Satya Astrology

Tag: arabic-astrology

  • Abu Ma’shar: Persian Prince of Astrology

    Abu Ma’shar: Persian Prince of Astrology

    “Insofar as the higher bodies signify the things existing in this world through the powers of their natural motions, then what is the advantage of being ignorant of this knowledge?”

    Abu Ma’shar

    Sa’id Shadhan, a ninth-century Muslim student of astrology, recorded several anecdotes about his teacher, a man named Abu Ma’shar. On a trip to Baghdad, Abu Ma’shar was staying with a friend who also had some knowledge of astrology. Seeing that the Moon in Leo was squaring Mars, Abu Ma’shar advised his fellow travelers against embarking at that hour, as it boded ill for the journey. The other travelers laughed at what they considered superstition and embarked anyway. Abu Ma’shar remained with his friend and the two ate, drank, and conversed. A short while later, the ragged remnants of the group returned. They had been attacked by thieves, who had killed some of them and robbed the rest. The travelers, blaming Abu Ma’shar for their misfortune, pursued the astrologer with sticks and stones. Barely escaping, Abu Ma’shar swore never again to discuss “the science of [astrology] with the man in the street.”

    The protagonist of this colorful tale, Abu Ma’shar, was in many ways the foremost representative of his science in the Medieval Islamic world. The author of more than 50 works on astronomy and astrology, the most famous court astrologer in Baghdad, and an important proponent behind the preservation of the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy via translation into Arabic, Abu Ma’shar would become to astrology what Ptolemy was to astronomy. Known as Albumasar in Medieval Latin and Apomasar in Byzantine Greek, his texts in translation reintroduced astrology to regions where the art had all but disappeared, causing a revival in the West along with the general transmission of Hellenistic knowledge that sparked the European Renaissance.

    Origins

    Jafar ibn Muhammad Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi was born in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, at the end of the eighth century A.D. His birth year is typically recognized as 787, thanks to an anonymous horoscope cited in one of his works, but in all likelihood, Abu Ma’shar did not know his own nativity. Balkh itself was an important frontier city in the new Abbasid caliphate, conquered as recently as the seventh century. One of the principal urban centers in the Khorasan region, Balkh boasted the full religious, cultural and intellectual diversity of Central Asia. Known as Bactra by the Greeks, it had long been a Hellenistic outpost in the region and had since become a significant site for both Zoroastrians and Buddhists. The city also boasted significant Jewish, Nestorian, Manichean, and Hindu populations. A pro-Iranian intellectual elite, of which Abu Ma’shar was a member, dominated the city during the Abbasid era, having supported the new caliphate in their revolt against the Umayyad.

    Scholars at an Abbasid library. Maqamat of al-Hariri

    During the reign of al-Ma’mun (813-833), Abu Ma’shar moved to Baghdad, the capital city of an empire that stretched from the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the northern coast of Africa. The ringed city, one of the world’s largest at the time, was a commercial and scientific hub. The libraries of its “House of Wisdom” boasted more books than any other in the world, with an intellectual elite of Arab, Persian, Jewish, Nestorian, and Syriac scholars writing in the international scientific language of Arabic. Thanks to the work of prominent intellectuals such as Masha’allah and al-Kindi, the city was also the foremost center for astrological learning, a science that had been transmitted to Arab dominions from Egypt and the Mesopotamian city of Harran.

    Abu Ma’shar, however, came to Baghdad not as an astrologer but as a student of the Hadith, the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad and his followers. Suspicious of astrology, mathematics, and philosophy, Abu Ma’shar became embroiled in a disagreement with al-Kindi, then the most prominent Arab philosopher in the city. Al-Kindi advised Abu Ma’shar to study mathematics, and it was in his 47th year that he did just that. Devoting himself to the study of mathematics and the motions and significance of the celestial bodies, Abu Ma’shar would soon become the most famous astrologer in the Islamic world.

    We have many anecdotes relating Abu Ma’shar’s exploits and proficiency as a practicing astrologer, handed down by students such as Shadhan, or recounted in Ibn Tawus’ 12th-century Biographies of Astrologers. All contributed to the myth of the man. He cast the horoscope of an Indian prince, served as a court astrologer in Baghdad, and advised princes on many matters. He even accompanied the ruler al-Muwaffaq on his campaigns against the Zanj in Basra. He may have been epileptic and was apparently fond of drinking. Many of these anecdotes paint a portrait of an astute individual and talented astrologer not particularly given to either moral or intellectual rigor.

