Bacon too decried judicial astrology while accepting astrological extrapolations from the sun’s effects on earth. He deprecated the art as “so full of superstition that scarce anything sound can be discovered in it,” and rejected horoscopes and houses as nonsense; yet he taught that great celestial cycles can have an effect on humanity at large and that stars can act on individuals via their humors. He looked forward to a “sane astrology” constructed from the aspects, culminations, distances, velocities, and characters of the planets; the colors, sizes, and twinkling of the stars; and systematic comparisons of historical disasters with accompanying configurations of the heavens. A sane astrology might well result from a physical astronomy that would abolish the eccentrics of the ancients, heal the divorce between things above and under the moon, and reveal “no slight knowledge of some motions of the lower world as yet undiscovered.”93 Constancy of species and variability of individuals might be consequences of the regularity of the fixed stars and the wanderings of the planets.94
Here are two lesser examples. In Astrologomania (1604, 1624), Dudley Carleton’s combative Calvinist cousin George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, rejected judicial astrology as neither mathematics nor natural philosophy. Aristotle did not allow it; Tertullian, Clement, and Lactantius condemned it; the devil invented it. Still, Carleton allowed that the stars regulate the weather, corrupt the air, and agitate the juices of animals and vegetables. “If Astrologie stayed it self in this, to foretell the natural Humours or their effects, which shall be in such Plants and Bodies as are somewhat governed by Planets; it might seem to have some likelihood.”95 Our Puritan guide John Geree demanded that astrologers be punished as wizards and sorcerers. Not because they were entirely wrong: The stars can “worke on the temper, and on the Soule,” pushing us to actions that “grace, education, civill Wisdome, a world of things may oversway.” Astral forces can affect our bodies, but not our minds and moral judgments. Whatever truth astrology might contain, Englishmen must have nothing to do with it; for, according to Preacher Geree, its practices are popish. “Popish I call them, because under Popery such practices had allowance, and countenance.”96
Although the popes had from time to time condemned astrology, usually they allowed the doctrine of St Thomas: sapiens dominatur astris, “the wise man rules over the stars.” Celestial bodies work on ours and so affect our actions if we do not have the will or wisdom to oppose them. Sixtus V had prohibited the prediction even of inclinations in 1586; Clement VIII ignored the order; Urban VIII believed in inclining predictions.97 Urban could boast a well-aspected sun as lord of his horoscope and he became pope as the sun moved into its domicile in the constellation Leo. No wonder he identified the sun’s wellbeing with his! When astrologers hired by would-be popes exploited solar eclipses to foresee his demise, he took pains to save himself with the help of an astro-magician.
This expert was Campanella, who had perfected his instrumentalist astrology during the twenty-seven years he spent in prison for plotting against the state of Naples and other infractions. After release he went to Rome, arriving four years after his Defense of Galileo, and was again incarcerated. Urban plucked him forth to defend against eclipses. Together, in a darkened room, the pope and the jailbird set out lamps to represent the planets and luminaries in their normal courses, and incense, aromatic herbs, and music to indicate the harmonies of the universe. It worked. Earthly enemies of the pope and his magus then purloined and published the manuscript in which Campanella described their proceedings.98 Urban was outraged by the public revelation of his credulity: which, however, reassured the faithful that they might entertain some belief in astrology.
Or, rather, should: “If there were no other, this were a sufficient errand for a mans being here below, to see and observe those goodly luminaries above our heads, their places, their quantities, their motions.” This teaching comes from a meditation on Psalm 8:3–4, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained ǀ What is man, that thou are mindful of him, or the son of man, that thou visitest him?” The Lord’s finger work includes the sun, “Monarch of dayes and yeares,” the moon, “Mother of moneths, Lady of seas and moystures, a secret worker in bodily humours,” and the twinkling stars, “as it were virgins with torches,” which work on us too.99 The author of this meditation worried how the earth stays in the middle of the cosmos so as to enjoy the full and even action of natural astrology. He has recourse to the fingers of God, whose hand he shows on his title page holding the earth by a string attached to the North Pole. Like a man wearing a belt and suspenders, the earth also floats on water.
By this one argument, fond atheist see
The Earth thou tread’st on shows a Deitie
On such a liquid basis could it stand
If not supported by a Pow’rfull hand?”100
As anyone could learn from Henry Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1622), properly finished people knew astrology. Dante would have felt at home in Peacham’s universe: a stationary earth, resting in the common center of the eleven spheres that turn the heavens and carry the planets, bakes evenly under astrological influences. For readers who wanted to know more, Peacham recommended consulting the books of John Dee for the art, and of “Clavius the Jesuite” and Copernicus for its astronomical underpinning. Unfortunately, he warned, the inquirer must first understand geometry.101
Elevated Discourse
Astrology is not always exact. That is not, however, a good reason to condemn it. The “Mercurial Columbus…of this Noble Science,”102 George Wharton, made the case with the power of an Oxford education. Why pick on astrology? What geometer can square a circle? No doubt many charlatans infest the field. So? We do not scrap politics because of Machiavelli, or the Catholic Church “because of [its] many Ravening Wolves and subtle Foxes.” Nor do we abolish the clergy, “because some Time-Buggering Changelings have…prefer’d their Worldly interests and carnal Ends of Pride, Vain-Glory, Strife, Covetousness, and desire of Preheminence above their Brethren, to the Truth and Peace of the Gospel.”103
Should we not worry that the new astronomical systems negate the principles of the Art? By no means, says Sir Christopher Heydon, in what became the standard defense of judicial astrology in Stuart times. No matter the system, it was the same God who created the ravishing celestial bodies and, “in the richness of his infinite mercy, did also as well by his eternall providence foreordayne their ministry, as he does still sustaine the same as his next meanes, and instruments, for the ordinary government of this inferiour & elementary world.” Multiplicity of systems gives the astrologer several ways to run calculations. That Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho differ in their concepts of the order and motions of the planets does not matter.
