the-astrology-book

History of Western Astrology
(1810–1875), the modern magician, who synthesized ancient esotericism and developed
a new form of magic. A relevant work on astrology was written in 1915 by Aleister
Crowley (1875–1947), a famous English occultist. He was a member of the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical society founded by S. L. MacGregor
Mathers, who was learned in kabbala and magic. Crowley wrote Astrology in 1915, in
which he taught a scientific astrology that reinterpreted the science of the stars in
light of the discovery of the last two planets, Neptune (1846) and Uranus (1781).
A revival of astrology also took place within the Theosophical movement,
started by Madame Helena Blavatsky in 1875 in the United States. Astrology became
the focus of the Astrological Lodge of the Theosophical Society (which publishes
Astrology Quarterly), founded in 1915 by Alan Leo (1860–1917), an important author
in the British revival of astrology. Leo was initiated into theosophy by his friend W.
Gorn Old (1864–1929), whose pen name was Sepharial, a man learned in astrology
and kabbala. From the theosophical movement and the Astrological Lodge—where
another famous astrologer, Charles Carter, was trained in astrology—the Faculty of
Astrology and the Astrological Association were founded in England a few decades
later. Leo’s work also influenced the German Uranian system (Hamburg Astrology
School, founded by Alfred Witte and Friedrich Sieggrün in the 1930s), cosmobiology
(a scientific school of astrology founded by Reinhold Ebertin in the 1930s that averred
the existence of a physical connection between the movements of the stars and
human behavior), and the Dutch Ram School. Within the theosophical milieu, Alice
Bailey (1880–1949), founder of the Arcane School, devoted the third volume of the
trilogy A Treatise on the Seven Rays to astrology. According to D. K., the Tibetan master
channeled by Alice Bailey, astrology was the most occult science. Bailey’s work
contributed to the revival of astrology in the twentieth century.
Astrology also developed in France through the symbolist school. It drew upon
the depth psychology of famous psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961),
who explained astrology via his notion of synchronicity. For Jung, astrology embodied
some of the archetypes that play an important role in the development of the human
mind. The French symbolist school, in the same way, aimed at freeing astrology from
its rigid mechanistic structure to enable a more descriptive approach to personality
through the understanding of astrological symbols.
Under Jung’s influence, astrology was also revived for application to psychology
in humanistic astrology as the North American counterpart of the French symbolist
school. As such, astrology’s focus is not centered on events but on the person.
Humanistic astrology was initially formulated by Dane Rudhyar, whose benchmark
work in the field was The Astrology of Personality: A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts
and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy (1936). Rudhyar
was particularly influenced by the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow.
An effort to use a scientific approach, based on the application of statistical
methodology, to astrology was carried out in the early twentieth century by Paul
Choisnard and Karl Krafft. Their studies convinced them that “astrology exists.” In
1950, Michel and Françoise Gauquelin again applied statistics to the study of astrology,
testing a large number of individuals (approximately 25,000) according to profes-
[320] THE ASTROLOGY BOOK