    For the most part, his reputation protected him from persecution, although he was once flogged during the reign of al-Musta’in for practicing astrology. He was also briefly imprisoned by Lenies, the king of the Persians, who was displeased by his predictions. The king promised to let him go free if his predictions proved true but threatened to kill him if they did not. Fortunately for the astrologer, he was right on the mark.

    Within the field of astrology, Abu Ma’shar’s principal contribution was that of synthesis. Working at the heart of the Abbasid caliphate during the golden age of Islam, he had access to Egyptian, Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Indian sources regarding the movements and attributes of the stars and planets. He frequently employed Indian techniques, treating the lunar nodes as equal in power to the luminaries. He also contributed to the number of lots and recognized as many as 25 conditions of the planets.

    Astrology and the Oneness of Wisdom

    At the heart of Abu Ma’shar’s philosophical justification for astrology—and, to some extent, at the heart of Islamic astrology in general—lay three key concepts. The first, tawhid, is an Islamic doctrine proclaiming a oneness of wisdom that parallels the essential oneness of God. This doctrine allowed Islamic thinkers to draw from the diverse sources of the ancient world in search of a unified, divine truth. The second, transmitted from distinctly pagan roots, was the Neoplatonic model of the cosmos. This concept had reached Islam by way of the city of Harran, in northwestern Mesopotamia, an influential center of Hermetic philosophy and astrology and the last refuge of the pre-Islamic Mandaeans.

    Ruins showing remains of a ancient university against the clear white clouds and blue sky
    Ruins of the Harran University

    The inhabitants of Harran resisted conversion until the 11th century, engaging star worship based on the Hermetica, texts attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. Their geocentric model of the cosmos consisted of three spheres. The outermost sphere was known as the divine sphere. The middle, or ethereal, sphere, contained the stars and the planets. Both revolved around the innermost hylic, or sublunar, sphere, where the four elements met in a state of constant change.

    For the Harranians, the human soul descended from the divine sphere to the earthly sphere, and so one’s spiritual journey involved striving to reconnect with this divine source. However, they believed that, instead of addressing the divine source in worship, it was better to address the stars and planets as intermediaries between the human and the divine. The form of this worship depended upon the respective attributes of each celestial body and thus relied heavily on astronomical observation and astrological knowledge.

    In recognizing this Neoplatonic approach to astrology, Abu Ma’shar attested to the scientific and religious reasons for studying the stars. Not only could their motions be scientifically predicted, but through the association between zodiac signs, planets, human behavior, and certain plants, animals, and elements, the astrologer could both predict the outcome of an event and even influence it through a practice known as theurgy.

    Abu Ma’shar explained the necessary techniques for working astrologers in his seminal work, The Great Introduction to the Science of Astrology, written around 850. With that and his Zij al-Hazarat, an astrological compendium drawing on Persian, Hellenic, and Indian sources and techniques, Abu Ma’shar attempted to reconstruct a unified “antediluvian” astrology as it had originally been revealed to humans by God.

    Main image shows Sun with a man seated beside a beast. Beneath that there are 5 images showing man involved in 5 different occupations as per the 5 traditional planets.
    Page of a 15th-century manuscript of the “Book of nativities” by Abu Ma’shar

    As opposed to the talisman-using Mandaeans of Harran, Abu Ma’shar’s primary interest lay more in predicting and justifying the course of history rather than influencing it. This brings us to the third pillar of Islamic astrology influencing his work, this time from Sassanian Persian roots: historical astrology. Initially introduced to the Arab world by caliph al-Mansur to solidify Abbasid legitimacy, historical astrology involved using mundane techniques such as transits to explain the course of history.

