Astrology - An Historical Footnote

Great Debates
1

An old thread Why Do People Believe In Astrology? from 2002 was resurrected in the last twenty four hours as a zombie, before eventually being locked by Bone on the grounds that the resurrector was suspected of commercial spamming. Now it had happened that by its end back in 2002 the thread had largely been diverted into a discussion between myself and an astrology supporter about the reliability of various historical details reported by the astrologer Liz Greene in her 1984 book The Astrology of Fate. These concerned the famous story that the astrologer Luca Gaurico had predicted the death of Henri II of France as a result of a jousting accident. Without particularly wanting to have the final word, the resurrection of the thread had seemed a good opportunity to note some details about the story that have only become obvious to me since 2002, but the thread was locked before I had a chance to post. Hence this separate post – especially since it now seems that the key text that the story depends on doesn’t appear in the source most everybody thought it did.

Mods - if there doesn’t appear a debate here, feel free to move this to MIPSM, but it is picking up from the GD thread.

Without recapping the whole argument – and the Liz Greene angle is incidental to the main point I want to make – the two sets of claims in 2002 were:

[ul][li]Once the citations were disentangled, it turned out that Greene states that Gaurico had made the prediction in 1555 that Henri would die in his 42nd year. This was in something reprinted in Gaurico’s Operum omnium of 1575.[/li][li]By contrast, James Randi and other writers on Nostradamus (a contempory of Gaurico) state that the prediction was made in a letter from Gaurico in 1556 and was worded along the following lines:[/li]

Their citation for this is a memoir by the contemporary courtier Claude l’Aubespine, reprinted in the 1835 collection Archives Curieuses de la France.[/ul]

Back in 2002, I noted these discrepencies and suggested that the latter seemed likely the more secure cite. At that point I hadn’t seen Greene’s book, nor Archives Curieuses de la France.

To take Greene first, having now seen The Astrology of Fate, it’s apparent that all the garbling of the citation was due to Greene, not the poster citing her. However where any attempt to base anything on Greene really runs into the buffers is that she herself admits that she can’t follow the Latin text involved (The Astrology of Fate, Allen & Unwin, 1984, p143, 145). So all she does is reproduce Gaurico’s horoscope for Henri (p146, which she cites as p1612 in volume two of the 1575 collection) and then offers her own interpretation of why it might be ominous.
However, as Randi and others have pointed out, Gaurico had published a horoscope for Henri in 1552, together with an interpretation that saw him living past ages 41-2. One of the great developments since 2002 is that so much historic material is now online and this is just such a case (pdf; the relevant page is opposite the one numbered “43”). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is identical to the one Greene uses for Henri (in modernised format), coming to rather different conclusions about it than Gaurico himself did in 1552.
The only conclusion can be that Greene is completely useless as any sort of source for the story.

The kicker, however, is in the other half. For Archives Curieuses de la France is now on Google Books. There are two references to “Gauric” or variants. The first is just in the editor’s “Avertissement” on p274. The other (p295-6) is the following passage about 1556:

Which is something like:

(Henri did not die immediately.) The editor’s footnote quotes Gaurico’s interpretation from 1552.
This is obviously evidence that a horoscope was sent by letter from Gaurico in 1556. What Claude l’Aubespine really tells us nothing about is what, if anything, Gaurico predicted as a result. It certainly doesn’t include anything about “forty-first year”, “wound to the head” etc. Yet it is that prediction that everyone (Greene excepted) uses this reference as the citation for. It looks likely that everyone (including Randi) has been parroting this as the cite for some considerable time now, without anyone going back and looking at it.
Since the footnote on the Wikipedia page for Gaurico (itself an advance compared to 2002) also mentions Pibrac as a possible source of the story, that’s also online and only refers to the 1552 horoscope and interpretation.

Bottom line: so where does the whole “avoid all single combat …” text for the prediction come from? I’ve no idea and wouldn’t be at all surprised if it is a late invention. The history of astrology can be as nonsensical as the subject’s supposed content.

2

While I applaud your industry and find your arguments convincing I can’t help but think the interlocutor you wish to persuade has lost the thread of this discussion a long time ago.

3

As predicted

4

Thanks for starting this thread. I was going to, but work got in the way (doncha hate it when that happens).

