Astrology as Art: Representation and Practice

ASTROLOGY AS ART

© Sophia Centre Press 2018

First published in 2018.

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Sophia Centre Press

University of Wales, Trinity St David

Ceredigion, Wales SA48 7ED, United Kingdom.

www.sophiacentrepress.com

Cover Illustration: Raffaello Botticcini (Attributed to) (1477–ca.1520), Detail of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, ca. 1495, tempera on panel, d. 104,2 cm. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1937.997, The Art Institute of Chicago.

ISBN: 978-1-907767-10-4

ISBN: 978-1-907767-60-9(e-book)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue card for this book is available from the British Library.

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Nicholas Campion and Jennifer Zahrt

Introduction: Ars, Technē, Śāstra, ʿIlm: What’s in a Name?

Martin Gansten

The Iconography of Libra and Pisces in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece

Micah Ross

Dwarfs as an Ancient Mayan Metaphor for the Stars

Suzanne Nolan

Astrological Imagery in the Rulership Propaganda of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici

Claudia Rousseau

Astrological Symbolism in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzivâl

John Meeks

Seeing the World Soul: Marsilio Ficino and Talismanic Art

Ruth Clydesdale

Lower Astrology and Silent Poetry

Spike Bucklow

Picturing the Practitioner: Notes Towards an Iconography of Astrological Practice

Richard Dunn

Twinkling Voices from the Gods: Fernand Khnopff’s Use of Stars as Mystical Guides in ‘Avec Verhaeren, un ange’

Liesbeth Grotenhuis

THE SOPHIA CENTRE

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

FOREWORD

Nicholas Campion and Jennifer Zahrt

The chapters in this anthology – the latest in the Sophia Centre Press series on ‘Studies in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology’ – are based on papers originally presented at the 2015 Sophia Centre conference on ‘Astrology as Art: Representation and Practice’. Two questions arise from the title: first ‘is astrology an art?’ and, second, ‘how does art represent astrology?’ The first question may be understood in various ways, such as ‘is the act of interpreting astrological symbols an art?’, or ‘is the visual language used by astrologers artistic?’ And then, on a deeper level, if astrological artefacts are considered to be alive, as talismans may be, then they are not representational. In that sense, how do we consider them art without misrepresenting their identity.

The definition of astrology as an art is familiar from secondary sources. Morris Jastrow in the The Encyclopaedia Britannica described it as ‘the ancient art or science of divining the fate and future of human beings from indications given by the positions of the stars (sun, moon, and planets)’.¹ The Concise Oxford Dictionary defined it as ‘(Formerly) practical astronomy (also called natural ~); art of judging of reputed occult influence of stars upon human affairs (judicial ~)’.² Roger Beck wrote ‘Astrology, the art of converting astronomical data (i.e., the positions of the celestial bodies) into predictions of outcomes in human affairs’.³ And amongst astrologers, Margaret Hone, whose The Modern Text Book of Astrology ranked as one of the most influential textbooks of the 1950s–70s, considered art to be one way of describing astrology: ‘Since there are many angles of approach to astrology as to religion or art, it is not easy to formulate a definition to suit all, but few will find disagreement with the following: Astrology is a unique system of interpretation of the correlation of planetary action in human experience’.⁴ The key to Hone’s statement, perhaps, lies in the word ‘interpretation’ – astrology may have an objective existence written into the fabric of the cosmos, but the astrologer has to consider, reflect, and provide meaning.

Astrology and art are words with different and contested meanings. At its broadest we can define astrology as the observation of relationships between the sky, stars, planets, and Earth, a statement which includes both the traditional medieval branches of the discipline: natural astrology which deals with physical and seasonal cycles, and judicial astrology, in which astrologers interpret matters of human interest, offering advice, managing the present and, sometimes, predicting likely futures. Both, of course, may overlap. As Patrick Curry succinctly put it, ‘In practice the line between natural and judicial astrology was constantly blurred’.⁵

Art, meanwhile, is, like judicial astrology (any astrology in which the astrologer’s judgement and interpretative skills are central), is largely a human creation. It is an artefact. In the first century BCE, Cicero defined one of his two forms of divination as ‘artificial’, meaning it relies on a structure, a framework which the diviner creates in order to reach a logical answer to a question.⁶ Popular modern examples include tarot cards and the I Ching. The astrological horoscope, the complex schematic diagram used by astrologers, can be another, although not necessarily so. Cicero’s other form of divination was ‘natural’, by which he meant that it is unrestrained by reason and logic. It is spontaneous and involves a direct interaction between the diviner and the divined. Divination from dreams, trance, and forms of enchantment are examples of natural divination.

