#history-of-astrology
12 articles
BeginnerFrom Avicenna to Pico: Great Minds Who Rejected Fortune-Telling
A cross-cultural roster of serious thinkers, from Cicero and Avicenna to Pico, who rejected predicting fates while respecting the cosmos.
BeginnerTycho Brahe: the nobleman who measured the sky
How the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe measured the heavens with unmatched precision and built the data behind modern astronomy.
BeginnerAl-Biruni: Master the Sky Before You Read It
How the Persian polymath al-Biruni taught that you must master astronomy and geometry before you dare to read a birth chart.
NatalPlacidus de Titis: The Monk Behind Your House System
Meet Placido de Titis, the 17th-century monk whose time-based house system still draws the twelve house lines in your birth chart today.
NatalRegiomontanus: the Renaissance astronomer who measured the horoscope
How Regiomontanus, the Renaissance astronomer-astrologer, gave the horoscope its precise tables and a house system still used today.
BeginnerAl-Sufi and the Book of Fixed Stars Explained
How the Persian astronomer al-Sufi preserved and corrected the catalogue of bright fixed stars that classical astrology still reads.
BeginnerThe Astrolabe: Computing the Heavens by Hand
The astrolabe is an analog computer that flattens the sphere of the sky onto a disc. For more than a thousand years it told the time, located the stars, and found the rising degree to cast a horoscope, exactly what AstroAk now does by computer.
BeginnerGuido Bonatti: the Medieval Master Who Systematised Astrology
Guido Bonatti, the famed 13th-century astrologer of Forli, wrote the encyclopedic Liber Astronomiae that organised the whole art.
BeginnerPtolemy and the Tetrabiblos: The Book That Shaped Western Astrology
The Tetrabiblos, written by Claudius Ptolemy in Alexandria around the second century CE, is the foundational systematic treatise of Western astrology and the work that gave the tradition its natural-philosophy footing.
NatalKepler the Astrologer: The Astronomer Who Read the Sky
Johannes Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion and worked his whole life as a practicing astrologer, casting charts while trying to reform astrology around the aspects.
BeginnerMarcus Manilius and the Astronomica: Astrology's Oldest Surviving Poem
The Astronomica is a Latin poem on astrology by Marcus Manilius, written about 10 to 20 CE. It is the earliest substantially surviving comprehensive account of Western astrology, cast in five books of verse.
BeginnerAbu Ma'shar: The Astrologer Who Carried Astrology to Europe
Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (787 to 886 CE), Latinized as Albumasar, was the most influential astrologer of the medieval Islamic world. His Latin translations helped reintroduce both astrology and Aristotle to Europe in the 12th century.