2
STAR POWER
Throughout much of history, knowledge of the heavens informed the rhythms of life and the mastery of territory. Astronomy moved arm in arm with agriculture, trade, migration, empire, and war. It created and marked time; it registered place on Earth. It was both a sacred mystery and a blue-chip stock. Astronomers wielded power and served the powerful.
Millennia before anybody had drawn usable maps of the continents, people memorized imagined maps of the sky. Long before there were astrolabes or sextants or precision portable clocks to establish distance, latitude, and longitude, people gauged their position with no tools but their eyes and the sky. To go where no one had gone before, to know how long it took to get there, and to return there if you liked what you found, you needed guides. The sky was a good one, especially if your path lay across uncharted ocean, unstable dunes, sweeping grasslands, or barren tundra. Heaven itself was both compass and clock, direction-finder and time-keeper. For many, it was also ultimate cause, crystal ball, and the home of deities—astronomy, astrology, history, folklore, religion, psychology, and poetry rolled into one. Knowing the rhythms of the sky was a means to knowing the character and fate of all things.
It’s anybody’s guess when and where a community chronicler, or maybe an insomniac, first decided to track the cycles of change in the Moon’s illuminated disk, or the alternate lengthening and shortening of the Sun’s arc across the sky, or the periodic comings and goings of Venus. Such tracking would have predated the first stone tools. Maybe an antecedent of Homo sapiens was the first to do it. Whoever it was and whenever it happened, that signaled the birth of astronomy, a source of both wonder and power for our nascent species.
Consider units of time. If the Sun never set and the Moon never waned, our measures of time might be grounded solely in biology—the beating heart, circadian rhythms, menstruation—because “periodicity is part of who we are.”1 But the Sun does set, and the Moon predictably waxes and wanes. Transitions recur endlessly in the skies above. Celestial cycles offer themselves as a natural measure of time in units we care about.
Earth’s early cultures, population centers, and central governments required official methods of organizing time, especially when they needed to plan ahead. Sacrifices, festivals, planting, harvesting, tax collection, daily work shifts, and daily prayers took place at predictable intervals. In Upper Egypt, farmers needed to know when the dazzling Dog Star, Sirius—the brightest star in the night sky—would appear in the dawn sky just before the rising Sun, because that was when the Nile, too, would be rising. Hunters, gatherers, herders, and nomads also required advance planning: their lives depended on knowing when the regional waterholes would dry up, when the cattle or gazelles or bison would give birth and the eggs of the mallee hen could be stolen, when to visit the wild strawberry patches and when to dig up the yams. It was useful to know how many days’ travel were needed to reach the nearest oasis. It was useful to monitor fertility. Everybody needed ways to track the passing days.
More than twenty thousand years ago, people made notches in animal bones and painted rows of dots on the walls of caves to mark the days of a lunar cycle.2 But no round number of lunar cycles matches the duration of the solar year, a discrepancy that gave rise to continual fussing with calendars. Several early cultures followed a twelve-month year; some added the occasional thirteenth month or five-day bloc to keep things on track. Discrepancies notwithstanding, sometime around the middle of the fifth millennium BC the Egyptians counted the correct round number of whole days in a year. They also devised a 365-day solar calendar that began with the rising of Sirius on July 19, 4236 BC—possibly the earliest secure date in history.3
Unlike the solar day, the lunar month, the Earth year, or the other celestial cycles that our ancestors could observe, subunits of time such as the hour, the minute, and the second are a matter of cultural and mathematical taste. Sociologically, they suggest the emergence of oversight, labor, standardization, and penalty: slaves and prisoners on construction gangs, priests reciting prayers at fixed intervals, sentries posted for a fixed watch—and, more recently, trains running on time, workers punching in, and spacecraft systems synchronized for launch. On a more personal level, they suggest practicalities and annoyances such as waiting for the bread to finish baking or your mate to return home. Enter the clock, whether based on a moving shadow (the obelisk or sundial), flowing water (the clepsydra), an advancing gear, a swinging pendulum, or a transitioning electron in an atom of cesium.
The Sumerians divided the day into twelfths, and each twelfth into thirtieths. The Egyptians divided both day and night into twelfths: voilà, the twenty-four-hour day. The Babylonians came up with the fraction-friendly sixty-minute hour and sixty-second minute. But not all units of time are as practical as the minute or the month. Plato, for instance, wrote of the “perfect year,” the period necessary for all the planets to return to their initial configuration. A scheme devised by the ancient Hindus employs even vaster units, such as the kalpa, the length of a single day or single night in the lifetime of Brahma, who dreams the universe into existence each time he sleeps. When he awakes, the universe begins anew; 4.32 billion years later, when he next falls asleep, it vanishes. The Maya, too, formulated an overview of time based on attenuated cycles of creation; the most recent cycle expressed through their complicated “long count” began on August 12, 3114 BC.4 Nor did such imaginative conceptions cease in the modern world. A mystical quasi-mentor of Adolf Hitler’s, for instance, foretold that the 730-year “cosmic week” beginning in 1920 would, because of Jupiter’s entrance into Pisces, bring about the millennarian triumph of blond Christians under the wise and genial rule of aristocrats, priests, and führers.5
Besides marking time, there was the challenge of mapping the sky. If Heaven was the fount of fortune and disaster, prudence demanded that the stars and the constellations they trace be demarcated and monitored. Some early Chinese astronomers divided the sky into the Five Palaces; others divided it into the Nine Fields or the twelve Earthly Branches or the twenty-eight Lunar Mansions. Early Mesopotamian astronomers divided the eastern horizon into the paths of three gods, with sixty fixed stars and constellations rising within the paths; later Mesopotamian (Babylonian) astronomers divided the sky into twelve segments, each associated with a constellation and each enclosing thirty degrees of the Sun’s yearlong path across the sky—forming the now-classic twelve constellations of the Western zodiac.
