The basic astrological assumptions are not hard to grasp. For if astronomy is the study of the movements of the heavenly bodies, then astrology is the study of the effects of those movements. The astronomers of the ancient world assumed a division of the universe whereby the superior, immutable bodies of the celestial worlds ruled over the terrestrial or sublunary sphere, where all was mortality and change. It was assumed that the stars had special qualities and influences which were transmitted downwards upon the passive earth, and which varied in their effect, according to the changing relationship of the heavenly bodies to each other.
They were led to postulate a single system in which the seven moving stars or planet shifted their position in relation to the earth and each other, against a fixed backcloth of the twelve signs of the zodiac. There was nothing obscure about these general assumptions. At the beginning of the sixteenth century astrological doctrines were part of the educated mans picture of the universe and its workings. It was generally accepted that the four elements constituting the sublunary region (earth, air, fire & water) were kept in their state of ceaseless transformation by the movement of the heavenly bodies.
The various planets transmitted different quantities of the four physiological qualities of heat and cold, dryness and moisture. Therefore astrology was less a separate discipline than an aspect of a generally accepted world picture. During the Renaissance, even more than in the Middle Ages, astrology pervaded all aspects of the intellectual framework in which men were educated. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were four main branches of judicial astrology. First, there were the general predictions based on the future movements of the ravens and taking note of such impending events as eclipses of the sun and moon.
These forecasts related to the weather, the state of the crops, mortality and epidemics, politics and war. They indicated the fate of society as a whole but not that of particular individuals. Secondly, there were nativities, maps of the sky at the moment of a persons births either made on the spot at the request of the infants’ parents’ or reconstructed for individuals of stature, those who could supply the details of their time of births. The horoscope at birth could subsequently be followed by annual revolutions, in which the astrologer calculated the individual’s prospects for the coming year.
The details of the client’s nativity were also needed before he could avail himself of the astrologer’s third main service, that of making elections or choosing the right moment for the right action. By comparing the relationship between the tendencies indicated by the client’s horoscope with what was known about the future movement of the heavens, certain times could be identified as more favorable than others for embarking upon any potentially risky undertaking, such as going on a journey or choosing a wife.
Finally there were horary questions the most controversial part of the astrologer’s art, and one that had only been developed after the days of Ptolemy by the Arabs. Its optimistic assumption was that the astrologer could resolve any question put to him by considering the state of the heavens at the exact moment when it was asked. These four spheres of activity – general predictions, nativities, elections and horary questions – formed the sum of the astrologer’s art. An individual might specialize in one rather than another but he was expected to be a master of them all. He might also possess a certain amount of medical learning.
Different signs of the zodiac were thought to rule over different parts of the body, and a proper election of times had to be made for administering medicine, letting blood or carrying out surgical operations. The availability of English treatises on astrology is a poor measurement for the actual prestige of the subject. Despite the lack of a vernacular literature, most Tudor monarchs and their advisers encouraged astrologers and drew upon their advice. Both Henry VII and those engaged in plotting against him maintained relations with the Italian astrologer William Parron.
The Earl of Leicester employed Richard Forster as his astrological physician and commissioned Thomas Allen to set horoscopes. It was at Leicesters invitation that John Dee chose an astrologically propitious day for the coronation of Elizabeth I. For intellectuals astrology remained a topic of consuming interest. A random list of sympathizers could include such celebrated names as those of Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne. As a young man Isaac Newton bought a book on judicial astrology at Stourbridge Fair.
These miscellaneous names testify to the sympathetic attitude in which many men of rank and intellectual importance held astrology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course it is not always easy to say just how seriously they took it. But it is certain that until the mid-seventeenth century astrology was no private fad but a form of divination to which many educated people had recourse. Due to the invention of the printing press, astrology was made available to an infinitely wider audience, and the literature took the form of the almanac. Strictly speaking the almanac comprised three separate items.
There was the Almanac proper, which indicated the astronomical events of the coming year, eclipses, conjunctions, and movable feasts. There was the Calendar, which showed the days of the week and the months’ and the fixed Church festivals. Finally there was the Prognostication, or astrological forecast of the notable events of the year. Printed publication was thus one of the main methods by which the astrologers made their impact upon the life and thought of the period. Some almanacs were so popular that they took on a life of their own and continued to appear long after the death of their origins founders.
But despite their enormous sales, the almanacs did not usually bring their authors much in the way of earnings; for it was private practice which gave the professional astrologer his regular means of subsistence; and it also was the way in which he made his greatest impact upon the lives of other human being. By the reign of Elizabeth I, astrology had become, as one contemporary put it, a very handicraft, so that many lived thereby’. Astrological practice was carried on by men, and in a few cases women of very different degrees of teaching. Sometimes it was only a sideline to some other occupation.
