Astrology For Dummies. Rae Orion
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will, those characters are not the ones we generally like. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves,” states Cassius in an oft-quoted remark. But Cassius is the one who has a lean and hungry look, the one who engineers the assassination of Caesar, and the one who — in a work of literature from another era — ends up in Dante’s ninth circle of hell along with Brutus, his fellow assassin, and Judas Iscariot: betrayers all.
Whether Shakespeare believed in astrology personally is probably unknowable. That he knew astrology is without question. In All’s Well That Ends Well, two characters even josh about the effect of retrograde Mars. Shakespeare found in astrology an organizing principle — and an opportunity for humor. “Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction!” says Prince Hal in Henry IV Part II as he watches an aging Falstaff romance a saucy wench. As Priscilla Costello points out in Shakespeare and the Stars, everyone would have caught the planetary references and laughed; it was a bit of a dirty joke. Shakespeare was a man of his times.
Foreseeing disaster with William Lilly
Another man of his times was William Lilly (1602–1680), the most influential astrologer of the seventeenth century. His book, Christian Astrology — a misleading title, nothing in it being especially Christian — is full of advice for the studious astrologer on topics such as how to calculate the length of life (it’s dauntingly complex) and how to answer run-of-the-mill questions about finding lost objects, renting a house, identifying a thief, predicting the course of an illness, or determining whether you will be repaid money you are owed. These problems were assessed through horary astrology, according to which the astrologer casts a chart for the moment the client asks a question, and that chart contains within it the answer.
Lilly was a master at this. He could answer any query and accurately predict the outcome of a battle or political conflict. He is most famous for predicting, seventeen years before the actual events, that in 1665 (“or near that year … more or less of that time”) the city of London would suffer from “a consuming plague” and “sundry fires.” And that’s what happened. In 1664, fleas carrying bubonic plague invaded London, and the death toll began to mount. By September of 1665, as many as seven thousand people a week were dying, and everyone who could leave, left. Close to one quarter of the population died.
A year later, a fire broke out in a baker’s house on Pudding Lane and set the town ablaze. In four days, four fifths of London was destroyed. Lilly was called before the House of Commons and questioned. He was acquitted of any wrongdoing. Nevertheless, with the city a ruin, he moved to the country, took up medicine, and contented himself with publishing a yearly almanac. His prediction retains its status as one of astrology’s great moments.
Watching the Decline of Astrology
For a long time, astronomy and astrology were braided together. Even the most important scientists of the age knew how to cast horoscopes — and some of them did it very well.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) started the Scientific Revolution by arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun, not the other way around. He also studied astrology and had exalted, ecstatic feelings about the Sun that were about as far from scientific as you can get.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, thus proving that all celestial bodies do not revolve around the Earth. This earned the ire of the Church, which accused him of heresy and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his life, all because he supported Copernicus. Galileo willingly cast horoscopes for his daughter, for himself — and for clients.
Johannes Kepler (1572–1630) determined the laws of planetary motion, bemoaned the importance people gave to astrology, and nonetheless cast more than eight hundred horoscopes, many with astute commentary and chillingly accurate predictions.
Even Isaac Newton (1642–1726), who discovered the universal law of gravity, entertained a certain curiosity about astrology, though he found alchemy more compelling. Newton is a transitional figure. He was so immersed in the search for the philosopher’s stone that he may have died from mercury poisoning, a side effect of his alchemical experiments, and yet his scientific and mathematical contributions were so essential that he is considered a founding father of the Age of Reason.
By the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment or Age of Reason was upon us, and astrology was often the object of ridicule. In 1708, the English satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, pretty much ruined the life of John Partridge, a former shoemaker, almanac writer, and astrologer whose death he “predicted” and then “reported” on the appointed date. Writing under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, Swift even composed an elegy for the man with a brief epitaph in rhyming couplets. “Here, five feet deep, lies on his back / A cobbler, star-monger, and quack,” it began. Partridge had to turn away his would-be embalmers at the door.
Nevertheless, astrology was part of everyday life, as the continuing sale of almanacs suggests. They included useful facts about weather, tides, and so on. But they were also filled with celestial information. In the British colonies of North America, Benjamin Franklin published his Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, an homage to an English astrologer who died before Franklin was born (and whose books were found in Isaac Newton’s library). Poor Richard’s Almanack, published from 1733 to 1758, sold well. Although it is known primarily for Franklin’s sensible aphorisms (“No gains without pains”), it also provides an enormous quantity of astrological data. In the very first issue, in direct imitation of Swift, Franklin predicts the death of a living person — in this case, Titan Leeds, his competitor in almanac publication. Leeds would die, Franklin wrote, “on Oct. 17. 1733. 3 ho. 29 m. P. M. at the very instant of the of and .” He knew the language of astrology, even if he mocked it.
Attitudes were changing, assisted by scientific advances. In 1781, William Herschel spotted Uranus, the first new planet discovered in recorded history. Twenty years later, astronomers discovered Ceres, originally thought to be a planet but later classified as an asteroid (although recently upgraded to dwarf planet). After Ceres came Pallas, Juno, Vesta — and eventually millions of small celestial bodies. In 1832, Neptune was discovered. And in 1835, almost three centuries after publication, the book that started it all, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, was taken off the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. By then, astrology was no longer in fashion. Universities didn’t even offer courses in it.
Saluting Modern Times
Wrenching change is what the nineteenth century was about. There were revolutions everywhere: wars of independence in Latin America, democratic revolutions in Europe, and in the United States, slavery, the Civil War, and the failed attempt at Reconstruction. There were astounding inventions — railroads, the telegraph, the electric light — and medical advances such as the first vaccines. Music, art, and literature flourished, and feminism arose at last. Early in the century, there was Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion and its preference for the intuitive over the rational. Later in the century, there was Spiritualism, with its séances and otherworldly spirits, and a resurgence of interest in the occult. Amidst all that, astrology sprang to life.
One person responsible for its resurgence was an Englishman named William Frederick Allan, a Leo who renamed himself Alan Leo, it being the style among astrologers to adopt celestial or angelic pseudonyms. In 1890, Leo began publishing The Astrologer’s Magazine. A few years later, when he changed its name to Modern Astrology and began offering free horoscopes to subscribers, the magazine took off. The