On Astrology


Astrology is the science and art of describing persons and events of the past, present, and future by correctly interpreting maps of the sky drawn up for the appropriate moments and places.

~ Rupert Gleadow



The heavens don’t affect our will…but they do affect our bodies.

~ Marsilio Ficino, the founder of the Platonic Academy in 15th-century Florence



…the foolish daughter of the respectable mother of astronomy.

~ The pre-eminent 16th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, who cast horoscopes as part of his jobs and made many confusing pronouncements on the subject.



Astrology is essentially conservative (in the strict sense of the word), sedative, private, unsocial.

~ Tom Harrison, founder of Mass Observation (a British sociological research organization) who wrote an article called “Mass Astrology” in the British weekly paper New Statesman in 1941.



I am convinced that the problem of the inequalities of the human race can only be successfully solved by a knowledge of astrology.

~ Alan Leo



Astrology is an art mathematical…

~ John Dee, 16th-century astrologer to Queen Elizabeth



As for Astrology, it is so full of superstition, that scarce anything sound can be discovered in it. Yet I would rather have it purified that altogether rejected.

~ Sir Francis Bacon



Unlike religion, astrology is based not on faith but on facts. The religious man believes; the astrologer knows. Experiment and observation are his guides.

~ American astrologer “Gabriel”, The Gospel of the Stars 1899



I believe every human being belongs to a Father Star in Heaven or Star Angel…”

~ Alan Leo



The comparison of horoscopes is the only way certain of making marriage not a lottery but a partnership.

~ Rupert Gleadow



[I find] disturbing accuracies in everything that concerns astrology.

~ American writer Henry Miller, born 1890



Astrology is the algebra of life.

~ Dane Rudhyar



At length I learned that wholly and altogether it was based upon no other foundation but upon mere trifles, and feignings of imaginations.

~ Henry Cornelius Agrippa, 16th-century France



If we listen within ourselves for a moment, then we hear the breathing of planetary forms.

~ Louis de Wohl, whom, according to himself, conducted a one-man astrological war with the Nazis. The following three quotes are also by him.



A man who plunges blindfold through the London streets is distinctly safer than a man without a horoscope.



Let us get this straight from the start: it is not prophecy. It is dealing not with certainties, but with tendencies. It has a fairly wide margin for error – but it works.



It was clear to me, as to every student of astrology who knew Hitler’s horoscope, that he would launch his great attack against the West when Jupiter was in conjunction with his Sun, in May 1940.



Saturn is by universal experience acknowledged to be the most powerful, evil, and malignant of all the planets.

~ R.C. Smith, a.k.a. Raphael, early 19th-century astrologer; before the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.



…the simple and easy but beautiful theory, which presumes that the same sympathetic power which causes iron and magnet to attract each other…the same occult influence which drives the frantic herd about the pastures; which provokes the gadfly to vex the steed;…which seizes with fits of temporary madness the owl and raven; which affects the brains of the maniac or which circulates through all living nature, pervading all disquieting all; …this universal sympathy or instinct (for all instinct is sympathy) is neither more nor less than the secret but powerful influences of the heavenly bodies.

~ Raphael



There is some physical sympathy that makes all earthly things depend upon celestial.

~ The Jewish philospher Philo, who lived in Alexandria in the time of Christ and made allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament



…cette chimére d’ Astrologie.

~ Voltaire, 18th-century France



There’s not even a blade of grass, however infinitesimal, that is not ruled by some star.

~ One Rabbi Eleazar, quoted in the 13th-century Zohar a mystical work compiled by Spanish Jews.



I believe God rules all by his divine providence and that the stars by his permission are instruments.

~ William Lilly, noted astrologer in 17th-century England



Astrology stands first among those superstitions of which she is both mother and foster-child.

~ Pico della Mirandola, late 15th-century Italian humanist



From the scientific viewpoint, there is little hope of proving that astrological correspondence is something that conforms to law.

~ Carl G. Jung



Some astrologers say or write things after the event and pretend they had predicted them beforehand.

~ The 14th-century French mathematician and ecclesiastic Nicole Oresme



If astrology is true, why bother with anything else?

~ An ancient Roman, about whom little is known, named Arellius Fuscus



No sign nor planet serves itself alone,
Each blends the other’s virtues with its own
, Mixing their force, and interchanged they reign,
Signs planets abound, and planets signs again.

~ Manilius, 1st-century Roman poet


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