The Development of Western Astrology

 Although it is difficult to pinpoint the origins of astrology, it is fairly easy to trace its growth from there. The Greeks encountered it when Alexander moved westward, and they took it back with them to Greece where it flourished. Western astrology reached its zenith during the Hellenistic period, when the astrologers of Egypt were renown for their insight and erudition. Western astrology has been in a long, slow, and torturous decline since that period, having survived several attempts to stamp it out completely. The first of these was when the Romans banned astrologers (they did this several times, in fact), because they were accurately predicting the fall of the emperors – something that was very dangerous politically. Since the astrology of this period was associated with the worship of the deities, astrology also came under heavy fire when the Christians took over Rome.

The Era of Muslim Scholarship

The only way astrology survived in the West was through the work of Muslim scholars, and then only by the skin of its teeth. These scholoars translated an astrological text penned by Ptolemy, which became very popular.  Their work created a second renaissance of astrology in the West, although it still never reached the heights of the Hellenistic period. Arabic astrology is, in essence, what has become known as Western astrology. This is because it was reintroduced into Europe during the thirteenth century by Muslim scholars. It was they, too, who first made widespread use of the tropical zodiac, and it is because of them that Western astrologers still use this zodiac. Although the tropical zodiac is their most important contribution, the most obvious trace of their influence are the so-called "Arabic parts" such as the Part of Fortune and so on, which are still widely used in Western astrology.

From the Renaissance to the Tea Room

Western astrology had a third (and even smaller) renaissance, this time in Europe, which peaked around the turn of the seventeenth century, when scholars like William Lilly brought it to another peak of erudition. With the rise of enlightenment science, and the science of astronomy particularly, Western astrology has slowly but surely been drifting into the realm of chicanery and entertainment. Even a cursory glance at the techniques employed by a late Western astrologer like Lilly four hundred years ago, shows that Western astrologers today have lost regular use of perhaps 80% of their techniques of prediction and analysis. There is today a strong emphasis on sign-oriented psychological typing – a fuzzy and imprecise art of wishful thinking, with a definite lack of predictive power. Part of this drift into disrepair can be blamed on the continued widespread and ignorant use of the tropical zodiac, which with every passing year becomes progressively more inaccurate, rendering most predictive techniques (except those based on non-zodiacal elements, such as the angles) impotent.

The Contributions of Western Astrology

Still, Western astrology has continued to contribute some important things to astrology as a science. First and foremost has been the acceptance and interpretation of the three transsaturnian planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (as well as, perhaps, some of the modern work with the asteroids). Beyond this, Western astrology has developed some very advanced and very powerful techniques such as the use of secondary and tertiary progressions, and very recently the science of astrocartography, that produce highly useful and desirable predictive results. Furthermore, in the mid-twentieth century, a group of Western astrologers resorted back to the sidereal zodiac – a movement set to return astrology back to its very roots in the best sense. Beyond this, Western astrologers pioneered the use of computers in astrology; a movement which has only been in existence since 1978 or so, and which still has much further to go. These two new developments, if widely accepted, will give Western astrologers the best of both worlds: powerful new techniques, the use of the outer planets, the use of the computer to generate a whole new science based on statistically-proven systems, and the use of the sidereal zodiac. With this combination, Western astrology could make a fourth, and perhaps even its greatest, renaissance.

In Part Two: Vedic Astrology