The greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance, such as Giordano Bruno and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, were on the side of magic and astrology. The belief in a deep dependence on cosmic forces was the foundation of understanding the world, and on the other hand, it was a source of great controversy.
The stereotypical image of modern history presents the European Middle Ages as a time of civilizational stagnation, an “irrational” and “dark” epoch, followed by a kind of breakthrough: the Italian Renaissance—a time of renewal initiating true modernity and everything that is characteristic about it including scientific and technical discoveries, the development of the arts and the beginnings of secularism, and the new position of human beings in the cosmos. The Florentines are partly responsible for this stereotype of the epoch—Petrarch wrote about the Middle Ages as a time of “barbarism” that followed the great Greco-Roman culture. This view was taken up and popularized by nineteenth-century historians, especially Jules Michelet.
More recent research, however, shows that this is a greatly exaggerated picture. In many respects, the Italian Renaissance was a continuation of medieval tendencies, and the real fundamental changes that made it possible to speak of the modern era—such as the fall of the monarchy and the monopoly of Christianity, the birth of industry, and the invention of the steam engine—came much later.
For a very long time, historians of philosophy and culture who wanted to see European history as a history of “progress” and the development of “rationality” lost sight of or ignored the phenomena fundamental to the Renaissance. Jacob Burckhardt, in his great work The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, wrote about the “diseases,” “follies,” and “sad elements in the life of Italy at that time.” But more than a century later, Jean Delumeau, in his La civilisation de la Renaissance (The Civilization of the Renaissance), stated that this epoch would remain incomprehensible until we took into account the deep meaning of all these “follies.” Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, Renaissance scholars have been revealing and interpreting documents that reveal a dizzying world of deep, complex ideas. Magic and astrology are combined with the writings of Plato, Ptolemy, and Christianity. What is more, many important phenomena and themes present in the works of artists of this era are still waiting to be explored and understood.
The Cosmic Alphabet
It should be emphasized at the start that it is not only about magic or “folk” astrology, but about the “learned” culture, theories and practices, the proponents of which were the most eminent minds of the period in question. In particular, the “astral sciences,” to which we will devote special attention, owed an extremely strong position to Renaissance philosophy and science. The period between 1450 and 1650 is described by scholars as the apogee of interest in astrology throughout Europe.
All Italian rulers or popes had their astrologers; they could even be found in the municipalities of the cities. Political actions, the reception of a diplomatic mission, the laying of the foundation stone for a new building—these were determined by specialists in the stars and planets. The time of departure of the troops or the taking up of service by the condottieri was carefully decided on. The societies lived with numerous, generally pessimistic predictions about epidemics, floods, and earthquakes. Anyone who owned a larger house kept a private astrologer in it. In Venice and Rome, astrological forecasts were published regularly. The universities of Marburg, Vienna, and Kraków had chairs of “astrological medicine.” Astral sciences were also used in agriculture. Above all, however, astrology shaped mystical-religious and scientific-philosophical ideas, defining the situation of the human being in the world at that time. As the Renaissance poet and astrologer Giovanni Pontano put it, the stars and planets were “letters of a cosmic alphabet.”
Eugenio Garin, an expert on the culture of the Italian Renaissance, argued that the very naming of this era is an expression of a certain astrological concept. Such concepts as “renewal” and “rebirth,” ideas about historical cycles, and the alternation of light and darkness are motifs connected with the idea of the movement of celestial bodies, determining the course of earthly events. As the planets move, they develop the destinies not only of human beings but also of entire empires and civilizations: they have their beginnings, phases of development, crises, and the final end, after which new phenomena are “born.” Great conjunctions mark the boundaries of cosmic epochs, synonymous with momentous changes in human history.
