Star Goddess

History of Astrology

Astrology is a a Language of symbols: It is a Science of relationships, a System that classifies, a Study of cycles and a Discipline of thought.

The roots of astrology can be traced back to Babylon, where Chaldean Priests scanned the heavens, making connections between events on Earth and events in the heavens. A collection of more than 7,000 observations, known as the Enuma Anu Enlil, has survived on cuneiform tablets excavated from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The earliest representation of the signs of the Zodiac was found on one of these cuneiform tablets. They show that such signs as lunar halos, eclipses and the first appearances of the planets were monitored. These were seen as signaling good or evil fortune for the state, and particularly for the royal family, who seem to have been the diviners principal patrons.

The reputation of the Babylonian star-gazers spread in the Middle East. It was the Sumerians who first named the 12 signs of the zodiac and tracked the course of the elliptic - the path the sun follows against the fixed stars during the year, as observed from Earth. These signs have come down through the ages virtually unchanged.

The birth of astrology proper appears to have followed Alexander the Great's conquest of Mesopotamia in 330 BCE and the meeting of Babylonian and classical Greek culture that ensued. A new center of learning developed at Alexandria, the city that Alexander founded on Egypt's Mediterranean coast.

Here, following the duodecimal pattern already established for the months, Greek-speaking savants divided the ecliptic into 12 equidistant sections, each covering 30 degrees of the sun's 360 degree journey. Each section was associated with the pattern of stars visible in the relevant portion of the night sky, for in the astronomy of the time the Earth was considered the center of the universe, with the sun and moon orbiting around it against a backdrop of fixed stars.

Each equidistant section highlighted a particular star pattern. These patterns became known as the constellations and the signs of the zodiac. The 12 sections, or houses, into which the ecliptic was divided provided the background for astrology. The classical world knew only the Sun, Moon and five planets visible to the naked eye, and Sumerian astrologers assigned each one certain characteristics based on their long experience of observation.

At the time, astrology was considered almost the perfect science, linking each aspect of life on Earth with the machine-like working of the rest of the universe. In its extreme form some astrologers believed that astrology was completely deterministic. By close study of his/her charts, the astrologer could compute all the movements of the heavenly bodies and work out the pattern of the past and the future. In practice, most astrologers believed that the planets exerted an influence on people's lives, but still allowed individuals a degree of free will to move with or against the pull of the heavens.

The new science spread rapidly east, reaching India by at least the second century CE and then moving on with Buddhist missionaries to China where a separate but allied tradition developed. From there, the science moved southeast into Asia. Astrology also became firmly entrenched in Iran, and later in the Islamic countries and the Byzantine lands of Eastern Europe and the Near East. Oddly, almost the only region where astrology remained virtually unknown was western Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire.

Although knowledge of astrology was lost along with the knowledge of Greek, in which most of its key texts were written, the Arabs took the texts back to Arabia and kept it alive during the Dark Ages. It was only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the first stirrings of the Renaissance, largely thanks to translations of Arabic treatises made under Moorish influence in Spain.

Thereafter astrologers flourished in all the European countries. Astrologers were routinely consulted by rulers and politicians, and their discipline held a prestigious position in the universities; Galileo held the Chair of Astrology at the University of Pisa. Astrology was not just an intellectually valid science but also a centrally important one.

Hypatia

During this time, Alexandria grew to be the center of the learned world. One of the most educated men in Alexandria and the last head of the great Library of Alexandria, was a man by the name of Theon. A mathematician, best remembered today as the source of our text of Euclid's Elements, Theon was also a major commentator of the work of Ptolemy, the astronomer whose account of the solar system reigned supreme until supplanted by Copernicus in relatively recent times. Theon had a daughter whose name was Hypatia. Born in 370 CE, Hypatia was the first woman known to have actively participated in an academic community.

She become renowned as a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and Platonic philosopher and surpassed her father and all other scholars of her time in knowledge as well as in reputation. People traveled long distances to hear her lectures. She has been credited with contributions to geometry and astrometry, which is the determination of the positions and motions of stars and solar system objects and the establishment of celestial reference frames. It is believed that she was instrumental in developing the astrolabe, an astronomical device used for solving problems relating to time and the position of the Sun and stars in the sky.

Hypatia is known primarily for her work on the ideas of conic sections introduced by Apollonius. She edited the work "On the Conics of Apollonius," which divided cones into different parts by a plane. This concept developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses. Hypatia is thought to be the first woman to have a profound impact upon mathematics and thought, simplifying Apollonius' concepts on conics.

Physically beautiful, devotedly celibate, she was the revered teacher of a man (Synesius of Cyrene) who, after his conversion to Christianity, helped formulate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, using neoplatonist principles learned at her feet.

However, it was not a good time to be an iatromathematician. Nor a neoplatonist. By the late fourth century the Roman empire was divided. Officially Christian, but patronizing to others: Jews, heretical sects, diverse schools of neoplatonists and other assorted "pagans" - and all of them at one another's throats. Alexandria in particular was seething with intercommunal rivalry and sectarian bitterness.

In 392, the Christian archbishop, Theophilus, obtained imperial permission to destroy the temple of Serapis, the deity of many Alexandrian pagans. After a series of bloody battles, he succeeded and set out to establish on the site a church dedicated to St John the Baptist.

In such a climate, iatromathematicians, as astrologers were known in Egypt, came to have a bad name. The Ptolemaic system of the universe (despite its later overthrow by the Copernican) was one of the world's earliest and still greatest scientific achievements. By its use, the positions of the planets could be foretold, and even more tellingly, eclipses could be predicted with great accuracy.

Then, as now, the business of science was to foretell the future. But for ordinary people, the future that most interested them was not so much the state of the heavens, as their own immediate future. Reputable astronomers and geometers like Theon and Hypatia got confused in the popular and in the ecclesiastical mind with less reputable practitioners and all were lumped together as "mathematicians".

The council of Laodicea in the mid-4th century outlawed "divination" and forbade priests to practice mathematics; at about the same time the emperor Constantius decided that no one may consult a soothsayer or a mathematician.

In the year 412 Archbishop Theophilus died and was succeeded by his nephew Cyril. Although Theophilus had destroyed the temple of Serapis, he had never, in over 30 years, moved against Hypatia. In part this may very well have been a result of his friendship with Hypatia's influential and adoring pupil, Synesius of Cyrene. However, Synesius died in 413 , and Hypatia was suddenly without her powerful protectors.

Cyril, making use of a 500-strong private militia, began to exert his authority in the temporal as well as in the spiritual sphere, and thus he came into conflict with the civil governor, Orestes. In 415, violence escalated and Cyril's powerful militia made a direct assassination attempt on Orestes. The attempt failed and the governor was able to apprehend and murder one of the assassins.

Cyril was furious and, managing to get hold of the body, pronounced over it a ceremony of canonization, enrolling the would-be assassin in the calendar of the saints (where he remained until this century).

Hypatia was close to Orestes and there was a rumor that it was Hypatia's influence that prevented the Christian Orestes from accepting Cyril's spiritual direction and becoming reconciled with his rival. Moreover she was seen as one "devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, [who] beguiled many people through her satanic wiles, and the governor ... through her magic."

Hypatia was attacked, torn from her carriage and dragged into a church, where she was stripped naked and battered to death with roofing tiles. The mob tore her body limb from limb, took her mangled remains out from the church, and burned them.

"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all," Hypatia is credited with saying. No good deed goes unpunished is what I say.

Hypatia is my personal hero. Is there a physical resemblance, too?