In short, the history of Western astrology can be summarized as a trip from ancient Babylon, Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome, back to Iraq for the Muslim Golden Age and then back to Europe again through Moorish Spain. Then as the New Age movement and the field of Psychology established themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries, modern astrology became focused on the internal psychological environment of the individual. A handful of Americans then re-discovered and translated Hellenistic astrological texts in the 1980’s and 90’s and reconnected the West with its astrological roots. If you’d like to see a really good overview, here is Chris Brennan giving a 2h40m lecture.

Below is a synopsis of some of the major stops along the way.

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The study of Western astrology starts in Mesopotamia where cuneiform tablets date back to about 2100 BCE. Astrology and astronomy were interchangeable practice and they were practiced by the priests who worked in the Kings’ courts. The ancient people noticed that when certain planets (“bright stars”) were in certain angles or configurations, or moved at certain speeds or became visible at certain times, things happened in conjunction with what happened in the sky. They believed that the gods were communicating their will to the king and it was the king’s job to decipher the messages. To the right is one of two tablets called the MUL.APIN, a Babylonian compendium of omens from about 1000 BCE, like “If in Nisannu the normal sunrise (looks) sprinkled with blood: there will be battles in the country.¹“

Mesopotamian culture lasted for over 2,000 years, and for a large part of that time, they were tracking the movement of the planets. One of their biggest successes was learning how to predict when planets would be in certain positions in the future and record them in ephemerides– catalogues of planetary heliacal rises and locations so they could make future predictions. As they developed more and more complex mathematics, they learned the planetary cycles and noticed certain patterns, like “If such and such happens, then this will happen”. They began to associate certain planetary occurrences with certain outcomes, and would inscribe these lists of omens on specific clay tablets in a syntax researchers call protasis-apodosis, or “p’s and q’s”. An example omen would be, “If someone is born when Canicula (Sirius) is rising, he will not die in the ocean.⁴” The king’s astrologers would pass on these omens to the next generation of apprentices (often their sons) and have them memorized. They re-wrote the omen tablets many times over for subsequent generations of scholars to carry on their observances and build on their knowledge.

By the 5th century BCE, astrologers knew that there were these 12 specific zodiac signs that appeared on the ecliptic band that circled the earth, about 23 degrees away from the equator.

They realized they could denote time if they used the zodiac signs to help divide up the sky⁸. They gave 30 degrees for each of the twelve signs, for a total of 360 degrees. It is worth remembering how fused the study of Astrology and Astronomy were- there was zero distinction in the minds of Mesopotamian scholars between the two- the scientific observation of the night sky fed into meaning-making- it was the king’s guidance from the gods. But also, the study of the celestial bodies was how Mesopotamians organized time and seasons; they came up with complex mathematics to calculate the length of the year, as well as the length of planetary and solar cycles. They were the ones who came up with the base-60 sexagesimal system; a lot of numbers divide into 60 really easily- it’s a highly factorable number- and it’s the number upon which our hours and minutes are still based today.

To the west was Egypt, and while Egyptians developed a similar form of astrology and astronomy, we know less about their body of work because while Mesopotamians wrote on clay tablets, Egyptians wrote on papyrus which disintegrates over time. What we do know is Egyptian mythology accorded great importance to the rise and setting of the planets- they likened their journey through the sky to the journey of life, and no journey was so important as that of the Sun, the King. For example, during the night when the sun went below the earth, temple priests marked each hour with a different rite to protect the Sun from the underworld.

The tracking of the planets meant Egyptians also had to keep track of time but they would do this by dividing clusters of fixed stars into groups of 36 that they called “decans”. Each decan was divided into 10 days- in fact the decan was their version of a week. Each decan represented a divine principle, and Egyptians found that it would express its particular qualities most prominently when it was either ascending over the horizon (at what would come to be known as the Ascendant) or when it was at the highest point in the sky (at what would come to be known at the Medium Coeli). The female sky god Nut was responsible for rotating the sky- the decans along with it- so that each decan had its turn rotating through the highest point in the sky. Historians believe this was the root of the concept we know today of angularity, the idea that planets are strongest when they’re at the “angles” of a chart: near the Ascendant (AC), the Medium Coeli (MC), the DC (Descendant) and the Imum Coeli (IC).

