# Astrology: from the Babylonian sky to the horoscope

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.

*This story parallel: The old gods and their long shadow*
*This story continues: Babylonian astronomy and the birth of the zodiac*
*This story part of: State, law, and coercion*
*Ptolemy: the map of the heavens and the earth parallel this story*

## c. 410 BCE — The world's first personal horoscope

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.

## c. 150 BCE — Hellenistic astrology fuses Babylon and Egypt

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.

## c. 16 — Rome expels its astrologers, then obeys them

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.

## c. 150 — Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos codifies astrology

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.

## c. 850 — Abu Ma'shar carries astrology into Islam and Europe

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.

## 1555 — Nostradamus publishes his prophecies

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.

## c. 1558 — John Dee, astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I

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.

## c. 1600 — Kepler founds modern astronomy while casting horoscopes

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.

## c. 1666 — The scientific revolution divorces astrology from astronomy

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.

## 1930 — The newspaper horoscope is born

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.

## 1988 — An astrologer in the Reagan White House

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.

## c. 2017 — The digital astrology revival

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.