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How Europe Received the Technique

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How Europe Received the Technique

Europe's larger place in this material is as the last stop on a long transmission, and as the place where the house catalogue took the form most modern readers meet.

Greek astrology was practised across the Roman world and then largely lost to Latin Europe, surviving in Byzantium and, decisively, in the Islamic world, where it was translated, systematised and extended from the eighth century onward. It returned to Latin Europe from the twelfth century through translations made in Spain, Sicily and elsewhere, arriving as Arabic and Persian astrology with its Greek inheritance carried inside.

What Europe then did with it was consolidate. The medieval and Renaissance texts organise the material into the compact house catalogue this atlas records under so many entries: twelve houses, each with a list of subjects, each with a lord and a general significator. Bonatti in the thirteenth century and Lilly in the seventeenth are the two landmarks of that consolidation among this atlas's sources, and Lilly's Christian Astrology of 1647 is its fullest English statement.

Astrology's institutional standing in Europe then collapsed over the following two centuries, and the nineteenth and twentieth century revival that followed rebuilt the practice on very different assumptions, psychological rather than predictive. The traditional revival of the 1990s went back to the Hellenistic and medieval texts and put their methods into working use again, which is why a reader today meets several incompatible versions of one technique in print at once.

Sources A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion with Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly, Liber AstronomiaeGuido Bonatti

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