The star Sirius that brought fecundity to the Nile every July was so important that she was positioned at the beginning of the decan wheel, in other words, she was the ascendant of the decans¹⁹. By the Ptolemaic period, she was conflated with the goddess Isis, the sister/wife of King Osiris in the Osiris myth.²⁰

Also by the Ptolemaic period, Egypt and Mesopotamia had shared enough astrological and astronomical knowledge that the decan system and the zodiacal wheel were assimilated, as seen in the famous zodiac of Dendera, which was carved onto the roof of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera (left).

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In ancient times, it was thought the planetary gods were communicating humans’ fate to them. In Homer’s Iliad, we encounter the Moirai, three goddess sisters whose job it was to make sure every person met their appointed fate, spinning out the thread of their lives from a spindle.

Pythgoreans proposed that eyesight worked by sending out rays or eyebeams to an object which then came back to the eye with information about the object. This is how they believed the planets perceived humans, by sending out rays to observe us. The Sun was particularly capable of seeing and judging us.

This idea would be important in developing the Aspect doctrine, the idea that planets “saw” each other through various angles- the 90 and 180 degree angles were tense angles and the 60 and 120 degree angles were friendly angles. When planets could see each other through one of these aspects, they were bearing witness to the other.

Aristotle was the philosopher who established the science of logic, and thus the basis for all scientific enquiry. He proved that the earth is a sphere and although he was wrong that the planets revolve around the earth, his geocentric theory of the cosmos was the first and most important scientifically-based model that then persisted until Kepler’s heliocentric discovery in the early 1600’s.

Building on the work of pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle came up with a cosmology that explained how the planets could be moving in perpetual motion; he called his theory The Unmoved Mover.² The idea was that there was a first cause, or a motionless mover in the heavens who was perfectly beautiful, indivisible, a being that contemplated itself- the perfect subject of contemplation. It was this eternal being who was, although unchanging itself, was capable of producing change below the heavens, as the stars and planets were just moving because they wanted to be more like the Prime Mover.³

So although (as far as we know) Aristotle didn’t contribute to any astrological techniques, the logic behind his cosmology laid the foundation for Hellenistic Greeks, particularly the Peripatetics who wrote De Mundo to start thinking of planets as causal bodies instead of just messages from the gods; they had specific energetic qualities that created change on earth.⁴

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The Macedonian general, Alexander the Great, conquered Egypt in 332 BCE and suddenly much of near East was under control of Greek-speaking rulers. Now Mesopotamian and Egyptian scholars were sharing information with each other and with Greeks in Greek; this was an important period of cross-pollination of astrological information. Mesopotamian astrologers who were once working for the kings had dispersed after 539 BCE when the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Nineveh, so they had pivoted from making predictions for their kings to doing natal horoscopes for the public. The first natal horoscope that we’ve found dates to 410 BCE.

Alexander died in 323 BCE and one of his generals, Ptolemy, installed himself as Pharaoh in Alexandria. He turned Alexandria into an important intellectual, cultural and commercial capital; in fact, it was the most important city of the Hellenistic world. He contributed to the building of the largest library in the world where scholars studied, transcribed, translated, and built upon important astrological texts.

For the next 200-300 years, Hellenistic astrology would continue to flesh out and solidify its most important tenets- the four pillars of Hellenistic astrology that we still use today:
– The nature of the planets and their rotations
– The zodiac
– The twelve houses
– The aspects

These two legendary and mostly unknown figures- often referred to as a pair- are thought to be the other two originators of Hellenistic Astrology. Nechepso was thought to be an Egyptian pharoah, and Petosiris was thought to be a priest (possibly a priest who worked for Nechepso), although they could have just be using pseudonyms to represent kingly and priestly ideas.