Inevitably, references to the cosmos show up in the art and architecture of antiquity. Cuneiform tablets inscribed five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia mention the Bull (Taurus), the Lion (Leo), and the Scorpion (Scorpio). A tablet inscribed almost four thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh lists the apparitions of Venus during the reign of King Ammisaduqa. The arched ceiling of a first-century BC Han dynasty tomb unearthed on the campus of Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China, presents a painted diagram of the heavens showing the Sun and the Moon surrounded by a circular band filled with symbolic figures representing the twenty-eight “lunar lodges” that mark the path of the Moon.6
Scattered across our planet are enormous stone temple ruins and looming stone monuments whose structure reveals well-established knowledge of sky patterns. In the ancient world, architecture, owing in part to the expense, labor, and time necessary for its construction, was the very embodiment of state and religious power. Among the oldest undisputed monuments with a celestial tinge are the fourth millennium BC stone “passage tombs” of County Meath, Ireland: low burial mounds where, at the winter solstice, sunlight streams through an opening above the entrance and illuminates a long passageway leading to a large chamber.7
Doorways and sight lines of massive stoneworks—whose many-ton components were, in some cases, quarried, transported, shaped, and positioned without the aid of metal tools—align, perhaps not precisely but still convincingly, with the rising or setting Sun at the spring equinox or winter solstice, the setting full Moon at the summer solstice, the cardinal directions, or the apparitions of a planet or the never-setting Pole Star. The slew of far-flung examples include the pyramids at Giza, stone circles throughout the British Isles, roofed temple complexes in Malta, octagons in the Basque region, the Caracol at Chichén Itzá, the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, and the Thirteen Towers at Chankillo, Peru, which consists of a row of towers strung across a ridge plus two observation structures, one to the west and one to the east. Other, more modest constructions embody the same principles: at Nabta Playa in southern Egypt, two upright stone “gates” in a small circle of sandstone slabs, akin to a small Stonehenge, align with what would have been the position of the rising Sun at summer solstice.8
In fits and starts, astronomy became a science. During the first millennium BC, the astronomers of Mesopotamia and China—in the service of hereditary rulers, warrior-kings, and eminent priests—compiled systematic records of what happened before their eyes and developed systems and even instruments for predicting what would happen in the future. About fifteen hundred Late Babylonian clay tablets, in the form of diaries chronicling routine observations, have been found to date. Spanning eight centuries, the tablets list such things as lunar eclipses, weather conditions, intervals between moonrise and sunrise and between sunset and moonset at different times of each month, and the changing positions of the planets in relation to thirty-one reference stars. By about 500 BC, Babylonian astronomers had devised mathematical ways of predicting the dates of new and full Moons. The world’s earliest known record of a series of solar eclipses, between about 720 and 480 BC, comes from China. By 200 BC, Chinese court astronomers had begun to chronicle most celestial phenomena visible to the unaided eye, both cyclic and episodic, whether or not they understood what they saw: auroras, comets, meteors, sunspots, novas, and supernovas, as well as the paths of planets month by month. The presumed relationship between the unfolding universe above and the affairs of state below rendered this record-keeping a guarded activity. In today’s parlance, it was classified research.9
When I was a postdoc at Princeton University in the early 1990s, a graduate student specializing in ancient Chinese culture stopped by my office with a query about a certain historical date. Sometime around 1950 BC—he couldn’t pinpoint the year—major events had taken place in China, and he suspected that some kind of sky event had preceded them. He was right.
Whipping out my planetarium sky-search software, I discovered that February 26, 1953 BC, corresponded with the tightest conjunction of planets ever witnessed by civilization: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn gathered on the sky within half the area of your pinky fingernail held at arm’s length (half a degree), with Jupiter two finger-widths away (four and a half degrees), creating a conjunction of all five known planets. Four days later, the very thin, waning crescent Moon would join the jamboree. All six objects were now nicely contained within the top-to-bottom area of your fist at arm’s length (ten degrees). Other spaceniks with equal access to computational tools would independently discover this alignment.
Although uncertainties abound when you’re trying to date events from early history, it turns out that 1953 BC just may coincide with the founding of the Xia Dynasty by its first ruler, Yu, of whom it was recorded in the Xiaojing Gouming Jue: “At the time of Yu the planets were stacked like strung pearls.” More important, the first-century BC Hong Fan Zhuan (“Account of the Great Plan”), now lost, declared that a new calendar began on a spring morning in about 2000 BC during a five-planet conjunction with the new Moon. All of which makes the February 1953 BC conjunction a convincing candidate for the start date of what became the modern Chinese calendar.10
While the Chinese were occupied in observing and recording the behavior of objects, the Greeks were expanding astronomy’s reach, making it both more conceptual, more practical, and more accessible. Empowered by geometry, they began to measure and map the universe as no civilization had done before. Triangulation, an idea set down in Euclid’s Elements (ca. 300 BC) as a pure mathematical statement, proved useful for estimating the distance between Earth and the Sun. Several centuries after Elements hit the market, an expert toolmaker—perhaps on the island of Rhodes, likely in collaboration with an astronomer—built a sophisticated calendar/astronomical computer/almanac/planetarium known today as the Antikythera Mechanism, perhaps the most-debated scientific object from the ancient world.
