Chapter 9
LAMBE REMAINS AN ENIGMA.Forman, despite all his notoriety and faults, had clearly done much to bring affordable health care to London’s poor. That, for many, was enough to expiate his sins. Another in that noble line was the English botanist, physician, and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper, whom all modern advocates of herbal medicine revere. Born in Sussex in 1616, the son and grandson of Puritan divines, Culpeper had been a child prodigy of sorts, studiously well-read far beyond his years, and fluent by the age of twelve in Latin and Greek. By then he had already become aware of astrology, through Sir Christopher Heydon’s great treatise in defense of the art, and was captivated by William Turner’sNew Herbal, published in 1551, with its striking illustrations of herbs and plants. Meanwhile, he had begun to explore the botanical wonders of his environment, and to learn anatomy with the help of a graphic text prepared by Thomas Vicary, the barber-surgeon to Henry VIII. At sixteen, he went up to Cambridge to study classics and, according to his family’s expectations, prepare for a career in the Church. But that was not his heart’s desire. After a couple of years of youthful dereliction, he tried to elope to Holland with an heiress but she was killed en route to their rendezvous when lightning struck her coach. Disowned by his family, Culpeper left Cambridge and settled in London, where he worked as an apothecary’s assistant before opening his own shop in Red Lion Street, one of London’s slums. In 1642, he was briefly charged with witchcraft for practicing medicine without a license, but like Forman he was actually more of an empirical physician than many of those the Royal College turned out. “They have learned little since Hippocrates,” Culpeper noted, and “use blood-letting for ailments above the midriff and purging for those below.” That, he thought, left a lot to be desired. Meanwhile, in addition to his exploration of herbal cures, Culpeper had begun to study astrology, “an art which teachest by the book of creatures,” he wrote, “what the universal Providence mind and the meaning of God toward man is.” Hippocrates, the great Greek physician, had insisted that his students master the art, and Culpeper likewise came to regard it as indispensable, once remarking that “physic without astrology is like a lamp without oil.”
After serving as a field surgeon and infantry captain on the parliamentary side in the English Civil War, he established a clinic in Spital-fields, just outside London, where “he treated all comers, even those who could not afford to pay.” The classical anatomy of Galen and the doctrine of the four humors were joined in his practice to the medieval doctrine of a sympathy or correspondence between all created things. Astrology formed the keystone. “If you do but consider the whole universe,” he wrote, “as one united body, and man as an epitome of this body, it will seem strange to none but madmen and fools that the stars should have influence upon the body of man, considering he, be[ing] an epitome of the Creation, must needs have a celestial world written in himself…Every inferior world is governed by its superior, and receives influence from it.”
Culpeper would prove even more unpopular with the medical establishment than Forman had been. He earned its undying hatred when he translated the standard medical reference work of the time—A Physical Directory, or the London Pharmacopoeia—from Latin into English. Like the vernacular translation of the Bible, this rebellious act made once-arcane knowledge suddenly available to all. In a rage, the Royal College denounced him as an atheist (he was nothing of the sort) and tried to discourage the sale of his version by impugning its skill. In fact, it was learned and exact, though he had taken the liberty of appending his own informed commentary about the uses and virtues of each drug. Two years later, he published an important guide,The Astrological Judgment of Diseases, as well asA Directory for Midwives, with advice for women and mothers at every stage of their childbearing years. His magnum opus, however, appeared in 1653. This wasThe English Physician, or an Astrologo-physical Discourse on the Vulgar [Common] Herbs of This Nation, a compendious astrological primer for herbal cures. Known today asCulpeper’s Herbal, it is the only book in English other than the King James Bible from the 1600s that has been continually in print since it appeared.
“First consider what Planet causeth the Disease,” he wrote. “Secondly, consider what part of the Body is afflicted by the Disease, and whether it lie in the Flesh, or Blood, or Venticles…Thirdly, consider by what Planet the afflicted part of the Body is governed. Fourthly, you have in this book the Herbs for Cure appropriate to the Several Diseases, and the Diseases for your ease set down in the Margin, whereby you may strengthen the part of the Body by its like, as the Brain by Herbs of Mercury, the Breast and Liver by Herbs of Juniper, the Heart and Vitals by Herbs of the Sun, &c.” This was all according to a kind of unified field theory of interconnectedness and correspondence, as nicely expressed by Sir Walter Ralegh inThe History of the World: “Why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers?” he asked. “For, seeing they are many in number and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think that in the treasury of his wisdom who is infinite there can be wanting, even for every star, a peculiar virtue and operation; as every herb, plant, fruit, flower, adorning the face of the earth hath the like.” After all, the movement of the heavens produced the diurnal cycle of day and night, as well as the course of the seasons; the moon controlled the tides; flowers opened and turned to greet the rising Sun.
