I would like to suggest a re-reading of the work of Pierre Bayle, concerning his assertions of the scientific status of History, and emphasizing in particular his critique of astrology in the writings dealing with comets which were translated into English in 1708. Those who have written about Bayle’s thinking have not understood that when Bayle deals with comets he is actually looking at the way they had been previously viewed by historian, and by religion. I therefore take the opposite standpoint to those who consider that Bayle’s proposals on comets are no more than a pretext through which to approach other subjects. Indeed it is better, I feel, to re-position Reflections on Comets in the line which we would call astro-history, and to place it closer to the critical work of Claude Duret, published in 1595, a century earlier. Speaking of pretexts, it must be understood that the debate on astrology and its effects on events is an integral part of a larger debate on History which is, at its heart, similar. Moreover, it is no accident that Bayle, from the opening pages of his Reflections, fiercely criticizes historians before even beginning to develop his critique of astrology. This critique is not as superficial as we might be led to believe; it involves a methodology which Bayle shows to us in great detail, and which aims less at traditional astrological knowledge, in which comets have a somewhat secondary role, than at those works which will not accept such a traditional view about astrology at all, except with certain reservations. In many cases, the word ‘comet’ can be replaced with any astral configuration without Bayle’s argument losing its pertinence.

Astrology is often referred to as a symbolic language. Does this make it different from an ‘ordinary’ language, and what are the implications of describing it as such? In short, what makes one form of language more ‘real’ than another? The talk will introduce Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language games’ to explore how language can be used in various ways to describe our experience of the world. This will address many confusions regarding concepts of ‘causes’, ‘principles’, and ‘underlying laws’ which are often used to bolster the scientific, as well as the astrological paradigm, which is itself an increasing victim of psychologism. Also drawing on other ideas from the philosophy of language we shall place the language of astrology within a wider frame. This will raise the question as to the extent that astrology itself can usefully contribute to the debate that dominates much current philosophical thinking on the nature and experience of language.

This paper will look at a topic hitherto equally neglected by classicists and medieval historians: the manner in which medieval scholars (including many churchmen) found a way of fitting the classical pagan deities back into Christianity through the medium of planetary magic. This enterprise lasted from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, and is one of the lost themes of the history of European religion

The Triple Moon Goddess of contemporary New Age thought has much deeper roots than is commonly believed. This paper demonstrates how Akkadian astrological tradition appears to have been incorporated in the development of a triple Moon goddess during the Hellenistic era. It offers an example of the way that astrological knowledge can be important in the practice of historical research.

The paper will briefly outline the manner in which the authority of the ancient Egyptians is invoked in several surviving astrological works of antiquity, with the focus on the second century works of Vettius Valens and Claudius Ptolemy, representatives of two vastly differing approaches toward the astrological lore. Consequently, the argument shall involve the question of Valens’ alleged Egyptian travels and the stance he assumes with respect to Nechepso and Petosiris, to end with the discussion of Ptolemy’s way of dealing with the inherited tradition. It will be shown that while sharing in some general tendencies and, moreover, facing the same tension between the contrasting urges of tradition vs. innovativeness, the two astrologers choose separate ways to extricate themselves from the dilemma.

. This paper addresses the question of the kind of knowledge which informed the astrological practice of Marsilio Ficino, and in so doing distinguishes between two modes of understanding the human relationship to the cosmos, the natural scientific and the magical. I will seek to show that Ficino’s critique of his contemporary astrologers derived from their lack of symbolic understanding, and I shall attempt to explore the nature of this understanding which for Ficino was fully revealed in the Platonic and Hermetic traditions. Finally I shall suggest that in his system of natural magic Ficino re-defined astrology as a unitive tool for healing, founded on both ‘scientific’ investigation into cosmic law and divinatory experience.