Art relates to the modern English words artifice and artificial: a work of art is artificial. It is something deliberately created and, for most of western history, has required a high level of craft. A skill has to be learnt, and if it is implemented well then the viewer, listener, or reader is moved and inspired. The practitioner of artificial divination has to aspire to such heights of they are to be successful in providing effective advice. However the history of western art since the late eighteenth century has seen first the Romantic notion that the artist must express the soul – either their own soul or the soul of nature, or the world soul. And as the twentieth century progressed, the idea began to take hold amongst some that skill and craft were irrelevant compared to the artist’s all-important self-expression. We are reminded both of Cicero’s natural divination in which the diviner naturally speaks the truth on the basis of a deep connection with the world, and of modern astrologers who regard themselves as speaking the truth on the basis of intuitions – ideas, thought and feelings emerging into consciousness from the psychic depths – rather than the application of the technical rules of astrology. Some artists, though, have reached a position in which art has no essential existence or quality. The value of what they create is judged entirely by the audience. Astrology tips into this domain even though few dare to admit it. After all Alexander Ruperti, one of the leading astrologers of the western world in the 1970s–90s declared that

there is not one Astrology with a capital A. In each epoch, the astrology of the time was a reflection of the kind of order each culture saw in celestial motions, of the kind of relationship the culture formulated between heaven and earth.⁷

Within mainstream western astrological thought itself runs the notion that judicial astrology has no absolute truth but evolves with culture. A medieval horoscope may resemble a Gothic cathedral, a modern one Le Corbusier. Some forms of art have moved from the representational to the conceptual. Astrological iconography conforms to both. There are artistic representations of zodiac signs and planets that may have no specific astrological use. Then there are the visual forms used by astrologers: glyphs to represent planets and drawings of horoscopes. Glyphs themselves carry concepts and some modern astrologers regard the reading of the symbol as the key act of the astrologer, as if the symbol has no fixed meaning.⁸ We then move into the realm of contemporary conceptual art, in which what is or is not a work of art is as dependent on the viewer as the creator.

The boundary between representation and practice is fluid and each of the nine chapters in this volume passes between them. They explore the meanings of art and astrology, the iconography of astrology and the nature of its practice, the use of zodiac signs, and the portrayal stars and planets in literature and the visual arts. The volume opens with Martin Gansten’s exploration of what exactly we mean by ‘art’. Micah Ross and Suzanne Nolan then consider astrological iconography in Mesopotamian and Mediterranean culture, and the Mesoamerican worlds, respectively. John Meeks moves into literary territory with his analysis of astrological symbolism in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic, Parzifâl. Claudia Rousseau, Ruth Clydesdale, Spike Bucklow, and Richard Dunn then take four perspectives on the European Renaissance, a highpoint for the use of astrology through imagery, metaphor, and symbol. Liesbeth Grotenhuis closes the volume by moving the debate to the modern era with her study of the symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff.

Nicholas Campion,

Associate Professor of Cosmology in Culture,

Principal Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities and the Performing Arts,

University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Jennifer Zahrt,

Honorary Research Fellow,

Faculty of Humanities and the Performing Arts,

University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

¹ Morris Jastrow, ‘Astrology’ in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), p. 795.

² ‘Astrology’, Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

³ ‘Astrology’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spaw-forth, eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p 195.

⁴ Margaret Hone, The Modern Text Book of Astrology (Romford: Fowler, 1951), p. 16.

⁵ Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), p. 10.

⁶ Cicero, De Divinatione, trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), I:lvi.

⁷ Alexander Ruperti, ‘Dane Rudhyar – March 23, 1895–September 13, 1985 – A Seed-Man for the New Era’, accessnewage.com, originally printed in Astrological Journal 33, no. 2 (Spring 1986): p. 55. See also http://accessnewage.com/articles/astro/rud8.htm [accessed 25 June 2017].

