Speakers and Topics
Conference abstract:
Astrology as a way of understanding the world has woven its thread into cultures since Mesopotamian times. Along with its technical descriptions of calculation and interpretation, whether written on clay tablets or vellum, using stylus, quill or printing press, it has also taken form in sculpture, mosaics and painting, as well as inhabiting such esoteric bodies of knowledge as Kabbalah, alchemy and magic. Modern scholarship, viewing astrology from the outside, pays little attention to the language incorporated in such esoteric lore and has assigned it solely a cultural meaning, assuming astrology to be a form of divination, shaped by Aristotlean cosmology and Neo-Platonic philosophy. In so doing the Academy has failed to understand that astrology forms a lingua franca stitching together multiple paradigms of thinking. These fall beyond cultures, and bind, underpin and flow through them, reflective of and inherently part of human experience.
Speakers:
Ronald Hutton
Professor of History, The University of Bristol
The Strange History of Astro-Archaeology.
Elliot Wolfson
Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Theosis, Vision, and the Astral Body in Medieval German Pietism and
the Spanish Kabbalah.
Kocku von Stuckrad
University of Groningen (from September 2009)
Jewish Astrological Imagery in Late Antiquity.
Roger Beck
Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
Imagery and narrative in an ancient horoscope: P. Lond. 130 (Greek Horoscopes no. 81).
Peter Forshaw
Assistant Professor in Western Esotericism, University of Amsterdam (from September 2009)
Astronomia Inferior et Superior:
Some Medieval and Renaissance Instances of the Conjunction of Alchemy and Astrology.
Geoffrey Shamos
Postgraduate research student, University of Pennsylvania
Astrology as Sociology: Depictions of the “Children of the Planets,” 1400-1600.
Liz Greene
Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol
The magical astrology of the British occult revival, 1885-1939.
Bernadette Brady
Postgraduate research student, Bath Spa University
The visual cartography of the sky since Mesopotamian times.
Darrelyn Gunzburg
Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol
Medieval frescoes and sculptures as astrological documents.
Speakers’ abstracts:
Ronald Hutton
Professor of History, The University of Bristol
The Strange History of Astro-Archaeology
Between 1965 and 1985, British archaeologists found themselves obliged to study the skies almost as much as they considered the evidence beneath the earth. The sciences of astronomy, mathematics and statistics bore down on the study of prehistoric monuments as never before, and a series of impressive books and conferences considered the alignments and proportions of ancient ceremonial sites, as some of the most important, if not the most important, of their features. A quarter of a century later all this excitement has evaporated. The four different disciplines have separated again, and prehistory has been handed back to excavators, now allied instead with a range of earth sciences. This paper is designed to answer the question of why things should have fallen out in this way, and with it some others. Were solid gains in knowledge made during the period in which astro-archaeology was fashionable? Has something valuable been lost as a result of the collapse of the fashion for it? Or was it all just moonshine?'
Elliot Wolfson
Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Theosis, Vision, and the Astral Body in Medieval German Pietism and
the Spanish Kabbalah
I will explore the notion of the astral body in the works of the Rhineland Jewish Pietists and the Spanish kabbalists of the thirteenth centuries. Specifically, I will focus on contemplative practices in the two streams of medieval Jewish esotericism that involved ascetic renunciation of the body as a means to cultivate a vision of the celestial image, culminating in the angelification and divinization of the human.
Kocku von Stuckrad
University of Groningen (from September 2009)
Jewish Astrological Imagery in Late Antiquity
In late antiquity, astrology was the most prominent technique and symbolic language for investigating the qualitative dimensions of time, for interpreting the deeper structure of history, and for trying to live healthy in accordance with the powers of the cosmos. This is true for all cultures in antiquity, particularly during the Roman Empire, and it is true for all religious and intellectual traditions that flourished during that period, even if opinions about the usefulness of common astrological techniques differed.
