(XII) HISTORY - 21ST CENTURY ASTROLOGY

However, Ptolemy's late treatise is the last flowering of a long period of maturation. After the outpouring of pre-Socratic philosophy and the movement toward systematization from which arose in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. the four principal schools of Greek philosophy -- the Academy of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle, the Grove of Epicurus and the Portal of Zeno -- Greek metaphysics entered a curious period of eclipse, which showed itself clearly in treatises on the history of philosophy. It was precisely during this period (250 B.C. -- 150 A.D.) that astrological philosophy, under the influence of the Stoics, flourished in Athens and Alexandria.

Historians of philosophy have paid rather scant attention to movements of thought based on astrology, magic, theurgy and pagan religious philosophy, which took up the baton of Greek metaphysics and immediately preceded the establishment of Christianity.

The pragmatic academician Carneades of Cyrene engaged a polemic -- reknowned because it has been taken up again by every adversary of astrology from Carneades' disciple Clitomachus of Carthage (187?-110 B.C.) to the French Encyclopedists and historians of superstition in the 18th and 19th centuries -- against the fatalism of the Stoics and the astrological theories of Babylonian inspiration supported by Cleanthus and then Chrysippus.

Franz Boll noted that Carneades' arguments are taken up by Christian writers without any significant change [5] and David Amand underlines the parrotry of the polemic: "It is always the same refrain served up with a desperate monotony; the same traditional arguments are brought to bear without cease. We should add that this polemic, which never moves on to fresh ground, has never been adapted seriously to perfecting astrological theories and techniques.

[6] The analyses of Carneades and the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus [7] formed part of a general critique of consciousness and of dogmatic philosophy; the situation has not changed one whit with regard to the hastily drawn and least satisfying representatives of received modern thought, especially those of moralizing astronomers and biologists, who are the unimaginative disciples of masters from bygone centuries, e.g. Jean Sylvain Bailly, Jean-Baptiste Delambre, or even Camille Flammarion." [8]