ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A falling star: History and the end of scientific astrology

• In Event: How Sciences End 1

English Abstract

In the late seventeenth century, the French Huguenot Pierre Bayle argued that astrology was ‘a remnant of pagan superstition’. While the first ancients to consider the stars were true scientists, greedy men abused their observations by twisting astronomy into astrology, thereby appealing to the superstitious masses. In branding astrology as the product of specifically eastern superstition, Bayle undercut established historical justifications of astrology. Christian astrologers had long presented their craft as a divine science practised by the biblical patriarchs. Tycho, for instance, explained that the science of the stars was invented by Adam, passed down the generations to Abraham, communicated then to the Egyptians and Greeks, and eventually grasped by Copernicus.

This paper explores the role of history in the end of a science, in this case astrology, which was taught and researched in universities across Europe for hundreds of years until it was excised from curricula over the course of the seventeenth century. The end of ‘scientific’ astrology was a complex and multifaceted process involving religion, politics, and scientific discovery as well as the vicissitudes of institutional and intellectual fashions. In this paper I add another layer to this story. I argue that in the early modern period, a wave of new historical research challenged mythical genealogies of astrology, jettisoning its entrenched associations with ancient wisdom and instead connecting it to pagan superstition. Crucially, this scholarship was not merely academic. In a period in which the sanction of history was a deeply desirable commodity, capable of legitimising or delegitimising whole bodies of knowledge, these new histories signalled not only that astrology was illegitimate for Christians to engage with, but also that it was not a true science. Ultimately, astrology came to be seen as a social and cultural phenomenon, a human construction rather than a collection of timeless truths.

Author

• Michelle Pfeffer, University of Oxford