We won’t hear about these two figures until later- about the first century CE, but we believe it’s about here in the 1st or 2nd century BCE that they were writing. Unfortunately, nothing has survived from their writings, but they, along with Hermes Trismegistus and Asclepius- are quoted as authorities in work by Claudius Ptolemy, Firmicus Maternus, Vettius Valens, Thrasyllus, Manilius, and Dorotheus⁶.

They are attributed in particular with the Thema Mundi, the theoretical chart for the beginning of the world that shows all the planets in their respective signs that we use today. Firmicus says that they in turn got the doctrine from Asclepius and Hermes Trismegistus⁷.

Between 275 BCE and 146 BCE, Rome was slowly taking over Greek territory and by the time Jesus was born, Nazareth was under Roman rule.

It was a testament to the intellectual culture of the Greco-Roman era that New Testament authors appealed to the astrological phenomenon that happened around Jesus’ birth and death as proof that he was the Messiah. In fact, Emperor Cesar Augustus had had his own astrological reading done, and his chart was said to be so good that when astrologer Theogenes finally convinced him to share his birth time, Theogenes “sprang up and fell at his feet.”⁸

After Jesus’ death, Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire during the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. The new religion, while borrowing from the mythology embedded in the cultures around them, still presented a challenge to the Stoic belief that one should just gracefully accept one’s fate. The Christian response to the fate versus freewill dilemma was that grace could change your fate; all you had to do was believe in their god and you would be saved. Despite being persecuted, this precept attracted positive attention to Christianity. In 381 CE, Emperor Theodosis made it the official religion of Rome.

Concurrently over the course of the Roman takeover of Greece, starting in 139 BCE, astrologers were subject to various bans and expulsions. Whereas Greeks saw Astrology as a philosophical, mathematical and scientific endeavor, many Roman rulers saw it as a threat to their reign; emperors didn’t want astrologers privately casting charts that might predict the fate of their rule or contribute to takeover plots. As Rome became more Christian, Christian emperors like Constantine inherited earlier emperor’s fear of divination and banned the “Chaldean” practice as mere magic and superstition. That being said, astrology wasn’t entirely stamped out…

Dorotheus was one of the most important astrologers of the 2nd century. He lived in Alexandria, Egypt, which was still the intellectual hub of the Hellenistic world. At the beginning of his book, he states that he travelled around the Egyptian and Mesopotamian world, collecting ancient astrological knowledge:

The resulting compilation was a famous text that was possibly called Pentateuch (“five books”), but later called Carmen Astrologicum. As the name suggests, Pentateuch is made up of five books that compile all the techniques used by the Hellenistic astrological community up until that point.

Later during the Medieval period when the center of astrological development moved to the Arabic world, it was Dorotheus’ book that astrologers like Masha’allah, Sahl ibn Bishr and Omar Tiberiades relied upon for transmission from the Hellensitic world⁹.

While Dorotheus seemed to have his finger on the pulse of the current astrological community at the time, it appears that Claudius Ptolemy, while contemporary to Dorotheus, was writing about astrology as somewhat of an outside observer.

Renowned author of Almagest and Tetarabiblos, Ptolemy was best known as an Alexandrian scientist. Perhaps he was attempting to make astrology work according to Aristotle’s model of the universe because he approached it like a natural science, and if he was, it worked. His Aristotelian treatment of Astrology – Tetrabiblos– was probably what allowed Astrology to survive Christian Rome through to the Renaissance¹⁰. He conceptualized the planets as causal agents, not just celestial bodies portending the future. He used Aristotle’s classification system of things being hot, cold, wet or dry to classify the effects of the planets according to their natures on life on earth.

