On a Brief History of Ancient Astrology

Roger Beck’s book is a decent introduction to astrology as it was practiced in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds; it has little to say about Mesopotamian, Islamic, Hindu, or post-classical European astrology. Beck is at pains to insist he doesn’t take astrology seriously — his curiosity is in how the ancients thought, not in any modern use. To him astrology coheres with ancient cosmology and a wholly different account of causation than ours; once our knowledge surpassed theirs, it lost its relevance. His other objection is that the system has too many variables to be falsified: when a prediction failed, an astrologer could always say the first reader hadn’t attended closely enough to Saturn in Aries sextile Mercury in Gemini, and an unexpected tragedy could be retrofitted to some overlooked corner of the chart.

The argument is adequate, but Beck returns to it so often that I suspect he has a bone to pick with modern astrology — or fears being quoted out of context in its defense. Either way the repetition is unnecessary, and it crowds out the more interesting material.

The book’s real strength is Beck’s grasp of the astronomy that fed classical astrology: how the celestial bodies move, and how the ancients would have observed and understood them, gets excellent treatment. To his credit he also recognizes, as Augustine of Hippo did, that astrology is a symbolic system — one of the many ways the logos is inscribed, open to being read in more than one way. That seems right to me.

The coverage of houses, signs, and planets is decent, but the commitment to serious history pulls away from what I find most interesting: the poetic resonance, the archetypal meanings. There’s a good start on contradictory meanings — why Sagittarius is “bestial” rather than “human,” why Taurus is a “feminine” sign, whether the sun is beneficial or malefic — but it stays skeletal, because the book is too brief to fill it in. That material is better found in works of cultural history or in modern astrologers than in scholars.

So it’s worth reading for the science behind classical astrology and for a sense of how the ancients understood the cosmos. I wish it were richer; I can’t quite fault Beck for that given how short the book is, but I do wish he hadn’t spent so much of it litigating whether astrology is “factually sound.”