Alexander Jones, a classicist and historian of the mathematical sciences, proposes that the Antikythera Mechanism be called a cosmochronicon. Found along with other high-end cargo in a large Mediterranean shipwreck at a depth of 180 feet, and fitted with dozens of bronze gear-wheels, a hand crank, multiple dials, and multiple inscriptions, it was a shoebox-sized creation that could calculate the phases of the Moon, the changing longitudes of the Sun, Moon, and planets, the timing of eclipses, solstices, and equinoxes, and several long-term time cycles. Investigators derive its date—most likely first century BC and certainly no later than first century AD—from such factors as the Hellenistic-era vocabulary and lettering in the inscriptions, the state of astronomical knowledge incorporated in the object, and the scores of coins found nearby in the wreck. Though almost shocking in its sophistication, the Mechanism does have several known antecedents. It also has a cultural context: astronomy was treated as a topic suitable for popularization (think Cosmos and Star Talk rather than the guarded cosmic secrets of ancient imperial China), and both public and private spaces in the Mediterranean world were liberally sprinkled with astronomy-related objects, such as sundials large and small, armillary spheres, star globes, and stone tablets called parapegma, which had movable pegs that fit into holes beside each numbered day and served as public almanacs. The Antikythera Mechanism, whose complex inner workings have recently been revealed through X-ray computer tomography (CT) and whose surface details have become more legible through reflectance imaging, strikingly exemplifies the Greek concept of “uniformly flowing time that could be measured on instruments.”11
Physics, too, now came to the fore. Ever since the second century BC, writers have been recounting the story of the Greek mathematician and military inventor Archimedes, who, they say, devised a “burning mirror” in about the year 213 to redirect and focus the Sun’s rays onto a fleet of Roman ships anchored in the harbor of Syracuse, thereby, in the words of Lucian, “set[ting] ablaze the triremes of the enemy through art.” But even before Archimedes did (or didn’t do) it, mathematicians and engineers had begun to consider what a workable burning mirror would look like. The earliest detailed analyses concluded it would have to be concave, perhaps parabolic, and made up of an array of at least two dozen hinged, movable mirrors rather than just one. Presumably the mirrors would be large and cast of polished bronze. To this day, mechanical engineers, teenage science-fair types, and TV crews stage the occasional simulation of Archimedes’s endeavor, some resulting in out-and-out failure, some in qualified success.12
Despite astronomy’s growing practicality, celestial events could still provide a potent magical kick. Sometimes they even swayed the course of history. Rulers could be dethroned because of a comet or a supernova. Battles were launched, won, lost, or abandoned because of an eclipse. The day Odysseus rejoined his waiting and presumably widowed wife and slaughtered the hordes of suitors who had been hanging out at his house may well have coincided with a noontime eclipse in 1178 BC.13 And Herodotus—the fifth-century BC war historian, travel writer, and investigative reporter—recounts the effect of an eclipse during the sixth year of battle between the Lydians and the Medes. The participants, he writes, were so shocked to see “day on a sudden changed into night” that both sides stopped fighting and started negotiating.14 Modern eclipse calculations, based on celestial mechanics, yield a precise date for that armistice: May 28, 585 BC, at about 7:30 PM. While the time of an ancient event is often uncertain, its location is typically well-documented. For this reason, total solar eclipses have served as a type of laboratory, permitting a comparison between where you would have expected to see a given eclipse, based on the assumption that Earth’s rotation rate has been constant over the millennia, and where the eclipse was actually observed on Earth. That these turn out to be two different locations on our planet’s surface offers incontrovertible evidence that Earth’s rotation rate has been slowing down, primarily due to friction from oceanic tides sloshing on our continental shelves. In modern times, this phenomenon is well-known and well-measured, which has led to the occasional addition of a “leap second” to the calendar.
While many ancient writers, no strangers to war, discussed the military advantage afforded by astronomy, Socrates discounts it. In Plato’s Republic, written twenty-four centuries ago (before Archimedes and his mirrors), Socrates and Glaucon debate which branches of knowledge would be useful to the rulers of Athens. Socrates contends, in Book 7, that the most valuable branches “have a double use, military and philosophical” and that a firm command of arithmetic and geometry is essential both for war and for the soul. Glaucon replies that astronomy—by which he means the observation of the seasons, months, and years—is as useful to the general as to the farmer or the sailor, but Socrates doesn’t agree. To him, astronomy is too wedded to observation, too dependent on the senses, and therefore antithetical to noble philosophy.