Astrology offered a theoretical framework for both historical considerations and the fledgling philosophy of culture. Roger Bacon, for example, was a proponent of an interesting astrological concept of “proto-religious studies”: if Jupiter, responsible for the formation of religion, can be in conjunction with six planets, then there can only be six great religions in the world. Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly even stated that the incarnation and birth of Christ depended on certain conjunctions. (This dignitary predicted the end of the world in 1789, which is quite interesting if we consider that he was French). Astrology, then, meant a certain way of understanding time—and it was in this perspective that the Italian Renaissance appeared as a time of “rebirth.” Georgios Gemistos, known as Plethon, a Byzantine philosopher and one of the pioneers of Renaissance Platonism, while in Florence directly predicted the end of the religions of Moses, Christ, and Mohammed and a return to the ancient gods.
The Second Plato
Various attempts have been made to explain the important place of the astral sciences in Renaissance Florence. According to some interpretations, this was due to the suffering characteristic of the era: epidemics and the experienced violence and injustice. They were meant to make people reflect on the irrational forces that govern the world. Astrology, with its fatalism and determinism, allowed people to understand and accept the inevitability of human fate. It is also pointed out that the authority of the Church was weakened: the humanist elites, bored with medieval scholasticism, looked for other sources of inspiration. Printing contributed to the dissemination of new ideas (the printing of ephemera was significant here). The fall of Constantinople and the political expansion of Islam were the cause of the influx of ancient Greek texts from Byzantium to Italy; some of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 also came to Italian cities, bringing with them Kabbalistic ideas.
Clearly, however, the shape of the epoch is not only influenced by anonymous forces; it is also formed as a result of the actions of specific individuals. In particular, one should mention the life and work of Marsilio Ficino, a key figure in the culture of the Renaissance, whose contemporary curricula in the history of philosophy unfortunately do not do him justice. Ficino was called “the second Plato” by his contemporaries, and the famous art historian Erwin Panofsky compared his influence on the Renaissance work to that of Freud in the twentieth century. Ficino’s ideas found expression in the achievements of, among others, Michelangelo; inspired Albrecht Dürer to create the famous Melencolia; and two of Botticelli’s masterpieces, The Birth of Venus and Primavera, refer directly to Ficino’s concept of the soul’s return to God through the astral deities.
Under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, the “second Plato” ran the Florentine Academy—an intellectual center and meeting place—which Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Leone Battista Alberti both attended. Of great importance were Ficino’s pioneering translations of The Orphic Hymns, as well as Plato and the works of the Neoplatonists. And not just their works. In 1460, a monk—Leonardo da Pestoia (not to be confused with a painter with a confusingly similar name)—came to Florence with a mysterious manuscript. Cosimo de’ Medici ordered the work of translating the Platonic dialogues be stopped in order to translate the purchased collection of manuscripts that was to become one of the most famous sources of texts of Western esotericism: The Corpus Hermeticum.
It is comprised of a dozen or so Greek-language religious and philosophical writings, containing revelations of cosmological mysteries and the hidden nature of the human being. Their authorship was attributed (with some exceptions) to Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical sage who combined the features of the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth. The Florentines, however, erroneously dated these writings, considering them to be manifestations of ancient Egyptian wisdom. They claimed, following the Neoplatonic philosophers, that even Pythagoras, Orpheus, and Plato were to draw on the revelations of Hermes (the correct dating—the second and third centuries AD—is the achievement of later philologists). They assumed that the earlier the revelation, the truer and fuller it was. Thus, Hermes Trismegistus appeared as one of the first great prophets of mankind, and the translation of his works took place in an aura of sensationalism. The discussion about priority took different turns. Towards the end of his life, Ficino maintained that it was the Persian magician Zarathustra, who was credited (also erroneously) with the authorship of The Chaldean Oracles; he was older (and more important) not only than Hermes but also Moses!
The idea of “correspondence” present in The Corpus Hermeticum is crucial for the entirety of hermetic and astrological issues: microcosm-macrocosm. The different levels of being—gods, stars, angels, humans, animals, plants—are bound together by a subtle chain of analogies. Everything is reflected in everything; the world is a great theater of mirrors. When we know the earthly realm, we get to know the divine realm, and vice versa.
