A Brief History of Astrology

    Astrology is a a Language of symbols. It is a Science of relationships, a System that classifies, a Study of cycles and a Discipline of thought. 

    The birth of astrology proper appears to have followed Alexander the Great conquest of Mesopotamia in 330 BCE and the meeting of Babylonian and classical Greek culture that ensued. A new center of learning developed at Alexandria, the city that Alexander founded on Egypt's Mediterranean coast.

Here, following the duodecimal pattern already established for the months, Greek-speaking savants divided the ecliptic into 12 equidistant sections, each covering 30 degrees of the sun's 360 degree journey. Each section was associated with the pattern of stars visible in the relevant portion of the night sky, for in the astronomy of the time the Earth was considered the center of the universe, with the sun and moon orbiting around it against a backdrop of fixed stars.

At the time, astrology was considered almost the perfect science, linking each aspect of life on Earth with the machine-like working of the rest of the universe. In its extreme form some astrologers believed that astrology was completely deterministic. By close study of his/her charts, the astrologer could compute all the movements of the heavenly bodies and work out the pattern of the past and the future. In practice, most astrologers believed that the planets exerted an influence on people's lives, but still allowed individuals a degree of free will to move with or against the pull of the heavens.

    The new science spread rapidly east, reaching India by at least the second century CE and then moving on with Buddhist missionaries to China where a separate but allied tradition developed. From there, the science moved southeast into Asia. Astrology also became firmly entrenched in Iran, and later in the Islamic countries and the Byzantine lands of Eastern Europe and the Near East. Oddly, almost the only region where astrology remained virtually unknown was western Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire.

    Although knowledge of astrology was lost along with the knowledge of Greek, in which most of its key texts were written, Arab scholars took the texts back to Arabia and kept it alive during the Dark Ages. It was only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the first stirrings of the Renaissance, largely thanks to translations of Arabic treatises made under Moorish influence in Spain. that astrologers began to flourish in all the European countries.

    Astrologers were routinely consulted by rulers and politicians, and their discipline held a prestigious position in the universities; Galileo held the Chair of Astrology at the University of Padua. It was not just an intellectually valid science but also a centrally important one.

My Favorite Astrologer and Librarian 

   Hypatia is known primarily for her work on the ideas of conic sections introduced by Apollonius.  Hypatia is thought to be the first woman to have a profound impact upon mathematics and thought, simplifying Apollonius' concepts on conics. Physically beautiful, devotedly celibate, she was the revered teacher of a man (Synesius of Cyrene) who, after his conversion to Christianity, helped formulate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, using neoplatonist principles learned at her feet.

However, it was not a good time to be an iatromathematician (original name for astrologer)  Nor a neoplatonist. By the late fourth century the Roman empire was divided. Officially Christian, but patronizing to others: Jews, heretical sects, diverse schools of neoplatonists and other assorted "pagans" - and all of them at one another's throats. Alexandria in particular was seething with intercommunal rivalry and sectarian bitterness.

Then, as now, the business of science was to foretell the future. But for ordinary people, the future that most interested them was not so much the state of the heavens, as their own immediate future.

Reputable astronomers and geometers like Theon and Hypatia got confused in the popular and in the ecclesiastical mind with less reputable practitioners and all were lumped together as "mathematicians". The council of Laodicea in the mid-4th century outlawed "divination" and forbade priests to practice mathematics; at about the same time the emperor Constantius decided that no one may consult a soothsayer or a mathematician.  Archbishop Theophilus  Synesius died in 413 and  Hypatia was suddenly without her powerful protector.

Cyril, making use of a 500-strong private militia, began to exert his authority in the temporal as well as in the spiritual sphere, and thus he came into conflict with the civil governor, Orestes. Hypatia was close to Orestes and there was a rumor that it was Hypatia's influence that prevented the Christian Orestes from accepting Cyril's spiritual direction and  becoming reconciled with his rival. Moreover she was seen as one "devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, [who] beguiled many people through her satanic wiles, and the governor ... through her magic."

Hypatia was attacked, torn from her carriage and dragged into a church, where she was stripped naked and battered to death with roofing tiles.  The mob tore her body limb from limb, took her mangled remains out from the church, and burned them.

"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all," Hypatia is credited with saying.  

No good deed goes unpunished is what I say.