Introduction
The following article provides a fleeting look at the Age of Enlightenment. Spanning from the 1650s into the 1780s, it is also referred to as simply, 'the Enlightenment' or 'the Age of Reason'; Western Europe was the hub of it all. During the period, concerned thinkers, intellectuals and philosophes, urged all to scrutinize what had commonly been accepted with little question 'til then. Intellectuals analyzed virtually every facet of society, including government, science, and religion, from the inside out. The motive behind posing new concepts in thinking was to spur improvement based upon new ideals.
The Enlightenment was not one consolidated effort; various nations had their own approaches, the specific timing of their respective enlightenments varied somewhat as well. Involved nations included France, Scotland, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and America.
The above concerns the very basics of the era; and with it under belt, let's move on to Race's article on how the period related to metaphysics, primarily astrology.
Metaphysics Suppressed During the Age of Enlightenment
To most of us in the liberal democratic societies that were built on their ideas, they seem enlightened indeed, but to the occultist and the metaphysician, the Enlightenment might otherwise look like a dark age. After centuries in which alchemy, divination, and magick were respected pursuits and prized knowledge, these same disciplines were dismissed as pseudoscience or mocked as superstition, and abandoned by their patrons and their students. Many (such as the chiromancy of my last post) became moribund and some nearly went extinct until the late nineteenth century. Why?
The reasons are many and complex, but perhaps the greatest was simple ignorance. In reviving the legacy of the classical world, the scholars of the Renaissance often read the ancients by their own cultural norms and interests, rendering ludicrous what was once profound. The rise and fall of the so-called “science” of astrology may illustrate the point.
The ancient Greeks credited the Babylonians with developing astrology, and we have detailed accounts from these ancient pioneers. What startles the modern reader is how very scientific they seem. Babylonian stargazers noted the positions of stars and planets, noted events in the world, and watched to see if those same celestial conditions would correlate to those same events in the future. Crops grow better when the sun is in certain constellations that mark the growing season; do they also grow better when Mercury is in those constellations? These are the questions the Babylonians asked. In time, most of their hypotheses didn't work out, and they found the stars were poor predictors of anything more than the seasons.
The Greeks took this Babylonian science and refashioned it as an art that suited their philosophical and mystical interests. They associated each planet to a god and endowed it with the god's attributes, powers, and domains. They finalized the signs of the zodiac, using each to modify the nature of the planets in it. They defined the astrological houses and connected them with different areas of human life. They named the possible angles between planets and made each one symbolic of a relationship.
Unlike the Babylonians, the Greeks and Romans left almost no records of specific observations. All of classical history has left only a couple of horoscopes, both as examples in manuals. Why? Because, unlike the Babylonians, the Greeks and Romans were not interested in checking predictions. They were using the language of stars and planets as symbolic representations of psychological forces and arenas of human endeavor. Their planets, signs, and houses were symbols onto which the varied aspects of the psyche could be mapped to make their relationships clearer.
Vettius Valens, for example, considered the reasons one would learn astrology in his textbook, including fame and fortune, but declared that, far more importantly, astrology had taught him “to overcome fear and desire”. Instead of written horoscopes, classical astrologers set colored markers on a board. Once the client had realized his true motivations, or been led to admit what she knew unconsciously but could not previously bring to her conscious mind, the board could be wiped clean. In our own time, the great psychologist Carl Jung used astrology in just this way with his clients.
Renaissance thinkers, however, had little interest in such mysticism, and took an approach based upon the perspective of their times. Being scientifically minded, they read Greek and Roman textbooks as if they were the naive, incipient science of the Babylonians. Astrologers of the period left thousands of horoscopes meticulously noted to track accuracy, and their fortunes rose and fell on predicting the future in minute detail from the subtlest calculations.
As the Babylonians had already discovered, the positions of Rigel and Betelgeuse cannot predict the manner of your death or the name of your true love, and so the Renaissance “science” of astrology became the rightfully scorned “pseudoscience” dismissed by the Enlightenment as a barbaric relic. It would not be until the Occult Revival in the nineteenth century—the time when modern psychology and comparative mythology would be born—that astrology, and many occult arts like it, would be recognized again as powerful tools for the guidance of lost hearts and the healing of broken minds.