For whether any of their opinions be true, or whether they be false…the Astrologer careth not. For so that by any of these Hypotheses, he may come to the true place and motion of the starres, this varietie of opinions, whether such things be indeede, and in what order they be, is no impediment to the principles of Arte.
We need only to know the angles as obtained by mathematics and their effects as derived from experience.104 Heydon could read Kepler on elliptical orbits with a critical eye and was among the first in England to study Sidereus nuncius. “I have read Galileus, and, to be short, do concur with him in opinion.”105
Angular experience shows that shifts in planetary orbits, alteration of the sun’s eccentricity, change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, and conjunctions of the superior planets have important consequences here below. Think only that, when Saturn’s apogee drifted into Cancer, Mohammed arrived; and expect that, when it reaches the opposite sign, Capricorn, the Muslim empire will begin to fall. Some tables put this event in 1630, others in 1728. The art is not perfect. But no one can deny that the shift of the apogee of Mars into Virgo in 1647 had its consequences: “A Dissolution of the English Monarchy, etc., [as] the whole World can witness.”106
The eccen
tricity of the solar orbit does not change. Early modern astronomers thought it did, and astrologers tracked its consequences. Following Copernicus’s spokesman Georg Joachim Rheticus, Wharton observed that the Roman Empire began, and Christ suffered, when the eccentricity hit a maximum; at its mean value, the Turkish empire rose, and, alas, persists, although the eccentricity has passed through a minimum. The change of the tilt of the earth’s axis is another long-term cycle of immense but undetermined consequence, for which Wharton gives no examples. Evidently he had not read the Faerie Queen, where the change in obliquity, like the precession of the equinoxes, is the cause of universal disorder:
So now all range, and do at random rove
Out of their places farre away
And all this world with them amisse do move
And all his creatures from their course astray
Till they arrive at their last ruinous decay.
On the effects of Wharton’s fourth cause, however, superior planetary conjunctions, he gives good measure, as these are frequent enough to keep up with the follies and disasters of humankind.107
Conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn occur every 20 years in such a way that for 200 years they remain within a “trigon,” a set of zodiacal signs 120 degrees apart. Each of the four trigons is associated with one of the four terrestrial elements. In 800 years the conjunctions complete a full cycle of trigon visits. Unpleasant events occur at every change of trigon and particularly unpleasant ones at the renewal of a cycle. Transitions from the Watery to the Fiery are the most fateful. One such occurred in 1603, the year of James’s accession. Campanella connected it with the nova of 1604, which occurred in the same neighborhood of Sagittarius, and predicted a change in religion. He was right to anticipate something profound. Counting backwards by 800-year intervals, we arrive eventually near 4000 bce and the deepest of profundities, Creation. When Jupiter and Saturn again renewed their meetings in the Fiery Trigon, something bad but unknown happened; the next renewal brought the Universal Deluge; and, subsequently, Moses and the Law, the birth of Rome and affliction of the Hebrews, Olympic games, Christ’s mission and the Roman Empire, Charlemagne, and the Stuarts’ age of trouble.108 These specifications agreed well enough with those in Kepler’s Stella nova (1606) to amount almost to a demonstration. His second conjunction, in 3200 BCE, advertised Enoch and banditry, cities, arts, tyrants; then Noah and the Deluge, Moses and the Law, Isaiah and the four monarchies, Christ and the reformation of the world. In our era, the seventh cycle, beginning in 800, coincided with Charlemagne and the Western and Saracen imperium, and the eighth, 1600, with Rudolf II and Kepler. The ninth, 2400, will be an age of people unknown, to whom, worse, we might not be known, “if indeed the world lasts so long.”109
Wharton recognized moral as well as physical causes for the decline of states. He must have had the Stuarts in mind when writing them down: intemperance, lust, and effeminacy of princes; refusal to keep promises; corruption, unlawful fines and detentions, heavy taxation, disdain of advice. “When the Prince listens not to Wise and Faithful Councellors, Changes are imminent.” The populace also has a part in ruining a state. When subjects become unwarlike, shake hands with infidelity, disobedience, and contumacy, and flout the law, things will go badly. “Where neither the laws nor Magistrates are held in Honour, then the Common-wealth cannot be safe or durable.”110 Astrologers do speak truly, sometimes.
