ABSTRACT
For over 1,700 years astrology was an integral part of a shared culture. People regulated their health, planned voyages and marriages, tried to foresee disasters, and even chose the date of coronations according to its directions. High and low, learned and unlearned, sought and tended to accept its predictions even if an increasing number of the learned during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to question the validity of its complex propositions. Interpretation of planetary and astral infl uences upon humankind and the earth itself depended on a division of the sky above and below the horizon into a zone of twelve zodiacal signs through which the heavenly bodies moved. The very term “infl uence” referred to the rays transmitting the planets’ and stars’ effects to those passive recipients which lived or grew or simply existed beneath the moon. Everything – human beings, animals, plants, minerals – was affected by and subject to these infl uences, and in consequence an extensive knowledge of astrology could well seem essential for a proper understanding not only of physical change within created beings and objects, but also of human temperament, disposition, and character. So Keith Thomas describes astrology as “probably the most ambitious attempt ever made to reduce the baffl ing diversity of human affairs to some sort of intelligible order.”3