In medical astrology, the natal chart was used to identify the patient by temperament, which helped the doctor select the right treatment; while a decumbiture chart—from the Latin worddecumbo, meaning “to fall or lie down”—was cast for the onset of the illness (or for the time the patient decided to consult a doctor) and served to help diagnose the ailment, indicate its course or progress, and suggest its cure. Different parts of the body were held to be ruled by different signs—the head by Aries; the cerebellum and neck by Taurus; the arms and lungs by Gemini; the stomach by Cancer; the heart and spinal cord by Leo; the intestines by Virgo; the kidneys by Libra; the sex organs and rectum by Scorpio; the hips and thighs by Sagittarius; the knees by Capricorn; the ankles by Aquarius; and the feet by Pisces. Different herbs were held to be ruled by different signs according to a related scheme. According to the doctrine of signatures, appearance often denoted function. For example, citron apple, spikenard, mint, and parsley, which bear in their leaves a heart formation, were thought to be congenial to the heart. In medical astrology, they were therefore ruled by Leo and the Sun. Other herbs, ruled by Gemini, that simulated the shape of the lungs, such as sage and lungwort, were thought to be good for pulmonary complaints. Yet it would be a mistake to think of these asaccidentally linked. They were (or were believed to be) essentially connected, the appearance bespeaking the Idea.
Culpeper’s holistic approach, as John Frawley writes, at least “had the virtue…of treating the patient rather than the illness—of regarding, that is, the patient as an individual organism with individual qualities, not as one of a race of identical machines which had developed a mechanical fault.”
After an examination of the patient and his horoscope, Culpeper applied the appropriate herbs. Nettles proved useful for sore throats; rhubarb acted as a sunburn cool; caraway assisted digestion; myrtle relieved diarrhea; the kidneys were cleaned by broom and furze; knap-wort (a marsh weed that acts as an astringent) helped with diseases of the skin. Culpeper had wandered all over England, collecting and classifying the plants and herbs he found, and “in each case meticulously recorded its character, the conditions in which it was found, its time of flowering, its zodiac ruler, and the diseases it could cure.” The best days for bloodletting and purging and for administering certain potions or drugs were also astrologically determined, especially by the phases of the Moon. It was axiomatic in medical astrology, for example, not to perform surgery (if you could help it) when the Moon was waxing (lest the blood flow increase) or to operate on some particular part of the body when the Moon was in the sign by which that body part was ruled.
Despite his demonstrable success in treating others, Culpeper lost the battle with his own failing health. He had been wounded at the battle of Reading during the English Civil War and while in the hospital had contracted tuberculosis, which he was unable to cure. When he died on January 10, 1654, he was just thirty-eight years old.
Culpeper’s methods are still used today to treat everything from heart failure to bee stings. “In each decumbiture chart,” one modern practitioner explains, “look at the Ascendant and the planet which rules it and see how the symbols describe the patient, their health, and vitality. Note also the element linked to the zodiacal sign, and how the nature of the planet—hot, cold, moist, or dry—interacts with the elemental nature of the sign it is in.” The condition of the ruling planet specifically describes the patient’s vitality—if dignified or exalted, strong; if in its detriment or fall, weak. It will be weaker still if retrograde or aspected by Saturn or Mars. The Sun and Moon (if different from the ruling planet) must be assessed in the same way. All this reveals what the general strength of the patient is. To identify the disease, one must look to the sign on the sixth house cusp, the planet that rules it, and the sign that planet is in. Again, the condition (by dignity) of that planet indicates how powerful the illness is. Different planets may signify its nature—Saturn (chronic), Mars (acute)—and the quadruplicities its likely course: cardinal signs, a disease that goes rapidly one way or the other; fixed, one that is entrenched; mutable, an illness prone to wax and wane. Whether the patient (unaided by therapeutic care) can prevail or not will normally be indicated by which of two planets—the lord of the Ascendant or the sixth house cusp—is overall in better shape.
ENDURING ASCULPEPER’S REPUTATION IS,still greater renown must be accorded to William Lilly, “the English Merlin,” universally considered one of the foremost astrologers who ever lived. It was Lilly who had given Culpeper his first tutorial in astrology when Culpeper had come to London at the age of nineteen, and had lent him an ephemeris and a book of “aphorisms for physicians” to guide his steps; and it was Lilly whose work would be looked to as the standard by most astrologers of talent for the next hundred years.
Born in the village of Diseworth in Leicestershire, on May 1, 1602, Lilly’s beginnings were not unlike Forman’s. He showed promise as the gifted son of a yeoman farmer, longed for higher education, seemed likely to get it, then saw his early prospects dashed. When he was a youngster, his father was imprisoned for debt, and though some land was sold to defray it, the family still had to scrape. Even so, Lilly received a good grammar school education—“my mother always intending I should be a scholar”—learned Latin, Greek, and a little Hebrew; read Cato, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Homer; and “could make extempore verses” in any meter on any theme. He was also, it seems, the star of his school debating team. “If any scholars from remote schools came to dispute,” he tells us, “I was ringleader to dispute with them; and if any minister came to examine us, I was brought forth against him, nor would I argue with him unless in the Latin tongue, which I found few could well speak without breaking Priscian’s head.”