    In his now lost work, Book of the Thousands, Abu Ma’ashar used a system of conjunctions, Aries Ingresses, and profections to explain the course of history. He attributed the greatest importance to the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, the slowest-moving Hellenistic planets. Their conjunctions, spaced 120 degrees apart on the zodiac, occurred every 20 years, and every 260 years they moved into a new triplicity. The cycle of conjunctions would begin anew every 960 years, giving astrologers three main subdivisions to mark periodicity in history. Abu Ma’shar aimed to use the technique to predict the rise of tyrants or prophets and ultimately underscored the temporary nature of all human societies—including the Abbasid caliphate. The astrologer predicted that the caliphate would last for another three hundred years after his death, a prediction not too far off the mark from the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.

    The Legacy of a Legend

    According to Ibn al-Nadim, a 10th-century bookseller, Abu Ma’shar died in Wasit, Iraq in 886 at around the age of 100. The astrologer’s fame outlived the astrologer himself, with his works commanding considerable influence and popularity in the Arab-speaking world for the next few centuries.

    His treatise On the Nativities of Men and Women circulated widely, with the 14th-century scholar Isfahani copying excerpts into his Kitab al-Bulhan. To the West, the abbreviated version of The Great Introduction became the first astrological manual to be translated into Latin, and Abu Ma’shar’s name became virtually synonymous with astrology in late Medieval Western Europe and Byzantine Eastern Europe. Flores Astrologie and the Book on Religions and Dynasties, two mundane astrology texts, saw translation into Greek and Latin and were much discussed by European thinkers, as did his Book of the Revolutions of the Years of the Nativities.

    Through his astrological treatises, his embracing of Hellenistic philosophy, and the promotion and preservation of the work of both Ptolemy and Aristotle, Abu Ma’shar influenced thinkers as diverse as Biruni, Albert the Great, and Roger Bacon. Ultimately, this colorful and accomplished character, through his prodigious literary output and synthesizing mind, became one of the core conduits by which Hellenistic astrology again moved west to experience yet another golden age in a radically different cultural context.

    References

    Images on this page

  • In the Footsteps of Angels: Medieval Arabic Astrology

    In the Footsteps of Angels: Medieval Arabic Astrology

    It is He who made the stars, so that they can guide you when land and sea are dark: We have made the signs clear for those who have knowledge.

    The Holy Qu’ran. 6:97

    Unifying the diverse fields of mathematics, philosophy, optics, and astronomy, Hellenistic astrology needed an environment conducive to higher learning to survive through the trappings of state-funded libraries, observatories, and schools. Once Rome fell, so too fell the instruments supporting the sciences in Western Europe. The region would remain too embroiled in territorial squabbles—and too suspicious of pagan sources of knowledge—to preserve the sciences of antiquity. The wealth and infrastructure of the empire would persist in the east within the territory of the Byzantine empire for another millennium but it would be a new power outside of Christendom that would take up—and ultimately improve upon—the “wisdom of the ancients”.

    In the century following the flight of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca, Islam would go from local sect to world religion. Arab tribal rulers came to govern a territory surpassing in size that of Rome with a distinctly multicultural population, each community boasting histories stretching back thousands of years. Though the invading Arabs would be initially hostile to indigenous scholarship, destroying Persian astrological texts they considered incompatible with Islam, the Arab elite would eventually come to embrace the intellectual and cultural heritage of the lands and people they now ruled. 

    Zodiac imagery and lunar mansions wheel, rich imagery.
    Celestial map, signs of the Zodiac and lunar mansions in the Zubdat-al Tawarikh, dedicated to the Ottoman Sultan Murad III in 1583.

    The Islamic Golden Age, a period of stability and prosperity stretching from the 8th to the 12th century, saw Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Persian, Syrian, and pagan intellectuals working alongside Arab thinkers in the prosperous Abbasid capital of Baghdad, translating, preserving, and improving upon an immense variety of fields, all in the scientific lingua franca of Arabic. By allowing initiates to read the will of Allah from the composition of the heavens, astrology was second only to the reading of the Quran in the sciences of this golden era.

    The work of prominent Arabic thinkers shaped astrology as wealth, cultural exchange, and innovation would allow for technical, mathematical, and philosophical advances surpassing those achieved in the Greco-Roman world. It was to be this flowering of knowledge that would then pass astrology—and many other founts of ancient learning—on to the West, sparking the Renaissance and the beginnings of modernity.

    Astrology within Islam

    The tribespeople of the Arabian Peninsula, as nomadic traders, were familiar with astrology, and they both used a lunar calendar and navigated through the desert by the stars. Islam ostensibly forbade the worship of the sun and moon but 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.

