Abu Ma'shar, Al-Kindi, a Grande Conjunção e o Conhecimento por Revelação: Exemplo Textual

 

North, J. D., 1989, Stars, Minds and Fate: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Cosmology, 63-4.

  Abu Ma'shar's work on conjunctions seems to have been much influenced by his teacher al-Kindi, the first great philosopher to have written in the Greek tradition in Arabic. Al-Kindi firmly believed that knowledge through revelation and prophecy is superior to the truths of unaided reason. He wrote on astrology, and, in a letter which is still extant, attempted to predict the duration of the empire of the Arabs on the basis of planetary conjunctions. Broadly speaking, the rarer the conjunction affecting political and religious events, the more potent its force. This is the doctrine central to my survey, and al-Kindi's editor, O. Loth, thought it began with him.

   In order of the slowness with which they traverse the zodiac, Saturn comes first (29.5 years), followed by Jupiter (11.9 years) and then Mars (1.88 years). Roughly speaking, Saturn and Jupiter meet every twenty years, while Mars meets with Jupiter about every two years and with Saturn marginally more often. Although it is impossible to be very precise without being inordinately tedious, we can say that the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter which are separated by a triple period, that is, about sixty years, will occur rather less than ten degrees apart. They can therefore occur within a single sign (30°) of the zodiac, if the first of the trio is close enough to the beginning of the sign. The character of the sign in which the conjunction occurred was thought to be important, but for the moment we need not go into details. Since the three signs in which successive conjunctions occur are likely to be equally spaced, comprising what is called a triplicity, three suitably chosen conjunctions in a series will be associated with one triplicity - which like the signs themselves was thought to have characteristic properties (fiery, earthy, aery, or watery, and so on). he successive conjunctions, occurring every 20 years, are simply the 'great conjunctions' of the title of Albumasar's book. There was also defined a coniunctio maior, which took place every 240 years, and a coniunctio maxima, which occurred every 960 years. The definitions of these were frequently misunderstood. Bacon, for example, gives a very hazy account in his Opus maius, and leaves us with the impression that he was paraphrasing Albumasar very carelessly. I will explain the periods of 240 and 960 years briefly, and those whose sympathies are with Bacon may omit the next paragraph. 

   Albumasar opens his Great Conjunctions with a detailed and rather precise account of the mean movements of Jupiter and Saturn, which we can summarize by saying that the conjunctions marked '0' and '3' in the series on the accompanying diagram will be thrice times 2°25'17"10'"6'v apart, or about 7 1/4º.11 We begin as near as possible to the beginning of Aries, in the fiery triplicity. Conjunction number 13, however, will fall into a new triplicity. If we reckon 20 years between great conjunctions, then the 'greater conjunction', when we pass from one triplicity to the next, should happen after 260 years; or, as Albumasar has it, the conjunctions may stay within a triplicity for about 240 years. They will then, by a loose extension of the argument, be in other triplicities for three similar periods, making 960 years in all, after which they will return to the original triplicity. Coniunctio maxima is that conjunction which marks the return to Aries. By virtue of the retrogradations of the planets in practice, and the fact that the figures quoted for the angles are not convenient sub-multiples of 360°, the argument is not precise and not worth discussing in any greater detail.12 What matters is that henceforth those who wished to find patterns in history had three convenient historical periods to conjure with, namely periods of 20, 240, and 960 years.

North, J. D., 1989, Stars, Minds and Fate: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Cosmology. Londres/ Ronceverte: The Hambledon Press.

Da Clepsidra o Vendaval (Poesia)

 

Bellini, Giovanni, The Feast of the Gods, 1514. Washington: National Gallery of Art.

Da Clepsidra o Vendaval

Entram sem rosto denso

No antiquário da história

Na poeira das afinidades

Nos recantos da alegoria

Recuperando do passado

Das ruínas os estilhaços

Os fragmentos de um ser

Da memória resgatados

19 de Maio de 2020

RMdF

Kleper, a Astrologia e os seus 1.170 Horóscopos

 

Rublack, U., 2015, The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother,135.

In the late sixteenth century, people usually explained personalities through astrology. Astrology formed a routine part of elite education, and was part of many universities’ curricula. Kepler, too, had learnt to cast horoscopes and predict the weather in Tübingen as part of studying mathematics, which in turn was integral to studying theology and the arts. During his career, he went on to compile a vast collection of more than 1.170 horoscopes for over 850 individuals. Although commissions from clients near and far provided him with welcome additional income, Kepler also collected horoscopes and data from a broad range of other practitioners in order to study them. When news reached him of an illness or the death of a particular person, he updated his records in order to verify his predictions. Horoscopes of famous, or ordinary, ill-fated people, such as a woman executed in Tübingen for infanticide, were closely scrutinized for patterns and causes. This immersed him in contemplating many different biographies. It made him curious about others. Anything but a distant academic dissociated from ordinary lives, he mined this information as a tool of empirical observation, so as to understand human nature through the movements of the stars.

