Astrology / History

Ancient Greek

    
    Pythagoras had little to say about astronomy, although the concept that the Earth was a sphere is sometimes attributed to him. The other claimant to this honour is usually Parmenides. It was also either Pythagoras or Parmenides who first used the word "Kosmos" meaning "world-order".
    
    The main contribution of the Pythagoreans to astronomy was made by Philolaus (5th c B.C.), a pupil of Pythagoras, and the "Philolaic" system was to influence European astronomy up to the 17th century. Philolaus said that the Earth and all the planets, including the Sun, orbited a central fire, the "watch tower of Zeus", a system which explained how, if all planetary orbits moved in perfect circles in perfect motion, then their orbits were seen to be irregular from the Earth. The Pythagorean belief in perfection was in direct contradiction of observable fact as far as planetary orbits were concerned, and the attempt to reconcile fact with theory was to be the main headache of astronomers until the discoveries of Kepler and Newton. Two main schools of thought developed. The one, which was originated by Philolaus, continued by Herakleides and Aristarchus, and which died out until revived by Copernicus around 1510 A.D., sought to remove the Earth from the centre of the Universe. The other, which was sanctioned by Plato and Aristotle, and which received its most complicated form from Ptolemy around 150 A.D., placed the Earth, motionless, at the absolute centre of the Universe and created ever more complicated reasons for the planets' irregular orbits through a perfect universe. Philolaus was the originator of the former school, whose crowning achievement was the discovery of the heliocentric solar system. His contribution was three-fold. He was the first philosopher to realize that the Earth moves through space, he broke away from the geocentric framework, which places the Earth at the centre of the Universe (without, however, adopting a heliocentric model), and he was the first to distinguish the diurnal, or daily, motion of the planets from the annual, realizing that the movement of the planets needed to be explained in more complex terms than had hitherto been the case.
    
    Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.), was the most remarkable of the Lonian School. He was the pupil of Anaximenes, the teacher of both the statesman Pericles and the playwright Euripides, and the greatest influence on the philosopher Socrates. Anaxagoras, without the aid of a telescope, discovered the irregularities on the Moon's surface and asserted that the Sun was a mass of burning matter. This latter is more revolutionary than its sounds to the modern ear, for the question must be raised that if the Sun is on fire, why then doesn't it burn itself out? He was also the first to popularise the idea of a divine creator/intelligence which imbued all matter with form, in contrast to the idea of 'hylozoism' which supposed that all matter contained innate formative intelligence. This type of philosophical problem is crucial to the issue of whether the planets act as mediums of the creator's will or as causative agents in themselves. The concept of a creating intelligence is also crucial to the notion of the "Chain of Being", a heirarchy of descending influences which was to be the essence of Medieaval astrology.

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