Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon

The central argument of Astrology, Science and Culture is that astrology is best understood as a divinatory technique, a dialogue with the divine. As a scientist and professional astrologer of almost 25 years experience this was not a viewpoint I cared to embrace. However, I found myself – grudgingly at first - won over on many of the skilfully elaborated points and paradigm-challenging insights. The collaboration between Willis, a professor of anthropology, and Curry, an astrologer and academic with a background in psychology and both the philosophy and history of science is a particularly happy one. Willis provides the cultural-historical-mythological context in which to set the scene while Curry traces the development, standing and practice of astrology to the present day. Two of the book's main themes are to explore and answer the questions 'What is astrology?' and 'Why does it attract so much hostility?' According to the church, science and academia, its three main opponents, astrology is respectively 'a pagan religious practise, therefore illicit, an unscientific kind of knowledge (therefore delusory) and a vulgar belief system (therefore ignorant)'. Astrologers (and I was among them) have countered by insisting that astrology is conformable with Christian tenets, or is susceptible to scientific 'proof' or is a kind of exalted universal truth, thus conceding the grounds of the argument to their opponents. Looking at the supposition that if it isn't a religion, science or even 'true' what is it? Curry agrees with Ann Geneva that 'In the final analysis it is only itself; a unique divinatory and prognostic art embodying centuries of accreted methodology and tradition.' The 'blatant fact that the great majority of the scientific and scholarly establishments in the western world regards astrology with a contemptuous hostility which at times borders on the pathological, if not the psychotic.' can be explained by the fact that astrology by its very nature challenges the monist worldviews of scientism, capitalism and religious fundamentalism which cannot, and will not, tolerate paradigms other than their own. And through insisting on the supremacy of objectivity and commodification, at the expense of subjectivity and meaning, the world has become dis-enchanted.

Popular astrology today (newspaper columns first appeared in 1930), crude though it is, arose chiefly in response to a widespread public desire for re-enchantment of the world where mystery has a place, where fate or destiny is a reality, where there are subtle connections between the highest and the lowest, a world, in short, which is still alive. At a profounder level, an astrological consultation is a participatory experience, with metaphor and myth as the irreducible language of psychic reality. The paradigmatic divinatory question is not the predetermined 'What will happen? but the moral-responsible 'What should I do?' The very act of cognising and recognising one's fate changes it. Thus every interpretation is necessarily also an intervention and destiny becomes negotiable. The personal and professional marginalisation that astrologers face has resulted in an intellectual impoverishment of the subject. The significance of Astrology, Science and Culture provides a welcome reversal of this trend and goes far beyond astrology to challenge entrenched and often unchallenged paradigmatic assumptions in science and western culture. This courageous refusal by Willis and Curry to bow down to intellectual intimidation will hopefully lead to many more productive debates on the subject.