The Latin translation of The Corpus Hermeticum—the so-called Hermetic writings—was published in 1471, was reprinted many times until the seventeenth century, and played a great part in European culture. Hermes appears, among others, in such works as Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. He is also one of the figures depicted in the aforementioned Primavera; at the request of Pope Alexander VI, he was painted on the frescoes of the Borgia Apartments. Some of the Hermetic texts were already circulating in medieval Europe, but it was Ficino who showed their philosophical depth and compatibility with monotheism. He did not limit himself to translations and commentaries on the writings of Hermes and Plato—he was also the author of his own synthetic and influential philosophical thought.
Similarly to other humanists, in his works he attributed the human being with a unique role in the cosmos: in a hierarchically ordered reality, the human being merged with the higher world; through the contemplation of divine beauty, the human being was even able to rise to the level of angels or deities themselves, abandoning the fears and desires of the body that were a “disease of the soul.” In many respects this philosophy—even though Ficino was a priest—did not agree with the Christian theology, e.g., hell, for him, was a state of realizing the emptiness of corporeal existence and was not associated with the idea of evil. At times, he shocked his listeners by reading “pagan” philosophers in churches.
In the context of these considerations, however, it is particularly interesting that for Ficino, every true philosopher is a magician. At this point, it is necessary to make an important distinction for the Renaissance between “natural” and “demonic” magic. The first one is based on the knowledge of the elements—the “correspondence” between the elements of the heavenly and earthly worlds—while the second one refers to the intervention of anthropomorphic beings. For example, natural magic occurs when a magician sings The Orphic Hymn while playing the lyre and burning herbs and incense (appropriate to a given star alignment) at a specific time with a favourable astral alignment. From Ficino’s writings, it appears that he himself practiced this kind of magic. The philosopher-magician is able to master the elements; he is a god on earth—this is the Hermetic idea of Man-God, an important and surprising source of the humanistic image of the human being. As a canon priest, Ficino was sensitive to possible accusations of heresy and did not explicitly support demonic magic. Researchers, however, suspect that he also practiced it, or more precisely, something like “astrological exorcisms”; he mentions in his writings that he happened to “cast out the spirits accompanying Saturn.” On one occasion he even went so far as to say that, although as a Catholic he was aware that there was a possibility of interference by evil demons during his magical practice, in a narrow, elite philosophical circle he considered it acceptable and safe.
To accusations of witchcraft, the canon replied that priests—whether Persian, Chaldean, or Egyptian—had always been engaged in medicine, and that medicine did not exist without astrology. Medicine, as he understood it, concerned both the body and the soul.
The Soul of the World
We see in Ficino that magic is inseparable from astrology, and scholars qualify him not only as an astrologer but also as an “astral magician.” Astral magic is understood as the belief that it is possible to “channel” the power of planets/deities through ritual manipulation of objects “corresponding” to these planets—in the case of the sun, it could be gold. According to Ficino, there is a “soul of the world” that permeates the entire cosmos, owing to which the stars interact with the terrestrial world. Is the reverse relationship possible? Is it possible to manipulate the sky and one’s destiny by manipulating objects? Some seem to have drawn such a conclusion. The philosopher—at least officially—was inclined towards yet another position.
Each of the planets is assigned one of the seven metals, a day of the week, and an hour. Through specific music, diet, and talismans (of whose healing value Ficino was absolutely convinced), it is possible to communicate and connect with the supralunar world in some way. The philosopher-magician recognizes the astral forces and uses them to intensify the impact. With an appropriate invocation, however, he cannot so much influence the sun to behave differently than usual, but rather he can make his own soul more “solar,” harmoniously “attuned” to a particular astral situation.
Since the human being is a cosmos in miniature, planets and stars can also be imagined anthropomorphically. Ficino claimed that the celestial bodies also act on the mind and soul as “persons” (one of the reasons why he is considered a precursor of Carl Gustav Jung’s depth psychology). Throughout his life, the Renaissance philosopher lamented the fact that he was born under the sign of Saturn, which was described in magical texts as a gloomy, cold, lonely, and wise old man. Because of Saturn he felt condemned to philosophy, loneliness, and melancholy—and even feared this.