⁸ Liz Greene, ‘Signs, Signatures, and Symbols: the Languages of Heaven’, in Nicholas Campion and Liz Greene eds., Astrologies: Plurality and Diversity (Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press, 2011), pp. 17–45; Nicholas Campion, ‘Is Astrology a Symbolic Language?’ in Nicholas Campion and Liz Greene, eds., Sky and Symbol (Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press, 2013), pp. 9–46.

INTRODUCTION:

ARS, TECHNĒ, ŚĀSTRA, ʿILM: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Martin Gansten

ABSTRACT: The designation of astrology as an art raises some simple but fundamentally important historical questions. How old is this designation, and, given that earlier generations of astrologers wrote in different languages, what words did they use that we translate as ‘art’? What are the connotations of those different words in their historical contexts? What other designations than ‘art’ would have been possible, and were such alternative labels used as well? Was astrology ever practised in cultural contexts where distinctions like that between ‘art’ and ‘science’ were not made? And if calling astrology an ‘art’ was not originally a question of aesthetics, was there still an aesthetic dimension to the practice of astrology, and how might we define or understand that dimension?

Introduction

We all know that language is a changeable thing, and that words may acquire new meanings over time. What I want to discuss in this chapter is what ancient, medieval and early modern astrologers are likely to have meant when they described astrology by the word art, or by words that we translate as ‘art’. I should perhaps state at the outset that this endeavour is not an instance of what is sometimes called the etymological fallacy: I am not proposing to find out the true meaning, or even the current meaning, of either ‘art’ or ‘astrology’ by means of linguistic analysis. Rather, what I am aiming at is what every historian or philologist tries to do, namely, to read texts – in this case, astrological texts – carefully and in a culturally and contextually sensitive way.

If we look up art in a contemporary English dictionary, we find meanings such as these:

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power

(the arts) The various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance

(arts) Subjects of study primarily concerned with human creativity and social life, such as languages, literature, and history (as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects)

A skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice.¹

These consecutive levels of meaning take us not only from the more common or widespread usages to the less common, but also from contemporary to historically earlier strata. The word art as it is used today, even by people with radically different views about what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘real’ art, is largely to do with creativity, aesthetics, and emotion. In the older sense, however, an art is simply a craft or an acquired skill, often contrasted with whatever is natural or inborn. This is not, of course, to say that premodern societies or civilizations were strangers to expressions of creativity, aesthetics, and emotion; merely that they did not use the word art to refer to them – or not exclusively to them: insofar as aesthetic activity involved a skill or craft to be mastered, it could be called an art, but the word art did not necessarily connote aesthetics.

To be precise, most earlier societies did not use the word art at all, as their cultures were expressed in other languages. It may seem rather trivial to point out that, for instance, Hellenistic authors did not write in English; but when we read works in translation it is very easy to forget that every occurrence of a term like ‘art’ is the result of a choice made – whether consciously or unconsciously – by the translator, and that, quite often, different but equally justifiable choices could have been made. Nor do we typically find one-to-one relationships between the terms used in the original and those of the translation, at least not in the more readable translations. To illustrate, let us look at a few well-known astrological texts.

Hellenistic origins

Horoscopic astrology arose in the Hellenistic world, building on Babylonian foundations, so a good starting point would be looking at Greek words that were used to describe astrology. The Greek term most often translated as ‘art’ is technē, which has precisely the range of meanings just mentioned: ‘art, skill, cunning of hand […] craft, i.e., a set of rules, system or method of making or doing, whether of the useful arts, or of the fine arts’.² This is such a broad definition that we may almost be tempted to ask: what else could they have called astrology, if not an art? And in the most influential of all Greek astrological texts, the Tetrabiblos, Ptolemy does indeed use the designation technē twice, with Robbins’s well-known translation rendering it as ‘art’.³ But Ptolemy also calls astrology a theory, theōria, which Robbins likewise translates as ‘art’, and epistēmē, which is translated as ‘science’.⁴ So there is some variation in terminology, more so in the original than in the translation; but nowhere does Ptolemy associate astrology with aesthetics or the fine arts. (He mentions those a few times in other contexts, calling them ‘that which relates to the Muses’ – which of course is the origin of our word music.)

