cardons cosmos

[crimsoncurrent]

CARDANO'S ASTRO[OGY was, in a way characteristic of its time, an
empirical <11:t.It rested on the belief that a sufficiently large collection
of carefully established genitures would provide a solid foundation
for
astrology as a whole. Everyone interested in astrology, from eager propo
nents to angry opponents, knew that an individual nativity could be faked
or corrupted,that
any given astrological principle might be' falsified by the
discovery of contradictory
instances. But almost everyone also believed that
a finite number of cases would suffice to settle all the outstanding ques
tions, rigorously. and fully. John Aubrey, for example, blamed the defects of
the art not on its principles but on its practitioners.
And he described his
own Brief Lives as the sort of foundational
major defects:
database that could repair all
Ital.Prov: E Astiologia, ma non e Astralogo. we haue not that Science yet per
fect. 'Tis one of the Desiderata. The way to make it perfect is to gett a supellex
of true .Genitures. in order wherunto I have with much care collected these
ensueing, wch the Astrologers may rely on; for I have sett downe none on ran
dome, or doubtful! information, but from their owne mouthes, qd NB.I
Like Aubrey's general sentiments,
his particular
astrological
practices
reflected his continued faith in the solidity of Cardano's astrological work.
He quoted Cardano and Schaner side by side, as equally valid sources of
interpretive
principles:
"for sayeth Cardan, Jupiter in sexta domo morbos
denegat aut leves praestat. Schoner also sayeth, si Venus Mercurius et Sol
Lunarn aspicientes inveniuntur, Natus erit longaevae vitae, et sanus,'? Like
Cardano, Aubrey carefully recorded many of the sources from which he had
drawn genitures.






that he had reason to trust his data and their sources.
Like Cardano, Aubrey took a special interest in strange cases, the livesand
deaths of executed criminals, for example.' And like Carda no, Aubrey knew
that astrologers saw themselves as expert on individual psychology-above
all, that of erudite and saturnine scholars like those who generally practiced.
the art. On that pertinacious self-scrutinizer "Dernocritus Junior" (Sir
Thomas Browne), for example, Aubrey reflected, ironically:" 'tis whispered, .
that non obstante all his Astrologie, and his bookc of melancholic, that he
ended his dayes in that chamber by Hanging himselfe.?"
Even those less enthusiastic about astrology than Aubrey accepted the
terms on which Cardano had based his discussion. Pierre Gassendi, for
example, savagely attacked incompetent astrologers in his Svutaoma. But he
based his criticism on exactly the same sorts of evidence on which Aubrey
had rested his defense. Gassendi examined Nostradamus' genitures of nota-, .
blcs, comparing them to the lives they actually led. For Antoine Suffren, he
glecfuily pointed out, Nostradamus had predicted a long beard, discolored
teeth, and a bowed back; but the gentleman in question actually kept hisjaw
clean-shaven, his teeth white, and his back erect to the end of his life.? By
compiling such particulars, Gassendi hoped to expose the systematic flaws
in astrological practice. There were occasional dissenters. IohnDee, as we.
have seen, tried to make a rigorous mathematical analysis of all the relations
that could obtain among the planets and stars in a given geniture-van
enterprise which, taken to its logical conclusion, would have shown the
impossibility of ever collecting enough empirical data to support the kinds
of general statement Cardano and his colleagues regularly made. But in this
respect Dee remained an isolated figure. Cardano's Hippocratic, case-by
case approach remained the model for an empirical, critical astrology until
deep in the century after his death.
But Cardano's astrology was empirical in a second, more alien sense as
well. It represented an effort to study, as directly as possible, his own body
and soul and those of many others. Unlike Cardano's dogged efforts to com
THE ASTROLOGER
AS EMPIRICIST
pile data, his notion of how to study them, and the ways in which he tri~d to
put it into practice, are strikingly unfamiliar now-and do not much
resemble the interpretive ways of the Nell' Philosophers of the seventeenth
century. Cardano drew his hermeneutical tools, as we have seen, from the
astrological tradition. And they focused his attention on a specific range of
connections between the ruinutest and most ephemeral phenomena of con
sciousness' the dr'ifting thoughts and uncontrolled feelings that he recorded
so intently, and the highest, most changeless, and most beautiful entities in
his universe: the planets and the stars.
The astrologer's way of tracing the connections between the heavenly and
the human body was peculiar. Philosophers who imagined themselves as
looking down to earth from the dizzying vantage point of the heavens nor
mally did so in order to distance themselves from trivial concerns, to master
the deeper realities of the cosmic order. Marcus Aurelius-whom,
as we
have seen, Cardano tried to use as his guide into the moral life-laid special
weight on this-form of mental discipline. His constant efforts to show that
things of the world and the body had no substantial worth, as Carlo
Ginzburg has recently argued, represented an effort to make alienation
from alleveryday concerns the mark of wisdom. And the royal road to alien
ation lay.through- a consistent effort to contemplate the vast expanse of
space and time in the universe-and thus to remove oneself from the
momentary concerns, which were revealed, when they appeared before this
immense backdrop, as worthless. Marcus Aurelius' sometimes puzzling
questions and riddles formed organic parts of a rationally conceived pro
gram of mental and spiritual exercises."
.
For Cardano and other astrologers, by contrast, the cosmic perspective
that lent distance had a radically different value. It concentrated their atten
tion on the local and the ephemeral. Examining the stars that shone at a
client's birth, watching the movements of the planets during an illness,
made the contours of the client's permanent character, even the minor ones,
and the details ·of his short-term case history, even its ephemeral fluctua
tions, stand out with a new clarity. Distance enhanced the astrologers'
promiscuous attention to the kinds of detail philosophers disdained. Their
cosmic viewpoint focused and intensified their intimate contact with the
emotional and the corporeal side of each individual life, asif a viewpoint on
the celestial pole or at the mid-heaven actually magnified the minute details
of individual life on earth. In the world of the astrologers, opposition might
not be true friendship, but distance could be true intimacy."
Cardano's cosmos and his body intersected at every moment and at every
turn. The corruptible and changeable was thus invested with something












