The Roots of Astrology
by André Barbault
Introduction
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When Didier Castille (the French Editor) and myself discussed with André which of his fifty or more books he wished to be the first translated into English, L’Astrologie Certifiée was his firm choice. How right he was! From its initial invocation of Urania to the intricate study of Picasso’s horoscope at the end, The Value of Astrology (its English title) is a deep study of the full range of the history, research, mundane and psychological areas of astrology, as well as its intrinsic nature and its future.
In Chapter 2 Very Early Sources below, André’s unique poetic style transforms scholarship of astrology’s roots into a living experience, as we see through the eyes of our ancestors at those times.
Chapter 2: Very early sources
Despite rich sources of information provided by archaeology, ethnology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, it is not easy to imagine the sentient thoughts of people from a distant time when faced with the universe. In addition to the access and the perspectives provided by these disciplines, we would, somehow, have to return to the womb of the alma mater.
The mindset which is dominant in our modern world gives rise to schizoid tendencies. This mental disposition is marked by a loss of emotional contact with reality, a lack of sensitivity towards the life on this planet. Having become a tipsy king of the Earth, man believes himself to be a creature apart, liberated from nature and having left the path where the things of this world are interlinked, to the point where we human beings are becoming the outlaws of the cosmos.
Early human beings were very different. Attached by necessity to their earthly condition, they respected the laws that connected them to plants and animals, to the elements and to the soil. Their souls were part of the fabric of ‘magical participation’ stretched between them and the things around them. These people really belonged in the workings of the world. They were at one with the universe; they were even the centrepiece. The conditions were perfect for them to read in Earth’s shadows, as in the stars, the signs by which the divine spoke to these people of nature’s temple.
Thus, at the most distant time in our history, there sprang up a system of ideas, inspired by the movement of the stars and the growth of plants. These ideas, by combining the life force with the laws of mathematics, connected human life and the systems which regulate it to nature itself and to the laws of the universe. Between the Neolithic era and the age of modern European science, this way of thought was the prevalent one. This was especially so in Asia, where it originated and where it played a determining role in the rise of religions, embryonic science, social philosophies, morals and metaphysics. The widespread long-lasting nature of these ideas gave them a truly civilising character.
This ‘astro-biology’(1) is the ancestor of astrology, its first precursor. It started to develop, many thousands of years before the Christian era, on the plains of Mesopotamia where the genesis of these ideas was integral to the development of a high culture from an agricultural society, just as the rise of experimental science in modern times is connected to great industries. In fact, by making the vital connection between stars and plants, the relationship between the growth of the wheat in their fields and the movement of the Sun in their sky, Chaldean observers discovered one of the first elements of science.
In the Chaldean civilisation, the harmony of the skies
transmitted itself to Earth and to terrestrial beings in a unitary vision
of nature, mankind and the universe. They applied the idea of numerical
relationship, established by the measurement and calculation of celestial
phenomena, to the sequence of events on Earth. We see them relating the
impersonal mathematical laws of recurring astronomical cycles to the
rhythms of vegetal life in the concept of a general unity of life,
nature and the law.
There was a definite step in the direction of astrology after the emergence of the idea of a unity, or an interchange between the lives of celestial bodies and those of terrestrial bodies; and if the lives of human beings are also involved, it is because we are not fundamentally different from vegetal life or from nature, a construct resulting from the notion that human law and cosmic order are one and the same.
Every town in Mesopotamia had its temple-observatory in the shape
of a tower or a tiered pyramid with the angles orientated to the four
cardinal points. This ‘sky hill’ or ziggurat, which housed
the doctors of the priesthood, was intended to link the Earth with the
sky and had at its summit the sanctuary of a god.
