Menu:
Astrology Articles
For my own Astrology articles please visit my Blog at Cafe Kakabel.
Use the list to the left of the page to find the articles and additional information of interest. Some are contributions from other websites and others have been gathered from open source pages on the Web. (see individual credits)
William Lilly
Biography taken from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org
William Lilly (May 1 (O.S.)/May 11 (N.S.), 1602 – June 9, 1681), was a famed English astrologer and occultist during his time. Lilly was particularly adept at interpreting the astrological charts drawn up for horary questions, as this was his speciality.
Lilly caused much controversy in 1666 for allegedly predicting the Great Fire of London some 14 years before it happened. For this reason many people believed that he might have started the fire, but there is no evidence to support these claims. He was tried for the offence in Parliament but was found to be innocent.
William Lilly was born in 1602 in Diseworth, Leicestershire, where his family were long-established yeomen. He received a basic classical education at the school of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, but makes a point of saying that his master never taught logic. At the age of seventeen, his father having fallen into poverty, he went to London and was employed in attendance on an elderly couple. His master, at his death in 1627, left him an annuity of £20; and, Lilly having soon afterwards married the widow, she, dying in 1633, left him property to the value of about £1000.
He began to dabble in astrology, reading all the books on the subject he could fall in with, and occasionally trying his hand at unravelling mysteries by means of his art. The years 1642 and 1643 were devoted to a careful revision of all his previous reading, and in particular, having lighted on Valentine Naibod's Commentary on Alcabitius, he "seriously studied him and found him to be the profoundest author he ever met with." About the same time he tells us that he “did carefully take notice of every grandaction betwixt king and parliament, and did first then incline to believe that as all sublunary affairs depend on superior causes, so there, was: a possibility of discovering them by the configurations of the superior bodies." And, having thereupon "made some essays," he "found encouragement to proceed further, and ultimately framed to himself that method which he ever afterwards followed."
Lilly's most comprehensive book was published in 1647 and was entitled Christian Astrology. It is so large that it came in three separate volumes in modern times, and it remains popular even today and has never gone totally out-of-print. It is considered one of the classic texts for the study of traditional astrology from the Middle Ages, in particular horary astrology, which is mainly concerned with predicting future events or investigating unknown elements of current affairs, based on an astrological chart cast for the time a particular question is asked of the astrologer. Lilly studied thousands of horary charts, most of the time successfully giving correct answers for a wide range of questions from the location of missing fishes to the outcome of battles. Worked examples of horary charts are found in Volume 2 of Christian Astrology.
He then began to issue his prophetical almanacs and other works, which met with serious attention from some of the most prominent members of the Long Parliament. If we may believe his statements, Lilly was on intimate terms with Bulstrode Whitelocke, William Lenthall the speaker, Sir Philip Stapleton, Elias Ashmole and others. Even John Selden seems to have acknowledged him, and probably the chief difference between him and the mass of the community at the time was that, while others believed in the general truth of astrology, he ventured to specify the future events to which he referred.
In 1650, Lilly wrote a preface to Sir Christopher Heydon's An Astrological Discourse with Mathematical Demonstrations, a defence of astrology written about 1608 which was first published posthumously, largely at the expense of Elias Ashmole. Even from his own account, however, it is evident that he did not trust implicitly to the indications given by the aspects of the heavens, but kept his eyes and ears open for any information which might make his predictions safe. It appears that he had correspondents both at home and in foreign parts to keep him conversant with the probable current of affairs. Not a few of his exploits indicate rather the quality of a clever police detective than of a profound astrologer.
After the Restoration he very quickly fell into disrepute. His sympathy with the parliament, which his predictions had generally shown, was not calculated to bring him into royal favour. He came under the lash of Butler, who, making allowance for some satiric exaggeration, has given in the character of Sidrophel a probably not very incorrect picture of the man; and, having by this time amassed a tolerable fortune, he bought a small estate at Hersham in Surrey, to which he retired, and where he diverted the exercise of his peculiar talents to the practice of medicine. He died in 1681.
The above entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In 2003 a commemorative plaque was placed next to the disused Aldwych tube station on the Strand. Lilly lived close to this spot.
The publication of a facsimile of the original 1647 edition of Lilly's Christian Astrology in 1985 by the Regulus Press, in England, brought about a remarkable renaissance in astrological scholarship in North America and Europe, and a transformation of the techniques of modern astrology itself. Curiosity about what modern astrology had lost stimulated many initiatives to recover, translate and disseminate the greatest works of astrology's ancient and medieval past. Possibly the most notable of these was Project Hindsight, an ambitious and extremely influential undertaking in translation begun in 1993 by Americans Robert Hand, Robert Zoller and Robert Schmidt, and supported by reader subscriptions. Project Hindsight translated many important Hellenistic and Medieval astrological texts from their original languages (mostly Greek and Latin, but also Hebrew) and published them. Because these translations were made by accomplished practitioners who understood astrological technique, they tended to avoid the misunderstandings that are sometimes encountered in the few academic translations available.
None of this would have been possible without the efforts of Olivia Barclay and other British astrologers who first began to unearth Lilly's astrological work, and who were influential in the eventual re-publication of Christian Astrology. Astrologer John Frawley, author of several books on traditional astrology, is one of the leading proponents of Lilly's methods, particularly in the branch of Horary Astrology. Other prominent Horary Astrologers are Deborah Houlding, Christopher Warnock, Sue Ward, Lee Lehman, Carol Wiggers and Anthony Louis.
Bibliography
- Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England, Princeton University Press, 1989.
