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Product Description
This first volume comprehensively charts Western astrology from 30,000 BCE to the 17th century, with particular focus on its magical, political and apocalyptic movements and use in everyday life throughout history.This is the first in a two-volume history of Western astrology, a survey which stretches from Paleolithic lunar counters 30,000 BCE, to popular astrology in the 21st century. Most general histories of astrology have focused on the period between classical Greece and the seventeenth century, excluding both preceding cultures and modern developments. By contrast this book includes Neolithic culture, Mesopotamian astral divination and Egyptian stellar religion from the early period, and the development of popular astrology and New Age cosmology from the eighteenth century to the present. While there is some reference to astrology's technical history the emphasis is cultural, religious and philosophical.The book's original argument focuses on the interplay of three explanatory models of astrology which originated in Mesopotamia and Greece; the stars are seen either as signs, measures of time, or influences.Other themes include astrology's shift from an elite, authoritarian practice to a popular democratic one as it moved from Mesopotamia to the classical world, and the arguments about the relationship between the spirit and the stars which coloured Gnostic and Christian attitudes to astrology. Astrology is considered in relation to magic, politics and apocalyptic movements and, throughout, the theory of astrology is related to examples of its use at all levels of society.Astrology is the practice of relating events on earth to patterns in the sky. Most histories of the subject follow a conventional scheme in which astrology begins in the 3rd-1st centuries BCE but here this narrow definition is challenged. It concludes that European astrology emerged as a combination of the technical structure developed in Babylon together with Egyptian theories about the relationship between the soul and the stars.
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