Florence and Bologna, Italy

The first art that the demon ever created was that of divination . . . thus he said on earth to Lady Eve: eat of this fruit and you will know good and evil and will be gods.

—BERNARDINO OF SIENA

A MONTH BEFORE I LEFT FOR ITALY, a curious email appeared in my inbox. Purple astrological emojis dotted the subject line: my “travel horoscope” awaited inside. “Look to the stars for travel inspiration,” Reservations.com instructed, leading me to click on my Sun sign (Capricorn) to “reveal where you should travel next and why.” Although I prefer to choose my destinations through more material means (spinning a globe, naturally), the tactic had my attention. Leveraging the public's passion for astrology is something organizations both sacred and profane have been doing for a very long time.

Love it, hate it, or live and die by it—astrology is a significant part of contemporary culture—and witchcraft. Wiccans, neo-Pagans, eclectic witches, and magical dilettantes alike armor up for retrogrades, celebrate eclipses, and chart their personal and professional lives through the solar system's vicissitudes. You don't have to be a witch to be into astrology, but most witches are in deep. It's no coincidence that with the witchcraft revival in full swing, astrological devotion has increased exponentially in the mainstream.

“Millennials have replaced religion with astrology,” declared a 2019 piece in the LA Times. And the oft-maligned millennial is more than likely to have used an astrology app, shared a star sign meme, or paid for a scathing birth chart read. In many circles, the idea of self-care has become as much about caring for your physical body as it is understanding the impact that heavenly bodies have on it. Astrology is seemingly inescapable right now, much to the delight of devotees and the chagrin of debunkers.

The sun was still blazing the day I went hunting for Florentine astrology. Crossing the Arno from the comfort of my medieval stone apartment, I steadily climbed hundreds of steps up to a religious complex known for a divinatory treasure. The heat threatened to spike that afternoon, so I pushed on despite feeling faint, the green and white marble of San Miniato al Monte seemingly a mirage in the distance.

Built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries on the foundation of a far older shrine to Saint Minias, San Miniato al Monte is a breathtaking specimen of Tuscan Romanesque architecture situated on one of the highest points in the city. If you want to take in vistas of Florence, this is the place. Pilgrims of all sorts make the trek daily for San Miniato's views and to see one of its not-so-secret features: a marble zodiac mosaic on the church floor featuring twelve astrological symbols.

Designed to track the passage of time and to mark important Christian feasts, San Miniato al Monte's basilica is positioned in such a way that sunbeams enter and illuminate different parts of the church—and the zodiac—as the year goes by. Stepping into the cavernous basilica, I found the zodiac panel in the center aisle surrounded by protective ropes. The intricacy is astounding in this well-preserved artifact: I initially made out the shape of a bull, a goat, two fish, and a crab amid decorative filigree. During the Feast of San Giovanni (which is also the summer solstice), light rushes in to electrify the symbol of the crab set into a circle for Cancer season. This zodiac inlay remains the oldest working solstice meridian in all of Europe, but was likely inspired by an even older zodiac inside another building of green and white marble: the Baptistery of San Giovanni.

An octagonal minor basilica across from the Duomo, the Baptistery was consecrated in the eleventh century. Some scholars believe its zodiac panel was installed so light would shine through the Baptistery and alight on the symbol of the sun to mark the Feast of San Giovanni. The zodiac was repositioned centuries ago, however, so it unfortunately no longer serves its original purpose—although it is still there to visit. Touring the Baptistery didn't make much sense until I saw San Miniato. Nearly identical in both form and function, the two marble zodiac panels are companion pieces that tell us much about astrology of the past.

While pondering these Pagan-cum-Christian marvels, I ventured next door to the basilica where members of the Olivetan order were serving homemade ice cream, a welcome antidote for the heat. Inside the San Miniato gift shop, I perused handcrafted oils for calming your anxiety and vivifying your skin in addition to all sorts of wares picturing the zodiac panel, from silk scarves to gold jewelry. A monk pointed out a necklace with a Cancerian crab on it, and I began to wonder whether the pope would approve of all this astrological idolatry.

“All forms of divination are to be rejected,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church decrees. “Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums . . . contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.” There seems to be no place for astrology in today's Catholicism—let alone any form of divination—but there has always been a lag between what is practiced and what is preached.

