11. Reading the Peruvian Skies

Abstract

A judicial astrology, which cast horoscopes in order to predict an individual's mishaps, was forbidden by the Catholic Church in the late 16th century and in 1631. By the mid-17th century, the manifold efforts in Europe to reform astrological prognostications lost their vigor, as new concepts in medicine, astronomy, and natural philosophy were slowly but surely undermining astrological doctrines. That was the time when Peruvian Creole scholars were only beginning to debate which kind of astrology their land required. And here, in the Spanish viceroyalties, and especially, in Peru, the Counter-Reformation attitudes towards astrology proved to have a much greater impact on scholars than in Europe. They undermined those attempts that in a Renaissance vain attempted to reform Europe's judicial astrology from the perspective of the Southern hemisphere. The Peruvian scholar Antonio de la Calancha was the first to realize that Peru required a new kind of astrology. Keywords: Antonio de la Calancha; Catholic Church; judicial astrology; Reformation attitudes