Two centuries later, in the section of his Histories titled “On the Art of a Commander,”15 the Greek politician-historian Polybius ranks astronomy up alongside geometry. Elaborating on the importance of knowing the movements and positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the constellations of the zodiac, he writes:
It is time, indeed, which rules all human action and especially the affairs of war. So that a general must be familiar with the dates of the summer and winter solstices, and the equinoxes, and with the rate of increase and decrease of days and nights between these; for by no other means can he compute correctly the distances he will be able to traverse either by sea or land. He must also be acquainted with the subdivisions of day and night so as to know when to sound the [reveille] and to be on the march; for it is impossible to obtain a happy end unless the beginning is happily timed.16
Neglect these matters, warns Polybius, and you’ll make a mess of things. Bad timing is fatal. To prove his point he cites a number of examples, including a precipitous decision taken on August 27, 413 BC, during the siege of Syracuse, a major campaign of the Peloponnesian War (though not the siege of Syracuse in which Archimedes is said to have deployed his mirrors):
Nicias, again, the Athenian general, could have saved the army before Syracuse, and had fixed on the proper hour of the night to withdraw into a position of safety unobserved by the enemy; but on an eclipse of the Moon taking place he was struck with terror as if it foreboded some calamity, and deferred his departure. The consequence of this was that when he abandoned his camp on the following night, the enemy had divined his intention, and both the army and the generals were made prisoners by the Syracusans. Yet had he only inquired from men acquainted with astronomy so far from throwing away his opportunity owing to such an occurrence, he could have utilized the ignorance of the enemy.17
It’s hard to avoid lunar eclipses. When they occur, on average every couple of years, they last hours, and the entire half of Earth facing the Moon will witness them. That’s because, unlike a total solar eclipse—an event that takes place on Earth’s surface—a total lunar eclipse takes place in space, with the full Moon entering Earth’s shadow. In fact, in ancient Greece and Rome, the intelligentsia already understood that, as Alan Bowen, a historian of the exact sciences in the classical world, puts it, “the antidote to the fear induced in the ignorant at the occurrence of an eclipse is learning that eclipses take place in the regular course of nature and are not omens or signs from the gods.”18
During his fourth voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus decided that an upcoming lunar eclipse would be a good way to threaten the locals on Hispaniola, who, because they produced almost no excess food, had been unable to supply Columbus with enough provisions to ensure that his crew remained loyal to him. He warned the locals that God, punisher of evildoers, would make the Moon disappear if they did not hand over more food. He even specified when this would happen. Divine wrath aside, Columbus—being familiar with recently compiled eclipse tables—knew that astronomy would back up his threat. February 29, 1504, would be the night. The eighteenth-century British historian Edward Drake relates the incident:
[K]nowing that there would be an eclipse of the moon within three days, [Columbus] sent an Indian, who spoke Spanish, to assemble the [community] on an affair of the utmost importance to their welfare: being met on the day preceding the eclipse, the Indian told them that the Christians believed in God who made heaven and earth [and who] was angry with them for not supplying his distressed servants with provisions, and would therefore chastise them with famine and other calamities, and, as a proof that what he told them was true; they should, that very night, observe the moon rising with a bloody aspect, as a warning of the punishment God would inflict upon them.
[T]he eclipse beginning as soon as the moon was up, and the darkness continuing to increase, it put them in such a consternation, that they hastened to [entreat] the Admiral that he would pray to God to be no longer angry with them, and they would bring as much provisions as he would have occasion for.
[R]etiring to his cabin, [Columbus] shut himself up till the eclipse was at its heighth, when he came out and told them he had prayed for them, promising they would be good . . . ; whereupon God had forgiven them, and they should see the moon by degrees, recover her usual appearance.19
Fourteen centuries before Columbus, Ptolemy had supplied the mathematics needed to compute the timing, magnitude, and duration of eclipses. Nevertheless, to the unlettered, they continued to seem special and portentous. In fact, every event and feature in the heavens, whether special or ordinary, has long been regarded as relevant to or even directly causal for the affairs of humans on Earth, if only its meaning could be divined.
Enter astrology.
For the Mesopotamians, astrology and astronomy were more or less the same thing. For the emperors of ancient China, as for the ancient Greeks, astrology and astronomy were intertwined. The skies spoke; the skywatcher listened and translated. Copernicus did astrology; Tycho Brahe did astrology; the great Galileo did astrology. Johannes Kepler, though critical of many aspects of astrology and aware of its cynical use, cast hundreds of horoscopes. In 1601, just after becoming imperial mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, Kepler published a treatise entitled Concerning the More Certain Fundamentals of Astrology; a quarter century later he served as astrologer to General Albrecht von Wallenstein.20
The modern distinction between astronomy and astrology was, at one time, fuzzy and irrelevant, just like the distinction between alchemy and chemistry or between magic and medicine. Promoting the propitious, avoiding calamity, and forecasting death suggest astrological interpretation. Yet prediction, which is an offshoot of analysis, can be exacting and scientific, given the right practitioner. Accurate observation of the skies, combined with a grasp of physics and a cartography of the cosmos, is the cornerstone of both.