Italy has long been a nation of divination. “Divination was built into Rome's culture, politics, and military prowess,” explains Brian Copenhaver, “not just its religion.” It was common for citizens and officials alike to consult with fortune-tellers, dream interpreters, and astrologers. Roman astrology drew on practices that began in ancient Mesopotamia and developed further in Greece. Studying celestial bodies and interpreting the stars and planets’ impact on people and events were not viewed as separate disciplines as they are now: the line between astronomy and astrology was blurry at best.

There were ancient Romans who famously questioned the validity of astrology—Pliny the Elder, for one—but the stars had the last laugh. Astrology was eventually “integrated into the Roman canon of sciences, as one of the seven artes,” writes Kocku von Stuckrad in History of Western Astrology, and “the ‘language of the stars’ became a kind of lingua franca, in which various cultural areas and religious traditions could easily communicate.”

So how did zodiac symbols find their way into Christian churches like San Miniato al Monte and the Baptistery of San Giovanni? You might think once Christianity began to draw a following that astrology was shown the door, but the opposite occurred. In fact, in the early Christian era, astrology “became the main discipline for interpreting the world and the future,” von Stuckrad explains. But it had to be integrated into the new religion first.

Overwriting astrology's Pagan past, newly minted Christians began to shift the meanings of the zodiac. The twelve signs came to symbolize Jesus's twelve apostles. The Sun came to symbolize Christ himself, who was worshipped on Sunday. It took centuries to Christianize the zodiac, but convert Saint Zeno of Verona proffered in-depth links between Christian theology and astrology in the fourth century AD.

Contemporary astronomer Simone Bartolini, who has worked extensively at San Miniato and the Baptistery, details the zodiac's early Christianized meanings in Sun and Symbols: The Zodiacs in the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte and in the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence:

According to [Saint Zeno's] interpretation, Aries became the symbol of the mystic Lamb that would be sacrificed; Taurus represented Christ's sacrifice and the divine drama, while Cancer and Leo represented the resurrection and the triumph of Light. Gemini is the symbol of the transition from the Old to the New Testament through the mystical womb of Mary, represented by the sign of Virgo. The remaining signs of the zodiac symbolized human drama, based on the passage from human ruin and perdition to redemption by Christ's sacrifice, here represented in the highest expression in Aquarius, a symbol of purification from original sin through Baptism, that was considered the salvation of humanity, symbolized by Pisces.

“This interpretation explains the presence of the zodiac inside the Baptistry of San Giovanni and the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte,” Bartolini concludes.

Astrology remained a popular subject among Christian elites throughout the Middle Ages. Renowned astrologer Guido Bonatti used his skills to advise government officials in Florence, Siena, and beyond during the thirteenth century. Florentine humanist and priest Marsilio Ficino wrote about astrological magic, medicine, and talismans in his Three Books on Life published in 1489, but made sure to remind his audience that it was God who made such workings effective. “In performing any work let us hope for and seek the fruit of the work principally from Him,” Ficino writes, “who made both the celestials and those things which are contained in the heavens, who gave them their power, and who always moves and preserves them.” Meanwhile, at the University of Bologna, professors were teaching physicians how astrology could inform their medical practice.

As scholars and theologians were debating and dedicating themselves to the discipline of astrology, the masses continued to engage with the heavens. “Usually the popular form [of astrology] referred more to phases of the moon than to motions of the other heavenly bodies, for the fairly simple reason that the moon could more easily be seen and its movements more readily understood,” Richard Kieckhefer writes in Magic in the Middle Ages. “Detailed charts told which days of the lunar cycle were good or bad for various activities.”

It was not until the early modern era that astrology and other forms of divination would come under increasing scrutiny of the Church. But that still didn't stop elites and everyday people alike from practicing their own forms of practical magic.

The Museo Internazionale dei Tarocchi is known as the “witch house” by its neighbors. Nestled in the bucolic province of Bologna, this museum dedicated to tarot lies behind the doors of an austere stone home perched on a hill. Upon arrival, I was ushered into the museum proper by founders Morena Poltronieri and Ernesto Fazioli, who have written multiple books on magic, tarot, and witchcraft and even created a tarot tourism guide of Italy.

