One of the aims of this paper is to describe the main ideas that transformed the Babylonian astral religion and science/technique of divination based on celestial omens into an operative system of thought. In this respect, we must observe the presence in the astrological system of the major philosophical ideas of Greek philosophy. In this sense, Western astrology:

1) Is the heritage of Babylonian astral religion and technique of divination, and assumed correlations between those astronomical references and terrestrial events, seen as manifestations of divine order.

2) Later, during the Hellenistic period, there was the addition of various Greek philosophical theories that developed a cosmological notion of the superiority of the celestial spheres, in accordance with universal principles and mathematical laws.

What is astrology? What are its philosophical and scientific bases? Is astrology a science? Is it a symbolic system? We can observe that – not only in general but also among educated people and astrologers – there is a poor and confused understanding of what astrology is. Normally astrology is mixed with a lot of other elements and beliefs, namely, religious and metaphysical. This paper intends to show how the original Babylonian astral religion changed under the influence of Greek Philosophy and how the Greeks rationalised and systematised those beliefs. I also will try to clarify some of the major cultural and philosophical basis of western astrological knowledge, and to critically analyse the assumptions and beliefs on which astrology is based as a system of thought.

In chapter one I intend to present a general view of the Babylonian origin of astrology, which led to a kind of practice that I call ‘macro astrology’. In chapter two there is a general survey of the major Greek philosophical ideas that transformed the original Babylonian astrology into a rationalised system of thought. Special references are made to Aristotle’s cosmological philosophy and Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, the inaugural work of Western astrology. Chapter three shows how astrology lost its scientific and philosophical foundations in consequence of the seventeenth century scientific revolution. In chapter four I intend to analyse the present epistemological status of astrology showing, in particular, the differences between Greek astrology and contemporary astrology. The paper ends with a final reflection on the possible directions for an astrological ‘craft’ or ‘art’ that, at present, has neither consistent philosophical theory nor scientific evidence to support it.

The original roots of astrology derived from myth: “astrology as we have inherited it in the West emerged originally from the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia”. The rudiments of astrology came from the area that is now Iraq. It seems that originally the planets were seen to be gods, and astrology “was a method for understanding the actions and desires of the gods who ruled over earth and mankind”. In mythological thought the fundaments of human society were derived from celestial and divine order, so to study that level of reality there was a major need to understand and organise human society.

The planet gods each have certain spheres of influence which vary over the course of the Sumerian-Babylonian culture, but which stabilize into a uniform picture in the astrological omen inscriptions of Enuma Anu Enlil (seventy clay tablets of the comprehensive library of Assurbanipal, 669-626 BC, king of Ninive). The myths of the star-gods describe which functions and capabilities these gods possess.

“In Mesopotamia the monarch was but a human servant of the gods (…) the physical hierarchy of earth and heaven was therefore reflected in a political order in which the king was subordinate to divine council, headed by Enlil, or to Marduk.” The king “could maintain the natural harmony only by watching over the service of the gods and attuning the life of the community to such portents as were vouchsafed him as revelations of divine will. Thus the king’s greatest attribute (…) was to understand and heed the advice of the astrologers and to perform the correct action at the appropriate moment”. In this context astrology and divination played a major role in the organisation of the community in accordance with divine harmony. Here we clearly found the organisation of human society based on a supernatural order. The king was responsible for maintaining the harmony between earth and heaven, and for being in accordance with that supernatural level of reality.

“By the middle of the second millennium BCE consistent astronomical observations were being made for the express purpose of producing astrological omens, anticipating divine intentions, predicting the weather and preparing for possible political crises (…) the purpose of the omens was to correlate astronomical patterns with terrestrial events.” In connection with this practice was “the belief that the historical process was subject to the same rhythms as the stars, and an understanding that the earthly political hierarchy was subordinate to a divine state.”

As stated in the introduction of Mundane Astrology, from earliest recorded times until three hundred years ago in Europe, the study of cosmic patterns was the very core of all attempts to understand collective behaviour. In every community, from the smallest city-state to the largest empire, and from the earliest days of Mesopotamia to the nation states of the seventeenth century, the most important task of the astrologer was to explain and forecast the vicissitudes in collective fortunes.

So we can admit that the initial impulse of astrological knowledge was connected with the need for a foundation for human society. In this process the pharaoh, the king or the emperor played a major role as the earthly representative of the gods. To ancient man, society was a reflection of a higher divine order, and to be in accordance with that level of reality there was a major need to maintain human organisation and the protection of the gods.

