs that the world had never witnessed before and might never witness
again developed together with a linear conception of time during the Enlightenment. But even
though the French philosophers of the eighteenth century noticed the “uniqueness” of the
University of New York Press; 1990; pp. 51-81.
4 Carey, Hilary M. Courting Disaster. Astrology at the University in the Later Middle Ages. London:
MacMillan; 1992., p. 5
5 Koyrè quoted in Steven Shapin,The Scientific Revolution, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.1
6 Butterfield quoted in Shapin (1996), p. 2
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