Introduction

This chapter argues that astrology is best understood as a divinatory technique: a dialogue with the divine in a postmodern, post-Christian, and newly reanimated, universe. The scientific attack on astrology will be addressed in detail, especially the way in which it exceeds what can be justified in strictly scientific terms. That excess will be analysed as the scientism – essentially, science as a rationalist cult – which drives astrology’s most influential contemporary critics. The astrology that lives in this tumultuous territory is warm-blooded, egalitarian, anarchistic and erotic, it seems. The particular tradition of doing so that we know as astrology originated in ancient Mesopotamia, but is virtually global. Notwithstanding all the subsequent changes and refinements, most recently computerization and mass marketing, its ancient intuitions, and the craft of their explication, seem to have lost none of their compelling attraction in the twenty-first century CE.