The Disciples of Hermes
Daniel P. Walker, in his book Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella, stated that Ficino’s astrological-magical concepts influenced Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa—the most famous magicians of the early modern period—and thus became a permanent part of Western esotericism. (Let us add at once that Agrippa didn’t feel obliged to avoid demonic magic and, in his works, recommended the ritual invocation of demons.)
The title of Marsilio Ficino’s only work published in Polish in book form—The Treatise Against the Judgment of Astrologers—should not mislead us. He criticizes certain ways of divination and various forms of “bad” astrology. As a Catholic, Ficino could not recognize the absolute determinism of the stars, which would exclude the freedom of the human soul. In addition, he was concerned about the activities of swindlers, uneducated “market” astrologers who took advantage of the trust and ignorance of the society. However, he himself taught astrology and gave horoscopes to friends and children of the Medici: it is said that for one of them, Giovanni—later Leo X—Ficino accurately predicted that he would become pope.
It is worth mentioning two more prominent figures of the Renaissance with well-known names and slightly lesser-known views. In 1498, Pico della Mirandola organized a meeting with a group of scholars and the Pope to publicly present and justify his nine hundred theses. He defended, among others, the claims about the power of natural magic, but above all he proclaimed the magical power of Kabbalah, of which he was a great spokesman and which he linked with Zarathustra. (Today it is recognized that Mirandola was a very important figure in the development of the “Christian Kabbalah.”) In Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, he questions fatalistic astrology and its “vulgar” versions and defends the Ficinian option. Still, the science of the stars is for him the basis of natural philosophy. In the Renaissance, astrology did not mean a single, universally accepted system of concepts and techniques. There were debates about ideas about astral determinism or correspondence, but the influence of the supralunar world on the sublunar world was as obvious as the law of gravity to us.
The second extraordinary figure of this time is Giordano Bruno, who arguably still stands as a martyr of science, a symbol of freethinking and the fight against irrational dogmatism, and a thinker whose scientific ideas were ahead of his time. Frances A. Yates’ famous book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, however, shed a whole new light on him. It turns out that Bruno was enthusiastic about Copernicus’ discoveries not because of their scientific merits but mainly because they were consistent with his own beliefs about the Phoenician magic of solar deities. (For this reason, he thought he was superior to Copernicus in his understanding of heliocentrism.) A careful reading of the accusations of heresy against him, which ultimately led him to the stake, clearly shows the philosopher’s Hermetic views. In the dialogue Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, Bruno constructed horoscopes for various religious denominations; in his mnemotechnics, he used astrological images. In his later work De rerum principiis, he rejected horoscope astrology and doubted the possibility of accurately predicting the future, but he still accepted the theory of great conjunctions and was convinced that celestial bodies could determine earthly events. Based on his original philosophy, however, Bruno saw the problem of this influence differently from his contemporaries: he believed that it did not take place through the “movement” of the astral bodies but through their “souls,” which were superior to human souls. (If this happened by calculable motion, events could be mathematically predicted, which is what he did not believe.)
More recent research into Bruno’s work and life suggests that he considered himself to be the religious restorer of humanity, sent by the god Mercury. He wandered around Europe to find followers for a religion that revived the old “Egyptian” (Hermetic) beliefs combined with Kabbalah and the “art of remembrance” (ars memoriae)—it was supposed to be a system of spiritual self-improvement intended for the spiritual elite.
Astrological imagery was the theoretical basis for the visions of reality typical of the Renaissance. The philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi saw astrology as a science that explains the cause of all phenomena occurring in the cosmos. In his perspective, even concepts like whether a prayer had a certain effect was determined by the alignment of the stars. For him, it was a kind of higher rationality and the basis of all knowledge of nature and the science of politics.