- William Lilly, Christian Astrology, Book 1: An Introduction to Astrology; Book 2: The Resolution of All Manner of Questions, 1647. 2nd ed., 1659. Re-published by Astrology Classics (Bel Air, Maryland), 2004; by Ascella Publications, ed. D. Houlding, London, 1999; and [in facsimile of 1647 edition] by Regulus Press, London, 1985.
- William Lilly, Christian Astrology, Book 3: An Easie And Plaine Method Teaching How to Judge upon Nativities, 1647. 2nd ed., 1659. Re-published by Astrology Classics (Bel Air, Maryland), 2004; by Ascella Publications, ed. D. Houlding, London, 2000; and [in facsimile of 1647 edition] by Regulus Press, London, 1985.
- William Lilly, History of His Life and Times from the year 1602 to 1681, 1715, London, by Elias Ashmole. Re-published by Kessinger, 2004.
- William Lilly and Elias Ashmole, Lives of Those Eminent Antiquaries Elias Ashmole and Mr. William Lilly, published by T. Davies, 1772, London. Reprinted by Kessinger from 1942 edition.
- Derek Parker, Familiar to All: William Lilly and Astrology in the Seventeenth Century, London, Cape, 1973.
- Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: works and days of Simon Forman, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654)
Nicholas Culpeper was an English botanist , physician , and astrologer. He was the son of Nicholas Culpeper, a clergyman. Born on October 18th, 1616, tragically his father, the Reverend Nicholas Culpeper, died 13 days before his birth.
Nicholas was brought up by his mother at her family home in Isfield, Sussex. His maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Attersole, then minister of St Margaret's Church, Isfield, had a significant influence on Culpeper's early development. Attersole's writings show that he had a great respect for astrology and was conversant with Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos. He taught Nicholas Latin and Greek as well as encouraging a strongly puritanical attitude and a healthy disrespect for the Crown.
By the age of ten Nicholas had started reading astrological and medical texts from his grandfather's library. His grandfather didn't approve preferring he limited his study to the Bible. Notably, Sir Christopher Heydon's Defence of Judicial Astrology (1603) greatly impressed Culpeper. He was fond of reading and looking at the illustrations in William Turner's New Herball (1568). From his early teens he was familiar with all the local species of herbs that grew in his part of Sussex.
In 1632, aged 16, Culpeper went to study divinity at Cambridge University until his childhood sweetheart, with whom he planned to elope, was killed by lightning. His mother was also very distressed and her health suffered. She died soon afterwards. His grandfather, angered by his withdrawal from Cambridge, cut him off from his mother's family. Disillusioned and disinherited, he became apprenticed to an apothecary called Francis Drake of Threadneedle Street, Bishopsgate, London. He later went on to run a pharmacy next door to the Red Lion Inn in Spitalfields.
But, he was a radical republican and opposed to the "closed shop" of medicine. He believed that the use of Latin by doctors, lawyers and priests was a conspiracy to keep power and freedom away from the general public. He wished to make the knowledge of herbal remedies available to everyone, especially the poor who could ill afford to visit a physician. And to this end he published in English a translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londonesis of the Royal College of Physicians, calling it A Physical Directory, or a Translation of the London Dispensary . Of this work he said:
"I am writing for the Press a translation of the Physicians' medicine book from Latin into English so that all my fellow countrymen and apothecaries can understand what the Doctors write on their bills. Hitherto they made medicine a secret conspiracy, writing prescriptions in mysterious Latin to hide ignorance and to impress upon the patient. They want to keep their book a secret, not for everybody to know... "
This act of producing an unauthorized critical translation of the London Dispensatory made him the enemy of the physicians. The College counter-attacked in the periodical Mercurius Pragmaticus . They strongly disapproved of his translation:
"The Pharmacopoeia was done (very filthily) into English by one Nicholas Culpeper who commenced the several degrees of Independency, Brownism, Anabaptism; admitted himself of John Goodwin's school (of all ungodliness) in Coleman Street; after that he turned Seeker, Manifestarian, and now has arrived at the battlement of an absolute Atheist, and by two years' drunken labour hath Gallimawfried the Apothecaries' book into nonsense, mixing every receipt therein with some scruples at least of Rebellion or Atheism, besides the danger of poisoning men's bodies. And (to supply his drunkenness and lechery with a 30-shilling reward) endeavoured to bring into obloquy the famous Societies of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons."
For a long time Culpeper had taken an interest in the work of the famous London astrologer William Lilly (1602-81). Lilly was living in the Strand, near Strand Bridge. One day in November 1635, Nicholas chose to pay him a visit and Lilly subsequently offered to teach Culpeper the 'art of astrology'.
On September 5th 1653, Culpeper completed his herbal The English Physician, or an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation. "- being a complete method of physic, whereby a man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge, with such things only as grow in England, they being most fit for English bodies”. This volume remains a significant contribution to Herbal medicine and with his inclusion of an astrological framework for presenting the basis of physic, a major astrological resource. The planet associated with each herb is used symbolically to derive its medicinal use. Encouraged by his instruction from William Lilly in the art of astrology, Culpeper saw how this knowledge lay at the root of the European herbal tradition, which contributed to his statement:
On 10 th January 1654 he died of tuberculosis at the age of 38.
Quotations
"Culpeper, the man that first ranged the woods and climbed the mountains in search of medical and salutary herbs, undoubtedly merited the gratitude of posterity" . -- ( Dr. Johnson ).
Quotation from Nicholas Culpeper himself: "The liberty of our Commonwealth is most impaired by three sorts of men, priests, physicians, lawyers."
References
* 1995. Culpeper's complete herbal. A book of natural remedies for ancient ills (Ware, Wordsworth edition).
* 2004. The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Benjamin Woolley. HarperCollins.