The Chaldean astrology practised here was based on a pre-existing
scientific astronomy founded on methodical observations, calculated in
order to predict the evolution of time. Already it had become an
“astronomy based on place”, and in particular it is an
astronomy which looks at angular movements. The forecasts and predictions
drawn from it were concerned with the fate of the sovereign and the
state, and this allowed the establishment of an agricultural calendar and
a calendar of religious ceremonies. All the important acts of public life
were subjected to astral interpretation; for example, everywhere on any
temple or palace are numerous inscriptions of the type: “I,
so-and-so, king of Assur and of Chaldea, I built this temple in honour of
my lord, at a propitious time…” The documents relating to these
ancient times go back to 4000 B.C.E, but the first epigraphic attestation
featured the celebrated prediction of Sargon of Akkad (2400 B.C.E.): this
was a forecast based on an observation of Venus and it refers to the
founder of the dynasty of Akkad. A tablet of baked clay, in a perfect
state of conservation, which concerns a portent based on a lunar
eclipse:
The King of Akkad dies and his subjects are safe.
The power of the King of Akkad will weaken.
His subjects prosper.
This eclipse occurred on 11 May (Julian calendar) 2259 years B.C.E
and coincided with the death of Naram-Sin, the grandson of Sargon. There
are thousands of tablets, conserved in the British Museum, which came
from the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, and another fifty thousand
tablets that were found in the library of the temple of Nippur, south east
of Babylon, containing documents spanning the years between 3000 and 500
B.C.E.
The predictions concern the community via their royal representative,
but they gradually switch from the king to the individual. Here are some
predictions that wouldn’t surprise the modern astrologer:
- If a child is born when Venus is rising, his life will be calm, voluptuous; wherever he goes, he will be loved; his days will be long.
- If a child is born when Venus is rising and when Jupiter is setting, later, his wife will be stronger than him.
- If a child is born when Jupiter is rising and when Mars is setting, he will have happiness and will see his enemies brought down.
The passage of a planet across the horizon...These first drops of milk of personal astrology drawn from the breast of Urania (effectively our first historical documents on the subject) form the basis of horoscopy, and we will see the respect due to them from the results of the calculation of probabilities.
It is natural that Chaldean astrology-astronomy was ordered within a generalised, animist and vitalist vision of the world… In ancient writings using the cuneiform script of the Sumerian language – the oldest language known to man – there is an ideogram which shows God in the shape of a star, and what is more, in a number of languages. The word ‘God’ is derived from a common Sanskrit root div, which means ‘to light’ or ‘to shine’. We cast ourselves in this ancient tradition when we invoke the prayer “Our Father who art in heaven”.
The divine call was first directed at the sky, towards the stars
moving high above in another universe, and it is increasingly accepted
that a belief in the stars was an essential phase in the general
evolution of religions, which were gradually lifted out of animism and
fetishism into superior types of worship. The heavens “tell the
glory of God”, says the psalmist, and the celestial vault is the
gateway to the divine city.
In the resulting spiritual system, the stars are imbued with vegetal energy; at the same time that God is defined as being ‘bio-astral’. In the oldest documents, the Sumerian gods are in direct contact with trees and plants. Sin, the lunar god, is associated (as is Osiris in Egypt) with the life force which makes plants grow. The stars are living, animated and divine; the planets are identified with great gods; their movements express the activity of the gods incarnated in them, divine regulators of natural life, vegetable, animal or human. These nomadic stars which move in their sky become the ‘interpreters’ of the spiritual powers with which they are assimilated.
The official religion of Babylon is a religion of destiny imposed by the gods.(2) The rule of destiny, with its qualification of time, is established by the link with the divine, with history and with the world. Above all, it is divine will, the gods being the true kings of the universe, from whom, by delegation, the earthly kings take their power. The world of the gods, represented in human form, is only a superior and exemplary representation of the human world. Human beings are objects of fate; to live in a time laden with destiny is to participate in destiny. Stones and plants appear to function as objects of destiny and consequently temples, statues, towns and edifices also have a destiny. Thus, we can understand the meaning of foundation stone ceremonies and the dedication of a building at a given time when the king or the priest acts for the deity, in a procedure designed to ‘fix destiny’. Destiny can be seen as a pronouncement emanating from a transcendental power, which invests in mankind a purpose or a mission to fulfil; it is a form of determinism which overwhelms us and incorporates us in the cycles of the world. It is not, however, a complete misfortune because we can see ourselves as players in an organic vision of life.