The Stars and the Reformation
Stosunek Kościoła pozostawał krytyczny względem pewnych aspektów astrologii. Co oczywiste, utożsamienie gwiazd z bóstwami było nieakceptowalne w ramach teologii monoteistycznej. Poza tym wpływ gwiazd kłócił się z wolną wolą. Mimo to renesansowi papieże również posługiwali się naukami gwiezdnymi i szukali porady u specjalistów w tej dziedzinie. Paweł III sięgał po opinię astrologów w celu ustalenia odpowiedniej pory na obrady konsystorza. Leon X wyrażał zadowolenie, że podczas jego pontyfikatu doszło do rozwoju tej nauki.
The church’s attitude remained critical of certain aspects of astrology. Clearly, the identification of the stars with deities was unacceptable within the framework of monotheistic theology. Besides, the influence of the stars was at odds with free will. Despite this, Renaissance popes also used the astral sciences and sought advice from specialists in the field. Paul III consulted astrologers in order to determine the appropriate time for the consistory meetings. Leo X expressed his satisfaction that during his pontificate, this science had developed.
Sobór trydencki sformułował jednak zakazy dotyczące przewidywania przyszłości. Kościół uświadomił sobie wreszcie niebezpieczeństwa polityczne wynikające z tego typu praktyk (łatwo sobie wyobrazić, że świat, w którym władcy podejmują decyzje w uzależnieniu od gwiazd, musi być zupełnie nieprzewidywalny). Kościelne władze podejrzliwie traktowały też samych astrologów, „sprzedawców horoskopów”, którzy zbyt łatwo bogacili się na swoim fachu.
The Council of Trent, however, formulated prohibitions against predicting the future. The church had finally become aware of the political dangers of such practices. (It is easy to imagine that a world in which rulers make decisions based on the stars must be completely unpredictable.) The church authorities were also suspicious of the astrologers themselves, the so-called horoscope sellers who were getting rich too easily from their trade.
Speaking of the church’s attitude towards astrology, it is difficult not to mention a particular prophecy circulating in fifteenth-century Germany, which turned out to be extremely important for the history of the church and the world. It spoke of the fall of the papacy resulting from the demoralization of the clergy. What’s more, it was confirmed by well-known astrologers: John of Lichtenberg (who lived at the emperor’s court) and Paul of Middelburg (papal astrologer!). According to this prophecy, a great reform was to take place in the church under the leadership of a holy monk and a scholar of the scriptures. Martin Luther, who was born in the years of the great conjunction, was well acquainted with this statement and identified himself with the monk of whom it spoke. In 1527 he even published Lichtenberg’s prophecy with his preface, explaining its meaning in detail.
The biographers of the reformer stated that he was afraid of certain predictions. However, despite his friendship with astrologers, over time he was to lose faith in the accuracy of their predictions. The attitude of Protestant theologians to astrology was not uniform. John Calvin had interesting rationalistic arguments: if sixty thousand people could die in a single battle, did “death give the same horoscope to everyone”? (This is, in a way, an inverted argument against astrology with Confessions of St. Augustine: the twins born at the same time have two different life stories). Still, the doctrine of Calvin’s predestination was consistent with astrological determinism for many theologians.
Astronomy?
As late as the early twentieth century, some historians of culture and philosophy such as Ernst Cassirer argued that, during the Renaissance, astronomy (the mathematical science) began to separate from astrology (the science of divination). But more recent research has shown that this claim is no longer tenable, and the whole problem is much more complicated (and interesting).
It is widely believed that the decline of astrology was due to the triumph of astronomy and its discoveries. The assumption here is that one system could replace the other; that astrology was essentially the same as astronomy, only a worse version—that is, it was a pseudoscience. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Astrology contained scientific elements, but at the same time it was a religious, mystical, psychological system that even responded to certain emotional needs.