    Abu Ma’shar was particularly instrumental to the integration of astrology into the Islamic worldview by attributing the field to the antediluvian prophet Idris/Enoch, fused with the neo-Platonic figure of Hermes Trismegistus. The prophet was said to have ascended to the seventh heaven, the Saturnian sphere of the cosmos, where he learned the art of reading the stars and the planets. Then, instead of ascending to paradise, he descended to Earth to share his newfound knowledge with humanity—although popular Islamic folklore has it that he left his sandals in heaven to allow himself to return.

    Main image shows Sun with a man seated beside a beast. Beneath that there are 5 images showing man involved in 5 different occupations as per the 5 traditional planets.
    Page of a 15th-century manuscript of the “Book of nativities” by Abu Ma’shar

    Both India and Sassanian Persia would absorb Hellenistic astrology in the first few centuries A.D. and both cultures would play a role in shaping Arabic astrology. The first astrology text to be translated into Arabic was “Siddhanda”, a Sanskrit text, in 770 A.D., and many prominent astrologers writing in Arabic, most notably Abu Ma’shar, Omar of Tiberias, and al Biruni, drew heavily from their Persian roots. There were also Hindu astrologers working in Baghdad alongside Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and pagans but the primary source for Arab astrology remained Greek. The Arabs partly encountered it after conquering Alexandria and its eponymous library in 647, and their dealings with the Mandaeans in the city of Harran. 

    Located in what is now southeastern Turkey, Harran was a prominent center of pagan learning that survived well past the rise of monotheism in the region. Its inhabitants practiced a form of astral magic and held a distinctly neo-Platonic view of the universe. Respected as practitioners of what many Islamic thinkers considered an original belief handed down by God before the Flood, the Mandaeans would resist conversion until the 11th century. With the influence of Abu Ma’shar and other astrologers, their neo-Platonic worldview would come to underpin Arab astrology, with the planets treated as angels or otherwise signifiers of the one God that could be addressed or observed in His stead. Al Kindi, known as the “Father of Arabic Astrology”, would introduce the work of Aristotle, the second Hellenistic pillar supporting the Islamic sciences, and establish a vocabulary for philosophy in Arabic.

    Arabic Innovations

    While the philosophical basis for Arabic astrology relied on the works of Aristotle and a neo-Platonic worldview, its practice in the Islamic world depended on several innovations, both technological and theoretical. The astrolabe provided astronomers and navigators alike with an analog map of the heavens. For astrologers, it provided a quick way to calculate the ascendant, the first step in casting a horoscope.

    The zij, meanwhile, were Arabic ephemerides, tables containing astronomical data and formulas for calculating the rising times of various celestial bodies. Initially inspired by Ptolemy’s tables, Arabic astronomers and astrologers improved upon the model, often providing information related to trigonometry, chronology, and geography alongside strictly astrological data. The wealth of the Islamic world also supported both astrological schools and observatories, the former providing training for the best and brightest and the latter allowing Arabic astrologers to predict celestial movement with unprecedented accuracy.

    Jupiter rising with Mars turning cadent in the 7th house. Ruler of 7th is debilitated by being retrograde, in the 8th house and conjunct the South Node. Sun is in rulership in Leo in the house of its Joy in the 9th house.
    Foundation of Baghdad – a classic astrology election, 31 Jul 762 2:40 PM

    The city of Baghdad, the newly constructed Abbasid capital on the Tigris, would prove to be a particularly essential center of learning and was even founded according to a chart cast by Jewish Arab astrologer Mash’allah, among others. The placement of Jupiter rising in its domicile of Sagittarius ensured over four centuries of prosperity—although a malignant Mars in the 7th house of open enemies (in line with the Arabic tradition) would have other plans. But in its prime, the city was a beacon of learning, drawing intellectuals from across the Islamic world.

    The first Arabic astrology school was founded there in 777 A.D. by Jewish astrologer Jacob ben Tarik, and the Caliph Al-Mamun would construct the first observatory there in 829 A.D. Al-Mamun would also be responsible for founding the House of Wisdom, either a library or group of intellectuals that supported the translation of ancient texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Syriac, and Greek into Arabic that fostered the careers of both al Kindi and Abu Ma’shar. Contact with Greek sources would give Arabs access to the natural philosophy of Aristotle and Ptolemy, plus the mathematics of trigonometry, while connections to the Hindu east would give them the concept of zero, a decimal system, numerals, and algebra.

