Historical Figure
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Lilly on his own nativity: a practitioner reading himself
Among the worked examples in Christian Astrology , the most instructive is the one readers most often skip: Lilly's judgement of his own nativity. It is unusual for three reasons. He applies his own rules to himself A textbook author demonstrating a method on a stranger's chart…
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Astrology and the Jesuits: what was actually permitted
The usual account has the Church suppressing astrology and the subject surviving underground until the nineteenth century. The seventeenth-century record, in Portugal as elsewhere, does not support it. Astrology was taught in Jesuit colleges. Jesuits corresponded about charts. A…
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A prince who cast charts: astrology at the Portuguese court in the 1600s
Astrology in the seventeenth century was not a fringe pursuit. It was taught, practised at court, argued about by theologians, and used by governments — and Portugal after the Restoration of 1640 offers a particularly clear view of what that looked like in practice. The heir Dom…
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Alfarrobeira, 1449: what a chart can say about a disputed death
Medieval chronicles occasionally record a birth to the hour. When they do, they hand the historian of astrology something rare: a chart for a documented life, cast from a source with no astrological interest in the outcome. One such case is the Portuguese Infante Dom Pedro, Duke…
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Temperament and the marks of a violent death
Two subjects that a modern reading usually leaves out sit near the centre of traditional practice: the temperament of the native, and the manner of death. The first is a diagnostic tool. The second is the point at which the tradition's confidence and a practitioner's discretion…