AbstractVol. 4 no 2

David J. Ross
‘The Bird, the Cross, and the Emperor: Investigations into the Antiquity of the Cross in Cygnus’.
pp. 3-28
Abstract. When was it that someone first gazed up at the Summer Milky Way and recognized the Cross among the stars of Cygnus? After the Big Dipper and the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, the Northern Cross is among the most familiar of asterisms, for Westerners at least. Turn to almost any modern handbook on the constellations and we find under Cygnus that the Swan often goes by this well known alias. Little explanation is required; the Cross being simply a matter of common knowledge. But when did it become so? One such popular guide, by the late veteran interpreter of the stars, Julius Staal, ventures only that it was ‘early Christians’ who recognized the cruciform shape of Cygnus.1 It is certainly a reasonable guess; but which early Christians recognized the Cross where others in their day would have imagined a great swan flying along the river of milk flowing from Hera’s breast? Although it seems little more than an odd bit of trivia, attempting to answer the question of the asterism’s antiquity touches on some interesting aspects of our cultural history. I hope to show how light from this admittedly peculiar angle may illuminate ways that astral imagery played upon the early Christian imagination, particularly as related to aspects of the history of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome.

Angela Voss
‘The Astrology of Marsilio Ficino: Divination or Science?’
pp. 29-45
Abstract. This paper addresses the question of the kind of knowledge which informed the astrological practice of Marsilio Ficino, and in so doing distinguishes between two modes of understanding the human relationship to the cosmos, the natural-scientific and the magical. I will seek to show that Ficino’s critique of his contemporary astrologers derived from their lack of symbolic understanding, and I shall attempt to explore the nature of this understanding which for Ficino was fully revealed in the Platonic and Hermetic traditions. Finally I shall suggest that in his system of natural magic Ficino re-defined astrology as a unitive tool for healing, founded on both ‘scientific’ investigation into cosmic law and divinatory experience.

Patrick Curry
Astrology on Trial, and its Historians: Reflections on the Historiography of ‘Superstition’
pp. 47-56
Abstract. This paper is an historiographical inquiry into some problems that arise when confronted with so-called supernatural, irrational or superstitious phenomena in human history. Other descriptions are possible, of course, but none of them without at least some question-begging - something that itself points to the principal problem. As an initial formulation, let us define that problem as follows: how can the historian describe and explain these phenomena without participating in the very processes – characteristically ones of power/knowledge - that produced them in the first place? And this problem becomes especially acute when the discourse in question, like astrology (but unlike, say, phrenology) is still the subject of contemporary controversy. This is not something I hope to resolve here, but perhaps I can improve the quality of the questions it raises.