Jews responded in a very interesting way to this dominant discourse. Usually, scholars portray ancient Judaism as a religion that is skeptical about or even radically opposed to astrology. Combining the opposition against the veneration of astral bodies with the iconoclastic tendencies in Judaism, many scholars assume that there simply cannot be a direct positive response to astrology in Judaism. This, however, is a simplification of the evidence that we find in ancient sources, both in material culture and in religious imagination. In fact, Jews produced a significant number of iconographic depictions of the planetary world, for instance in mosaic pavements of ancient synagogues and on amulets and in other magical contexts. When it comes to religious imagination, the iconography of the heavens—strongly influenced by astrological thinking—is a recurring motive in large bodies of literature, from the Hermes-Metatron-Enoch traditions to the Hekhalot texts of the early Middle Ages. The lecture gives an overview of these imageries and demonstrates the iconographic importance of astrological thinking in ancient Judaism.
Roger Beck
Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
Imagery and narrative in an ancient horoscope: P. Lond. 130 (Greek Horoscopes no. 81)
In my book The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (Oxford U.P. 2006) I put forward the concept of ‘star-talk’ as a ‘symbolic idiom’ spoken in and by these mysteries as their peculiar language. From an objective point of view star-talk is a form of jargon invented and spoken/written by astrologers. But to many of the ancients - the evidence for this is overwhelming - star-talk was considered primarily a celestial language spoken by the stars themselves in their motions. The language signs were themselves conscious language users.
The dual nature of star-talk conceived as a language spoken by both stars and humans poses questions of semiology and semantics, of grammar and of narratology. My talk will address some of these questions in the context of an unusual Greek papyrus horoscope from the first century CE: P. Lond. 130 (Neugebauer & Van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes no. 81). This document is a ‘de luxe’ horoscope in which highly elaborate descriptions of planetary journeyings have replaced the usual matter-of-fact listing of longitudes.
Peter Forshaw
Assistant Professor in Western Esotericism, University of Amsterdam (from September 2009)
Astronomia Inferior et Superior:
Some Medieval and Renaissance Instances of the Conjunction of Alchemy and Astrology
The fourth-century astrologer, Julius Firmicus Maternus, is one of the first known writers to use the term alchemy. In the twelfth century, when alchemical works were first beginning to enter Europe, Daniel of Morley’s Liber de naturis inferiorum et superiorum provided one of the earliest references to this new art, listing alchemy as one of the twelve parts of astrology. While acknowledging the medieval notion of astrology as astronomia superior and alchemy as astronomia inferior, historians William Newman, Anthony Grafton and Joachim Telle have been careful to point out that, in the great majority of medieval and renaissance alchemical treatises, there is little evidence of the authors’ knowledge of astrological theory or practice, let alone the assumption that the former was dependent on the latter for its success. This paper shall consider some works that do attempt to relate the two sciences, from the late medieval Aurora Consurgens, the alchemical horoscopes appearing in Thomas Nortons Ordinall of Alchemy, to the theoretical reflections found in the works of the revolutionary alchemist Paracelsus and influential followers like Heinrich Khunrath and Oswald Croll.
Geoffrey Shamos
Postgraduate research student, University of Pennsylvania
Astrology as Sociology: Depictions of the “Children of the Planets,” 1400-1600
Three folios from the German Housebook, ca. 1480-90
In his De natura rerum, Alexander Neckham (1157-1217) observed that, “Seven are the planets that not only adorn the world but also exercise their influence on the lower sphere.” Neckham, like many of his medieval contemporaries, believed that the planets -Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun, and the moon - affected the course of terrestrial events and determined the temperament, complexion, profession, and even the manner of death of individuals. Such concepts were depicted by late medieval and early modern artists in a series of images commonly referred to as the “Children of the Planets.” This pictorial convention typically shows the personified planets ruling over groups of figures arranged according to their susceptibility to particular planetary influences. Enjoyed by a variety of audiences and employed in diverse contexts, the series appeared in manuscripts, prints, paintings, and tapestries throughout central and western Europe for nearly two centuries (1400-1600). By merging scientific knowledge and popular imagery, the series helped to shape the understanding of the cosmos during the late medieval and early modern period. In addition, the “Children of the Planets” provided a means of defining social relations. While astrology is often described in terms of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm or the universe and the individual, the “Children of the Planets,” instead, links diverse individuals according to mutual planetary affiliations, offering a system for categorizing corporate identity. By interrogating the correlations between various individuals in relation to the presiding planetary deities in series of the “Children of the Planets,” this paper attempts to elucidate the sociological function present in much early modern astrological imagery.