After his mother died, Lilly taught school for a year, which agreed with his bookish bent; but that upset his father, who wanted his help on the farm. Lilly demurred, in part out of a pronounced aversion to “country labor,” as he put it, but also because he could see “no hope by plain husbandry to recruit a decayed estate.” Not surprisingly, his father denounced him as useless and threw him out of the house. Lilly accepted his fate, bought a rough new suit of traveling clothes, and (like Dick Whittington with his cat) set off for London with twenty shillings in his pocket to make his way in the world. He walked the whole way, through wind and storm, and arrived with seven shillings and sixpence left. Yet his prospects were not as bad as they seemed. Through a family friend he obtained a letter of reference to Gilbert Wright, a prominent merchant in the salt trade who was also “an upper servant to Sir John Puckering, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, sometime Speaker of the House of Commons, and a great favorite of the Queen.” Lilly became his general assistant, which, to his chagrin, entailed all sorts of menial chores in addition to clerical tasks. He had to clean Wright’s shoes, sweep the street before his house, fetch water in a tub every morning from the Thames, weed his garden, empty his slops, and “ceremoniously walk before him to Church on Sundays.” During the seven-year term of this indentured servitude, as he saw it, his master went through three wives. The second of the three, who died of breast cancer, had apparently consulted Simon Forman at some point, for one of his sigils was found among her belongings at her death.
Wright’s third wife, Ellen Whitehaire, however, outlived him, and it fell to Lilly to settle Wright’s affairs and pay his debts. Lilly did so in a competent fashion, which kept the estate intact, and in grateful admiration Wright’s widow decided to make him her own. “She had many suitors,” Lilly tells us, “old men, whom she declined; some gentlemen of decayed fortunes, whom she liked not, for she was covetous and sparing,” but his own combination of acumen and youth had the right appeal. On September 8, 1627, they were married, and though Lilly was scarcely more than half her age, they lived quite happily together for the next six years. She enjoyed his youthful vigor, and he “reveled in the opportunity to live comfortably” without having to work. Who could blame him? After drudging for Wright, he now went fishing in the Thames, passed his time at games such as primero (a form of poker) and basset, and frequented the theaters and fairs. Sometimes he went out to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to watch the long-bow archers bully up their marks, or took leisurely walks with his own servant now in tow. Yet he was not an idle soul. His passion for learning was prodigious, and in addition to his private medical studies (precipitously begun when Wright’s second wife was dying), he kept up with the classics and his knowledge of Latin and Greek.
One Sunday in 1632, Lilly met a law clerk at church who afterward introduced him to an astrologer. That astrologer was John Evans, a Welsh divine who had been forced to flee his Staffordshire parish for some offense. He was an odd character and not the best of the breed. When Lilly first met him, he was “suffering from a monumental hangover” and living in a flophouse in Gunpowder Alley, off Shoe Lane. In his person, Evans was somewhat deformed—“a squat little man, dark and beetle-browed, with splay feet and a flattened nose”—shrewd but irascible, and a bit of a rogue who often got into street fights and tavern brawls.
Still, Lilly was intrigued, engaged Evans to instruct him, and after seven or eight weeks of intensive study “could set a figure tolerably well.” That was something, for in London at the time, according to Lilly, an in-depth academic knowledge of the art was fairly rare. Evans himself, in fact, had almost no library to speak of and relied mainly onThe Judgment of the Stars by Haly Abenragel, the court astrologer to an 11th-century Tunisian prince. Lilly made the rounds in search of other adepts, but didn’t have much luck. For example, there was one Alexander Hart, who lived in Houndsditch, “a comely old man of good aspect. He professed Questionary [Horary] Astrology and a little Physick. His greatest skill was to elect young gentlemen fit times to play at dice, that they might win or get money. I went unto him for resolutions for three questions at several times, and he erred in every one. To speak soberly of him, he was but a Cheat.” Hart was later indicted for fraud but rescued by the intercession of John Taylor, “the Water Poet,” who talked the Lord Chief Justice into granting him bail. Once released, Hart fled to Holland, where he died. Another pretender was a certain “Captain Bubb,” who lived in Lambeth Marsh; there was also a William Poole, “a nibbler at Astrology, sometimes a gardener, a drawer of linen, a plasterer and a bricklayer. He would brag many times he had been of 17 professions; was very good company mostly for drolling,” and had a penchant for scatological verse.
A couple of others were more worthy. There was Jeffrey Neve, the former mayor of Yarmouth, who had “a little smattering in Astrology, could resolve a question of theft, or love-question, and something of sickness,” which wasn’t bad. Better still was William Bredon, the vicar of Thornton, who went strictly by Ptolemy, “which he well understood,” and was “absolutely the most polite person for Nativities in that age.” Bredon had collaborated with Sir Christopher Heydon on hisDefense of Astrology, and was a reverent soul, but so addicted to tobacco that for lack of it he once cut the bell ropes of his church to smoke in his pipe.