Valens was a 2nd century Hellenistic astrologer from Antioch, in modern-day Turkey, who wrote Anthology. Chris Brennan calls him “the single most important surviving source for studying the Hellenistic astrological tradition”¹¹. He includes passages from astrologers we wouldn’t know of otherwise if it weren’t for Anthology, including passages from Nechepso and Petosiris.

Firmicus was a lawyer, astronomer, and and astrologer from Sicily who wrote Mathesis, another important technical manual on Hellenistic astrology. The book was intended for his students and included a lot of translations of earlier Greek texts into Latin. He wrote between 334 and 337 CE while the Christian emperor Constantine ruled. At some point after Mathesis, he converted to Christianity and wrote The Error of Profane Religions, attacking paganism, but for whatever reason, did not mention astrology.¹², ¹³

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By 395 AD, Rome had gotten too big to rule, and it was divided into two different administrations, Eastern and Western Rome. In 476, the Western half collapsed to Barbarian invasions. In 610 CE, the prophet Muhammed had his first visit from the angel Gabriel in a cave, thus seeding the beginnings of the Muslim religion. Over the ensuing 150 years, Islam spread from Mecca outwards as far as Spain and Portugal and down into Morocco and the Sahara. After Muhammed’s death, a series of caliphates ruled the Muslim world and it was the third caliphate, the Abbasid caliphate, that produced a fertile intellectual environment that was open to study and new technical, mathematical and philosophical ideas. The Abbasids moved the capital of the Muslim world from Damascus to Baghdad and opened a large public academy called the House of Wisdom, which became the home for a massive translation movement of Greek texts into Arabic.

Here, the Arabs made many advances in the field of astronomy and mathematics, one of which was the improvement of the astrolabe to observe the movement of celestial bodies. With this advance in technology, they were able to write more precise ephemerides, as well as time practical activities like the daily call to prayer.

During this time, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Persian, Syrian, and pagan intellectuals gathered in Baghdad to translate and further develop the field of astrology. This philosophical openness was justified by the Muslim concept tawhid:

“One Quranic doctrine would allow philosophers to draw upon and adapt pre-Islamic sciences to fit into a distinctly Islamic worldview. This doctrine, known as tawhid, took the oneness of God to imply the oneness of wisdom, with all knowledge deriving from an original, uncorrupted source despite its seemingly fragmented nature. Tawhid allowed scholars writing in Arabic to draw upon the work of their Greek, Syrian, Persian, and Hindu predecessors, regardless of the religious content of those sources.”¹⁴

– Geoffrey Ballinger

Abu Ma’shar was one of the greatest astrologers to come out of the House of Wisdom. Born in Afghanistan, he went to Baghdad to study and while there, encountered the Muslim scholar Al-Kindi, considered the father of Arab philosophy. Al-Kindi believed it was possible to integrate Aristotelian and Ptolemaic approaches to natural philosophy and physics into an Islamist worldview, and he was instrumental in underpinning Islamic thought with Hellenistic science and mathematics¹⁵. Abu Ma’shar had initially been hostile to Al-Kindi’s approach, but was eventually won over, and he ultimately wrote several manuals on astrology. He came to astrology late in life, at age 47, but his books were some of the most influential, such as Kitāb al-mudkhal al-kabīr, or The Great Introduction to the Science of Astrology. Eventually when Europe opened up again to Astrology, Abu Ma’Shar’s books were among the first to be translated to Latin¹⁶.

Abu Ma’Shar wrote another important book called Book of Thousands, and in it, he identified the Muslim prophet Enoch as one of the incarnations of Hermes Trismegistus, thus cementing the place of Astrology in Islam¹⁷.

Among the other Greek Classical texts that were translated into Arabic at that time were Dorotheus’ Carmen Astrologicum, Valens’ Anthology, Rhetorius’ Compendium, and Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos¹⁸. Ironically, it was the Muslim adoption of a Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian theoretical foundation and their translations of Greek texts that allowed Europeans later able to access what had previously been pushed underground by the Romans.