    By the early 9th century, when Omar of Tiberias wrote the texts that would eventually influence Latin astrologers, the astrology that he was using was by and large Hellenistic in content. The alterations from Hellenistic practice may have been due to the influence of Persian astrology, but many features would become fundamental for the development of horary and mundane astrology.

    The concept of orbs of light to measure aspects between two planets, rather than measuring aspects from sign, degree, or even bound, first appeared in Arabic astrology and would be carried into the medieval European tradition. Similarly, the first departure from the whole sign house system to quadrant houses is visible in Arabic language texts. Arabic astrologers also used a complex system of interferences with aspects, known as Alitifel, that few modern astrologers employ.

    Astrologer holding the celestial sphere and probing it.
    Title page for a 1504 German edition of De scientia motvs orbis, originally by Māshāʼallāh (740–815)

    Additionally, the work of Mash’allah and Abu Ma’shar would introduce a historical view of astrology based on conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, the slowest-moving visible planets. A prominent feature of Persian astrology, these conjunctions occur in some form every 20, 260, and 960 years and were seen as signifying momentous events in world history. Indeed, Abu Ma’shar would use these so-called “Great Conjunctions” to analyze the astrological conditions around both Jesus’ and Muhammad’s births and foretell the downfall of his own patron, the Abbasid Caliphate. Aries Ingress charts would become another important technique for mundane astrology, with Solar Return charts serving as their counterpart in natal astrology. 

    The system of lots, or parts, mathematically defined locations in a chart, would also become more prominent in Arabic astrology, especially in horary practices. While Ptolemy defined only the lot of Fortune, Arabic astrologers would use dozen of lots to predict everything from the debt of the native to the prospects of that year’s lentil harvest. Al Biruni, a philosopher and astrologer working in 11th century Afghanistan would provide a comprehensive list in his Elements of the Art of Astrology, complaining that “they increase in number every day”.

    The End of an Era

    The unified Arabic worldview—a fusion of neo-Platonic thought and Islamic doctrine—would intrigue the European Crusaders when they arrived in the Holy Land. However, the most important transit point of Islamic sciences, astrology included, would become the Jewish communities of Western Europe. From Moorish Spain to Renaissance Italy, most cities boasted a sizable Jewish community, some with considerably higher status than is typically assumed. 

    A scene of Ibn Ezra practicing Astrology with an Arabic manuscripts being held by the men that flank him to either side.
    An illustration of Ibn Ezra (center) making use of an astrolabe, ca 1235

    Perhaps the most famous Jewish astrologer, also a philosopher and poet, Ibn Ezra began the life of a roving scholar after increasing persecution pushed him out of his native Navarre. He wrote a dozen books on astrology, from mundane to medicinal, in Hebrew that contained techniques and philosophies prominent in Arabic sources.

    These works would see a Latin translation thanks to Pietro d’Abana, while other European Jewish intellectuals collaborated with priests to translate important Arabic works into Latin. This new flood of scientific knowledge from the East, some direct from Hellenistic sources and some from their improved Arabic equivalents, would ignite the intellectual fervor of the European Renaissance and bring about the birth of modernity.

    The works of Ptolemy, Omar of Tiberias, and Abu Ma’shar would inspire a whole new generation of astrologers and see the ancient science integrated into a distinctly Christian worldview. While some Latin astrologers would dismiss astrological techniques attributed to Arabic sources, William Lilly himself would cite the sayings of Abu Ma’shar, al Farghani, and al Kindi in Christian Astrology centuries later. Meanwhile, in the east, the Golden Era of Islam was drawing to a close and Mars was to have its revenge on the glimmering city of Baghdad. In 1248, Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked the city, burning its libraries and making a pyramid from the skulls of its literati. The city would experience a similarly disastrous conquest by Timurlane in 1401 and never reclaim its former level of glory. The city that once preserved the “wisdom of the ancients” had seen its downfall foretold by the very art it helped survive the passage of the centuries.

    References

    Images on this page