Inside the small but beautifully curated museum, there are two floors of artistic interpretations of the major and minor arcana. More decks than I've ever seen in one place are stacked in glass cases. (A deck of cat tarot featuring ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi's work was the most memorable.) Downstairs, the oldest examples of tarot imagery are mounted on the wall, guarded by a figure in Renaissance garb.

Walking through the tarot museum, I was struck by the creative breadth of the practice. There are infinite ways artists have explored tarot archetypes—I saw paintings, sculptures, films, fashion, and food inspired by the tarot on display—as there are infinite ways to incorporate the reading of tarot as a discipline. These days, it can be as much a creative or therapeutic tool as a method of divination.

The tarot museum has been open since 2007, but it was only in recent years that locals dared enter, Fazioli told me with an incredulous laugh. (Hence its designation as the “witch house.”) Many people still don't understand the art and science of tarot in Italy, Fazioli observed, and associate it only with fortune-telling. Apparently, Italians haven't yet given themselves over to the recent tarot renaissance to the extent those from the US and UK have.

The tarot we know today is a direct descendant of the Italian card game of tarocchi. Some of the oldest known Italian tarot decks, the Visconti-Sforza decks, were commissioned by the duke of Milan for various auspicious occasions in his family's life. An early set was populated with deities from Greek mythology, but later decks evolved to depict archetypes from Roman antiquity and medieval court life. A surviving Visconti deck from c. 1450–80 consists of four suits of fourteen cards (minor arcana cards) and twenty-two trump cards (major arcana cards), which squares with the seventy-eight-card tarot decks that are in use today.

The tarot continued to change centuries after its inception, sometimes for political reasons. Fazioli impressed upon me that the Inquisition's growing disdain for divination—particularly in nearby Bologna, which birthed its own tarot deck—led to the temporary removal of certain cards: those with powerful women like the Empress and the High Priestess, along with the Emperor and the Pope cards. They were the likeliest to ruffle the feathers of those in power.

In the fifteenth century, San Bernardino of Siena—a highly influential itinerant priest—supposedly set his sights on tarot as one of many sinful vices. His public speeches were literally filled with fire and brimstone, and it was he who originated the “bonfires of vanities,” which predate Savonarola's events of the same name.

“With a large portion of local citizenry and leadership in attendance, these ‘bonfires’ involved the burning, in major civic arenas, of not only cosmetics, wigs, and clothes, as well as playing cards . . . magical books, amulets, and other instruments of magic, sorcery, and superstition,” Franco Mormando details in The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy.

One biography of Bernardino suggests that he had a special fire set to burn tarot decks. But that was the most innocuous of what he really wanted to burn. San Bernardino was fanatical about fighting heresy at all costs and publicly calling out sinners—especially witches—at his frenzied events.

“Through the staging of these spectacles . . . and through his preaching in general, what Bernardino succeeded in doing was not only to send to the stake for the crime of diabolical witchcraft women who may very well have been guilty of simple sorcery,” Mormando continues, but “more important, he also succeeded in provoking or intensifying the general climate of fear and suspicion about witches that hung over the cities and towns of Italy and beyond.”

Accusations of witchcraft were often voiced in the same breath as accusations of divination. There is a documented overlap in Italy between those involved in the practice of love magic and those who proffered horoscopes or divinatory readings. They were almost always women—and in cities like Venice, Rome, Modena, and Siena, they were often sex workers, too.

Divination became increasingly suspect throughout the sixteenth century, but under Pope Paul IV, books on astrology were banned, and astrologers caught practicing were banished from the Papal States. In 1585, Sixtus V declared all manner of magical practices—including divination—the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. His papal bull singled out female diviners and women possessed by demons, but did not directly mention witches. “There was no mention of maleficium, sex with the devil, or the flight of witches to the Sabbath,” Rainer Decker notes in Witchcraft and the Papacy. “Only the pact with the devil was named, but again only in connection with divination.”

The relationship between divination and Christianity would go through many periods of storm and stress from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and into modernity. Like the wheel of the zodiac, popular opinion about astrology and the tarot is seasonal and cyclical. The sacred becomes the profane becomes the sacred once more. And, like the wheel of the zodiac, it seems we always end up where we started, looking to the stars and the cards to divine inspiration and answers.