Not long after Lilly met Evans, his wife, Ellen, died and left him with a comfortable income, which he used to lease his house and buy a part share in thirteen houses in the Strand. That allowed him the freedom to turn his full attention to the stars. He bought up everything on the subject he could find, and eventually his library included almost every relevant book in print. The heart of it was acquired from the Reverend Arthur Bedwell, former chaplain to Sir Henry Wotton, whose collection contained many choice works, including Valentine Naibod’sCommentary upon Alchabitious, which Lilly especially prized. His study of astrology now preoccupied him wholly, by his own account, up to eighteen hours a day, even as he began to experiment with various forms of occultism, including astral magic and crystal-gazing, though he later gave these up.
From Evans he had learned the basics: how to draw up and interpret a birth chart, cast for horary questions and elections, read a solar return, ingress charts, and so on, as well as the importance of shrewd judgment in getting a reading right. Evans himself, according to Lilly, “had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft and many other questions that I ever met withal,” which was high praise indeed, considering what a master Lilly became. However, the two eventually had a falling out when it became apparent to Lilly that Evans was willing to doctor his readings for a fee. One day, it seems, a woman came to see Evans and “I standing by all the while and observing the figure,” Lilly tells us, “asked him, why he gave the judgment he did, since the significators showed the clean contrary, and gave him my reasons; which when he had pondered, he called me ‘Boy,’ and must he be contradicted by such a novice? But when his heat was over he said had he not so judged to please the woman, she would have given him nothing, and he had a wife and family to support.”
Lilly may have had his opportunistic side, but in astrology he was a purist, and his developing standards made him impeccable in the practice of his craft. Years later, in laying out a code of ethics for aspiring astrologers, he offered this sound yet lofty advice: “Be humane, courteous, familiar to all, easy of access: afflict not the miserable with terror of a harsh judgment [prediction]; direct such to call on God, to divert his judgments impending over them. Be civil, sober, covet not an estate. Give freely to the poor, let no worldly worth procure an erroneous judgment from thee, or such as may dishonor the art.”
To Lilly’s credit, he heeded his own counsel, and devoted many years to the practice of astrology before venturing into print. By then he had a solid name. His clientele, like Forman’s, ran the gamut, from nobles and high state officials to chambermaids. In the course of his career, he drew tens of thousands of charts (four thousand in one two-year period alone) entailing every kind of question, though an increasing number had to do with matters pertaining to the English Civil War. In the 1640s, he attracted the interest and friendship of a number of men of power, including Bulstrode Whitelocke, later keeper of the Great Seal; Sir Philip Stapleton (a prominent parliamentary leader); Robert Reynolds; Sir Robert Pye; Anthony Ashley Cooper, later first Earl of Shaftesbury; Philip, fourth Earl of Pembroke; and Sir Christopher Wray. All of these men had come to him at one time or another for astrological or medical advice. An ailing Whitelocke, for example, had brought him a sample of his urine, and by setting a figure for the moment he received it Lilly determined (correctly, it seems) a proper treatment for the disease. Indeed, by 1644 Lilly’s practice was already thriving when he published his first almanac, modestly entitledMerlinus Anglicus Junior, followed byA Prophecy of the White King and Dreadful Deadmen Explained. From then on until his death he issued a new almanac each year.
Of all the many predictive manuals that crowded the bookstalls in those years, his were by far the most popular and widely esteemed. He had some trouble though over the way the first one came out. It so happened that the government licenser of all such texts at the time was John Booker, also an astrologer, “who had earned a considerable reputation by correctly predicting the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and the Elector Palatine.” Booker published an annual almanac of his own, and was initially wary of Lilly as a potential rival. So before he agreed to license Lilly’s work, he “made many impertinent obliterations,” as Lilly put it, which tempered and abridged the text. He also ran it past some religious censors who grilled Lilly about his personal beliefs. Even so, it was a great hit, read avidly by members of Parliament as well as the general public, and Booker was soon forced to reissue it uncut.
Meanwhile, in 1642 England had erupted into Civil War. Astrologers took sides, of course, and their forecasts were often used as propaganda—each tending to emphasize those planetary trends that seemed to favor his own cause. Lilly cast his lot with Parliament, and proved so potent in the influence he wielded by his predictions that the king declared he would trade half a dozen regiments to get him on his side. One day when Cromwell’s army was in Scotland, about to do battle, a soldier stood with Lilly’s almanac in his hand, crying out as the troops passed by, “Lo, hear what Lilly saith; you are in this Month promised Victory; fight it out, brave Boys!” which gave them a confidence only Cromwell himself could have inspired. Among important battles, he successfully predicted the crushing Royalist defeat at Naseby in June 1645, and the capitulation of the Royalist stronghold of Colchester in 1648. George Wharton, a Royalist astrologer, attempted to challenge Lilly at every turn, but in the competition of their predictions was almost always wrong. Lilly, in truth, didn’t think much of Wharton’s skill. Once, when Wharton ventured to criticize Lilly’s remarks on a Mars-Saturn conjunction in Taurus, Lilly wrote to him scornfully: “You are yet in your ABC’s; when you have learned your Accidence you may be able to prate, but not correct.” That only fueled Wharton’s ire. In 1647, they clashed again. Lilly had publicly announced, “God is on our side; the Constellations of Heaven after a while will totally appear for the Parliament, and cast terror, horror, amazement, and frights on all those Dammee-Blades [Cavaliers] now in Arms against us.” Wharton rashly rushed to proclaim: “The Stars are now so propitiously inclined to our Party, and so averse and destructive to theirs…that we cannot fail of Victory.” Yet Parliament prevailed.