Some historians argue that the entire astrological structure collapsed with the overthrow of the geocentric vision of the world. However, this explanation is contradicted by the facts. Astrology and Hermetic ideas developed for much longer: as late as the mid-eighteenth century, Georg M. Bose, a professor at the University of Wittenberg, interpreted Isaac Newton’s discoveries in terms of astrological “action at a distance” (Newton’s alchemical interests alone would require a separate article). Moreover, it turns out that these two orders—astrology and magic, and astronomy and mathematical natural sciences—not only coexisted but were also causally related to each other: it was only certain magical-esoteric interests that led to certain scientific discoveries (the distinction itself between these orders is much later).
According to Francis Yates, Copernicus lived in the world of Ficino, Neoplatonism, and Hermes, which was precisely heliocentric: Hermetic ideas could be the impetus and precede his mathematical calculations. The author of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres studied in Bologna, Italy with Domenico Maria Novara, who is known today for his astronomical achievements, but who was in fact an active astrologer—scientists suspect that Copernicus himself co-created astrological calendars with his master during this study.
Johannes Kepler was the astrologer par excellence and did not agree with the criticism of this science that Pico della Mirandola conducted. He believed in the existence of a “soul of the sun” and in a spiritual element permeating the cosmos. Galileo was a strong opponent of divinatory astrology, but scholars of his writings noted the presence of a Neoplatonic metaphysics of light. On the other hand, in the scientist’s cosmological speculations, the influence of Kabbalistic ideas was noted. But it was not only those figures that we today associate with the history of the Scientific Revolution that had their connections with magic and esotericism. Famous esotericists were also proponents of what we now associate with science. Cornelius Agrippa claimed that every magician must know mathematics, and his words were faithfully repeated by Tommaso Campanella. At that time, the fascination with mathematics was not free from the fascination with the neo-Pythagorean symbolism of numbers and the idea of cosmic harmony.
Cosmos and Freedom
As it turns out, the problem signalled by Petrarch at the beginning of the epoch proved to be as important for the decline of modern European astrology as the Scientific Revolution, which later appeared many times, for example, in the aforementioned criticism of Pico della Mirandola.
Petrarch was an opponent of astrology because he defended freedom and human dignity—what Renaissance humanism considered to be the essence of humanity. He was not concerned with the possible effectiveness of predicting the future, but with the very concept of the world that resulted from astrology: a world of static, determined nature, which he rejected. Eugenio Garin emphasizes that the Renaissance discussion of astrology revolved precisely around this central problem: for science and certain knowledge of the world to be possible, it is necessary to make an assumption about the iron laws of nature. But if we accept such an assumption, how are human freedom and creativity possible?
On theological grounds, astrological fatalism was untenable: if the good or evil done depends on the horoscope, the idea of reward or punishment after death loses its meaning, completely abolishing the moral responsibility of the individual. There is reason to believe that the abandonment of astrology, similarly to magic, was not only the result of increasing secularism or rationality, but also the result of the Reformation, those currents which meticulously purged European religiosity of all traces of so-called paganism. Since the astrological imagery responded to religious needs, it was not replaced by science, but was dominated and overpowered by other religious ideas.
Without a doubt, astrology has its religious-existential advantages: it opens up the prospect of a universe permeated with meaning. All suffering and injustice acquire meaning, even if it is incomprehensible and mysterious. Human life is not accidental; each I acquires its own dignity. Each person has its share in the fate of the cosmos; no one is superfluous. The universe itself begins to be human, and the stars and planets become people with whom we can enter a dialogue, because they feel, think and suffer—just like us. Heaven is not an impersonal dome, but the visible presence of transcendence. The only thing that can cause unease is the fact that human life depends on unknown and alien powers that can send us madness or passion, and we have no influence over them. At the same time, however, a perspective that removes responsibility for failures or guilt can be liberating.
Astrology had a profound psychological impact on people, as two biographies illustrate well. Jacopo Caldora was fearless when he was suffering from the most serious illnesses—he knew that he was in no danger when the stars wrote his death on the battlefield (which was finally confirmed). Girolamo Cardano, an eminent mathematician and astrologer, had supposedly predicted the day and hour of his own death using calculations. However, when it did not come, he committed suicide.
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