“When beggars die, there are no comets seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”111 Is there not ample evidence of the malevolence of comets? Nonsense, says the Earl of Northampton, “[‘Tis] plaine that neither Princes alwayes dye when comets blaze, nor Comets alwayes blaze when Princes dye.” He was right. In 1612, a very bad year for great personages, an emperor, two queens, a pair of dukes, the Earl of Salisbury, and Prince Henry had all fallen “without any blazing star or other extraordinary sign.” This last observation shows that the connection between comets and potentates was never far from people’s minds whether they believed it or not.112 Northampton himself proves the rule.
Although he had written a big book against all sorts of prognostications, including astrology, which he ridiculed for claiming that planets exert physical influences on people (“A citizen of London might as well smell the perfumes of Paris”), Northampton could not bring himself to deprive the heavenly bodies of all influence here below. “Stars and Planets, by a certaine conformable heate or quality…[cause] the lower bodyes to draw their first beginning, both of their action and life.”113 Similarly, the eclectic Nicholas Hill had accepted some celestial portents such as eclipses as advertisements of illness (eclipses are diseases of the “eyes of the world”) but rejected other signs as “the inventions of petty minds unworthy the magnanimity of a philosopher.” Like many of their compatriots, Northampton and Hill accepted the contradictions of astrology as they did the relation between the royal prerogative and the liberties of the subject—an incipient opposition that could be maintained, and even made useful, if not driven to confrontation.114
The three comets of 1618 re-established whatever reputation blazing stars might have lost by their invisibility in 1612. The most brilliant of them announced the death of Queen Anna, the dethronement of Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia, and the Thirty Years War. It seemed aimed at James. His queen’s death affected him deeply, temporarily.
Thee to invite the great God sent a starre
Whose Friends & kindred mighty princes are
. . . . .
Thus she is chang’d not dead, noe good prince dyes
But like the day-starre only sets to rise.
He soon began to suspect that the comet, “which though it bringe the World some news from fate ǀ The letter is such as non can translate,” might have a bright side.115 After all, it did not kill him. Rather, by appearing in the constellation Libra, it seemed to endorse his balanced foreign policy. The ordinary Englishman preferred to suppose misfortune.
Then let him dreame of famine, plague and warre
And thinke the match with Spayne has rays’d this starre
And let him thinke that I theyr Prince, and Mynion
Will shortly change; or what is worse religion.
Archbishop Ussher agreed with the common man. The effects of the comet would be punishing and enduring: “the judgment that has begun [in Bohemia, in 1619] will end heavily upon us; and (if all things deceive me not) it is even now marching toward us with a swift pace.”116 That was the general opinion. In one of the hundred or more contemporary tracts on the comets of 1618, we read that blazing stars herald such catastrophic events as “alterations of commonwealths and such slaughters as seldom are seene, with many more calamities, infinite and innumerable.” A little consideration made clear why peers and princes were particularly exposed to their power: great people live “more delicately and intemperately than other[s],” and so suffer more readily from the corrupt air comets cause. “[S]o they…nourishing the cause of ill in themselves, being unpatient and not able to indure the working of medicinable receipts, quickly perish and miscarrie.”117 Comets announce the fate of the leisured classes.
Was that the reason that Wotton caught a cold watching them in 1618? He was then in Venice, where people were usually so intent on their business that they did not care about comets; but Wotton suspected that the obvious connection with the disturbances in Bohemia might arouse their languid interest. It certainly caused consternation in Rome, where Paul V lived “tormented by astrologers.” And, as James foresaw, ordinary Englishmen noticed its bearing on the Spanish match.
A starre did late appeare in Virgo’s trayne
The which from South to North did post awayne
If England then be North and South be Spayne
Brave Charles sitt fast, and look unto thy Wayne.118
These clever lines (“Charles’s Wain” signifies the Big Dipper, a conquest, and a wagon) came from Richard Corbett, a longtime resident of Christ Church, Oxford, where, h
e wrote in December 1618, all talk was about the comet.
Physicians, Lawyers, Glovers in the Stall
The Shopp-Keepers speak Mathematiques, all
. . . . .
All weapons from the Bodkin to the Pike
The Mason’s Rule, the Taylor’s Yard alike
Take Altitudes; and th’early Fidling Knaves
Of Fluites, and Hoe-Boyes, make them Iacob’s-staves
Lastly, of fingers glasses we contrive
And every fist is made a Perspective.
What did it all mean? “O! tell us what to trust to, ere we wax ǀ All stiffe and stupid with the Parallax.”119
Among more professional observers of the great comet of 1618 were Galileo, Kepler, and a mathematician at the University of Leyden, Willibrord Snell, known to posterity as the discoverer of the law of optical refraction. Galileo worked out the dangerous theory that Conn defended, which, however, exonerated comets; for, as optical illusions, they could scarcely affect the weather. Kepler took the comet to be a real body moving rectilinearly above the moon and made explicit that its apparent path arose from the earth’s rotation. Snell likewise located it in the former quintessence. Both saw it as a portent. Kepler associated it with the troubles in Bohemia and the death of his employer, the emperor Matthias. Snell saw a celestial conspiracy.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 21