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(VII.) HISTORY - Astrology in Medieval Europe

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Bianca
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« on: August 17, 2007, 08:42:42 am »







Early Christian literature provides examples of the Druids predicting a child's future from the date of its birth, and the word for cloud divination (neladoracht) is also freely used to mean astrology and divination in general. There are several references to astrology itself; for instance, it is related how an astrologer calculated the planets' positions in order to tell the foster-father of St Columkille, better known as St Columba of Ireland, when it was a propitious time for the boy to begin lessons. It is clear too that the Druids operated a system of lucky and unlucky days: the thirteenth day of a lunar cycle was considered a bad one on which to begin anything; a boy born on that day would be 'courageous, bold, rapacious, arrogant, self-pleasing', and a girl 'saucy, spirited, and daring of her body with many men'.

Little is known about the patterns of international travel in ancient times; however, it is by no means impossible that, as some scholars have suggested, astronomical knowledge of all sorts reached Britain and western Europe in the earliest years of Babylon; it does not seem very likely that men should otherwise spontaneously have started building stone circles and similar monuments in various parts of the western world at the same time. Such legends as those that support the coming of Mediterranean traders to Britain many centuries before Christ may be far from nonsense; and while it does not seem at all likely that men with the knowledge to design and build such a sophisticated monument as Stonehenge would be travelling on a trader's boat, there is nothing inherently absurd in the idea: scholars have often also been adventurers.

We begin to see our way rather more clearly round about the time of the Roman occupation, when Mithraism brought knowledge of the existence of astrology to Gaul, Germany and Britain, and temples to the Roman gods were built - often on the sites of Druidic temples, it seems, for Caesar says that the Gauls worshipped Mercury, Apollo, Mars and Minerva (and can only have meant that they worshipped local gods like those Roman ones).

With the departure of the Roman legions, and the Dark Ages, astrology like so much else vanishes from our view, except for some hints that the knowledge brought by the Romans was treasured by some scholars, especially in the north and west of the province - at the limits of Roman power, whence, eventually, came so many early scholars - Alcuin and Bede, Adelard and Roger Bacon among them. Did the British who had learned to read continue to treasure Roman books after AD 410? A few relics suggest the answer books in Greek or Latin with scribbled comments and notes in a Scottish or Welsh dialect.
« Last Edit: August 18, 2007, 04:56:04 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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