Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions

Nicholas Campion

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780814717141
• eBook ISBN: 9780814708422
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When you think of astrology, you may think of the horoscope section in your local paper, or of Nancy Reagan's consultations with an astrologer in the White House in the 1980s. Yet almost every religion uses some form of astrology: some way of thinking about the sun, moon, stars, and planets and how they hold significance for human lives on earth.









Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions offers an accessible overview of the astrologies of the world's religions, placing them into context within theories of how the wider universe came into being and operates. Campion traces beliefs about the heavens among peoples ranging from ancient Egypt and China, to Australia and Polynesia, and India and the Islamic world.
Addressing each religion in a separate chapter, Campion outlines how, by observing the celestial bodies, people have engaged with the divine, managed the future, and attempted to understand events here on earth. This fascinating text offers a unique way to delve into comparative religions and will also appeal to those intrigued by New Age topics.

1 Cosmology and Religion

Measurement and Meaning

It has long been known that the first systems of representation that man made of the world and of himself were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not both a cosmology and a speculation about the divine.¹

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are creatures of the cosmos and always hunger to know our origins, to understand our connection with the universe.²

There is no human society that does not somehow, in some way, relate its fears, concerns, hopes, and wishes to the sky, and to the organizing principle behind it, the cosmos. Neither is there any society that does not express at least some fascination with the sky and its mysteries. This is as true of modern culture as of ancient culture—witness the media attention given to recent revelations, via the Hubble and Herschel telescopes, of strange and wonderful visions of far-distant parts of the universe, millions of light-years from our own planet. It is still the case that “Like every earlier culture, we need to know our place in the universe. Where we are in time, space, and size is part of situating ourselves in the epic of cosmic evolution.”³ And note the rise, in tandem with 20th-century cosmology, of beliefs in alien visitation and abduction, and of contact with spiritually superior beings from other worlds. For many modern cosmologists, cosmology itself remains a human study, we ourselves lying at the heart of it.

This book considers cosmology as a meaning-system, examining its relationship with religion. It focuses on astrology, which is the practical implementation of cosmological ideas in order to understand the past, manage the present, and forecast the future, in a range of cultures, past and present. It deals with mythic narratives, ways of seeing the sky, and the manner in which human beings locate themselves in space and time. It looks at magic, ritual, and the actions that people take to negotiate destiny and find meaning in the stars. Among the themes covered are the use of celestial myth and story to provide insight and meaning, the role of sky and stellar deities as organizing principles in both social and political organization, as well as in sacred texts and calendars, and the understanding of stars as offering a path to salvation.

This book opens new territory that will be of use for the study of comparative religion, especially addressing such issues as origin myths, sacred calendars, and time and destiny, as well as the question of astrology as an application of, and aid to, religious behavior. It will also be of great interest to astronomers, who are concerned with the history of their subject, its wider relevance, and such areas as “ethnoastronomy” and “cultural astronomy.”

Astronomical theory fed through into the political and religious thought of the ancient world, when the sun, the king of heaven, was the celestial counterpart of the emperor on earth.⁴ The connection of the stars to politics is no less insistent in the modern world. Notions of the celestial emperor were challenged in the 18th century when radicals seized on Isaac Newton’s demonstration that the entire universe was governed by one natural law, gravity, in order to argue the consequence—that all human society, being an integral part of the cosmos, must also be governed by one law, kings included. By the end of the century Newtonians, flushed by the discovery that planetary orbits could be explained by mathematics alone, with no need for divine intervention, began to promote scientific arguments for atheism. And so, the notions of the rule of law, taken for granted in Western-style democracy, and of a world without a supernatural creator, can be seen, in part, as functions of astronomical-political theory. More recently, Einsteinian relativity—from which it can be argued that there is no fixed center to the universe, only an infinite series of observers trapped forever in their own reference points—has encouraged the onward march of cultural relativity, the ultra-liberal belief that, as no one culture is “central,” all cultural perspectives and practices must be respected on their own terms. All such views are versions of what I term the Cosmic State, the application of cosmological theory to political ideology and the management of society.

We might call such political opinions cosmic, or cosmological, a description endowing them with a power which that other classical word, “universe,” completely lacks; if we describe something as universal we know it is everywhere, but if we describe it as cosmological it has depth. Universus is the primary Latin word that replaced the Greek Kosmos for Latin writers. Unus verto means literally “changing into one” and is closer in meaning to the Greek panta—everything—than to “cosmos.” Given Latin’s legalistic nature (it was the language of law and civic matters) as opposed to Greek’s continued use as the language of philosophy, universus represents the Roman view of the world—as a unified collection of people subject to Roman law. Universe, we might say, is a matter of quantity, but cosmos is concerned with quality.