Lilly rebuffed a number of Royalist attempts to win him over, and on one such occasion declared that “he would rather eat bread and water with the Parliament than roast meat with the Cavaliers.” Yet throughout the conflict he never lost some personal affection for the king. Indeed, even while he was being consulted by Cromwell’s General Thomas Fairfax (who professed to “know nothing of astrology” but hoped it “was lawful and agreeable to God’s word”), he could not turn away when asked to help save the king’s life. It so happened that after Charles I had been captured, he sent an emissary to Lilly to ascertain, by astrological means, “in what quarter of this nation he might be most safe” to go should he escape. Lilly drew up a chart in response to the question; it indicated that he would be wise to seek refuge in Essex. Instead, the king made for Southampton, where he hoped to take ship for France. No ship was available, so he crossed to the Isle of Wight, where he was caught. Lilly later remarked: “I told him to go east and he went west.”
Lilly was an adept in every branch of astrology—horary, natal, elective, and mundane—as well as on the impact of comets, eclipses, and parhelia on public affairs. To a remarkable degree, he got things right. In hisMerlinus Anglicus Junior of 1644, for example, he had analyzed the relations between the king and Parliament according to a figure for the Sun’s entrance into Aries for that year. The planetary pattern showed a mutual desire for peace (since the planets that signified the two parties formed a benevolent aspect); on the other hand, those planets representing the articles of peace themselves, then under negotiation, were skewed in favor of the king. (The telltale planets, it seems, were in trine aspect to the tenth house, “representing his Majesty” but not to the Ascendant, by which Parliament was shown.) In time, the articles were rejected precisely because the king sought an unfair advantage by their terms. In another pamphlet published the same year—England’s Prophetical Merlin—Lilly linked the Civil War to a recent Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, and thought the solar eclipse that had taken place in Gemini in 1639 portended the king’s demise. This seemed confirmed by two mock Suns, or parhelia, which had been observed flanking the Sun itself on the king’s own birthday, November 19, 1644.
Mock suns had been of interest to astrologers and natural philosophers for a long time. Aristotle thought they were produced by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the “upper air”; others, by some effusion from the Earth. Almost all thought they had a meaning for events. Pliny reported that parhelia had hung over Rome when Augustus was enthroned; and a vision of three suns in 1434 was supposed to have predicted the fall of Constantinople in 1453. On February 2, 1461, at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross during the War of the Roses, Edward IV had also observed three suns, which Shakespeare recounted inHenry VI, Part 3. Edward says: “Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three Suns?” Richard, the Duke of York, replies:
Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale, clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow’d some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event.
No one doubted that the Sun was the natural symbol of the king, so it seemed natural enough that his fate would be reflected in solar events. Mock suns could appear for good or ill. At Mortimer’s Cross they had merged in surpassing brilliance to spook the foes of Edward IV. But, Lilly wrote inAn Astrological Prediction (1648), “when mock Suns like Yeoman of the Guard, so encompass the true Sun,” as they had on the birthday of King Charles, it meant his “captivity,” which indeed he suffered, as events played out. Lilly also made the following judgment on a horoscope that he cast in 1647 for the king’s fate: “Luna is with Antares, a violent fixed star which is said to denote violent death, and Mars, approaching Caput Algol, which is said to denote beheading, might intimate that.” At the time, few thought it would come to such a pass. Two years later the king’s head fell on the block.
In 1647, in the midst of the Civil War, Lilly publishedChristian Astrology, a massive work of 841 pages that offered the first comprehensive guide in English to the theory and practice of the art. The whole tradition found reflection in its pages, which in three parts summarized the fundamental precepts, the art of horary astrology, and nativities or natal charts. In his account of the planets and signs, he is often pithy and succinct. As a master of horary astrology he was perhaps beyond compare. His book is full of example charts, many of them remarkable for their kind, with a focused grasp always of the salient points. If an astrologer is asked, “Whether one absent will return or not, and when?” he tells us, “Consider by what house the absent party is signified, and [by] what Planet” (in this instance, the Lord of the ascendant); “and if the journey is short, look to the third house; if of some length, to the fifth; if long, to the ninth; if very long, the twelfth…But if he be in a Cadent house [the third, sixth, ninth, or twelfth], and not behold his own ascendant, he neither cares for his return, or hath any thoughts thereof, nor could he return even if he wished.” Again, to know “Whether a Damsel be Virtuous or not, Behold the lord of the seventh, the cusp of the seventh, and the Sun; and if they be in fixed signs and well aspected, you may judge that she is correct.”
