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Praise of Astrology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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By the end of the seventeenth century, high culture had banished astrology as a mixture of superstition and imposture. The great astrological treatises of the past - in particular the Ptolemaic Tetrabiblos (whose very authenticity was cast into doubt) - stopped being published; a hodgepodge of minor writings, mostly preserved in manuscript form, lay mouldering in oblivion in the far recesses of libraries. It was only in the latter decades of the eighteenth century that the learned world began once again to pay attention to the ancient art, when historians of ancient religions and science began to realize the impossibility of exploring their subjects without taking into account a presence that could be neither denied nor underestimated. The history of astrology then began to take shape as a specific field of study, and historicophilological research was able to employ it as a tool for penetrating the tie between mythos and logos, at the origin of western civilization. Along with the image of the Greek miracle, an overly simplistic and schematic definition of reason and science began to decline. It was necessary to isolate, as Hermann Usener sought to do, the “wild germ of science” and to acknowledge the fact that logic and magic bloom on the same stem, as Aby Warburg has often reminded us, with reference to Jean Paul.
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- Copyright © 1998 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. For a modem English edition, see Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. by T.E. Robbins, London, Cambridge.
2. The reader is referred above all to Usener's 1873 essay on Censorino and to his 1901 review of A. Bouché-Leclercq's L'astrologie grecque, both found in H. Usener, Kleine Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin, 1912), vol. 3, pp. 11-21 and pp. 372- 376. The question of Ptolemaic texts is discussed in F. Boll, “Studien über Claudius Ptolemaeus,” Jahrbücher für klassische Philologie, Suppl. vol. 21, 1894, pp. 52-244.
3. A. Warburg, “Art italien et astrologie internationale au Palazzo di Schifanoia à Ferrara,” in Aby Warburg, Essais florentins, intro. Evelyne Pinto (Paris, 1990), pp. 197-220 (“Arte italiana e astrologia internationale nel Palazzo Schifanoia de Ferrara,” 1912, in La Rinascita del paganesimo antico [Florence, 19802]; again in M. Bertozzi, La tirannia degli astri: Gli affreschi astrologici di Palazzo Schifanoia [Livorno, 19992]); F. Saxl, La storia delle immagini (Bari, 1982/2), and La fede negli astri. Dall'antichità al Rinascimento, edited by S. Settis (Turin, 1985). The essay by Panofsky and Saxl, Dürers “Melencolia I”: Eine Quellen- und Typen geschichtliche Untersuchung, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, II (Leipzig-Berlin, 1923), underwent long and adventurous reworkings before finally being pub lished as R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London and New York, 1964).
4. F. Boll, Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder (Leipzig, 1903; Hildesheim, 1967).
5. E. Cassirer, La forme du concept dans la penséee mythique. Oeuvres VI (Cerf, 1997), p. 73; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, ed. M. Domandi, Oxford, 1963. (Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, X [Leipzig, 1927]).
6. E. Weil, La philosophie de Pietro Pomponazzi. Pic de la Mirandole et la critique de l'astrologie (Paris, 1985).
7. E. Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life, trans. C. Jackson and J. Allen (London, 1983). (Lo zodiaco della vita. La polemica sull'astrologia dal Trecento al Cinquecento [Roma-Bari, 1976/2 (1943)]). But at least two other essays by Garin should also be consulted: “Magie et astrologie dans la culture de la Renaissance” and “Considérations sur la magie,” in Moyen Age et Renaissance, trans. Claude Carme (Paris, 1969) (Medioevo e Rinoscimento, Bari, 1954).
8. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Stars down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrol ogy Column, A Study in Secondary Superstition,” in Soziologische Schriften, II (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1975).
9. “Est igitur Astrologia, ut pulcherrima, sic laboriosissima et difficillima,” G. Cardano, Aphorismorum astrologicorum segmenta septem, 1547, in Opera Omnia (Lugduni, 1663), vol. 5, p. 31.
10. In French in the original Italian text.
11. Carl G. Jung, Nécrologie de Richard Wilhelm, in Oeuvres, vol. 13 (1930); Études sur l'alchimie; commentaire du secret du nombre d'or (1929). Italian version in Opere, vol. 13, Studi sull'alchimia (Turin, 1988), p. 70; Commeno al Segreto del fiore d'oro, ibid., p. 45.
12. In French in the original Italian text.
13. For more in-depth development of these observations, the reader is referred to O. Pompeo Faracovi, Scritto negli astri. L'astrologia nella cultura dell'occidente (Venice, 1996).
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