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In the 11th century, Muslims occupied the south of Spain. Toledo was the capital of the Moorish kingdom of Al-Andalus, but there was frequent fighting between the Muslims and the Christians on the peninsula. In 1085, Alfonso VI of Leon invaded Toledo, where his army discovered large Arabic libraries. Instead of destroying them, a team of Toledo-based scholars started translating them. Abu Ma’shar’s books were some of the first to get translated into Latin in 1133¹⁹.

These translated texts began trickling into European intellectual consciousness and provided a new foundation for European astrologers to reignite their study of astrology. Guido Bonatti was a renowned Italian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer and he wrote a classic textbook Liber Astronomiae or ‘Book of Astronomy’ in 1277. He had excellent predictive abilities, which served him well in his advising roles to kings and generals.²⁰

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Up until this time, astronomers thought planets moved in perfect circles around the earth, but in the early 17th century, German polymath Johannes Kepler proved that 1) planets moved in elliptical orbits, and 2) they orbited around the Sun. It would be impossible to overstate how important this discovery was to science and eventually to the psychology of the Western mind, and by extension, the practice of astrology. The heliocentric model de-centered humans and put the Sun – God Himself- at the centre of the cosmos. This was both humbling and hard for academia to accept, but it also had the effect of making Europeans feel like they had direct access to God. Astrologer and historian Richard Tarnas quotes an excited Kepler after he made the discovery:

“Now, since the dawn eighteen months ago, since the broad daylight three months ago, and since a few days ago, when the full Sun illuminated my wonderful speculations, nothing holds me back.  I yield freely to the sacred frenzy; I dare frankly to confess that I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle for my God far from the bounds of Egypt.  If you pardon me, I shall rejoice; if you reproach me, I shall endure.  The die is cast, and I am writing the book- to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not.  It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.²¹“

– Johannes Kepler

It took academia many years to fully come around to Kepler’s model. Ironically, even Martin Luther – the very Martin Luther who decentered the Pope in Christianity and claimed that the priesthood of all believers allowed lay people direct access to God – critiqued Kepler. What was happening was that, slowly, on an astrological level, the Sun was becoming the center of the human consciousness and thus the most important planet in the natal horoscope. The sun was Jesus- the godhead within each of us instead of outside of us. Just as the Egyptians tracked the journey of the royal Sun coming up over the horizon, ascending his throne at noontime and then dying on the western horizon each evening, each of us was living out the Christ journey from life to death to resurrection in the morning.

Unfortunately the scientific revolution threw the baby out with the bathwater- it elevated scientific reasoning over spirituality and relegated astrology to mere superstition and magic. By the late 17th century, astrology was falling out of popularity in Europe.

Astrology did, however, enjoy a little revival with William Lilly before being totally relegated to the backwaters of Western society. Lilly wrote his famous 1647 textbook on the astrological technique called horary, Christian Astrology. It was the first Astrology book ever written in English, and modern astrologers still use it.

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It is long past due that I should mention Gnosticism and Hermeticism.  They were sibling sects that rose up around the same time in and around the multicultural city of Alexandria between the 1^st to 2^nd centuries CE, at the same time as Christianity was getting its footing.  Gnosticism and Hermeticism do have differences, but they both believe that knowledge of God is knowledge of self.  The philosopher Plato had a theory called the One and the Many: we as humans are fallible expressions of an infallible One, an original template, who is perfect and immortal.  Neo-Platonists who were contemporaneous with Gnostics and Hermeticists followed up on his theory by saying that the Many longed to be reunited with the One and should seek union with the One through inner work and divine revelation- knowledge- or gnosis.  Hermes Trismegistus, after whom Hermeticism is named, is considered the inventor of Astrology and his famous expression links our inner lives to what’s happening with the planets: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.”  In other words, the macrocosm is a mirror of our inner microcosm and vice versa.  This kind of belief, along with paganism and many other kinds of spiritual expressions might loosely fall under the umbrella terms esotericism or mysticism or spiritualism, and much of it traces its threads back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. 