His description of the planets was both pungent and entertaining. For example, Mercury, “being well-dignified, represents a man of subtle and politic brain, intellect, and cogitation; an excellent disputant or Logician, arguing with learning and discretion, and using much eloquence in his speech, a searcher into all kinds of Mysteries and Learning, sharp and witty, learning almost anything without a Teacher.” Ill-dignified or poorly placed, on the other hand, it signified “a troublesome wit, his tongue and Pen against every man, wholly bent to fool his estate and time in prating and trying his conclusions to no purpose; a great liar, boaster, prattler, busybody, false.” Again, Mars well placed, or dignified, “in feats of War and Courage is invincible, scorning any should exceed him, subject to no Reason, Bold, Confident, immovable, Contentious, challenging all honor, Valiant, lovers of War.” Ill-dignified or poorly placed, “a prattler without modesty or honesty, a lover of Slaughter and Quarrels, Murder, Thiefery, a promoter of Sedition, Frays and Commotions, as wavering as the Wind, a Traytor of turbulent Spirit, Perjured, Obscene, Rash, Inhumane.”
Lost objects were a staple of horary work, and according to the rules laid down by Lilly, to ascertain the thief and the object’s location, the ascendant, in most cases, signified the place from which it was stolen; the planet ruling the ascendant, the person robbed; the Moon and the planet ruling the second house, the object; the fourth house and its ruling planet, where the object was concealed; and the seventh house and its ruling planet, the thief. Prospects for recovering the lost object were good if the Moon was moving toward the ruler of the ascendant, or the planet ruling the twelfth house, or the planet ruling the house in which the Moon itself was placed. Otherwise, not—unless the Moon was in the ascendant or in the second house.
Here is a horoscope Lilly judged concerning the theft of some money. “Question: Money lost. Who stole it? Is it recoverable? 24th May, 1647, 5P.M.” Result:
Here Scorpio ascends, and partly describes the questioner’s person; Mars, lord of the ascendant, show his mind and disposition…Finding Mercury in an angle, having no essential dignities, and in partile conjunction of Saturn, and square of Mars, I took him to signify the thief…The Moon was in a masculine sign, applying to a masculine planet (Mars), and Mercury was in conjunction with Saturn, and square to Mars, both masculine planets; I judged therefore that the sex was male. As Mercury ever signified youth…I said he was a youth, of some 15 or 16. I described him of reasonable stature, thin visaged, hanging eyebrows, with some scar or blemish in his face, because Mars cast his square to Mercury; bad eyesight, as Mercury is with evil fixed stars (the Pleiades) of the nature of Mars and Luna [the Moon]; dark hair, because of his closeness to Saturn; a scurvy countenance, and one formerly accused of knavery and theft. The youth significator being in conjunction with Saturn, lord of the third and fourth houses, I judged him the child of some neighbor; and as Luna is in Gemini, and Mercury in Taurus in the seventh house, I said he dwelt either opposite the questioner, or a little south-west.
Lilly turned out to be right on all these counts. Moreover, “as Luna applied to sextile with Mars, lord of the ascendant, and was within about four degrees of the aspect, I judged [the victim of the theft] should…have his money again within four days.” And within that time, it was returned.
There was a general admiration for his work, though from time to time religious zealots attacked him—rather to his surprise, since he firmly believed astrology was consistent with Christian belief. When one Reverend Thomas Gataker denounced him for a perfectly ordinary observation, Lilly joked to a friend: “I only wrote ‘senes bis pueri’ [old men are twice children] and he wrote 42 pages against astrology and myself.”
But it was his astounding skill at political prediction that amazed the public mind. There “is nothing appertaining to the life of man in this world,” Lilly wrote inChristian Astrology, “which in one way or other hath not relation to one of the twelve houses of heaven.” For example, in 1646 Lilly was asked by a member of the House of Commons, “Whether Presbytery shall stand?” that is, whether the Calvinist Presbyterian faction of the government would succeed in taking power. The Royalists were then in retreat, but those on the other side were split: between the Independents, on the one hand, who believed in freedom of worship for all Protestants, and the Presbyterians, who did not. The Independents looked to Cromwell and the army for their strength; the Presbyterians had the House of Commons on their side. Lilly drew his chart. In it, all the angles were in mutable signs and only Saturn among the planets was “fixed.” This indicated that the situation was extremely volatile and could go either way. He then looked to the ninth house (of religion), which gave him three planets to assess: Jupiter, the natural ruler of the ninth and “the general significator of religion”; Saturn, which occupied it; and Venus, the ruler of Taurus, the sign on the ninth-house cusp. Jupiter, though exalted in Cancer, was impaired because it was about to enter Leo, where it would aspect malefic fixed stars and be in its detriment by term and face; Venus was in her detriment in Aries, in the twelfth house from her own (when counting counterclockwise from the ninth as the first), and would have to pass through a square to Jupiter and Mars before reaching her own sign; finally, Saturn (representing the Presbyterians) was also in poor shape: it was “peregrine, occidental, with no essential dignity”; failed to make any aspect with the Part of Fortune; and, of paramount importance, failed to aspect the Moon (which stood for the people) in the chart. From all this, Lilly concluded that the Presbyterians would fail in their bid for public support.