Claudius Ptolemy, a renowned second-century AD Alexandrian mathematician, addressed all of the above. Besides writing astronomy’s formidable founding document, the Almagest, he wrote the influential compilation of the geographical and cartographical knowledge of his day, the Geographike Hyphegesis, and the equally influential astrology opus, the Tetrabiblos. He begins Tetrabiblos by asserting a link between sky and Earth and the dual nature of sky studies:
Of the means of prediction through astronomy . . . , two are the most important and valid. One, which is first both in order and in effectiveness, is that whereby we apprehend the aspects of the movements of sun, moon, and stars in relation to each other and to the earth, as they occur from time to time; the second is that in which by means of the natural character of these aspects themselves we investigate the changes which they bring about in that which they surround.21
Ptolemy did not doubt that the cosmos was a unified, harmonious system (the Greek word kosmos means “order” as well as “world”) or that the celestial affected the terrestrial. He traced a natural progression from heavenly configurations within and among the zodiacal constellations to the differing strengths of their influence on different sectors of Earth, to the general temperaments of persons born in those sectors, to the particular temperaments of persons born at particular times when particular influences were prominent. The sky was the seal that stamped the wax.22
By calculating where everything was, is, and will be on the sky, the astrologer could assign cause—preferably before, but sometimes after, the effect. Excesses of the body, flaws and felicities of character, distresses of the soul, and disruptions of society and nature could be traced to a source. Jupiter and Venus were temperate and moistening, hence fertile, active, and beneficent; Saturn and Mars were chilling and drying, hence destructive. Leo the Lion, the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter embodied masculinity; Virgo the Virgin, the Moon, and Venus embodied femininity. Europe, the northwestern quadrant of the known world, was familiar with Leo, Aries the Ram, and Sagittarius the centaur Archer and was governed by Jupiter and Mars; therefore, wrote Ptolemy, the men there were warlike, commanding, clean, fond of liberty, and indifferent to women. The inhabitants of Britain and Germany, he added, were especially fierce because of their greater familiarity with Aries and Mars.23
Your horoscope (hora, “hour”; skopos, “watcher”), which derived from the Sun’s location among the stars at the time of your birth, delineated your basic individual tendencies. In addition, the changing skies triggered changing effects. Knowing your own as well as the planets’ proclivities, you could calmly prepare yourself for what lay ahead and, if necessary, rein in your worst tendencies so as to reduce your risk. Events and cities were subject to similar influences: while celestial configurations predisposed an individual to violence or acquiescence, and a polity to peace or endless strife,24 they could also signal a coming shipwreck, earthquake, or robbery, or suggest the most advantageous timing for a marriage, a coronation, a prayer, or an invasion.25
The influence of classical astrology lasted for centuries. Astrologers cast horoscopes not only for Jesus and Pope Urban VIII but also for the fate of Florence and Rome and for the belligerent parties in World War I. They predicted or retroactively explained the assassination of monarchs, the success of empires, the rise of religions, even the end of history.26 Not that everybody thought Ptolemy’s legacy was a good thing. Astrologers, contended the critics, usurped power that rightly belonged to others; horoscopes were too persuasive. Even Ptolemy himself had reservations.27 Hardly had the ink of Tetrabiblos dried than astrologers began to be expelled from Rome. The practice of astrology was restricted or even banned by the emperors Augustus, Diocletian, Theodosius, and Justinian. Saint Augustine said it was untenable to propose that the stars, whose power derived from God, could cause evil. Martin Luther pointed out that numerous astrologers had predicted a Great Flood of 1524, which didn’t happen, whereas none predicted the massive Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, which did. Urban VIII, whose death had been misforecast for 1630 by a renowned abbot-astrologer, issued a papal bull against astrologers in 1631.28
But even vocal opponents of astrology sometimes played it safe: Francesco Guicciardini, a politician in Renaissance Florence who ridiculed the widespread tendency to remember astrologers’ successes while forgetting their far more numerous mistakes, had his own horoscope cast by a murderer. Nor did astrology vanish with the rise of rationalism or the increasing interest in observational astronomy or the spread of the telescope, despite the sudden appearance of brilliant new stars (supernovas) in 1572 and 1604, not to mention Galileo’s discoveries in 1609 and 1610 of the mountains and craters of the Moon, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and the two seeming companions of Saturn—all of which made astrology’s foundations tremble. Suddenly the map of the sky, and consequently the analysis of celestial influences, had to be revised. William Herschel’s discovery in 1781 that Uranus was a planet further confounded the profession.
Beliefs, however, have a strong grip. Although many educated Europeans came to reject celestial determinism in the lives of individuals, many continued to embrace the idea that the stars and planets affect the more general course of nature. Diplomats advised a limited reliance on astrology rather than an all-out rejection of it, especially in times of war.29 The English philosopher-scientist Francis Bacon discounted the doctrine of horoscopes and felt astrology to be “so full of superstition, that scarce anything sound can be discovered in it,” yet declared that purifying it was preferable to discarding it altogether.30 Britain’s first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, trod lightly on astrologers’ toes: referring to the rare triad of Saturn–Jupiter conjunctions in 1682–83, he wrote that while astrologers had “affrighted” the “Common People” with “fearful Predictions of direful events . . ., the more Judicious are desirous to know how often and at what time their Conjunctions happen.”31 Galileo, too, was caught between the old and the new. He himself drew up horoscopes for his friends, his daughters, his patrons, himself. The dedication of his paradigm-destroying Sidereus Nuncius, published in March 1610, includes a panegyric to Jupiter and to his patron Cosimo II de’ Medici, whose horoscope Galileo slightly rigged to make that regal planet maximally dominant.32
Astrological prognostication kept its hold well into the seventeenth century. After enduring a few body blows in the eighteenth century, it gained ground in the nineteenth, survived the twentieth, and is alive and well across the globe in the twenty-first, especially among those with limited science literacy.33 Few people, including those who hold power, are immune to the suspicion that astrology might have something to offer or to swear by.