In the Babylonian pantheon, the rule of destiny is administered by
a hierarchical community of great gods. While each god has their own task
or separate domain, the members of the divine assembly are united by a
strong bond and exercise their power collectively. At the head of
Sumerian society is the king-priest, the leader of a divine patrimony. He,
too, carries an inner destiny (grace, predestination, talents….) and he
serves and brings to fruition the actions of the gods as priest and head
of society. Mr. David states that this Babylonian notion of destiny
constitutes “the first complete system of civilisation on which we
can reasonably hang a string of beliefs, ideas and doctrines which served
us well until the dawn of modern times”.
From the plains of Mesopotamia, this nascent astrology spread in ever
widening circles, disseminating itself in every direction: Persia, India,
China, Arabia, Egypt, Greece.
Likewise, in China we see the king-priest of a celestial
religion serving as an intermediary between God and men. Again, we have
the union of astronomy, agriculture and law (the agricultural calendar),
as well as the basis of social order. This is the imperial cult of the
Sky, the emperor being charged with making the unchanging order of
celestial motion apply to public life; he is the Son of the Sky. Through
this cult human society connected itself astro-biologically to the
celestial order. The fall of the first dynasty, that of the Hia, would
have been caused by an astronomical error, the occurrence of an
unforeseen eclipse of the Sun. Because the Sky had demonstrated by the
ensuing chaos that it had turned away from this dynasty, they had to
appeal to a new emperor to put right the unrest and re-establish the
accord between the Earth and the Sky of which power must be the agent of
essential virtue. At their geneses, Confucianism and Taoism were fed by
this astro-biological thought. The Tao is the life force of the universe
and of man:
The Tao, which manifests itself in the Sun in the sky, also manifests itself in the heart of man.
If Taoism is directly related to astrology, Confucianism also models human nature on the nature of the universe and establishes a moral code based on the laws of the sky.
In India, the same basic thought forms the root or the framework of the principal philosophical pathways. It is evident in the bio-solar religion of the Veda, and the speculations of the Upanishad lead to the identity of the human soul and the soul of the world, while the techniques of yoga are related to a vitalist theory of the harmonious relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. For its part, Buddhist thought comprises a philosophy of nature combined with astronomy; it adopts the notion of an impersonal law which gives moral support. Being astro-biological philosophies, the Sankhya and the Vaisheshika are neighbours of Taoism, and Jainism carries strong traces of it; the appearance of the notion of universal love is historically linked to the affirmation of universal astronomical law.
Judaic and Islamic monotheism were both equally subject to astro-biological influence, because the idea of a single god emanates from the idea of the unity of the universe, coming from this concept in the same way that the solar god rapidly became the supreme god, the preponderant divinity in the polytheist pantheon.
Astrology came to Egypt much later. There,
it took on a stellar character with the establishment of the triple
connection between the start of the Nile flood, the solstice in Cancer
(the scarab) and the heliacal rising of Sirius (Sothis). The civil
calendar was founded on these phenomena: when this star, the brightest in
the sky, rises in the east with the Sun, the great flood renews the
fertility of the earth which fills the granaries of the country. The
rising of Sirius was also used to forecast the state of the nation. The
twelve signs of the zodiac appear on the ceiling of the Ptolemaic
funerary vaults.
The Hellenic civilisation gave its own definitive structure to astrology. Its various philosophical systems made contributions which were always in keeping with astro-biological thought. Greek science or ‘wisdom’, as shown in the writings of physicians such as Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, affirms a belief in the essential and substantial unity of the world. The underlying dogma of astrology was created here: the unity of man and the universe, the interdependence of the part and the whole. With Pythagoras (the title ‘mathematician’, later held by astrologers, was invented in his school), this universal accord expresses itself in harmonic, rhythmic, numerical and geometric ways.