As shown above, Babylonian astrology played a major public role as an aide to political management and decision making. This is what we can call ‘macro’ or ‘State’ astrology. Stellar omens were considered too important to apply to ordinary people; the concerns of the astrologers were directly linked with the king and the collective. This same role we can see later in the Roman Empire or in the Renaissance with the presence of the court astrologers. Even in the 20th century we can find rudimentary reminiscences of macro astrology, for example, in Nancy Reagan’s astrologer scheduling events for the Reagan presidency, or on the TV’s predictions for the beginning of the New Year.

(…) yet we must assert, that whatever the Greeks receive from the Barbarians, is by them carried to greater perfection. This, too, we should conceive to be the case with respect to the subject of the present discourse. For, though it is difficult to discover without ambiguity all such particulars as the present, yet the hope is both beautiful and great, that the Greeks will reverence all these divinities [the stars] with a more excellent mode of worship than that which they receive from the Barbarians, and that they will employ both discipline and the Delphic oracles, and every legitimate observance, for this purpose. Plato, Epinomis

In this passage of Epinomis we find a fundamental trait of the ancient Greek spirit: to carry to greater perfection whatever was received from the Barbarians. But I do not want to address here the issue of the debt of Greek astrology to Babylon. “That the Greeks borrowed the idea of astrology from the Babylonians is not disputed.” On the other hand, from a philosophical perspective, it seems clear that the systematisation of western astrology, as we found in the Tetrabiblos, is a result of the Greek spirit. “Despite the presence of ‘Babylonian’ elements, the philosophical rationale of Greek astrology and its doctrine of interpretation are all Hellenistic Greek in origin and explainable only in terms of Greek tradition itself.” For the Babylonians, celestial phenomena were regarded as signs in accordance with a view of nature as inseparable from the divine. On the other hand, Greek astrology understood “celestial phenomena as causes in accordance with a view that physical events had determinate natural causes, disassociated from gods. For this reason elements common to both systems took on radically different character and function.”

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Astrology as a synthesis of Greek philosophy

What are the Greek philosophical bases of the astrological system?

Starting with the heritage of the Babylonian astral religion and celestial omens, the first Greek addition is the notion of cyclic time, the idea of eternal return, the notion of circularity of time that is manifested in the motion of the planets. The eternal return is represented in the circular motion of the planets in an organised, finite and perfect cosmos, as we can see in Aristotle’s Physics. “The motions of the heavens are therefore responsible for all change and almost all variety observed in the sublunary world.” The idea of cyclic time, which is a major basis of astrological thought, has its roots in the philosophy of Heraclitus (late 6th century BCE), formulated in terms of the Logos as the unifying formula or proportionate method of the arrangement of things; a structural plan of things, unity of opposites; identity through change. “The Logos is not an ‘abstraction’, but an actual constituent of things – coextensive, in particular, with the primary cosmic constituent, fire.” All things originate from fire and return to it again in a perpetual flux structured by the Logos, which structures the ever-changing processes of the cosmos.

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Ptolemy and the Tetrabiblos

Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos is the major work in the history of Western astrology; here we find the first explanation of the astrological tradition in a rational and unified system. Ptolemy’s aim is to make a theoretical and systematic reformulation of old astrology under the influence of Aristotle philosophy as presented in works like Physics, Meteorology, On the Heavens.

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Of the Power of the Planets

The active power of the sun's essential nature is found to be heating and, to a certain degree, drying. This is made more easily perceptible in the case of the sun than any other heavenly body by its size and by the obviousness of its seasonal changes, for the closer it approaches to the zenith the more it affects us in this way. Most of the moon's power consists of humidifying, clearly because it is close to the earth and because of the moist exhalations there from. Its action therefore is precisely this, to soften and cause putrefaction in bodies for the most part, but it shares moderately also in heating power because of the light which it receives from the sun.

It is Saturn's quality chiefly to cool and, moderately, to dry, probably because he is furthest removed both from the sun's heat and the moist exhalations about the earth. Both in Saturn's case and in that of the other planets there are powers, too, which arise through the observation of their aspects to the sun and the moon, for some of them appear to modify conditions in the ambient in one way, some in another, by increase or by decrease.

The nature of Mars is chiefly to dry and to burn, in conformity with his fiery colour and by reason of his nearness to the sun, for the sun's sphere lies just below him.