The questions this text poses of cosmology are, first, How does it tell stories? Second, How does it assign meaning? And third, How is such meaning manifested in the detailed activities that are its primary functions, such as managing time, understanding the self, pursuing salvation, or predicting the future, all of which can be gathered together under the heading of astrology? Each chapter covers a different region and religious worldview and has a different emphasis. Some, particularly those that concern the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their intellectual descendants, contain obvious overlaps. Some have more of a historical emphasis, some modern, and, in others, the distinction is irrelevant. All, though, offer common ways of seeing the cosmos as an integrated, interdependent whole in which the sky and the earth are reflections of each other and the movements of the heavenly bodies function simultaneously as a demonstration of universal order and constant variety, indicating a dialectical and symbiotic relationship between repetitive constancy and endless change, and revealing messages and meaning to those who care to look and listen. Order and permanence, variety and change are, as Seneca wrote, at odds. His view, common among many cultures that value social order, was that change undermines order: “Deviation by nature from her established order in the world,” he argued, “suffices for the destruction of the race.”⁵

Most cultures share the notion of the sky as a theatrical device, a stage on which celestial dramas are played out. In China, “the sky was like the setting of a stage on which all kinds of events were happening.”⁶ For the Maya, meanwhile, “The sky is a great pageant that replays creation in the pattern of its yearly movements.”⁷ Many cultures also assume the relativity of time and space. For the Aztecs, it has been said, “time and space were naturally juxtaposed.”⁸ They moved in step with each other and were inseparable—one could not be understood or perceived without the other.

But what, exactly, is cosmology? This book is concerned with cultures from around the world, but the discussion of what cosmology is happens to be mainly a concern of Western scholars. In one sense, cosmology is “the science, theory or study of the universe as an orderly system, and of the laws that govern it; in particular, a branch of astronomy that deals with the structure and evolution of the universe.”⁹ This, of course, is a modern view, emphasizing the logos of cosmology as a study, as the detached, scientific investigation of the cosmos. In a different context the logos might be the word, which is how it is translated in the famous opening passage of John’s Gospel, suggesting that the cosmos is an entity which speaks to us. This is the standard pre-modern perspective, in which the study of the cosmos aids understanding of the nature of existence. In Islam, cosmos can therefore be understood as the vehicle by which one obtains knowledge of the external world (al-‘alam al-khaariji), as opposed to the inner world within each person (al-‘alam al-daakhili). In this sense, the cosmos, by which we mean everything other than God, is therefore a means for God to speak to humanity.

“Cosmos” is a word of Greek origin that translates roughly as “beautiful order,” a meaning probably used first by one of the 5th- and 6th-century BCE philosophers Parmenides or Pythagoras. In the Greek conception, as expressed through such influential schools of thought as the Platonic and Stoic, the cosmos is, simply, beautiful. It may be an “order,” but is also an “adornment.” The Romans converted “cosmos” into their word Mundus, which for us means mundane, or worldly. As Pliny (23/4–79 CE) wrote:

The Greeks have designated the world by a word that means “ornament,” and we have given it the name of mundus, because of its perfect finish and grace. For what could be more beautiful than the heavens which contain all beautiful things? Their very names make this clear: Caelum (heavens) by naming that which is beautifully carved; and Mundus (world), purity and elegance.¹⁰

Hans Jonas summed up one version of the classical approach in his study of the Gnostics, whose cosmology he described as follows:

By a long tradition this term [“cosmos”] had to the Greek mind become invested with the highest religious dignity. The very word by its literal meaning expresses a positive evaluation of the object—any object—to which it is accorded as a descriptive term. For cosmos means “order” in general, whether of the world or a household, of a commonwealth, of a life: it is a term of praise and even admiration.¹¹

In some religions, such as classical Gnosticism, the cosmos itself can become an object of veneration. One might even identify in some forms of religious cosmology a species of what Festugière called cosmic piety, a reverence for cosmic order almost as divine in itself.¹² And, against the pietists and cosmophiles, who believe that the cosmos is essentially good, we might pose the cosmophobes, for whom it is essentially threatening and something to be escaped (as in the case of the most pessimistic Gnostics) or dominated (as by those well-funded modern scientists who depend on research grants to avert the threat of future collision with rogue asteroids or comets). The cosmophobes, meanwhile, are represented by Blaise Pascal’s often-quoted infinite dread of the endless, silent eternity of the universe.