Take America. For most of the past thirty years, the fraction of the US population that embraces astrology has held steady at one-fourth but is now growing (about the same fraction believes in reincarnation, while twice as many have had what they call a “mystical experience”). While Ronald Reagan was president, he and his wife Nancy consulted a Vassar-grad astrologer who prescribed the timing (sometimes right down to the second) of presidential election debates, the announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s appointment to the Supreme Court, press conferences, takeoffs of Air Force One, State of the Union addresses, and much else. Right after 9/11, a “prophecy” ostensibly written by the illustrious, obscurantist sixteenth-century astrologer and seer Nostradamus raced across the Internet, further terrifying masses of already terrified Americans and further priming them for retaliation. In fact, the quatrain was an intentional fabrication, written for a twentieth-century student essay: “Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, / while the fortress endures, / the great leader will succumb, / The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.” Embellishments soon included “On the 11th day of the 9 month, / two metal birds will crash into two tall statues” and “In the city of york there will be a great collapse.” In 2004, after several years of intensive fear-promotion by media and public officials alike, the most popular search term on AOL was “horoscope.” On the night of September 4, 2008, as a vast-screen video introduced John McCain to the party faithful at the Republican National Convention, to the accompaniment of swelling music and applause, a sonorous voiceover proclaimed: “The stars are aligned; change will come.”34
Or take India, where astrology is Vedic rather than Ptolemaic, and the Moon figures more prominently than the Sun in horoscopes. Today, as in the past, few Hindus marry without consulting—and obeying—an astrologer. As the diplomat, journalist, and writer Khushwant Singh put it: “Astronomical harmony was the one guarantee of happiness.” On November 27, 2003, twelve thousand couples got married in New Delhi because Jupiter’s “planetary mischief” would be kept at bay that night. In late October and early November 2006, Delhi was again awash in weddings, this time because even couples whose discordant horoscopes would normally rule out a marriage were being assured of a happy outcome. But matters of matrimony are far from the only domain where astrology rules: political candidates’ nomination papers are filed, and the winners are sworn in, at astrologically opportune times. In 2001, with the Bharatiya Janata Party in power, publicly funded Indian universities were urged to offer courses in Vedic astrology. Many Indian scientists and academics vilified the policy—“For our Government to send satellites into space yet permit astrology to be taught using public funds is too great a contradiction to bear further mention”—but it was upheld by the Supreme Court of India.35
In his panoramic 2007 novel Sacred Games (now a Netflix series), Indian-American writer and computer geek Vikram Chandra offers an extraordinary depiction of astrology wedded to annihilation. One of his characters is a guru whose goal is to engineer the nuclear annihilation of the city so as to start Earth’s cycle of time and life afresh. Speaking to a gang kingpin who has become his disciple, he says,
Think of life itself. Do you think it has no violence in it? Life feeds on life, Ganesh. And the beginning of life is violence. Do you know where our energy comes from? The sun, you say. Everything depends on the sun. We live because of the sun. But the sun is not a peaceful place. It is a place of unbelievable violence. It is one huge explosion, a chain of explosions. When the violence ceases, the sun dies, and we die. . . . Have not holy men fought before? Have they not urged warriors to battle? Does spiritual advancement mean that you should not take up weapons when confronted by evil? . . . We must resist this so-called peace which emasculates spirituality and makes it weak.36
Money, an overwhelmingly obvious source of power, is another matter in which astrologers are hard at work. Read the business press, and you’re likely to run across a quote from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” But plenty of people seem to feel that money is power and that astrology is control, and that if you put the two together, you’ve got control over money. The Gilded Age banking magnate John Pierpont Morgan reputedly said, “Millionaires don’t hire astrologers, but billionaires do.” Both Morgan and Seymour Cromwell, president of the New York Stock Exchange from 1921 to 1924, consulted a high-profile astrologer named Evangeline Adams, who received her clients in a suite above Carnegie Hall.37 More recent financial astrologers’ mottoes and book titles may give skeptics pause (“Market timing by planetary cycles and technical analysis”; Planetary Harmonics of Speculative Markets), but investors, fund managers, bankers, and corporate executives still seek their advice. Statistically, of course, amid all the misses there’s the occasional hit: one astrologer forecast that the stock market would plummet in October 1987; another forecast that gold would hit $487 an ounce in 2005. Horoscopes can be, and are, drawn up for a bond, a Treasury bill, a company, or even a stock exchange, based on the hour of its first offering or its incorporation or the start of trading.38
Astrologers were no doubt heartened by the findings of two business-school professors, to the effect that across the full history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S & P 500, the NYSE, and the NASDAQ, stock returns have been as much as 8 percent higher (about double) for the fifteen days around the new Moon than for the fifteen days around the full Moon. Elsewhere the “lunar cycle effect” has been even more pronounced: for the final three decades of the twentieth century, in stock exchanges around the world, the returns were as much as 10 percent higher.39 Meanwhile, the half month surrounding the new Moon generates, on average, the same gravity and the same tidal forces as the half month that surrounds the full Moon.
One “classical scientific astrologer” and financial commentator has stressed planetary transits and oppositions rather than the phases of the Moon. Posting his analyses in the late summer of 2007 amid the deepening credit crunch, the flood of home foreclosures and bank failures, and the ubiquitous (though widely ignored) signs of imminent global economic meltdown, Theodore White warned of the bursting housing bubble, contending that Jupiter helped inflate values and that Saturn had begun to deflate them. “Saturn’s long transit of Virgo (26 months) and another four months by retrograde in the year 2010, takes place in a sign ruled by Mercury,” he wrote. “This transit will have a devastating, nearly depressing, effect on those severely affected by the downturn in the housing market nationwide.” In addition, Saturn would be “rising in sunrise diurnal charts, and will be Lord of the months of October & November, with continuing strong influences into December 2007.” The latter’s transit near the South Lunar Node pointed to the subprime mortgage crisis “crystalliz[ing] into a major call for regulation throughout the economic climate of the United States.”40
After-the-fact revelations are easy to come by when you consult the nearly limitless number of cyclic phenomena. It’s not hard to find one that matches your needs or expectations. There’s the eleven-year sunspot cycle, the twenty-six-month cycle of Earth and Mars in space, the 18.6-year cycle of lunar eclipses. There’s also the yearly cycle of months: in 1907, 1929, 1987, and 2008, the stock market sustained huge hits in October. Other Octobers saw pullbacks. Does that mean the “October effect” is a real thing? No. But if significant numbers of buyers and sellers believe that cosmic forces will bring down the market, a sell-off will follow, thereby fulfilling their prediction. Plus, keep in mind all the failed predictions.
