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Astrology - lrresistible Magic
 Astrology persisted as the most successful intellectual movement of all epochs. it infected every culture, no matter what the prevailing religion; it infiltrated all levels of education. It penetrated into dying Egyptian civilization and into the vital, mature life of the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Chinese, into the flowering Arabic culture and the budding culture of the Occident during the Middle Ages. Believers in Christ and Mohammed, in the Platonic Eros and the wisdom of Confucius, paid tribute to it. It affected equally those whose goal was Buddhistic contemplation and Roman organization. It captured the minds of superstitious fellahin and sophisticated mandarins, mystics in monks' cowls and Stoics in togas, Caesars of the second century and popes of the sixteenth, the visionary who wrote the Apocalypse and the mathematical genius Ptolemy.lts conquest of the Greeks was swiftest and most complete of all. That this should have been so runs exactly contrary to one's notions.· The Greeks of all people would seem to have been immune to such beliefs. They were a daylight people who saw all things concretely, who cast abstract ideas into tangible form. So humanized were their gods that a savage fetish would arouse mystical ideas more easily than such gods. Their cult of heroes erased the boundaries between god and man, and ended by building temples for the living. Nothing could have been further from the minds of the Greeks, it would seem, than viewing the night sky as ruler of man's soul and destiny.
Of course, the Greeks shared the universal human dread of the wrath of Heaven, which comets and eclipses patently proclaimed. But Pericles showed his soldiers that they had nothing to fear from an eclipse by giving them a scientific explanation; he held a cloak in front of a lamp to demonstrate what happened during an eclipse. General Nieias was despised by the public for abandoning a siege because of an ill omen. Aristophanes called the Moon and Sun "gods of the barbarians." And yet these very same Greeks developed astrology into a rigid system of dogma. The stages by which this earthiest of cultures paradoxically arrived at a form of celestial mysticism can be traced step by step. It began with Plato.
His universal spirit was open to all suggestions from other realms of the mind. Plato had one Chaldean as a friend, and one as a disciple. Perhaps influenced by them, he took up the idea that hitherto had only been hinted at in the Orphic mysteries: that the stars possessed a divine nature. The stars, Plato went on to teach, consisted of the four elements plus a soul. This wholly un-Greek conception opened wide the gates to Babylonian astrology. Aristotle, ordinarily so critical, spoke with enthusiasm about the stars as animate beings. The Stoic philosophers, in their turn, attributed to them emotion, understanding, and will.
When horoscopes first appeared, the realistic minds of the Greeks objected vigorously. Even the Stoics protested: if man's fate were predestined to the last detail, men would be nothing but slaves of the stars-machines, in fact. Moreover, twins and other persons with exactly the same horoscopes ought to have precisely the same sort of lives. But in spite of these sensible objections, astrology soon became a great fad.
From the third to the second century B;C., Greek culture underwent a transformation. All the Mediterranean lands had been Hellenized; now they won their independence. The distinction between Hellenes and barbarians disappeared; in art and science Syrians and Egyptians had an equal voice with Greeks. The intellectual center of the Greek world shifted from Athens and Pergamum to Alexandria. Economics and technology became more important than literature and philosophy. Greece herself, with her tiny city-states insisting with vain arrogance upon their individuality, ceased to have any political importance. The despised Romans from the West wiped them off the map more easily than they had Carthage or Egypt, carried off the treasures of wrecked Corinth, and made themselves at home amid the charms of Athens.
The feebleness of the Greeks sprang from an inward change. Their faith in the Olympic gods had long since vanished; their mythology had become an object of mockery. In the third century only the goddess Tyche, Chance, was really worshipped. In the second century she yielded her place to Ananke, Necessity or the coercion of circumstances.
Widespread skepticism paralyzed the energy of the Greeks; they wanted only to know the future, not shape it. Criticism, not creation, was the principal passion of the intellectuals.
The Greek people longed to return to religion. All their old gods came to life once more-as stars. The planet Venus now was seen as Venus herself; the Father of the Gods, Jupiter, stood plainly visible in the sky. He no longer revealed himself in thunder and lightning, as in days of yore, but by direct radiation. He might no longer associate personally with a few chosen mortals, but he wielded direct, magical influence upon every living soul. Astrology afforded a living relationship with the gods, which had formerly been reserved to the mystery cults.
This form of astrology meant infinitely more than mere fortunetelling. It confirmed the supremacy of Ananke above Tyche by providing calculable laws of destiny. Liberated from Chance, life once more acquired a deeper meaning. From the depths of the night sky sounded divine voices; a web of causes and effects linked man to the universe. Man's soul depended on the planets and the signs of the zodiac; the human microcosm represented the image of the animate macrocosm. Man's horror of his solitude in the universe was placated; blind Moira no longer reigned; in faith in the stars, in the demonstrated connection between past and future, men could find inner peace.
That faith overwhelmed the Greeks at the time their own cultural forces were running dry. Once they had restrained their Dionysiac impulses, giving vent to them only in brief, occasional orgies. Now they regarded such impulses as the brief lure of life; they abandoned themselves to the dark powers. It was a tremendous experience for them to feel themselves trembling in contact with other worlds, as though invisible threads from these came together within their souls.
Precisely because the spirit of mysticism was so alien to their culture, it took hold of them with enormous power as soon as they lost their souls intellectually and politically.
The Romans casually absorbed astrology as they did all other beliefs that came their way. In their Pantheon all the fashionable gods were successively equated with the Sun.
They had only a practical interest in astrology, and used it for the crudest sort of fortunetelling. The Emperor Tiberius himself practiced it. Hadrian annually drew up a professional prediction for himself. In Rome astrology became a business.
Innumerable "Chaldeans" practiced every variety of it, from the primitive disc of destiny to the weekly horoscope. Iuvenal's satirical remarks sound quite modern: "Your dear wife asks the astrologer why her bilious mother-in-law is so slow about dying. She does not follow you to the provinces because Trasyllus' fortune-book advises against it. When her eye twitches, she finds the right medicine in her horoscope, and Petosiris tells her when she must take it. For a trip as far as the next milestone she has some woman friend choose the proper hour from her much-fingered yearbook." It was not Christianity that spelled the end of Greco-Roman culture; it had been undermined far earlier by Chaldean magic.
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