Noah's Fourth Son and Moses’s Rings: Mythical Histories of Astrology

Josephus, pseudo-Methodius, and Petrus Comestor all ascribed astrological knowledge to the patriarchs, with the two latter tracing its origins to divine revelation. Similarly, the ninth-century Baghdadi astrologer Abu Ma’shar, translated into Latin in the twelfth century, described the revelation of astrological science to three separate figures named Hermes, the first before the Flood, and the second sometimes equated with Noah. This talk examines the ways in which this mythical history was appropriated by later proponents of astrology, including Michael Scot, John of Legnano, Pierre d’Ailly, and Simon de Phares. Scathing attacks on astrological prognostication by Nicole Oresme and Pico della Mirandola in the 1360s and 1490s demonstrate the way in which this material was understood to have functioned. For Oresme, this history needed to be debunked both because it served to defend an impossible art and because the patriarchs were not to be imagined wasting their time with such nonsense. But for Pico, under the sway of the visionary Savonarola, what was disturbing about this imagined past was not just its falsity or its utility in shoring up astrological prognostications per se, but the insistence that the science had been revealed, a claim for which he reserved particular scorn. Pico’s invective reveals a growing worry about those astrologers who blurred the lines between their predictions and genuine prophecy and whose views rested in part upon claims of astrology’s origins in divine inispiration. Using a method given to humans via revelation to read what God had written in the heavens was, by implication, a valid means to religious truths—perhaps more valid than interpreting Scripture (on which people could disagree). Such a mode of thinking, I will suggest, would ultimately influence the natural theology of the early modern period.