However, if we turn for comparison to Ptolemy’s contemporary and fellow Alexandrian, Vettius Valens, we find that he does not call astrology technē at all: the word occurs twenty-odd times in his Anthologies, but never as a designation of astrology.⁵ Nonetheless, the widely circulated translation by Mark Riley – which, I should add, is by his own admission a preliminary one – uses the word ‘art’ as a designation of astrology quite often, to render a number of Greek terms that to me, at least, have a more theoretical ring to them.⁶ The most frequent of these is theōria itself, which occurs ten times – twice as often as the next in order, epistēmē, which I (like Robbins) prefer to translate as ‘science’.⁷ The last three terms used by Valens, with at least one occurrence each, are suntaxis, mathēma and doxa, which mean something like ‘system’, ‘learning’ and ‘opinion’, respectively.⁸ So to Valens – who, intriguingly, is often seen as a more hands-on, practical astrologer than Ptolemy – astrology is a theory, a science, a system, a form of learning, and an opinion, all of which sounds rather more abstract, even academic, than the ‘art’ with which Riley has somewhat loosely translated all these terms into English.

Astrology, then, is sometimes called an ‘art’ or ‘craft’ in Greek, if not as often as the translations might make us think; but that is only one of several designations, and neither the most frequent nor the most specific one. Now, if we travel from Alexandria across the Mediterranean to Sicily, we find, a couple of centuries later, the Roman lawyer Julius Firmicus Maternus writing on Hellenistic astrology in Latin.⁹ The English word art is, of course, derived from the Latin ars, and Firmicus does call astrology ars a few times.¹⁰ This Latin term covers more or less the same semantic range as the Greek technē, with ‘acquired skill’ or ‘craft’ being among the most frequent meanings – again, there is no necessary creative or aesthetic dimension here. Much more often, though, Firmicus calls astrology scientia, which is the origin of our word science.¹¹ Just as ars does not correspond very closely in meaning to the modern concept of art, so scientia doesn’t mean ‘science’ in the modern sense; but it does mean ‘knowledge’: it is a matter of understanding something, rather than of creating or enjoying it. Another word that Firmicus is fond of using to describe astrology – so fond, in fact, that it is the title of his book – is the Greek loanword mathēsis. Like the mathēma used by Valens, it means ‘learning’ and is related to our word mathematics, and of course to mathematicus, which for many centuries was one of the most common Latin words for ‘astrologer’.

Perhaps more surprising to many is the fact that Firmicus occasionally uses the word religio as a designation of astrology.¹² Again, this does not mean that he viewed astrology as ‘a religion’ in the modern sense of a more or less exclusive system of observances and beliefs; but it does connect astrology with what we would call religious attitudes and experiences, as does the adjective divina, ‘divine’, which he sometimes uses to qualify ars or scientia.¹³ Perhaps this is where astrology in the classical world most closely approximates ‘art’ in our sense of aesthetic creativity and enjoyment – but let us return to that point in a moment.

India, the Islamic world, and Europe

By the time Firmicus wrote his Mathesis, horoscopic astrology had most likely already made its way from the Greek-speaking world to India, where it soon took root. The Sanskrit culture of classical India has no concept precisely analogous to technē or ars, but it does have a category somewhat closer to our modern idea of art: kalā, which covers a number of what we would call the fine arts, including singing, music, dance, drama, painting and sculpture – although it also covers a number of practical skills, mostly associated with pleasures and amusements, that may not strike westerners as equally fine or important, such as dressing hair; arranging flowers; putting on costume, jewellery and perfumes; preparing drinks and dainties; playing games, telling riddles and doing magic tricks; organizing cockfights, teaching parrots to talk; and so forth.¹⁴ Some of the more complex arts can be classified in their theoretical aspects as śāstras, a word that denotes any systematic body of teaching (and the texts expounding it); but most śāstras are not arts (kalā).

Astrology, like medicine, is uniformly viewed as a śāstra – jyotiḥśāstra, ‘the science of lights’ – or a vidyā,