There was a time not too long ago when people rushed out to buy a newspaper to read the daily horoscope. They would track down their astrological sign and devour the short description of what the stars had in store for them.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” as Puck puts it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s the classic Shakespearian line that always popped into my mind when I thought about astrology. Yet as Alexander Boxer’s new book, A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data, shows, we may owe a small debt of gratitude to the blasphemous study of the stars.
Boxer writes early in the book that astrology’s “taboo status as the arch-pseudoscience makes it all the more delicious to think about.” A data scientist with a doctorate in physics from MIT, he is sympathetic to premodern astrologers, whom he views as the “quants and data scientists of their day,” as well as “the originators, and for most of history the sole cultivators of a tradition that transmuted numbers into stories.”
It’s interesting to note that astrology and astronomy were once viewed as interchangeable fields of academic study. Boxer points out that many of the “principal innovators” of mathematics and astronomy “were themselves practicing astrologers.” Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1400) uses the words “astrology” and “astronomy” three times apiece, “with no obvious distinction between them.” A small contingency table Boxer created of astrology and astronomy books written in the 15th century reveals there were far more of the former than the latter (23 titles versus 5) — and even today, books with one of the words in the title are “split right down the middle.”
Boxer traces astrology, which he informally defines as the study of “the configurations of the heavens above [that] can influence our lives here on Earth,” back to the ancient world. The Egyptian pyramids, for instance, contained inscriptions detailing a pharaoh’s “celestial journey to the afterlife.” One of the oldest of these “Pyramid Texts,” in the tomb made for Pharaoh Unas, dates back to 2350 B.C. Boxer mentions clay astronomy tablets (the MULAPIN or “Plough Star” series), dated to 687 B.C., discovered in the 1800s in the royal library of the Assyrian Empire, in modern Iraq. He also points to an astronomical diary from 331 B.C., now located in London’s Birth Museum, that details an eclipse that occurred just before Alexander the Great defeated Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela.
Ancient Rome and Greece both had a fascination with the stars and planets.
The Roman military leader Marcus Claudius Marcellus, for instance, successfully waged war against the Sicilian city of Syracuse in 212 B.C. by using secret information that its “north wall would be lightly defended during the city’s festival to Artemis, the virgin huntress and goddess of the Moon.” Thrasyllus — who would serve as a “trusted confidant” to the Roman Emperors Augustus and Tiberius — and his son Balbilus “were able to maintain their position as imperial astrologers for a combined period of over seventy-five years.” And the Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius was the first known author to describe the 12 signs of the zodiac, which are mentioned in his Astronomica, composed between 30 and 40 A.D.
“Even today, two thousand years later,” Boxer wrote, “there is hardly any astrological idea, no matter how sophisticated or complex, which can’t trace its debut” to Manilius’s didactic poem.
It would be easy to chalk up the ancient world’s fascination with astrology to its ignorance and naiveté. Yet A Scheme of Heaven shows that this supposed nonsense played a significant role in the modern world.
For instance, the brilliant Greek mathematician Ptolemy’s second-century book on astrology, Tetrabiblos, “was still required reading in the astronomy curriculum” when the great mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus studied at the University of Bologna in 1496. The Persian Jewish mathematician Masha’allah ibn Athari produced studies on the orbital patterns of Jupiter and Saturn in the eighth century that were carried on by other prominent scientists, including German astronomer Johannes Kepler. In one of the more bizarre associations identified by Boxer, the 13th-century astrologer and mathematician Guido Bonatti’s Ten Treatises helped establish “matching algorithms” for forecasting into the future about everything from planning banquets to buying and selling on the stock market.
That’s not to mention the effects of astrology on literature, in particular the works of Shakespeare. Boxer reminds us of the “star-cross’d lovers” in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet’s cosmological intuitions (“O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space”), and the nearly 150 references to “star,” starry,” and “stars” in the Bard of Avon’s plays and sonnets — all of which make my previous line look a tiny bit shaky, truth be told.
Boxer, to his credit, has produced an illuminating revisionist history of astrology that doesn’t revise the arch-pseudoscience one iota. We can all continue to accept that astrology is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Yet the seemingly far-fetched practice of peering into the stars led to great scientific discoveries, data collection, the seven-day workweek, and early prototypes for mechanical clocks. Maybe there’s more to it than meets the astrological eye.
Michael Taube, a Troy Media syndicated columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