The philosophers of the Eleatic school, Herakleides, Empedocles, Leucippus, Democritus and Anaxagoras, applied this connection between man and the world to the laws governing the elements. In the Socratic school, Plato makes a huge contribution with his propositions in the Timaeus, a bookwhich will become the breviary of astrologers: the world is one, it is a living being, the stars are living gods, the creation of human beings on Earth is brought about by the cooperation of all the planetary gods; they are imitations of the world which is itself an imitation of God, a theme taken up later by Philon and others. Later, Aristotle helped to determine the basic rules of astrological interpretation with his theory which relates the four elements to the four elementary principles: hot, cold, dry and wet.
But it was primarily the Stoics (Zeno, Chrysippus…) who contributed most to the elaboration of astrological theory when they based the influence of the stars on the notion of ‘sympathy’, expressing the epic nature of the myths in astronomical or cosmogonic allegories, and completing the idea of man-microcosm…In medicine, Hippocrates founded the principles of astro-biology in applying to the human body the measure of the rhythms that astronomers observe in the universal body (cycles of illness, critical days, etc.). This cosmological medicine gave birth to the astrological idea that there is a link between the four elements and the four Hippocratic temperaments, a correlation which continues to make a fortune for today’s astrologers.
According to Pliny, the great astronomer Hipparchus
steadfastly believed “in the connection between the stars and man
and that our souls are a part of the sky”. One of his astrological
texts is the Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus inspired by
The Treatise on Phenomena of Eudoxus of Cnidus. It essentially
fell to Ptolemy to make an appraisal of astrological tradition. The
Hellenic civilisation opened itself permanently to astrology with the
arrival of Berossus (around 280 B.C.E.), who came to Cos from his natal
Mesopotamia to teach, as did his contemporary Conon of Samos, a friend of
Archimedes. The Stoics were their first disciples and collaborators. They
supplied them with their essential tools and introduced them to the
sanctuary of philosophy; they were followed by the Neo-Pythagoreans and by
the Neo-Platonists.
It is thus that natal astrology took shape in Greece. Freed from the primitive images of early peoples and from the imaginary shapes and myths of oriental astrology, the Hellenic astral religion gave birth to spiritual entities that were perfect and immortal. The mythology belonging to the Greek Pantheon had the effect of hiding the direct relationship between star and god behind the bio-cosmic transformation of divine will into the laws of nature, the Stoic Posidonius putting astrology in the same category as other general theories about the forces of nature. In this spiritual universe an elaborate cosmology is linked to a doctrine of correspondences (a doctrine of universal sympathy - astrological tenets being founded on the principle similia similibus – applied to the unity of the cosmos and the interdependence of all its constituents), again one of the constituents of the philosophical foundation of astrology.
This influence was openly recognised by a large sector of Hellenic civilisation. It fashioned the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. It inspired the work of Homer: the Homeric hymns to Apollo and Aphrodite as well as the Iliad, which reflects the anthropocentric religion of the time. Hesiod also wrote about it in Works and Days. Architecture and sculpture express the same thought. The symbolic value of astrology is depicted behind temples and sanctuaries erected to the deities: Zeus, Poseidon, Diana; the most beautiful masterpieces of statuary that portray the astral divinities for all eras, the only lasting human prototypes. This is where the astro-mythic dream of our origins gave birth to the most prestigious creations of art and culture.
Rome continued along this path. Varro and Figulus made the scientific rules of the ‘mathematicians’ (previously called the ‘Chaldeans’) available to ordinary people. In his Georgics, a true astrological almanac before its time, Virgil put his poetry to the service of natural astrology. Manilius sang to the beauties of the sky in his Astronomica and celebrated astrology as a divine revelation reserved for noble souls. Seneca dedicated a part of his Natural Questions to him for initiating his belief in the influence of the stars; for Lucian, Horace, Persius, Quintilian, Tacitus and Macrobius it was the same. Cicero and Sextus Empiricus were major opponents of astrology. They witnessed the damaging spectacle of astrology in the hands of charlatans, something that was bound to accompany the moral degradation of a civilisation falling into decadence. But the great families and the emperors had their official astrologers: Octavius, Augustus (who stamped silver coins with his natal sign of Capricorn), Tiberius, Agrippa, Otho, Vespasian, Domitian, some of them having even become adherents or experts, like Titus, Marcus Aurelius, Septimus Severus and Alexander Severus…This was history rich in colourful anecdotes.
