Babylonian Astrology: Its Origin and Legacy in Europe

Abstract

Astrology in the twentieth century West has a central place in popular culture, at least if we judge from the spread of horoscope columns in the press and popular magazines. There has been little attempt to trace the causes for its popularity or even to examine its nature. Most histories of the subject from Thorndike (1923-1958) to Tester (1987) assume a fundamental conceptual and technical break between Babylonian and Greek astrology in the last centuries BCE. They say that western astrology also effectively came to an end in the late seventeenth century, when it lost its intellectual respectability, allowing for little connection between then and the present day. The Encyclopaedia of Religion (Culianu, 1987: 472) stated categorically that ‘astrology, a product of Hellenistic civilisation, appeared at the end of the third century BCE’, completely denying any Mesopotamian connection. Chambers Encyclopaedia was more circumspect, considering that, It was in Greece, about the 4th century BC, that astrology underwent a great development and was regarded as regulating all things in the universe, including the fates of men’ (1970: 724). However, while it is clear that astrology, like any other belief system, experiences periods of reinvention as it passes between different cultures and periods, it is possible to identify a fundamental continuity from the earliest Babylonian astrology to the present day. Contemporary popular astrology may therefore be seen as a remarkable revival of the practical applications of an ancient non-Western astronomy, that of Mesopotamia of four thousand years ago, one which predates all the other intellectual pillars of western society, from Greek philosophy to Judaism, Christianity and modern scientific method.