Some classicists actually use “world” as a translation for Greek kosmos.¹³ The leap from “heavens” into “world” is a useful one, challenging the general modern distinction between what is down here and what is up there. Cosmology is therefore a matter not just of exploring the far reaches of the universe but of recognizing that we are an integral part of it and that our environments, our houses, feelings, families, communities, towns, and cities are part of the cosmos as much as are the sky and stars. This is why, in pre-modern cultures, kinship structures could have correlates with the heavens:

It has been proposed that kinship itself constructs social systems according to cultural rules. Different Kinship systems may transform notions of personhood, gender, the transmission of ancestral substance to offspring, metaphysics and cosmology.¹⁴

Great cities, such as Baghdad, might have been founded when the planets were in an auspicious alignment and designed in accordance with the principles that, it was thought, underlay the cosmic order, but nothing in traditional cosmology is ever permanent. Among the North American Lakota people, “Far from being a static entity, cosmology is dynamic, changing and moving through time as ritual moves through space.”¹⁵ The most immediate exemplars of cosmic power are heat from the sun and light from both the sun and moon, but also wind, rain, and the change of weather through the day and the seasons. In pre-modern cultures we may even use “nature” as a convenient synonym for “cosmos.”¹⁶

A cosmology is also a conception of the cosmos, a thought that takes us back to the notion of cosmos not of something that encompasses us but as an idea that we create. We can identify different cosmologies, many of which may have common features but that are all the products of their own cultures. The ecologist Freya Mathews’s words are appropriate here. She considered that

Cosmologies … are conditioned by many and various historical, environmental, technological, psychological and social factors. A flourishing community is likely to evolve a bright, self-affirming cosmology, and a languishing community is likely to see the world in darker shades…. A good cosmology … is good for its adherents.¹⁷

She added that, having been constructed, a cosmology achieves a life of its own, like any other ideology, becoming an active force. As an example, we might point to millenarian beliefs that the cosmos is heading toward cataclysmic destruction—and perhaps rebirth; such beliefs have long been a force in revolutionary politics, as well as an inspiration in more harmless activities such as radical art movements.¹⁸

If we adopt a broad understanding of cosmology, the difference between traditional and modern cosmologies disappears. The historian Steve McCluskey is persuasive on the matter. Writing of Native American cosmologies, he argued that they

display those general characteristics of “traditional” understandings of nature: conservatism, resistance to change and a close interconnectness with society, myth, and ritual. This should not be taken as a defining characteristic, however[,] for in this regard they differ only in degree from modern scientific cosmologies. Like modern cosmologies they are tied to empirical observations of celestial phenomena, to theoretical models that render those observations intelligible, and to general explanatory themata that guide a whole range of a culture’s intellectual, political, and artistic endeavors, including those theoretical models themselves.¹⁹

For pre-modern cultures, the cosmos was interior as much as exterior; it was inside us as much as outside us. The implications of such a view are considerable for what it is to be human and take us toward those cosmogonies (theories about the origin of the universe) in which the gods and goddesses—or God—made people in their own image; humanity is then reflective of the creative force from which the cosmos is engendered. The individual, both in mind and body, becomes a replica of the cosmos, expressing hopes, fears, desires, and expectations that follow an order evident in the motion of the celestial bodies. In China, “state and the body were so interdependent that they are best considered a single complex.”²⁰ In this sense the body itself becomes an expression of cosmology, or even, as in traditional African philosophy, a cosmology in itself.²¹ Cosmogonies themselves may be classed either as chaotic on the one hand, emanating in unplanned steps from an original formless state that is simultaneously something and nothing or, on the other hand, as cosmic, created as a deliberate act by a creator God.²² Such schemes may pose emanation of the cosmos out of matter (as in Babylon, where it emerged out of water), or consciousness (as in classical Platonic thought). We find chaotic cosmogonies in China, Polynesia, and ancient Egypt, while Judaism, Christianity, and Islam include the most important examples of cosmic cosmogonies.

One of the great issues in comparative cosmology is universalism, which is now out of fashion but pervades the literature of the 1960s and earlier and argues that people in geographically diverse cultures share certain fundamental, universally valid conceptions of the cosmos. One who followed this line was the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He viewed calendar rituals and star stories as containing encoded information about such matters as fertility, both of the land and of people, and sexual relationships, both...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Cosmology and Religion: Measurement and Meaning
• 2. Astrology: The Celestial Mirror
• 3. Australia: The Dreaming
• 4. Oceania: Navigating the Sky
• 5. North America: The Great Spirit
• 6. South and Central America: Salvation and Sacrifice
• 7. Sub-Saharan Africa: Heaven on Earth
• 8. Egypt: The Solar Society
• 9. China: The Celestial Offices
• 10. India: Ancient Traditions and Modern Practice
• 11. Babylon: Signs in the Sky
• 12. Judaism: Myth, Magic, and Transcendence
• 13. Classical Greece: Ascent to the Stars
• 14. Christianity: Influence and Transcendence
• 15. Islam: Faith and Reason
• 16. Theosophical, New Age, and Pagan Cosmologies: Nature and Transformation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index