Looking at the world as a whole, we must not forget the
astro-biological civilisation of America before Columbus, that of the
Mayans and Aztecs. At the height of the Mayan civilisation, between 400
and 600 C.E., Copan was a city of priest-astronomers in their
observatories. A rectangular temple stood at the top of a terraced
pyramid, as in Babylon, and was orientated towards the four cardinal
points, just like a Chaldean temple or a Chinese palace. Here, maize was
venerated in a cult which celebrated the periodic renewal of the life
force that is associated with the sun-god, a role played by wheat in
Chaldea or in the cults of Osiris or Demeter.
It should also be acknowledged that Christianity owes something to the influence of astro-biological thought. In the Gospel of St John, Christ is presented initially as being the true light and as having the quality of immortal life; and is thus incorporated into a bio-solar god that has been spiritualised by the philosophical influence of ancient Greece. In addition, the celebration of the Lord’s nativity takes place at midnight on the winter solstice, the moment in the year when the Sun is at its lowest, a perfect symbol for the return of the light. For the passion and resurrection of Christ – the twelve apostles forming a zodiac for this Sun – the Church set the date close to the spring equinox, on a Sunday, a day dedicated to the Sun. Moreover, the early Christians prayed facing east, towards the rising Sun. In addition, the ethic of universal love comes from the belief in astro-biological solidarity, in a universal ‘sympathy’ between all living creatures; the ideal of one-ness which came from an astronomical source.
Remember also that on the tympanum of the great doors of various cathedrals there is a cross surrounding Christ formed by the fixed signs of the zodiac: as we can see in Angoulême, Arles, Burgos, Canterbury, Chartres, Moissac, etc., the four signs have become evangelical symbols, the bull for St Luke, the lion for St Mark, the eagle for St John, as well as the angel of Aquarius for St Matthew. The cosmic nature of Christianity still endures with the resplendent rose windows of the cathedrals with their twelve zodiacal-apostolic branches. So, the Church is enveloped in its cosmological atmosphere.
It does not seem excessive to recognise that life in ancient civilisations was, as a general rule, dominated by astrological ideas. On all continents the law of the sky presided over the order of terrestrial life. Empires were organised in harmony with the march of the stars, their social structures reflecting the cosmic order. Everywhere temples and altars were modelled on the cosmos. The pyramid with its seven planetary terraces orientated towards the cardinal points, from the top of which the priest-astrologer-astronomer observed the stars, can be found in such disparate places as Mexico, China, Chaldea and Angkor. The calendar is an astronomical programme, concerned with nature, politics and religion; social rites, as well as customs and beliefs, form part of the laws that the sky imposes on nature as a whole. Religions - principally Taoism, Manichaeism and Mazdaism, but also Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity – have taken root in cosmic-biological thought.
We could say that, up to a given point in time, symbolic astrological thought was intertwined with the religious esotericism of all the ancient civilisations at the same time as it was predominant as a way of thought.
Notes:
1 Cf. René
Berthelot, La pensée de l’Asie et l’Astrobiologie
(Asian Thought and Astrobiology), Payot, 1972
2 Cf. M.
David, Les Dieux et le Destin en Babylon (The Gods and
Destiny in Babylon), PUF 1949
Image sources:
Milky way and night sky: Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
All other images taken from the book.
Published by: The Astrological Journal, Jan/Feb 2020
Author:
André
Barbault (1921-2019) was a renowned French astrologer who greatly
influenced mundane astrology, also in the English-speaking world. Two of
his books have been transalted into English and are available here: astrologicalassociation.com
© André Barbault 2020