The prosecution of war is at least as durable and hard-nosed a pursuit as the acquisition of a fortune, and certain real-life warriors have been as interested in astrology as were the rulers of Mesopotamia and ancient China. Nazi Germany offers a stunning case study, chronicled in detail by Ellic Howe, a writer, historian, and expert forger who during World War II worked for a British agency called the Political Warfare Executive.41
Interest in astrology rose rapidly in defeated, inflated Germany following World War I, writes Howe—more rapidly than in the rest of Europe. A graphologist-journalist named Elsbeth Ebertin was fast becoming a well-paid, widely read professional astrologer, and in the spring of 1923 a follower of Adolf Hitler’s, hoping to learn about his leader’s horoscope, sent Ebertin the rising politician’s date of birth (though not the exact hour, a crucial detail). Ebertin decided to publish the horoscope in the 1924 edition of her annual almanac, A Glance into the Future. She did not name Hitler, but she didn’t have to:
A man of action born on 20 April 1889, with Sun in 29° Aries at the time of his birth, can expose himself to personal danger by excessively uncautious action and could very likely trigger off an uncontrollable crisis. His constellations show that this man is to be taken very seriously indeed; he is destined to play a “Führer-role” in future battles. It seems that the man I have in mind, with this strong Aries influence, is destined to sacrifice himself for the German nation, also to face up to all circumstances with audacity and courage, even when it is a matter of life and death, and to give an impulse, which will burst forth quite suddenly, to a German Freedom Movement. But I will not anticipate destiny.42
Ebertin’s prognosis, calculated on the assumption of a noonday birth, appeared in July 1923. In November, Hitler participated in what could easily qualify as an “excessively uncautious action”: the Beer Hall Putsch. By the time he landed in jail for his part in the putsch, Ebertin had learned that he’d been born at 6:30 PM. No matter. Astrology’s star was rising in Germany, aglow with swiftly multiplying societies, publishers, manuals, conferences, and adherents of every sort. More than a hundred Herren Doktoren—philosophers, paleontologists, physicians, even an astronomer who worked on ballistics problems and possibly the dreaded V-2 rocket—publicly joined their ranks. As Howe put it, “In Germany between the two wars there were more astrologers per square mile than anywhere else in the world.”43 Popular as it was, astrology also spawned powerful opponents.
With Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the Third Reich on January 30, 1933, his horoscope became a matter of wider interest. Aiming to justify various characterizations of the Führer, some astrologers even “corrected” the hour of his birth, putting the Sun in Taurus rather than in Aries and, in a few cases, questioning his capacities. The authorities saw that as a line in the sand. In the spring of 1934 the Berlin police banned most forms of astrological activity, and by the end of the year the Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, headed by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, had silenced public astrological speculation concerning the fortunes of the Third Reich and the horoscopes of prominent Nazis. Astrological literature, both popular and abstruse, was confiscated from publishers and booksellers. Homes were searched, persons arrested. The last major annual astrological conference took place in 1936. One after another, periodicals ceased publication during 1937 and 1938.44
Late in the afternoon on May 10, 1941—coincidentally, a few hours before the most horrific night of the London Blitz—the mentally unstable Rudolf Hess, occupant of the third highest leadership position in the Third Reich and, like so many of his countrymen, something of an aficionado of astrology, climbed into a Messerschmitt-110 fighter plane and headed for Scotland. He had secretly decided to embark on a peculiar, unvetted mission of peace: trying to convince British high officials to accept German supremacy in Europe and thereby save their country from further devastation. Practicalities soon intervened: the plane’s fuel supply wasn’t sufficient for the trip, so he had to bail out, leaving the plane to crash onto a farmer’s field near Glasgow while he himself parachuted down, breaking his ankle and ending up in a British military hospital. Reich officials, needing to produce an explanation for the surprise flight that would somehow satisfy not only the German people but also the rest of the world, decided to blame a combination of insanity and astrology. Rumors flew around Europe; the London Times posited that Hess was Hitler’s secret personal astrologer. Propagandists on both sides went into overdrive.45 Within a couple of days the Gestapo arrested and questioned several astrologers; within the month they arrested hundreds more, primarily those who belonged to astrological societies and who had published their analyses, along with many more people involved in activities tinged with the occult. On June 24 public lectures and performances involving astrology, clairvoyance, telepathy, and other esoteric practices were thenceforth forbidden. On October 3 the ban was extended to the print media. Some astrologers ended up in concentration camps.
Yet despite the considerable censorship, astrology and the occult flourished behind both closed and open doors, supported in part by Goebbels. On November 22, 1939, at one of his almost-daily ministerial conferences (convened for the attendees to assent, not confer), he decreed that a psy-ops leaflet based on Nostradamus’s prophesying of the far future be swiftly prepared for dissemination in France.46 In 1940 the Propaganda Ministry hired Karl Ernst Krafft, a fervent, statistics-minded Swiss astrologer, to annotate selections from Nostradamus.47 In 1942–43, chastened by a few months of incarceration following the Hess affair, Krafft and another notable, though more pragmatic, astrologer named F. G. Goerner were conscripted to spend their days excerpting Nostradamus and preparing the horoscopes of Allied generals. Other recently arrested astrologers, along with astronomers, mathematicians, and psychics, were recruited for the Pendulum Institute, where, during the spring of 1942, under the directorship of a captain of the German navy, the professional staff assiduously swung pendulums over maps of the Atlantic Ocean, searching for the positions of enemy ships.48
As the Reich’s fortunes wavered, the drafting of prophecies and the private study of horoscopes mounted.49 Publicly, prediction became the general order of the day—at least while it remained useful—and radio was the propagandists’ preferred medium. From September 1942 through March 1943, the second winter of the campaign in Russia, nearly one in every eight items in the German news bulletins was an explicit prediction.50 Refugee German intellectuals described the Nazis’ approach to prediction and prophecy:
Belligerent governments invariably predict victory. The stakes are high, and the public is naturally anxious. Not to predict is to encourage suspicion and to destroy confidence. To predict ultimate failure is morally to surrender. Thus propagandists predict victory, for it is the only thing they can do. . . . Above all, the Leader is forced to prophesy to demonstrate his charismatic gift. . . .