William Lilly (1602-81) had come to London as a young man to make a career. His father was a poor Leicestershire yeoman and Lilly began as a domestic servant but made good by marrying his master’s widow. He learned astrology in a few weeks in 1632 and began to practice seriously in 1641. His first almanac came out in 1644 and was followed by an increase of publications. He enjoyed a great deal of political influence and was the acknowledged leader of his profession. His casebooks throw light upon his consulting-practice but he himself remains an enigma.
On a number of occasions Lilly was asked to predict the result of a particular legal action presumably so that the client would know whether it was worth continuing to fight it. One customer asked despairingly in September 1649 if he would ‘ever have justice’. In addition to helping with personal decisions, Lilly was also asked to resolve a variety of military and politics issues. When would Pontefract surrender? Was it true that the King had taken Cambridge? Would he bring troops over from Ireland? The remaining major department of the astrologers’ art was medicine.
The thoroughgoing astrological doctor proceeded entirely by the stars and did not even demand to see the patient. The astrologers were further expected to diagnose pregnancy, estimate how the mother would fare when her labor started and prognosticate the sex of the unborn child. Their consulting-rooms were full of women made desperate by prolonged and unaccountable childlessness. The general impression given by the casebooks is that Lilly dealt with his patients sensibly enough and his remedies, so far as they are recorded, were not necessarily astrological in character.
He was prepared to prescribe medicines and on at least one occasions chose to refer his client to a doctor. But, like all the astrologers, he was prepared to admit the possibility of witchcraft and had rules to determine whether or not it was the cause of his patients’ sufferings Until the later seventeenth century, a cross-section of the English people took the astrologers very seriously. The clients who flocked to Forman, Lilly and Booker included aristocrats’ merchants, and persons of outstanding intellectual and artistic distinction.
Nothing did more to make astrology seductive than the ambitious scale of its intellectual pretensions. It offered a systematic scheme of explanation for all the inexplicable human and natural behavior. Every earthly occurrence was capable of astrological explanation. In the absence of any rival system of scientific explanations and no other existing body of thought, religion apart, which even began to offer so all-embracing an explanation for the baffling various ness of human affairs. This was the intellectual vacuum which astrology moved in to fi1l.
The disadvantage of the system was its rigidity. Since there were a limited number of planets, houses, and signs of the zodiacs the astrologers tended to deduce human potentialities to a set of fixed types and to postulate only a limited number of possible variations. Such obstacles notwithstanding, the astrological explanation of personal misfortunes seems to have appealed to clients. When William Bredons two daughters died in successive months, their bereaved father wrote to Richard Napier to discuss ‘the astrological cause for the tragedy.
Many of the clients entered an astrologers’ consulting-room were seeking an explanation for the various misfortunes which had beset them – illness’ sterility, miscarriage, political failures, and bankruptcy. No doubt it was more comforting to learn that had been crossed at birth than to be told that one had no one to blame for ones misfortunes but oneself. Astrology could thus appeal as a means of evading responsibility, removing guilt from both sufferer and society at large.
Like religion, it also combated the notion that misfortune was purely random in its incidence. There really was no such thing as chance in nature declared the astrologer John Butler. The astrologers also claimed to predict the course of political events. If the Scots had read Lilly’s almanac thought William Paine, they should have known in advance that their invasion of England was doomed to defeat. In the eighteenth century most sections of the English economy were dependent upon the weather. It was this, which gave astrological predictions their credibility.
To predict the weather was to predict the harvest, and to predict the harvest was to predict the discontent which would follow a food shortage, and the rebellion which might follow the discontent. In brief, a society which was dependent upon the weather for its efficient functioning, and had fewer means of guarding itself against the depredations of storm or droughts, it was not possible for a weather forecast to refrain simply a weather forecast. Inevitably, it carried with it a chain of far-reaching consequences of a social and political character.
How was astrology able to retain the allegiance of intelligent men when it was utterly incapable of providing the accurate prognostications they wanted? Dating the seventeen years of subsequent records John Booker’s astrological practice showed no signs of respite. On the contrary, the same clients returned again and again, and brought their friends as well. The astrologers, or at least the reputable ones, did not claim for their predictions a binding and inevitable end, all they claimed was that they were likely to be fulfilled.
It was always possible for a man to overcome the tendencies indicated in his horoscope by exercising free-will and self-determination. In this way two men born under the same star might well have a different destiny. Astrologers, a practitioner asserted did not make definite predictions ‘but only a probable conjecture by natural causes. It was during the Civil War however, that the political potentialities of astrologic forecasts were most systematically exploited.
From 1642 the newspapers printed astrological predictions and the astrologers were taken up by both sides in the conflict with Lilly and Booker prominent among the supporters of Parliaments and George Wharton writing on behalf of the King. Some of the conspiracies against Henry VII drew on astrological advice, and all the Tudor Monarchs were made the subject of astrological calculation by dissident groups. In 1581 Parliament made it a statutory felony to erect figures, cast nativities, or calculate by prophecy how long the Queen would live or who would succeed her.
