Marriage and Divorce of Astronomy and Astrology

1

Marriage

and

Divorce

of

Astronomy

and

Astrology,A

History

of

Astral

Prediction

from

Antiquity

to

Newton

I S B N 9 7 8 - 1 -4 1 1 6- 8 3 26 -6

Gordon Fisher g f i she r @ s hen t e l .net

ContentsChapter 1. Some Sources of Astral BeliefsChapter 2. From Astral Beliefs to Kepler, Fludd and Newton

Appendix to Chapter 2: Newton’s Laws

Chapter 3. Some Astrological TechniquesChapter 4. From Babylon to CopernicusChapter 5. Stoics, Kepler, and Evaluations

Appendix to Chapter 4: Diodorus Siculus (of Sicily), Bibliotheca Historica, Book II,28:29-31

Chapter 6. Earlier Christians and AstrologyChapter 7. From Ptolemy to Newton

Appendix to Chapter 7: Pierre d'Ailly, and Newton Again

Updates and Addenda

2

Chapter 1. Some Sources of Astral Beliefs

Even a god cannot change the past.

Agathon, born c. 445 B.C.E

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because theycan be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

Samuel Butler,

Erewhon Revisited,

1901

Who says there’s a past? Show me where it is!

1. The heavens, the ones where the stars and other assorted celestial objects are, were for a long time regarded as the place where the gods are, and the place from which directions aregiven and powers exerted for what takes pl ace on earth. Aristotle said there is something beyond the bodies which are on earth, different and separate from them, and that the glory of this somethinggrows greater as its distance from this world of ours increases. The

primary

body, he says, the oneat the greatest distance from earth, is eternal and unchanging. For, Aristotle says confidently,surely there are gods, and they are immortal, and

everyone

agrees they are located in the

highest

place in the universe. He avers that the evidence of our senses tells us, at least with the certaintyattainable by humans, that in the past, as far as our records reach (meaning as far as the records

he

looked at seemed to him to reach) no change has taken place in the outermost heavens. So heconcluded that the

primary

body is something beyond earth, air, fire and water, which, he believed, make up the sort of things and activities we find on earth. This primary body is called the

aether,

Aristotle says, because it runs forever.

1

2. Aristotle based his theory on the evidence of our senses. He says phenomena confirmhis theory. He also says his theory confirms the phenomena. That is, predictions made with his

1

Aristotle (384 -322 B.C.),

De caelo (On the Heavens),

269b12- 16, 270b1 -23, translated by J. L. Stocks.In classical Greek, transliterated into Roman letters (more or less),

aei thein

means “to go on forever”. On the other hand,

aither

(often transliterated

aether

for some reason) means “upper air” or “the sky”, which suggests an origin of

aither

from the notion that the

upper

air or the sky goes on forever, as distinguished from the

lower

air, called by theGreeks

aer

(e = eta, not epsilon). One may be struck by the similarity of

theo

(o = omega, not omicron), “I run” to

theos

(o = omicron, not omega), “god”, but that may be accidental. On the other hand, Cicero says in his

De natura deorum(On the Nature of the Gods)

that “Zeno declares that the aether is god - if there is any meaning in a god withoutsensation, a form of deity that never presents itself to us when we offer up our prayers and supplications and make our vows.” (That’s the Stoic, Zeno of Citium, not Zeno of Elea, he of the paradoxes.) Plato stated in his

Timaeus

that the

aither

is a fifth element, and was quite taken with the analogy between

five

elements and the

five

regular solids, aswas Johannes Kepler much later. As shown in Euclid’s

Elements,

there are five and

only

five regular solids, thetetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron.

3

theory were verified by observation. He had an empirically based procedure, contrary to whatsome have said. Generously speaking, his failures appear often to have been due to lack of information, or incorrect interpretation of it; or to phenomena unnoticed or not examined closelyenough; or to new stars (if any were known to him) and comets being regarded as being relativelynear to our earth, perhaps

because

they showed change; or to insufficient knowledge of thechemical constitution of matter; and so on. That celestial objects are alive wasn't a bad conjecturein the context of what was known, since they appear to be

self-moving.

It seemed obvious that thisis a characteristic of

living

entities, although there are some quite sessile creatures. Other motions,then, such as flight of spears or running water, must be

caused

by some entity or entities, or forces, acting on them from outside of themselves. This suggests that birds and caterpillars, for example, can move themselves, without external motivation or incitement, when they are aliveand in a mobile condition.3. That the celestial objects are divine wasn't too bad a conjecture, either, given theoverall regularity and permanence of many of them visible without instrumental aids, over periodsof time which are long relative to human lives. When Aristotle associates the divine with the outer heavens, he doesn't actually say the outer heavens or the stars

are

gods. He says they are

like

gods by virtue of their unchanging nature.

2

On earth, change is everywhere. The living are born or sprout or otherwise come to be, are transformed or transform themselves, and eventually die or pass away or otherwise cease to exist.

3

Ores in the earth can be changed to metals, metals rust.Mountains explode or wear down. Waters flood or dry up, spring from the earth or fall fromabove; when boiled (using

fire

)

water

turns into

air

and when frozen

water

turns into a transparentform of

earth

(the four basic elements in the theory of Empedocles and Aristotle are

water, earth, fire

and

air).

Only the stars appear permanent and unchanging, he says. But, he asks, are there any

bodies

which last forever in one form? Those who believe there are immo rtal gods, says Aristotle,may be prepared to believe this too, and that the planets and stars are such bodies.4. The divinity and regularity of the movements of the sun, moon, planets and stars weretaken by many ancients as evidence that these celestia l objects

regulated

or at least

influenced

various kinds of changes on earth. The objects were considered by some to be quite tyrannical,and to

dictate

events on earth. This extraterrestrial autocracy was taken to mean that one canmake predictions about events on earth. If everything, or at least something, is dictated inadvance, then it is reasonable to try to find out in advance what will happen. Success of prediction depends on events being completely or at least partly

determined

in advance of their happening. There was an association of the divinity and the regularity of celestial objects withwhat we may rather pedantically call

astral determinism,

the doctrine that some, at least, of themyriad changes on earth are dictated by stars and planets.

4

This, in turn, is associated with the

2 We can get around a potential contradiction here to the fact that Aristotle says stars are

like

gods, rather than thatthey

are

gods, by considering

divine

here as indicating that stars partake in someway of the gods , or byregarding them as permanent instruments of the gods, or in various other ways.

3

Aristotle also wrote a book called

Peri geneseos kaiphthoras,

otherwise known as

De generatione et corruptione,

often rather euphemistically translated into English as

On coming- to- be and passing- away.

4 In ancient times, the

planets

were commonly taken to include our earth’s sun and moon, as well as the planets (intoday’s sense of the term) which were visible to unassisted eyes, viz. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Theword

planet

traces back to the Greek word

planasthai,

to wander, since these five celestial beings, together with

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