All that to say that esotericism in general had disappeared from Europe along with astrology for a few hundred years, but in the middle of the 19^th century, a young Russian aristocrat named Madame Blavatsky had her first vision around the age of 20, which led her to pursue spiritual knowledge for the rest of her life, bringing some of these major threads back together again.  Along the way, she formed the Theosophical Society, which was a compendium of Neoplatonism, some Gnostic and Hermetic threads, as well as Buddhism and Hinduism.  By the 1920’s, Europe and the West in general was ready for this renewed spirituality.  The Scientific Revolution, Martin Luther’s Reformation, and the French Revolution had laid the foundation for individualism: individual freedoms from nobility as well as from God and the Pope. Moreover, industrialization encouraged a faith in machines instead of God to lead people toward progress, so there was a a growing atheism. Therefore it stands to reason that the West might be itching to connect back with divinity in some way.  Among their various teachings, the Theosophical society brought back Astrology, but this time as a method for self-development and growth; whereas before it had largely been used for prediction.  There were a few astrologers who formalized this thought process toward a more psychological approach to Astrology, two of the most prominent being  Alan Leo from Britain and Dane Rudhyar from France and the United States. 

Carl Jung was a young psychiatrist when he encountered the New Age movement, but his access point was through Eastern religions, of which he was an avid reader.  His approach to human psychology therefore became based on the Asian understanding of wholeness- this idea that, contrary to Christianity that had us climbing a ladder to upwards to perfection, we are perfect when we are whole, in other words, when we’ve embraced our shadow side and integrated what our psyche is trying to ignore and shove away from our awareness.  This was a completely new approach to human nature in the West.  Prior to that, the Christian church had painted a picture of us having a devil on one shoulder tempting us in one direction, and an angel on the other coaxing us in another. 

Jung was also privately an avid astrology student and while it wasn’t his idea, he worked with the concept of the Sun as the Christ figure within us working out our hero’s journey through life.  His work paved the way for Jungian analysts to follow in his footsteps and identify how each of the planets in our charts represents a part of our psyche.  The most important Jungian analyst to formalize this school of thought in Astrology was Liz Greene (1946- ); she helped develop the field we would call Modern Astrology- the type of astrology that concerns itself with how we can use our natal charts to integrate our shadow with our light (egoic) side. 

Robert Schmidt (1950- ) was an American philosopher with formal training in reading the Classics in Greek and he was always on the search for clues as to where he could find the Hellenistic texts at the root of the Western Astrology “tree”:

“Schmidt’s decades-long search for the original astrology of the West was akin to an Indiana Jones quest; following clues from various texts, piecing together bits of lore and finding patterns in the system that would point to an underlying philosophical framework, and then applying that philosophical framework forward to illuminate fragmentary doctrine.”

In 1993, Robert Schmidt and his wife Ellen Black, who was also trained in the Classics, brought on board astrologers Robert Hand and Robert Zoller (among others later on) and started translating a large number of previously untranslated works by Paulus Alexandrinus, Antiochus of Athens, Ptolemy, Vettius Valens, Hephaestio of Thebes, and others.  Their working group name was Project Hindsight and their work was three-fold: to translate the texts, figure out the astrological techniques the ancients were using, and to reconstruct the cosmological belief system behind the techniques.  The project was quite successful and the team recovered important concepts like:

• Sect
• Whole Sign Houses
• Annual Profections
• Time-Lords
• Zodiacal Releasing
• The Kurios (Master of the Nativity)
• and more²²

In May 1993, modern astrologer and mother, Demetra George (1946 – ) became involved in Project Hindsight.  When her children were grown, she went back to school to get her Masters in Classics and learn Latin and Greek, she became the first person to write a book on Hellenistic Astrology for the modern lay reader: Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice: A Manual of Traditional Techniques, Volume I. Right after graduation, she was hired as one of the first instructors at Kepler College, a newly formed astrological college in the US.  She introduced Kepler to Project Hindsight in May, 2001 and by all accounts, the teaching they received that night in May from Alan White was electric with energy and so was the room.  Kepler College adopted Hellenistic astrology as its foremost approach to astrology soon thereafter. 