As events transpired, he was right. He also correctly predicted that “within three years” the king (then still living) would be gone and “a more amenable government rule.” Three years later, on January 30, 1649, Charles I was beheaded and a republic was formed. From still another chart, prepared for the date of the king’s execution—which he took to be the birth chart of the commonwealth itself—it appeared that the commonwealth would be replaced in turn by a new monarch within twelve years. Just so: it ended with the coronation of Charles II on April 23, 1661.
Of course, he could also be wrong, though that was rare. He did uneven service for Charles Gustavus, the king of Sweden, who gave him a medal and a gold chain (while the service was still good); and was certainly off the mark when he predicted in 1659 that Cromwell’s son, Richard, would be able to fill his father’s shoes. On at least one occasion, the range of Lilly’s acumen also skirted the law. The use of astrology in medicine was generally accepted, and in horary castings few topics were out of bounds. But in 1655, Lilly was indicted for having “unlawfully given judgment in return for payment respecting the recovery of stolen goods.” The recorder entered a plea in Lilly’s favor and the case was dismissed.
Throughout these years, Lilly kept his practice going at his house on the Strand, where he based his fees on a sliding scale. He charged half a crown or more from those who could afford it; a shilling from those of lesser means. On occasion, he gave medical advice to the poor for nothing, and urged his colleagues to do the same. Meanwhile, in 1648 he had received a handsome pension from the government (later revoked by the Rump Parliament, when he predicted its fall); remarried (upon the death of his second wife); and weathered the transition back to monarchical rule. Lilly accepted the shift without resentment, and fervently shared in the hope of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Clarendon, who in his speech to Parliament on the Act of Indemnity, prayed that the nation’s horoscope would now assume a brighter shape. “The astrologers have made us a fair excuse,” said Clarendon, “and truly I hope a true one: all the motions of these last twenty years have been unnatural, and have proceeded from the influence of a malignant star; and let us not too much despise the influence of the stars. And the same astrologers assure us, that the malignancy of the star is expired; the good genius of this kingdom is become superior, and hath mastered that malignancy, and our own good old stars govern us again.”
Yet the height of Lilly’s fame still lay ahead. The most celebrated of his forecasts were those made in 1648, when he foresaw the plague that would sweep through London in 1665, and the Great Fire that nearly consumed it in 1666. “In the year 1665,” he wrote, “or near that year…more or less of that time, there will appear in this kingdom so strange a revolution of fate, so grand a catastrophe…as never yet appeared…it will be ominous to London…to all sorts of people…by reason of sundry fires and a consuming plague.” Hieroglyphics of this twofold horror subsequently appeared in his pamphlet entitledMonarchy, or No Monarchy, published in 1651: images “representing a great sickness and mortality; wherein you may see the representation of people in their winding-sheets, persons digging graves and sepultures, coffins, etc.” On the next page, “after the coffins, and pickaxes, there is a representation of a great city all in flames of fire.” On the cover was also a striking woodcut of twins (representing Gemini, the sign on London’s ascendant) falling headlong into a great conflagration and men struggling to put out the blaze.
Thirteen years later, ominous signs of the plague itself began to appear in the blistering hot London summer of 1664, when flies arrived in swarms. They lay in matted clusters on the ceilings, and clung in clumpy nests to windows, posts, and doors. The first reported deaths, with their horrible, black lymphatic swellings, occurred in St. Giles and Drury Lane, but the contagion soon spread from one parish to another, until by the spring of 1665 the mounting toll was 400 a week. The plague then spread eastward, encompassing the heart of the city, before crossing the Thames to Rotherhithe and Deptford. In a vain effort to contain it, the taverns and theaters were closed, and all sporting and other crowd-drawing events were banned. A nine o’clock curfew was also imposed, but the deaths exponentially increased each month until, by summer’s end, four to five thousand were perishing each week. All who could flee the city did—the king and his court to Oxford; the nobility to their country estates; clergy, doctors, and well-to-do merchants to other retreats. By September, there were not enough able-bodied men left to bury the dead. Dwellings where infection had been diagnosed were marked with a red cross and “Lord have mercy upon us” scrawled upon the door. Every night, carts were driven through the empty streets to collect the corpses, the drivers shouting “Bring out your dead,” which were then thrown into huge burial pits covered with lime. Although flea-laden rats were of course the real emissaries of contagion, in one counterproductive and misguided measure—inspired by the idea that pets helped spread the disease—the mayor ordered all dogs and cats in the city killed. But that just gave the rats, freed of their natural predators, more room.
For some obscure reason, the scent of nosegays was believed to ward off the germs, and many who succumbed were found with the gentle flower in their hand. Hence that riddling rhyme:
Ring a ring o’roses
A pocketful of posies.
Atishoo! Atishoo!
We all fall down.
The ring of roses was the circular red pattern of the telltale rash; the posies were the nosegays; “atishoo” was the violent sneezing fit that plague victims often suffered toward the end; and “we all fall down” told the common fate. Indeed, before the plague subsided completely in the winter of 1666, some hundred thousand Londoners had died.