pile data, his notion of how to study them, and the ways in which he tri~d to
put it into practice, are strikingly unfamiliar now-and do not much
resemble the interpretive ways of the Nell' Philosophers of the seventeenth
century. Cardano drew his hermeneutical tools, as we have seen, from the
astrological tradition. And they focused his attention on a specific range of
connections between the ruinutest and most ephemeral phenomena of con
sciousness' the dr'ifting thoughts and uncontrolled feelings that he recorded
so intently, and the highest, most changeless, and most beautiful entities in
his universe: the planets and the stars.
The astrologer's way of tracing the connections between the heavenly and
the human body was peculiar. Philosophers who imagined themselves as
looking down to earth from the dizzying vantage point of the heavens nor
mally did so in order to distance themselves from trivial concerns, to master
the deeper realities of the cosmic order. Marcus Aurelius-whom,
as we
have seen, Cardano tried to use as his guide into the moral life-laid special
weight on this-form of mental discipline. His constant efforts to show that
things of the world and the body had no substantial worth, as Carlo
Ginzburg has recently argued, represented an effort to make alienation
from alleveryday concerns the mark of wisdom. And the royal road to alien
ation lay.through- a consistent effort to contemplate the vast expanse of
space and time in the universe-and thus to remove oneself from the
momentary concerns, which were revealed, when they appeared before this
something o








the deep and permanent interest of the celestial sublime which governed it.
The ancient, authoritarian tradition of astrology, with all its stiff templates
for classifying and judging human character and action, could still provide a
flexible and precise way to describe and judge the intimately human'. In this
special, sixteenth-century sense, astrology could become a disciplined, em
pirical inquiry into the depths of the self. It both prescribed profound exer
cises in characterology and introspection and stimulated inventive exercises
in expressing and recording their results. Some of those who lost faith in
the explanatory mechanisms that Cardano and other astrologers still em
ployed, or claimed to have lost it,likeGiambattista della Porta, retained their
confidence in the readings of human bodies and spirits that the astrologers
had obtained. Della Porta, writing after a papal bull of 1586 had forbidden
the practice of astrology, explicitly denied the influence of the stars. But he
cast his Celestin IPhysiognomies in astrological terms nonetheless. The seven
different natures of the planets still provided the basic categories with which
he classified the human temperaments.'?
Asconsistently as their contemporaries who scrutinized politics and his
tory, the Machiavellians who looked for "the effective truth of things" and
the Stoics who wrote their selvesinto a disciplined state, the astrologers and
their clients used rational means to explore their worlds and their selves,
and to master them. Like the disciplines now called psychology, political
theory, and moral philosophy, which are still considered both rational and
indispensable, astrology provided sixteenth-century scholars and rulers
with what most of them saw as fundamental tools for analyzing and con
. JmJ.!i!Jg their ?o~i.e.ties,their bodies, and their souls