Jupiter has a temperate active force because his movement takes place between the cooling influence of Saturn and the burning power of Mars. He both heats and humidifies; and because his heating power is the greater by reason of the underlying spheres, he produces fertilizing winds.

Venus has the same powers and tempered nature as Jupiter, but acts in the opposite way; for she warms moderately because of her nearness to the sun, but chiefly humidifies, like the moon, because of the amount of her own light and because she appropriates the exhalations from the moist atmosphere surrounding the earth.

Mercury in general is found at certain times alike to be drying and absorptive of moisture, because he never is far removed in longitude from the heat of the sun; and again humidifying, because he is next above the sphere of the moon, which is closest to the earth; and to change quickly from one to the other, inspired as it were by the speed of his motion in the neighbourhood of the sun itself.

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Micro Astrology

With the naturalisation of the cosmos and the development of Greek humanism, astrology also became available for individuals, no longer exclusively concerned with the collective. The development of more accurate techniques of calculation, interpretation and forecast made astrology useful for common human affairs; this was the beginning of micro astrology. During the next centuries, macro and micro astrology subsisted parallel, fulfilling both collective and individual needs for guidance. But after its decadence in the seventeenth century, astrology no longer recovered its former importance, and the end of the nineteenth century just saw the revival of micro astrology. We sometimes see astrology dealing with collective affairs, but that only to a small extent. Most of contemporary astrology became ‘petite-bourgeoise’ mainly dealing with common individual concerns like love, money, business, health, relationships, or psychological needs.

Till the middle of the seventeenth century astrology “fitted in with ancient cosmology, it drew on the data of astronomy, it offered an extra dimension to medicine, it shared the convictions of philosophers, and it fitted in with much religious understanding of the divine. Not everybody believed in astrologers, but hardly anyone was willing to deny the stars some effect on human life”. It was this enviable position of ancient classical astrology that radically changed after 1650.

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Destruction of the Greek Cosmos

Aristotle’s cosmology and Ptolemy’s astronomy dominated Western thought and cosmos conception during centuries. But Copernicus work De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium, taking the Earth from the centre of the world and putting it in the middle of the planets, destroyed the foundations of the traditional cosmic order and started one of the most radical revolutions in the history of science.

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Destruction of Aristotle’s physics and conception of space

The scientific paradigm that sustained astrological thought started gradually to collapse under the influence of the works of Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes. For Descartes teleological conceptions and explanations had no value in physics. For him the Aristotelian and common sense qualitative explanations were subjective and confused. The world is mathematical and uniform and only contains matter and motion; being matter equal to extension, there are only motion and extension.

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4. Epistemological Status of Astrology in the 20th and 21st Centuries

In the introduction to the second edition of Il Linguaggio dell’Astrologia, the professor of Philosophy of Language of Bologna University, Ugo Volli, states that astrology is not a science in the sense that concept has in the last three centuries, because the astrologer does not follow the scientific method; does not base his knowledge on empirical principles; does not make empirically controlled scientific research to discover and verify laws; his assumptions and hypothesis are not subjected to falsification; and finally, because there is not a well defined scientific community who holds and critically evaluates a corpus of precise knowledge.

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Differences between Greek and contemporary astrology

Greek astrology as systematised in the Tetrabiblos, with its assumptions and postulates, remains the basis of western astrology. The main philosophical principles are the same, and in fact no one made, in the last eighteen centuries, a more systematic theory or explanation of the fundamentals of astrology. The meaning of the Planets, the Zodiac Signs, the Houses and the Aspects are basically the same. But the astrological practice during the 20th and in the beginning of 21st centuries is quite different from Greek, Medieval or even Renaissance astrology. So one can ask are what the fundamental differences between contemporary astrology and Greek astrology?

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Ways to ‘a practice’ with no philosophical foundations and no scientific evidence

If we want to understand contemporary astrology without making appeal to naïve supernatural or metaphysical speculations of dubious value, we must to focus our analysis on the language of astrology. From a phenomenological perspective, astrology appears as an operative system of language, a complex system of meanings that can be used to make interpretations and to present potential developments of particular human situations. When an individual uses astrology to make interpretations, we can see in action three different aspects that, in the end, allow that those interpretations can make sense: first, the astrological operative system of meanings; second, the personal experience of the ‘astrologer’ dealing with human issues; third, the natural or developed ‘intuition’ and awareness of that individual. Even if we arrive at the conclusion that there are no celestial influences, those aspects will be in operation in an astrological consultation making that encounter between two persons a potentially meaningful moment.

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José Prudêncio

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