One year later, on the night of September 2, in the house and shop of Thomas Farynor, baker to the king, in Pudding Lane, the Great Fire of London began. Farynor had neglected to douse the coals in his oven the previous evening, and embers scattering from it ignited some kindling nearby. At one o’clock in the morning, a servant woke to find the house ablaze. Sparks from the house fell on hay and straw in the yard of an adjacent inn; from there the flames flowed like lava across the thatched roofs of London’s close-packed hovels to engulf warehouses on Thames Street filled with a combustible mix of hemp, spirits, and oil. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was awakened, but long since exhausted by his battle with the plague, thought nothing of it and said merely, “A woman might piss it out.” Within five hours, however, the blaze had become an inferno, fanned by a strong east wind. It roared through the mostly wooden houses sealed with tar and pitch, and wrapped itself around St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose bricks burst like grenades. On the second day, wrote the diarist John Evelyn, “we beheld that dismal spectacle, the whole city in dreadful flames near the waterside; all the houses from the bridge, all Thames street and upwards towards Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes…The people were so astonished that from the beginning, I know not by what despondency or fate, they hardly stirred to quench it, so that there was nothing heard or seen but crying out and lamentation, running about like distracted creatures without at all attempting to save even their goods.” Belated attempts to create firebreaks by blowing up houses in the path of the flames failed to halt them and by the fourth and final night, “all the sky was afire, like the top of a burning oven,” and London within a radius of ten miles as bright as day. Most of the surviving inhabitants fled to outlying fields as far as Highgate, where they put up makeshift shelters as best they could. In all, fully 80 percent of the city, including 13,000 houses and 89 churches, was reduced to charred rubble. Almost the whole of Shakespeare’s London was gone.
After both catastrophes came to pass, Lilly was summoned to appear before a committee of the House of Commons and closely questioned about his knowledge of the conflagration and its cause. (They could hardly suspect him of having conspired to cause the plague.) But he succeeded in vindicating himself completely, for as he afterward wrote: “The Committee seemed well-pleased with what I spoke.” With respect to his prescient pamphlet, he told the committee that he had found it “most convenient to signify my intentions and conceptions thereof in Forms, Shapes, Types, Hieroglyphics, etc., without any commentary, so that my judgment might be concealed from the vulgar, and made manifest only unto the wise…Having found, Sir, that the City of London should be sadly afflicted with a Great Plague and not long after which an exorbitant Fire, I framed these two hieroglyphics as represented in the book, which in effect have proved very true.” Lilly added that he had subsequently attempted to discover by astrological means whether the fire had been deliberately set but that seemed not to be the case. He concluded, therefore, that it was “the finger of God.”
How did Lilly foresee the fire? Here a distinction between natal and mundane astrology must be drawn. In natal astrology, a conjunction of the Sun, Moon, or one of the four angles of the chart with a powerful fixed star was considered of great moment—for example, when Charles I was born, his Sun stood at 8 degrees 3 minutes Sagittarius and was therefore conjunct Antares, a malevolent fixed star that indicated “a rash, ravenous, and head-strong person, destructive to himself by his own obstinacy,” which, few would contest, Charles proved to be. In mundane astrology, a judgment from a direction of the ascendant to a fixed star had more weight. Why? As Guido Bonatti explained: “The Fixed Stars are slow in motion, and consequently in mutation; whence it comes to pass that their impressions require subjects and patients of the same nature, that is to say, such as are the more lasting [like cities, states, or nations], and carry a conformity with them to perfect or accomplish their effects.” In foreseeing the Great Fire of 1666, Lilly had noted the close proximity of the Bull’s North Horn—a star of the second magnitude, “of the nature of Mars”—to London’s ascendant (at 17 degrees 54 minutes Gemini), and calculated the time of its conjunction for 1666. (In a similar way, the transit of Saturn through London’s ascendant had also boded ill. Rebellion and pestilence had accompanied such transits in 1408, 1439, and 1554; they had coincided with the English Civil War; and in modern times, with the London Blitz.)
After his acquittal, Lilly obtained his medical license and retired to Hersham, Surrey, where in his last years he pursued his practice on a more modest scale and carried out his duties as the local warden of St. Mary’s Parish Church. Except for a brief, bitter dispute with John Gadbury (an astrologer of rank whose career he had helped to foster), his retirement was a quiet one in which he was greatly assisted by Henry Coley, an able young astrologer who became his adopted son and scribe. Beginning in 1676, Coley came every summer to Lilly’s home in Hersham to work with him on his almanac, and, when Lilly’s sight began to fail, on English editions of excerpts from some of the classic texts. These were later published in 1676 asAnima Astrologiae: Or, a Guide for Astrologers, being the Considerations of Guido Bonatus [Bonatti] and the Choicest Aphorisms of Cardan [Girolamo Cardano]. Meanwhile, Lilly’s health rapidly declined and on June 9, 1681, he died of a stroke. Mourned widely, he was exalted as the “English Atlas” of his arcane craft, and ceremoniously interred beneath a black marble gravestone (which his friend and colleague Elias Ashmole had provided) near the chancel or altar of his church. George Smallridge, later bishop of Bristol, supplied a Latin epitaph.