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How reading fate in the stars travelled three thousand years: from the first Babylonian horoscope and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos through the astrologers of Islam and the Renaissance courts to astrology's divorce from astronomy and its modern revival in newspaper...
How reading fate in the stars travelled three thousand years: from the first Babylonian horoscope and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos through the astrologers of Islam and the Renaissance courts to astrology's divorce from astronomy and its modern revival in newspaper columns, the Reagan White House, and the smartphone.
A Babylonian scribe casts the earliest known horoscope for an individual, recording the positions of the planets at a child's birth to read its fate. Astrology turns from the fate of kingdoms to the fate of persons, the form it still takes today.
In Greek-ruled Egypt, Babylonian planetary science, the zodiac, and Egyptian ideas combine into horoscopic astrology, complete with the twelve houses and the rising sign. This Hellenistic synthesis is the direct ancestor of all Western astrology.
Roman emperors repeatedly banish astrologers from the city while secretly keeping their own, so feared was the power to read a ruler's death in the stars. Astrology sat at the heart of Roman politics even as it was outlawed.
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The same Ptolemy who wrote the great astronomy textbook also writes the Tetrabiblos, the standard handbook of astrology for the next 1,500 years. Astronomy and astrology were one science, taught together, well into the modern age.
The Persian astrologer Abu Ma'shar (Albumasar) becomes the most influential astrologer of the Islamic Golden Age. His works, translated into Latin, carried Greek and Babylonian astrology into medieval Europe, where it was taught in the universities.
The French astrologer Nostradamus publishes Les Propheties, cryptic astrological verses that would be read as prophecy for centuries. Renaissance kings and queens kept court astrologers, and the stars guided affairs of state.
The mathematician and occultist John Dee sets the date of Elizabeth I's coronation by astrology and serves as her adviser. Science, magic, and astrology were still one world at the birth of the modern age.
Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, earned his living partly by casting horoscopes for noble patrons. He called astrology astronomy's 'foolish little daughter', yet the two had not yet parted ways.
As the new science took hold, learned academies dropped astrology and it lost its place in the universities. For the first time in three thousand years, the study of the stars and the reading of fate went separate ways.
After a British newspaper runs an astrological column on the birth of Princess Margaret, the sun-sign horoscope, one forecast for each of the twelve signs, becomes a fixture of the popular press. It made astrology a daily habit for millions.
It emerges that astrologer Joan Quigley had for years helped set the schedule of US President Ronald Reagan, timing events by the stars at the First Lady's request. Documented in the chief of staff's memoir, it showed astrology reaching the highest office in the world.
Smartphone apps and social media drive a boom in astrology among a new generation, turning the ancient Babylonian art into a billion-dollar wellness industry. The oldest of pseudosciences finds its largest audience yet in the most modern of media.