Your example shows the limitations of using the past to validate (or invalidate) astrology. What is needed is the scientific method, and I disagree with those in the zombie thread who allege that only a lot of study of astrology is needed before we can assess the topic. You just need a well-planned experiment, following the standard model.

[ul][li]First, make it clear what astrology is going to predict. You say, for instance, “people born under the sign of Pisces with Aquarius rising are more analytical and better at math” (or whatever - some concrete measurable observable factor). But you have to agree on the specifics of the prediction, and of the method used. [/ul][/li][ul][li]Then you identify your test population. You find, say, a thousand people who are good at math, or a thousand people who are born under Pisces with Aquarius rising. [/ul][/li][ul][li]Then you see if the number of people who are good at math are more likely to be born under Pisces, or if the number of people born under Pisces are more likely to be good at math.[/ul][/li][ul][li]Then collect your results, and repeat the experiment.[/ul]Otherwise it is like the classic exchange with an astrologist.[/li]
“I can always guess people’s star sign. For instance, you must be a Capricorn!”

“No, I’m a Leo.”

“I knew it!”

Regards,
Shodan

5

Good tests of any modality that touts itself as being science-based include the degree to which it has revised its practices to take new evidence into account, and the rigor with which it utilizes quality control.

I wonder to what extent (if any) astrologers have dumped old, ineffective methods in favor of new, presumably more accurate ones.

(are those crickets I hear?)

6

Thanks to the mods for fixing the links in the OP. One lingering habit from posting back in 2002 is that I habitually (from long past bitter experience) compose such long posts offline first. Which can snarl up the links when you copy and paste onto the board. The same keystrokes don’t necessarily translate.

7

Ooo, fun. I’m still around, still interested in astrology, though I haven’t done much with it in 10 years or so. As I said in the old thread, I enjoy it aesthetically as a mythology-based palette of psychological projection; it’s not a big part of my thinking or decision-making. I don’t “believe” in it or think it has predictive powers.

So, Greene certainly garbled the dates and dodged the Latin. However I think what you call “her own interpretation” isn’t her view, but a summary of the traditional interpretations that would have influenced Gaurico to think the king’s natal chart was ominous. That he presumably didn’t think that is backed up by the 1552 Tractatus, depending how much one thinks he was hedging his bets by stipulating the king had to survive past 56 at least. There is nothing there about single combat and all the rest.

That’s neither here nor there, I suppose, as we agree Greene is beside the point. My point was that the modern sense of “believing in astrology” differs from the historical/medieval sense. Gaurico had no problem being specifically predictive, whether it was doom or a “green age” for the king, right up to “10 months and 12 days”. I don’t think most modern astrologers would be so specific. I gather your point is that the “prediction” was retrofitted to reflect Henri’s actual fate. I have no problem with that. It certainly underlines the idea of “belief” as “astrology is specific and one’s fate is inescapable.”

You seem to have skipped over the addendum in the editorial footnote to the Archives. It quotes the 1552 interpretation, but goes on “A Gaurico observant…” etc. My Latin’s pretty scratchy, but with a boost from Google Translate, the general sense is “Having observed from five years before his [presumably, Henri’s] birth, Gaurico advised him by a letter, at approximately forty-one years to avoid a duel, the threat of stars, a wound to the head, which immediately brought blindness or death.”

So I’m guessing that footnote is one source of the whole “avoid single combat, forty first year, wound to the head” stuff. The Ed. says the passage “confirms what Brantôme reported of Gauric’s horoscope, which prediction is in the book des Nativités by that author.”

Brantôme is Pierre de Bourdeille, abbé de Brantôme, and there’s some stuff about him and what he wrote here. Scroll down to just below the shudder-inducing drawing of the splinters that killed poor Henri. This additional account doesn’t add much specific about the prophecy, either, except for mentioning “duel singulier”. Also it may be the source of the story of Henri’s reply about not fearing honorable death.

The source of the Latin addendum is given as “Adparatus litterarius of Friedrich Gotthilf Freytag, Leipzig, Weidmann, vol 3, 1755, p.743”

It’s a Nostradamus site, so I have no idea what kind of validity the cite has, and I haven’t time to chase down the primary sources. If you have time and inclination to nail dates and stuff down, the results would be interesting.