Before the split: reading medieval astrological astronomy in translation

[over_thinking_7683]

Found this project recently — some small team translating medieval Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts into English for the first time. Mostly 12th-13th century stuff. I've been skimming through their drafts and something keeps hitting me.

These texts don't separate astronomy from astrology. Like, at all. The same guy calculating planetary positions is also interpreting what those positions mean for human affairs. There's no cognitive dissonance there. It's just... one discipline.

I think we have a bias toward assuming historical people were basically like us but with worse technology. But that's probably wrong. The conceptual framework was fundamentally different. Jung talked about this — he called it "participation mystique," the idea that pre-modern consciousness didn't draw a hard line between observer and observed. The stars weren't "out there" separate from you. The macrocosm-microcosm thing wasn't a metaphor. It was just how reality worked.

Reading these texts, I keep thinking about The Star card in tarot. Most people read it as hope, inspiration, whatever. But in the older traditions it's tied to the idea of celestial influence actually pouring down. The naked figure isn't just contemplating the sky — she's receiving something. The divide between "astronomical fact" and "spiritual meaning" literally didn't exist for the people who shaped these symbols.

Honestly, as someone who tends to overthink everything, there's something almost relaxing about that worldview. My engineering brain wants to categorize: this is science, this is superstition, this is psychology disguised as mysticism. But these medieval writers wouldn't have understood those categories.

I'm not saying I suddenly believe in planetary elections or medical astrology. I probably don't. But I think the split itself — the way we decided "real" knowledge and "spiritual" knowledge are completely separate things — might have cost us something. Maybe a way of seeing that doesn't require everything to be either objectively provable or meaningless.

Not sure what I'm trying to say exactly. Just been sitting with this.

[boring_sunday_283]

I think we have a bias toward assuming historical people were basically like us but with worse technology. But that's probably wrong.

I'd push back on this, actually. Not because I think medieval thinkers were secretly modern materialists, but because I think you might be romanticizing the consistency of their worldview. The same texts you're reading — do they show zero internal tension? No one ever complaining that the calculations don't match the observed event? No scribe ever scratching out a passage because two authorities contradicted each other?

I ask because I spent years in engineering before I picked up astrology, and one thing I've learned from calculating charts the hard way — by hand, the tedious way — is that precision has a way of exposing cracks. These weren't naive people. They were rigorous. Ptolemy himself in the Tetrabiblos spends significant energy arguing about what's knowable vs. what's speculative. That doesn't sound like someone operating in a seamless unity of astronomy and astrology. That sounds like someone wrestling with the boundaries.

My experience with chart calculation has actually made me more skeptical of the "they didn't separate these categories" narrative. When you're sitting there with an ephemeris and your trig tables trying to get a primary direction exactly right, you're doing math. Hard math. The interpretive layer comes after, and it feels different — not worse or better, but different in kind. I suspect medieval astronomers knew that feeling too, even if they didn't have our vocabulary for articulating it.

The split might have been less a modern invention and more something that was always latent, just waiting for better tools to make it obvious.

[Harmonia]

This resonates deeply with what I encounter in my own practice. When I study Hellenistic source texts — Valens, Ptolemy, Dorotheus — the absence of any astronomy/astrology divide is striking. These writers moved fluidly between calculating a planetary latitude and interpreting its meaning for a client's health. The conceptual wall we erected in the 17th century simply did not exist for them.

Jung's participation mystique is the right diagnostic, though I would add something from the history of science itself. The split was not a discovery — it was a political act. The Royal Society deliberately separated natural philosophy from what it called superstitious practice to gain institutional legitimacy. We did not find two separate domains. We created them.

Your engineering instinct to categorize is exactly the habit these texts challenge. In Hellenistic astrology, a planetary position was simultaneously a mathematical fact, a physical influence, a symbolic omen, and a medical indicator. These were not competing interpretations. They were different aspects of a single reality.

The Star card reading is particularly relevant. In the older traditions, the figure is not passively contemplating — she is actively receiving. The two urns represent the downward flow of celestial influence, a concept that only becomes superstitious if you have already decided that influence is impossible. These medieval writers had not decided that yet, and reading them reminds you that the decision was not inevitable.