ABSTRACT
Standard histories of astrology inform us that the craft, if one chooses to call it that, ‘originated in Mesopotamia, perhaps in the third millenium BC’. The most powerful of all images of that lunar astrology, is the wonderful rock-engraving from the Dordogne region of south-west France, known to archaeology as ‘the Venus of Laussel’. The archaeological researches of Andrew Mellaart and Marija Gimbutas into the ‘matristic’, Goddess-focused cultures of the Middle Eastern and European Early Neolithic, offer abundant confirmation of this picture. Standard histories of astrology, already mentioned, place its origins in the early dynastic civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This Mesopotamian and Egyptian astrology, though inevitably inheriting many elements from the astro-science of the Palaeolithic, was specifically designed by the male priesthoods to serve the interests of the newly emergent god-kings of the region.