Liz Greene
Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol
The magical astrology of the British occult revival, 1885-1939
Astrology enjoyed a resurgence in the British occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a result of its reformulation by Theosophically inclined astrologers such as Alan Leo. The public face of this ‘new’ astrology, although clothed in modern dress, was based on traditional Ptolemaic horoscopic interpretations and was used primarily for divinatory purposes as well as character analysis. But at the same time, another astrology was being cultivated within Victorian and Edwardian magical orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and this ‘secret’ astrology, taught in the higher eschelons of the Golden Dawn and its later offshoots, was concerned with self-transformation and spiritual and psychological development through the magical adjuration of planetary and angelic ‘powers’. Occultists drew on late antique Jewish and Greco-Egyptian magical practices as well as medieval and early modern Jewish Kabbalistic texts, melded these materials with the transformational themes of Hermetic alchemy and the ceremonial procedures of Freemasonry, and in the early decades of the 20th century allied their rituals with the new psychological theories proffered by Freud and Jung, who were themselves influenced by alchemical and Kabbalistic sources. The magical astrology of the British occult revival is part of an extraordinary and enduring syncretic current in Western esotericism which, although virtually unexplored in scholarly literature, has nevertheless exercised a major influence on contemporary astrologies, psychologies, and spiritualities.
Bernadette Brady
Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol
Celestial Imagery as an Irrepressible force in Cultures
This paper considers the inexhaustible human desire for sky images. It explores the shifts and changes of these images from the deities of antiquity to Mars bars and argues that celestial patterns are an instinctive need within a society’s culture. The paper builds this argument by observing some of the earliest images of patterns in the stars drawn by the Assyrians and the Egyptians who thought of the stars and constellations as deities. It follows these images into the sky poetry of the Greek authors Aratus and later Manlius, through to the beginning of rationalisation of Ptolemy’s Almagest. It then looks at the Christianisation of the heavens in the 18th century and the eventual secularisation in the early 19th century, along with the end of astronomy’s relationship with sky imagery post -Bode’s great atlas of 1801 Uranographia. With the removal of the sky images from celestial cartography, the lecture then shows how sky images maintained themselves in 20th century western culture through sun sign astrology, and through commerce such as in the confectionary industry which provided for a non-sky-aware culture such sky concepts as the Mars Bar and Milky Way candy bars. The paper argues that even through most people today have no awareness of the night sky, people still do “wish upon a star”, or look for “star” qualities in other people and a starry night will cause most to stop in wonder. The paper concludes that humanity has an irrepressible desire or need for celestial imagery in our daily 21st century western culture.
Darrelyn Gunzburg
Postgraduate research student, University of Bristol
A Cultural Cosmology:
The fresco paintings of the first floor Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Italy.
In the first decade of the fourteenth century Giotto di Bondone completed work on a cycle of paintings in the first floor Salone of the local Town Hall, the Palazzo della Ragione or Palaceof Justice, in Padova, Italy.This three-tiered cycle of paintings was said to be influenced by Pietro d’Abano, who was teaching medicine, philosophy and astrology at Padua University at the time. Damage over the centuries has meant that the scheme of the Salone is no longer in its purely original state. However, despite this, the Commune kept commissioning a repainting of the same images, perhaps seeking to maintain in the narrative those pictures which had originated under Giotto’s hand. Hence it is possible to see in what remains traces of the original thinking. According to primary documents the Salone was commissioned as an astrological scheme but the astrological logic behind the images has evaded art historians. However, by taking a medieval astrological position, viewing the Salone takes on a whole new light.
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