In 2004, one of her students at Kepler College was a young man named Chris Brennan, and he also fell in love with Hellenistic astrology.  He and Demetra have both worked on Project Hindsight at different points.  Chris took that translation knowledge and experience and became the first [modern?] person to write a full compilation on the history of Hellenistic Astrology.  He also hosts an important podcast on Youtube, The Astrology Podcast, and has interviewed many leaders in the astrological community.  He has hundreds of hours of content and is playing somewhat of an anthropological role in the astrological community, compiling all the current knowledge in this exciting time of fertile development and documenting it carefully.  Many of us consider ourselves formally or informally his students.   

In a podcast interview with Chris Brennan, Demetra reflects on how lucky she feels as an astrologer to be alive at a time when astrologers can be reconnected to their Hellenistic roots:

“And the exciting part is thinking what a fortunate time to be born in. That for the first time in 2,000 years, we have access to the ways that our tradition was originally conceptualized and can see it in practice, that no other astrologers have had this access in the interim, like all of this stuff at once. And what a shame to be an astrologer now and not learn what our own tradition is all about, and how fortunate to have the opportunity to do so.”²³

1. http://www.thelivingmoon.com/42stargate/03files/Sumerian_Astronomy_02.html, quoted by Kepler College, https://library.keplercollege.org/omens-in-the-stars/ ↩︎
2. Botteri, Gerardo and Roberto Casazza, The Astronomical System of Aristotle, ch. 5, “Aristotle’s Astronomical System“, accessed from Brill on August 14, 2026. ↩︎
3. Wikipedia, Unmoved Mover, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover, accessed on August 14, 2026. ↩︎
4. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 148 ↩︎
5. Wikipedia, Hermeticism, accessed on August 14, 2026 ↩︎
6. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 21 ↩︎
7. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 234 ↩︎
8. Broege, Valerie, RASA School of Astrology, The Horoscope of the Roman Emperor Augustus and his Attitude to Astrology, accessed August 14, 2026. ↩︎
9. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 98 ↩︎
10. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 103 ↩︎
11. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 105 ↩︎
12. World of the Free Mind, Firmicus Maternus (4th Century CE), accessed on August 14, 2026 ↩︎
13. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 110 ↩︎
14. Ballinger, Geoffrey, In the Footsteps of Angels: Medieval-Arabic Astrology, accessed August 14, 2026 ↩︎
15. Cooper, Glen, Kindī: Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al‐Kindī, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, accessed on August 15, 2026. ↩︎
16. Wikipedia, Abu Ma’Shar al-Balkhi, accessed on August 15, 2026 ↩︎
17. Ballinger, Geoffrey, In the Footsteps of Angels: Medieval-Arabic Astrology, accessed August 15, 2026 ↩︎
18. Brennan, Chris, Hellenistic Astrology: the Study of Fate and Fortune, Amor Fati Publications, 2017, pg. 131-132 ↩︎
19. Wikipedia, Abu Ma’Shar al-Balkhi, accessed on August 15, 2026, ↩︎
20. Dykes, Benjamin, The Life of Guido Bonatti, accessed from Skyscript on August 15, 2026. ↩︎
21. Tarnas, Richard, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, Penguin Group, 2006, pg 6 ↩︎
22. Schmidt, Robert, Robert Schmidt Astrology, About Project Hindsight, accessed on August 15, 2026 ↩︎
23. The Astrology Podcast, The Life of Demetra George, accessed on August 15, 2026 ↩︎