Astrology and Mandalas

Though astrology played an essential role at the court of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary (1458–90), it has been a largely neglected field of scholarship. This article provides a general overwiew of the issue, investigates the relations between astronomers /astrologers or humanists, the related primary sources and branches of astrology pursued at the court, and analyses some exemplary horoscopes. The investigation is based on a great variety of sources (including literary and visual artworks): poems for the king, chronicles, various horoscopes and iudicia. The most popular branches of astrology seem to be natal and catarchic astrology. Astrology was applied for various purposes: to forecast one’s fortune in general, to forecast political and military events, to support institute foundations. Royal patronage and political propaganda played a great role in the importance of this discipline. Even taking into account the popularity of astrology in Europe, the king’s personal predilection for the stars seems to have been remarkably strong.

The article examines the presence of astrology in the heraldic work Orbis Polonus by Szymon Okolski dating from the mid 1600s. While due to a growing fascination with neo-Platonism and hermetic writing, astrology had enjoyed popularity since the Renaissance, in Okolski’s case its infl uence came mostly through Early Modern books of emblems and compendia of symbols. It is, therefore, important not only to track down astrological motifs in the works of Alciatus, Cesare Ripa, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Julius Wilhelm Zincgref, and Diego de Saavedra to compare them with those found in Orbis Polonus but also to recognise the fact that emblematics had a great impact on how Okolski perceived the import of his heraldic work as such. The novelty of Okolski’s project consisted in treating armorial bearings as universal symbols and interpreting them not only in accordance with the rules of heraldry but also through a wide range of cultural sources, trends and traditions. In order to make the symbolic significance hidden in coats of arms more apparent, the author tried to organise the heraldic entries in a new way. Apart from the usual parts describing the coat of arms (delineatio), its origins (origo) and the family that used it (linea familiae), he introduced subchapters dealing with its symbolic meaning. He called them “considerations,” “precautions,” or “omens” depending on which aspect of the symbolic explanation he wanted to emphasise. Especially the third of these dovetails with astrology because the symbolism of the coat of arms, including motifs derived from, or related to, astrology, is presented as the best path that should be taken by a family bearing a particular coat of arms. All the while, however, these auguries are made based on symbols as such and not on careful observation of stars, planets or comets, and Okolski is not concerned with the destiny of individual people but with more general tendencies that aff ect the virtue of noble families, and virtue is for Okolski the foundation of nobility.

In December 1521, the Louvain arts faculty hosted a public quodlibetica disputation about an astrologically caused world-wide flood that was expected for February 1524. This paper situates the discourse of the disputant Thomas Montis, which produced a critique by the physician Damianus de Fenaco and a subsequent reply by Montis, in the context of the late medieval relations between academic theology and astrology. It argues that Montis's text, along with many other contributions to the 1524 Flood-debate from the Low Countries, is symptomatic of a tendency to interpret the theologian as the representative of a social group, rather than as the privileged voice of a divine teaching, and of a more outspoken tendency to cultivate a direct relation to the Word and theology, thereby emulating some of the basic patterns which Erika Rummel uncovered among the northern humanists of this period.

The examination of MS 363.3, a parchment bifolium in the Archivio di Stato, Modena, recently led to striking findings. First, although the right side of the verso and the left side of the recto bear a fragment of a hitherto unknown redaction of Sefer ha-Mivḥarim (Book of elections) by Abraham Ibn Ezra, the left side of the verso and the right side of the recto contain another fragment of a hitherto unknown redaction of the same author's Sefer ha-Seʾelot (Book of interrogations). Second, a very close Latin translation of these Hebrew fragments has been located in two Latin manuscripts that contain two astrological works designated therein as Liber eleccionum and Liber interrogacionum , confirming that these Latin texts are translations of the full texts of the lost Hebrew redactions of Mivḥarim III and Seʾelot III. Finally, the fact that we now have these fragments of Mivḥarim III and Seʾelot III as well as their Latin counterparts corroborates the thesis that Ibn Ezra composed at least three Hebrew astrological encyclopedias, consisting of several individual redactions of the various works. The present notice announces this discovery and offers a brief account of the Hebrew fragments and their correspondence with their Latin counterparts. Six excerpts from both fragments are published, accompanied by the Latin translations in Liber eleccionum and Liber interrogacionum and an English translation of a collation of the Hebrew excerpts with their Latin counterparts.

CHAPTER II. The Conventions and Possibilities of Astrology

4. Astrology and the I Ching

Astrology and Mandalas

Astrology in Shakespeare's Day

Astrology, heliocentrism and the Copernican question.

The Story of Astrology

Journal Article ‘The Crab behind his back’: Astrology in Spenser's Epithalamion Get access Gordon Campbell Gordon Campbell University of Leicester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume ns-34, Issue 2, June 1987, Pages 200–201, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/ns-34.2.200 Published: 01 June 1987

It is generally assumed that astrology enjoyed a vigorous revival, centred on the European courts, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to Jourdain, for example: A partir des Valois surtout, l'astrologie judiciaire prit en France un développement comparable à celui qu'elle avait en Italie, en Allemagne et en Espagne, au temps de Frederick II et d'Alphonse X. Ses disciples se multiplièrent et furent confondus dans l'estime publique avec les véritables astronomes.1

Dechire entre les pratiques de la diplomatie du debut du XVII e siecle et son desir d'envisager un cosmos ordonne et moral, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo utilisait l'astrologie afin de creer des liens entre la societe humaine et le desir divin. Il affirmait que tandis que la connaissance humaine est imparfaite et incomplete dans chaque discipline, l'homme doit utiliser l'astrologie pour arriver a un ordre juste, plutot que de faire reposer l'autorite sur des principes comme la force ou la supercherie

Astrology, Politics and Power in 16th-century Florence: Giuliano Ristori’s Extensive Judgment on Cosimo I’s Nativity (1537)

Astrology in Islam