Rublack, U., 2015, The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother. Oxford/ Nova Iorque: Oxford University Press.

A Relação Saturno/Lua a partir da Leitura de Liz Greene do Liber Novus de Jung: Exemplo Textual

Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, Elijah and Salome.

Greene, L., 2018, The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus: Daimons, Gods and the Planetary Journey,75.

Like Elijah, the Scholar lives in isolation with his daughter, far from the world with its extraverted, banal life. Unlike Elijah, he is neither a prophet nor a magus; he is a grief-stricken recluse, echoing Ficino’s association of Saturn with grief as well as solitude. In the ‘small, old castle’, the hall is lined with ‘black chests and wardrobes’ – a colour Jung associated directly with Saturn – while the Old Scholar’s study reveals ‘bookshelves on all four walls and a large writing desk, at which an old man sits wearing a long black robe’. The sheets in the tiny chamber in which Jung is offered a bed are ‘uncommonly rough’, and the pillow is hard. Associations of the colour black with Saturn abound in antiquity as well as throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and today the association still lingers in the present-day attribution of black gemstones such as jet, obsidian, and black onyx to this planetary god.

The air in the room is heavy, and the Old Scholar seems ‘careworn’. He has given himself tirelessly ‘to the material of science and research, anxiously and equably appraising, as if he personally had to represent the working out of scientific truth’. In this description Jung seems to be recreating the portrayal of Saturn given by a long list of astrological authors over many centuries, but in an extreme and highly personalised form. Jung at first believes the Old Scholar leads ‘an ideal though solitary existence’. Although no image of him appears in Liber Novus – only his stone castle – his description mirrors Waite’s image of The Hermit in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, standing alone in a barren, mountainous landscape with a lantern and a staff. 

But the Scholar, although he belongs to the same chain of senex images as Elijah, is a sad and self-destructive figure. His personality is lopsided, and he seems to personify what Jung experienced as his own rigidity of intellect – the same rigidity that ‘poisoned’ the giant Izdubar. The Scholar is ‘petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world’. The old man keeps his daughter imprisoned, fearful of allowing her to confront the dangers of worldly life. (...)

Greene, L., 2018, The Astrological World of Jung's Liber Novus: Daimons, Gods and the Planetary Journey. Londres/ Nova Iorque: Routledge.

Os Eclipses e as Observações de Gregos e Babilónios: Exemplo Textual

Steele, J. M., 2000, Observations and Predictions of Eclipse Times by Early Astronomers, 95-6. 

There has been much debate over the years concerning the source for the Babylonian observations in he Almagest. As I have suggested above, Ptolemy probably obtained them from Hipparchus. But how did Hipparchus come to possess them? Did he travel to Babylon himself and persuade a Babylonian astronomer to translate the records for him, as has been suggested by Toomer (1988: 359)? Or was knowledge of Babylonian astronomy widespread among Greco-Roman astronomers? Certainly, Babylonian mathematical astronomy must have been known fairly widely. The Oxyrhynchus papyri show that astrologers both used and understood Babylonian ACT methods, and there is nothing to suggest that the Oxyrhynchus material would differ from that which would have been found in any other medium size city had the conditions for survival of papyri been as good. But the transmission of actual observations is a different matter. To be of any value in determining, say, some parameter of a lunar theory, not just any lunar observation will do. Eclipses, of course, are the most useful, but even then what one really needs are eclipses fulfilling tions. Furthermore, these conditions certain condiare in part dependent upon the theory that one is developing. Thus, a Greek astronomer wanting to use Babylonian eclipse observations would probably have to obtain a long run of records, from which he could select certain ones at a later date. 

The Babylonian records described by Ptolemy range in date from 721 BC to 382 Be. Even if these represent the earliest and latest reports available to him, Ptolemy must have had access to records covering a period about 350 years. Furthermore, this list of eclipses must have been fairly complete. It has generally been supposed that the original source for these records was the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries. However, there are good reasons for doubting that this was the direct source from which Hipparchus made his compilation. A typical Diary covers a period of six months, during which there will be one, or occasionally two, lunar eclipse possibilities (i.e., observations or predictions). In compiling a collection spanning 350 years, therefore, one would have to consult about 700 tablets. It seems unlikely that a Babylonian astronomer would read through all of these tablets, even if they were all preserved, and then explain them at the request of a visiting Greek. There is, however, another ready-made source which would have been of much greater use to Hipparchus: the large compilation of eclipse records, preserved in part on LBAT * 1414, LBAT 1415 + 1416 + 1417, and LBAT *1419.

Steele, J. M., 2000, Observations and Predictions of Eclipse Times by Early Astronomers. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media.