The reasons for astrology’s long exile from the academy have been as much psychological as intellectual and political, for it represents the shadow of the scientific, professional and technical value-system of the contemporary academic culture. The reintroduction of astrology as a serious topic of university studies produces an inevitable collision between the norms of intellectual objectivity (the stance of the modern scholar who stands apart from the material being studied) and the reality of what C.G. Jung called the objective psyche, or collective unconscious, from which we can never fully separate our conscious standpoint. For astrology systematically reveals the unconscious, archetypal factors underlying conscious experience and collapses the subject-object dichotomy fundamental to the modern psyche and the modern intellect, thus undermining the assumptions and identity of the modern scholar. To reintegrate astrology into academic life requires bringing more objectivity into astrology but also bringing the implications of the objective psyche fully into the academy. This requires a historical perspective on astrology’s psychological position since the Enlightenment and a capacity to do personal and intellectual ‘shadow work’ in academe – a slow and costly alchemical process, but a necessary one if astrology’s full contribution is to be realized.

When was it that someone first gazed up at the Summer Milky Way and recognized the Cross among the stars of Cygnus? After the Big Dipper and the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, the Northern Cross is among the most familiar of asterisms, for Westerners at least. Turn to almost any modern handbook on the constellations and we find under Cygnus that the Swan often goes by this well known alias. Little explanation is required; the Cross being simply a matter of common knowledge. But when did it become so? One such popular guide, by the late veteran interpreter of the stars, Julius Staal, ventures only that it was ‘early Christians’ who recognized the cruciform shape of Cygnus.1 It is certainly a reasonable guess; but, which early Christians recognized the Cross where others in their day would have imagined a great swan flying along the river of milk flowing from Hera’s breast? Although it seems little more than an odd bit of trivia, attempting to answer the question of the asterism’s antiquity touches on some interesting aspects of our cultural history. I hope to show how light from this admittedly peculiar angle may illuminate ways that astral imagery played upon the early Christian imagination, particularly as related to aspects of the history of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome.

The paper addresses the boundaries between astrology and science and concentrates on a demarcation problem. It will explore the criteria science poses for new sciences. In order to be a science one has to take into account for example the idea of a theory, methods and paradigms. An independent branch of science is known for its own methodology but in astrology’s case usually statistics are introduced. However, qualitative methods will give new and fresh viewpoints to this issue. “Astrology and Science – A New Millennium” discusses the position of astrology in the academic world and the possible advantages and disadvantages that might arise along with that position.

From the 2nd century AD the coincidence of Passover and Easter was recognized as a problem for the Christian church by the church authorities, and in the 4th century, after Christianity became the Roman state religion, Roman authorities took steps to prevent Passover and Easter coinciding. This effort was complicated by the growing separation between the churches in Rome and Constantinople. Though from the 2nd century the majority of Jews lived in the diaspora, at least up to the 10th century the calendar was governed by a rabbinical court in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Here we discuss the changes in the Jewish calendar in the 5-8th centuries AD, the middle (c. 636 AD) of which period witnessed an abrupt transition from Byzantine rule over Eretz Israel to Arab rule. In this period no serious changes were made in the basic mathematics of the Jewish calendar; the only changes had a political context. Here we discuss a single but singular feature of the Jewish calendar, the ‘Deĥiyot’ [postponements] of Rosh Hashana. Our major claim is that Deĥiyah D [postponement from Wednesday to Thursday] and Deĥiyah U [postponement from Friday to Saturday] entered the calendar c. 532 AD as an ingenious Jewish response to Emperor Justinian’s ban against the Passover feast (Nisan 14) falling on a Saturday, instituted to mend a famous calendar rift between the Roman and Alexandrian churches. Next we claim that Deĥiyah A [postponement from Sunday to Monday] became part of the calendar no earlier than when the 2nd day of the festivals Rosh Hashana [New Year] and Sukkot [Tabernacles] acquired the status of sacred day and we raise the lower historical boundary of Deĥiyah A’s introduction in the calendar up to the time of the first Gaonim [heads of talmudic academies in the Arab caliphate] (c. 658 AD). We also suggest the reasons for the timing of three other deĥiyot.