Reassurance was given by initial victories. As time went on, however, the propagandist . . . found it convenient to deal with the increased tension of the German people, by an increased use of predictions. [There is a greater] need to predict in times of distress rather than in times of comfort. For a long time predictions took the place of good news. [But w]hen . . . Russia’s force remained unbroken, the policy was suddenly changed, and prediction became rare. It was at this time that Goebbels began telling the German people in so many words that this was a world in which one could not predict and that the war was simply “the riddle of riddles.[”]51
The specifically astrological form of prediction, however, retained its appeal. From the late 1930s onward, rumors about a Hitler–astrology connection multiplied. One astrologically sophisticated writer—Louis de Wohl, a part-Jewish Berliner who got himself out of Germany in 1935 and wished to survive in style in London and New York—found astrology a convenient way to facilitate his survival, and so he let it be known that Krafft was Hitler’s personal astrologer. The president of Columbia University soon announced that Hitler had a team of five astrologers. The London Evening Standard named Elsbeth Ebertin the Führer’s favorite astrologer.52
In fact, neither Hitler nor most of his closest Nazi colleagues53 turned to astrologers for advice on what to do when, even though the Nazis’ angry nationalism and ardent racism put them on the same side of the fence as many people who embraced not only the political mission of a racially pure, redemptive Aryan future but also the fairytale vision of a golden Aryan past, full of spiritualism, folk identity, cosmic mysteries, and astrological constructs. Nevertheless, as Goebbels put it, “crazy times call for crazy measures,” and the Third Reich’s waning weeks must have been intensely crazy, not least because its leaders had not yet grasped that their nanosecond of supremacy had already come and gone.54 And those were the weeks when Hitler turned to prophecy.
From the April 1945 diary of Hitler’s minister of finance, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk (a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford), we learn that around midmonth, Goebbels and Hitler decided that the time had come to examine two horoscopes: that of the Führer himself, which had been cast in 1933, and that of Greater Germany, cast in 1918. The revelations must have been thrilling. As the diarist writes,
Both horoscopes had unanimously predicted the outbreak of war in 1939, the victories till 1941, and then the series of defeats culminating in the worst disasters in the early months of 1945, especially the first half of April. Then there was to be an overwhelming victory for us in the second half of April, stagnation till August, and in August peace. After the peace there would be a difficult time for Germany for three years; but from 1948 she would rise to greatness again. . . . [N]ow I am eagerly awaiting the second half of April.55
Early on Friday the thirteenth of April 1945, the Reich’s state secretary rang up the finance minister to announce that President Roosevelt had died the previous day. “We felt the wings of the Angel of History rustle through the room,” Schwerin von Krosigk records. “Could this be the long-desired change of fortune?” Goebbels thought so. When a reporter told him the news, he called for a bottle of the best champagne and telephoned Hitler to say that just such a turning point had been “written in the stars.” Goebbels was ecstatic.56
Less than four weeks later, the Nazis surrendered.
To proponents of National Socialism, the discovery of icy little Pluto in 1930 seemed pregnant with implications. Astrologers swiftly integrated Pluto into their horoscopes, and in 1935, two years after Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, a German astrologer, Fritz Brunhübner, published a brief but detailed book on the newcomer, Der neue Planet Pluto. According to Brunhübner, Pluto is “the end of the old world and the ascent of a new spiritual epoch.” It is “a malefic in the greatest form,” “the planet bringing death,” “the instigator of the turn in world events.” Its “destiny is to clean up the old and to march before the new era in a new form.”57
But the creepiest connection he makes between Pluto and Hitler’s Germany is the following:
Moreover, I believe Pluto to be the planet of National Socialism and the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler and almost all of the leading men now in the government, also the Nazi Party, and the horoscope of the Third Reich (January 30, 1933, the day of Potsdam, the Reichstag elections of March 5th and November 12th, 1933) show—besides a very dominant Uranus—a strong Pluto.
It has to be like this. Pluto is the planet of the turning-point. The National Socialistic movement, in the horoscope of which Pluto is elevated above all other planets, brought about, according to the laws of Pluto, a reversal in German history. And what tells the horoscope of Adolf Hitler? At that moment, when Reich President Hindenburg handed Adolf Hitler the fate of the German people, transiting Pluto stood in the Zenith, tied to the most important places of the radix horoscope . . . a trial of strength, a seizure of power, a turning-point, a crisis.58
“Turning-points” keep turning. At the war’s end, the Allies dissolved and banned the National Socialist German Workers Party, and Germany itself now deems the performance of the Nazi salute a criminal offense. In the decades following the war, astronomers found that Pluto is smaller than not only our own Moon but six other moons in our solar system as well, and the International Astronomical Union no longer classifies Pluto as a true planet. The search for sources of sky power, conquest, and “new eras” must turn elsewhere.