(III.) HISTORY - Through The Doors of Greece

This is a Roman sundial dating from the 2nd century AD. The (missing) central gnomon throws the shadow across the lines and marks the time. The head possibly represents Berosus, supposed Greek inventor of this type of sundial. - LIVERPOOL MUSEUM

It was, as might be expected, a Chaldean - Berosus, a priest of Bel Marduk at Babylon - who in about 260 BC came to the island of Cos, where there was a medical school at which Hipparchus had taught, and set up there a formal school of astrology which was perhaps the earliest such establishment. He seems to have used for his textbook a treatise called The Eye of Bel, which existed in the form of seventy tablets in the library of Assurbanipal, but was compiled much earlier, in the 3rd millenium BC, for Sargon I - or so it was said. Berosus also wrote an enormous history of his homeland, Babylonica, covering some five hundred thousand years from the creation of the world to the death of Alexander the Great, setting out in it a considerable amount of astronomical/astrological lore: about the Great Year, for instance, and the theory that earthquakes were caused by planets being in conjunction with the Sun. He also predicted a cataclysmic world disaster when all the planets were in conjunction in Cancer: the earth would become mud during an inordinate flood, and the world would eventually be covered with water, sweeping away all human life.

Berosus was famous in his own time, and it is said that Athens raised a statue of him with a golden tongue, to pay tribute to his oratorical skills. He was succeeded on Cos by Antipatrus and Achinapolus, who taught medical astrology, and seem to have been the first non-Babylonian astrologers to experiment with the idea of drawing up a horoscope for the moment of conception rather than birth. They worked a good deal on the ancient aphorism, preserved in Hermetic literature, to the effect that the sign occupied by the Moon at the moment of conception would be in the ascendant at the time of birth. Interestingly Dr Eugen Jonas, a Czechoslovak psychiatrist, did a great deal of work on the same theory in the 1960s, claiming to be able to predict by the tropical position of the Moon at the time of conception the sex of a child, before birth. The Communist government banned his work in 1970, before his full evidence could be published.