marginalization of astrology

[Jim__]

6. The reasons for its demise may be uncertain.

Here's an article, with multiple links, that claims that the reasons for the loss of the respectability of astrology vary from country to country. For instance, it claims that the reason for this loss in Britain, was that during the English Revolution, puritan astrologers were more accurate than royalist astrologers, and so, upon restoration of the monarchy, astrology fell into disrepute. Of course, I can't attest to the accuracy of any of the claims in the article, but it claims the reasons are both multiple and uncertain.

An excerpt from the column The Renaissance Mathematicus:

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Astrology entered the world of higher education with humanism at the end of the 14th century. The main driving force was the rise of astro-medicine derived from newly available texts from the Hippocratic corpus. In the 15th century humanist university in Italy and famously in Krakow established chairs for astrology and throughout the next two hundred and fifty years nearly all European universities offered Astrology 101 for medical students taught by the professor for mathematics. Nearly all of the leading Renaissance mathematicians were practicing astrologers, many of them court astrologers. Even Galileo, a practicing astrologer, routinely taught Astro 101 during his tenure as professor for mathematics in Padua. This is not to say that astrology was without its critics, the most extensive criticism of astrology being written by the humanist scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 – 1494), his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, which contains all of the standard arguments against astrology still in use today.

Astrology continued to thrive well into the 17th century but went into a steep decline from about 1650. The big question is why? In general histories of science and cultural histories the standard answer, if they deal with the question at all, is that the new heliocentric astronomy killed off astrology as an academic discipline. This is completely false as any superficial examination of the historical facts immediately shows. As I wrote in an earlier post, Robert Westman famously wrote that there were only ten Copernicans in the entire world between the publication of the De revolutionibus in 1543 and the beginning of the 17th century and as a historian of astrology correctly pointed out all ten of them were practicing astrologers. Although Kepler, whose heliocentric system was the one that came to be accepted, rejected traditional horoscope astrology as it was practiced in his own times he believed deeply in celestial influence and wrote extensively about his own attempts to create a reformed astrology. So how are we to explain the loss of status of astrology in the 17th century?

The answer lies in another aspect of the scientific revolution. The Renaissance belief in astrology was based on the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos theory or as above so below. This theory said that the world of the heaven or celestial sphere is reflected in the normal world or terrestrial sphere and that the ability to read the one enabled predictions in the other. This philosophy was inherited from Greek philosophy and was also present in the interpretation of Aristotle that dominated mediaeval philosophy. As Aristotle was replaced as the foundation of natural philosophy by the new scientific philosophy of the 17th century and disappeared out of the academic realm the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos theory also lost its foothold in academia and with it astrology. Although this process was general throughout Europe it would appear that the reasons for the final loss of respectability for astrology varied from country to country. This has been researched in some countries, such as Britain, but not in others, such as Germany.

In Britain the English Revolution, or Civil War, played a major role in the demise of astrology. In the decades leading up to the English Revolution the social status of astrology was very strong and there was even a Society of Astrologers in London, which boasted many members of the intellectual elite amongst its supporters, such as Elias Ashmole and John Evelyn. During the Revolution astrologers on both sides used their reputations and supposed skills to make war propaganda for their troops, predicting victories and losses that were written in the stars. Following the restitution of the monarchy astrology fell into disrepute because the puritan astrologers had been more successful than the royalist ones. The Society of Astrology was also suspected as being a secret puritan organisation and so the members dissolved the society to remove the suspicion. The fashions in medicine also changed throughout the 16th and 17th century and by 1700 at the latest astro-medicine was out and Astro 101 was no longer part of the university curriculum.

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