[MUSIC] Hi, there! Glad to know you're still with us. The last video was pretty tough, wasn't it? Let's see if we can get down to business with this one
and give you a few specific data about the different sources and practices that made up the astrological corpus of the first centuries of the Middle Ages in Christian Europe. Just for this once, we won't be using the conventional periods you're all familiar with, Early Middle Ages, Late Middle Ages, and so on. We will start instead with a far simpler division into a pre-Islamic and a post-Islamic period, understood as the periods before and after the Islamic Golden Age that began with the ascent to power of the Abbasid Dynasty in the 8th century. This is not to say that we will focus exclusively on the Islamic context. In fact, the Arabic-Islamic, scientific tradition was actually Graeco-Arabic, and pre-Islamic astrology coexisted with successive
Arabic-Latin contributions for centuries. But given that Islam was that the same time the receiving end of the astrological legacy of antiquity, and one of the main means through which said legacy was passed on to the West, using its expansion as a dividing line between two distinct astrological periods,
seems convenient. In the pre-Islamic period it doesn't seem that Western astrology owed much to the classical legacy of Late Antiquity. Most of the astrological concepts produced by Graeco-Roman scholars that made it to this period were vague, non-technical, and anomymous notions usually mixed up with astronomical texts that were mostly concerned
with cosmology. Their focus was the explanation of the structure of the universe through a model where the earth was at the center,
and descriptions of planets and zodiacal signs that were somewhere between science and poetry. This kind of materials were preserved mostly in a sort of philological primitive encyclopaedism whose main works were the <i>Saturnalia and the Commentary on Cicero's <i>Dream of Scipio</i>
by Macrobius in the late 4th century. <i>De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii</i>, [On the Marriage of Philology
and Mercury], by Martianus Capella in the early 5th century. The <i>Etymologies</i> and <i>De Natura Rerum</i>, [On the Nature of Things], by Isidore of Seville
in the 6th century. And a century later, Bede's work, <i>De temporum ratione</i>, On the Reckoning of Time. This sort of philological astrology was accompanied by several different versions of a Christian Zodiac that interpreted the different signs as allegories of the Bible, thus replacing the mythological interpretations that had prevailed until that moment. The astrological purpose of these early medieval centuries was what Isidore himself used to rebuke, describing it as
<i>astrologia superstitiosa</i>, superstitious astrology. Divinatory astrology appeared in many miscellanies across Europe, together with other predictive techniques. As for astrological literature in Latin, it was represented, especially from the 9th century onwards, mainly by two specific genres,
<i>Lunaria</i> and Zodiologies. On the one hand, the <i>Lunaria</i> were a series of texts that offered basic information about the advisability of buying and selling, embarking on a journey, having a phlebotomy performed, or taking a remedy, depending on the position and phase of the moon. For example, they contain statements such as "the eighth moon is the most favorable time
to sow the fields and move the bees." On the other hand, zodiologies provided brief descriptions and general predictions for the natives of each zodiacal sign. "The woman born under the sign of the lion will be shy, ingenious and spirited," for example. These works were usually accompanied by brontologies, predictions based on thunders. "If it begins to thunder during the first hour of the night, great mortality will ensue." Texts on chiromancy, texts interpreting dreams as the renowned dreams of Daniel, and calendar and meteorological predictions. "If the calends of January fall on a Monday, the winter will be hard." Despite their unsophisticated and almost folkloric appearance, all this divinatory literature was a product of Latin scholarship especially produced during the Carolingian Renaissance
of the late 8th century on the basis of late antique sources. Their simple nature, and the lack of requirement of any technical skill, made this kind of astrology quite popular,
even beyond the monastic sphere. And these texts were translated into vernacular languages from early on, in particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, this Carolingian astrology had none of the most characteristic elements of Western tradition such as horoscopes
and the typical astrological jargon: ascendant, aspect, triplicity, exaltation, combustion, houses. All these terms and the concepts behind them belong to mathematical or technical astrology originally practiced by Graeco-Roman <i>mathematici. But the transmission of their knowledge to medieval Europe was interrupted with the fall of Rome. In fact, it was not really reintroduced and reestablished in Latin Europe until the arrival of the translations of Arabic texts that were carried out mainly between
the 10th and the 12th centuries, while the Greek translations of the same texts were also in circulation in Byzantium from the beginning of the 11th century onwards. In any case, this learned astrology, although crucial, did not replace the poorer and more primitive tradition we have just described. Both of them flourished together, for both of them met the needs and interests of medieval society in their own different ways. After all, it was precisely the fact that Merovingians and Carolingians kept alive their curiosity about astrological doctrines what made possible the search and translation of new texts that dealt
with similar topics, which by that time were necessarily written in Arabic. In our next video, we will address the evolution of this newborn medieval astrology, and we'll witness the rebirth of technical astrology, which is, in a way, the birth of horoscopes, one of the last pieces of the astrological puzzle of the Middle Ages that has managed to survive until our extremely scientific 21st century. Stay tuned. [MUSIC]
