Astrology / History

Astrology in the Roman World 200 B.C.-500 A.D.

    
    In the year of 193, the use of astrology by the Imperial Court entered a new dimension with the accession of the dynasty of the Seveni. The founder of this dynasty, Septimus Severus (193-211) married the daughter of Bassianus, a Syrian priest, and Syrian Sun worship became the official religion of the Empire, eventually displacing the Olympian pantheon. The fifth Emperor of the line, Elagabalus (218-222) was even known as Heliogabalus in order to make his link with the Sun explicit. In a situation where the Sun was worshipped, and the Emperor in turn identified with the Sun, astrology and astrological symbolism formed an integral part of the phi1osophy of the state. This acceptance of Sun worship from the east into the Roman Empire marked perhaps the culmination of the process of marriage between east and west which had been initiated by Phthagoras and continued by Posidonius. These oriental ideas, which placed the Emperor above all other people as the link between Heaven and Earth, continued into Mediaeval Europe, preserving a climate of opinion officially favourable to astrology. Even today they form the basis for the English coronation ceremony in which the monarch becomes sovereign through the action of the Church.
    
    The greatest figure in astronomy and astrology in the Roman world was Claudius Ptolemy born 70 A.D.), who lived in Alexandria in Egypt, which was by this time a province of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy had available the resources of the vast library at Alexandria, containing all the, written knowledge of the ancient world, and produced two major text books which were to become the mainstay of astronomical and astrological thinking for the next 1500 years. The astrological text was known as the Tetrabiblos (also know as the Quadrapartitium, or Four Books), which summarized all the astrological work produced in the past by Mesopotamians and Greeks, and which is still a useful reference work. Among other things it helped establish the Tropical zodiac as the zodiac of the west on the basis of Ptolemy's argument that the zodiac should be tied to the Seasons rather than to the constellations. Ptolemy's astronomical work was known as the Almagest (or Syntaxis in Greek) and the innovatory theory of planetary motion which it propounded was to have long lasting influence, even being the basis of the system proposed by Copernicus in 1543. Ptolemy was concerned to preserve perfect cyclical motion as the basis of planetary orbits, yet, like his Greek predecessors was faced with the problem that the planets quite clearly did not move in perfect circles. He therefore proposed that each planetary sphere contained smaller spheres, known as epicycles. The effect of the epicycles was to make the planets move physically in irregular orbits, while maintaining perfect cyclical motion as the metaphysical basis of the Universe. In later Arab and Mediaeval European cosmology the Aristotelian system of regular homocentric spheres and the more complicated Ptolemaic version of epicycles were the two main theories of planetary motion. It is no overstatement to say that Claudius Ptolemy was the most important single figure in the history of astrology, and one of the most important in the history of astronomy.

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