Hopes, Fears, and Astrology
Early Modern Europe and ancient superstitions
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This is a riff on a Michelle Aroney article in History Today by the same name.
Astrology, originating in the Third Millenium BC in Mesopotamia, where priests used celestial movement observations to interpret divine signs and omens. Originally used for forecasting weather, agriculture, and political events, it developed from mundane Babylonian astrology into the zodiac-based, personal, and horoscopic systems adopted by Hellenistic Greece and Rome. Conflated with astronomy for about two thousand years, the practice spread around the Old World, becoming a major influence on ancient culture, politics, and medicine. Once considered a respected academic discipline closely tied to mathematics, since the 19th Century academia and science have deemed it a recreational pastime, superstition, and pseudoscience.
In the 15th Century, it was a popular parlor game.
Appearing in 1482, the Libro de la Ventura (Book of Fortune) became a staple of Renaissance parties. Translated into many languages, lavishly illustrated, and surviving in many editions, this parlor game became a bestseller across Europe. The point of the game was to divine answers to tricky questions, a series of which players could choose from. Will my upcoming trip go smoothly? Will I recover from this illness? Does my spouse truly love me? After selecting a question, the player rolled three dice and followed prompts through the book until they landed on an answer.
The game’s appeal partly lay in its dry humor.
The creators intended many of the answers about love for amusement, including, “Your husband is cheating on you; go and cheat on him too!” This unseriousness made the game less daunting to play with difficult, anxiety-inducing dilemmas about life, death, and relationships. But the playful could easily slide into the serious. Some owners crossed out dice combinations that led to bad answers, so they could roll again if the dice landed in that inauspicious combination. A similar Italian game, Le sorti (The Fates, 1540), likewise marketed itself as amusement, yet its stock questions were poignant and evergreen: Will I have children and will they be healthy? Am I secretly disliked by others? Will the news I’m waiting for be good or bad? No matter how cynical the player, landing on a bad or uncannily accurate answer to such questions could be deeply unsettling.
The topics in these games struck directly at core anxieties.
The Libro de la Ventura and Le sorti featured timeless questions with answers phrased to apply to anyone, like any horoscope or seer prediction. We know these were questions that people grappled with in the 16th Century because of the evidence provided by the archives of practising diviners. The largest such archive is the case records of the London astrologers Simon Forman (1552-1611) and Richard Napier (1559-1634), which document around 80,000 horoscopic consultations, shedding light on the questions that bothered people around 1600.
The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.
John Schaar
The Church had long condemned astrology, and elite culture marginalized it. Physicians, who were also astrologers, looked down on self-taught practitioners like Forman and Napier, dismissing them as quacks. Yet none of this stopped clients from coming in droves to their clinics, asking the astrologers to make known the unknown.
Early modern astrologers were the most general of general practitioners, in that people sought their help with all kinds of fears and anxieties. Forman and Napier’s records are vivid indexes of what bothered early modern people. As with the parlor games, many questions were about love. People wanted to know whether they were courting the ‘right’ person. In 1600 Elizabeth Nichols - Napier’s servant - asked him whether her suitor John Chivoll, whom she did not actually love, was ‘a fit match for her’; her family was putting pressure on her and the dilemma was making her ‘mutch disquieted in mind’. The astrologers did not always record their answers, but in this case Napier noted the outcome was ultimately in Elizabeth’s favor: “Nowe the match is broken off because she is unwilling to have him.” In 1608 Edward Osborn asked whether he would get the love of the woman he sought; that he was still asking the same question two years later probably points to the answer. But he was far from the most anxious romantic. Barrington Mullens consulted Forman about his love life a dozen times in a single year, at first asking for his prospects with Mary Hambden, before setting his sights instead on Elizabeth Southwell, only to double check whether giving up on this new match would finally secure him Mary’s hand later.
Platonic relationships also brought anxieties. Some consulted astrologers to know if they would maintain good relationships with friends or if bitter disputes would ever be resolved. People fretted over whether to reach out. Many asked if they could trust a certain person.
A few questions seemed on the edge of paranoia.
In 1618 William Bouth asked whether he had “an evil enemy intending mischief.” Family dynamics also troubled many. Mothers worried about their children, and children about their parents. Would an absent family member who was traveling or at war be ok?
Career anxieties were also predictably rife.
Margaret Worsape asked whether she should keep working her trade in London or move to the country. William Tillye asked if it was better to stay in his current trade or to change (as his mother was urging him). Employees were curious about the possibility of promotion, while employers were anxious about new hires. Politics, plagues, and invasions also troubled Forman and Napier’s clients. Some were stressed about their health, when they would die and how, and what happened after death. Their mental health, and that of their friends and family, was also a keen cause of stress.
Divination archives teach us about the fears and anxieties of people in the past.
Anxiety and fear are historically contingent, as are ideas of what is and what is not risky. Some of Forman and Napier’s clients asked questions that would not concern (most) of us today (is my neighbor a witch?). Others asked questions that are ageless: Are there better days coming? During the 17th Century, European society increasingly marginalized astrology; universities removed it from their curricula, and mainstream culture pushed its practice to the sidelines. Other specialists—therapists, career and financial advisers, and even insurance agents—gradually took over many of the roles of astrological consulting.
Yet astrology never left us, because the questions astrologers answered without factual information also remain.
Crop Duster: A Novel of WWII
Flying B-17s in Europe in 1943 required a great deal of luck to survive, but the odds were always against the American aircrews. Likewise, the German fighter pilots assigned to kill those Americans relied not just on skill but on Providence to stay alive.
And Finally...
On 9 May:
1386: Portugal and England conclude the Treaty of Windsor at Whitehall, London, England. The oldest active diplomatic alliance in the world established a (so far) permanent pact of mutual defense and friendship between the two countries, sealed by the marriage of two noble families, both of which are now extinct.
1945: Elements of the US 36th Infantry Division capture Hermann Goering in Radstadt, Austria. The former #2 man in Nazi Germany had resigned from all his posts just days before, and was under a sentence of death after the fall of Berlin a week before. The Allies would try him at Nurnberg, sentence him to death, but he would commit suicide before his execution.
And today is the TIME OF REMEMBRANCE AND RECONCILIATION FOR THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, commemorating this day in 1945 when the Soviet Union declared VE Day. The UN created the day in 2004.