Astrology in England

London invented the newspaper horoscope, and the date is known.

England has the best-documented astrological tradition in modern Europe, and it begins close to the throne. John Dee — mathematician, librarian and adviser to Elizabeth I — chose the date of her coronation by astrology. It is one of the most cited cases of election in the whole history of the practice, and it is exactly the technique this site calls electional astrology: searching, among the hours available, for the one whose sky matches what the act calls for.

A century later came the writer still read today. William Lilly published in 1647 the Christian Astrology, the first great astrology treatise written in English, rather than Latin. Taking astrology out of Latin is what put it within reach of people with no university training, and the book is still used by those who practise horary astrology — the kind that answers a question through the chart of the moment it was asked.

Lilly lived through the peak and the beginning of the end. During the English Civil War, astrological almanacs sold by the thousand, and both sides used them as propaganda. After the Great Fire of London, in 1666, he was called to give evidence before Parliament — he had published an engraving years earlier showing a city in flames, and they wanted to know if he had known something. It is the moment an astrologer's fame turns into a problem for him.

The eighteenth century was a retreat: as science organised itself around the Royal Society, astrology lost the academic standing it had held. It came back through the door of occultism at the end of the nineteenth century, and Alan Leo is the name behind that return — tied to Theosophy, he simplified the practice for a wide public, and it is because of him that the Sun sign carries the weight it does today. He was prosecuted for fortune-telling, which says a good deal about how the profession stood at the time.

And it was in London that the format the whole world copied was born. In 1930, the Sunday Express commissioned R. H. Naylor a piece on the newborn Princess Margaret's chart. The piece went down well, the paper asked for more, and the column became a fixture. Every newspaper and magazine horoscope on the planet descends from that — including the one read in Portuguese at a corner newsstand.

What England gave astrology

England gave astrology two opposite things: the technical treatise in everyday language, which deepened it, and the newspaper column, which flattened it into twelve boxes.

Five things about the sky over England

Reading the sky in England is far older than any name mentioned above. Stonehenge, raised in stages across the third millennium BC, has an alignment nobody disputes: from the centre, looking towards the Heel Stone, the Sun rises there at the June solstice, and sets in the opposite direction at the December one. Whoever built it left no text, so nobody knows what they did with it — but they knew where the Sun would rise on the longest day of the year, and that is observation repeated across generations.

Four thousand years later: when the Royal Society was founded, in 1660, one of its founding members was Elias Ashmole, a practising astrologer, who drew up charts to decide his own affairs and kept a record of every one. It was he who collected and preserved William Lilly's papers, and it is because of that collection that so much is known about how a seventeenth-century astrologer actually worked — what questions he was asked, what he charged, when he got it wrong. The museum that bears his name in Oxford grew out of that same habit of keeping everything.

What is worth keeping is the date. The institution that would come to symbolise modern science and the practice it would eventually expel were, in 1660, in the same room, and sometimes inside the same person. The separation that looks obvious today took more than a century to happen, and it was not decided in a single day.

When it did happen, the law followed suit. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 stopped treating witchcraft as a real crime and started punishing anyone who pretended to have powers — in other words, the law changed from "this is dangerous" to "this is fraud". It was under that logic, and under the vagrancy law of 1824, that astrologers and fortune-tellers were prosecuted through the 19th and 20th centuries, Alan Leo among them. The 1735 law was only repealed in 1951.

And the newspaper column, born in London, caught on because of a tragedy. A few months after it started, R. H. Naylor wrote that British aircraft would be in danger, and days later the airship R101 crashed in France, killing almost everyone on board. The coincidence made the column's name and secured it a permanent slot. The format now seen as the most harmless side of astrology took hold through a disaster — and it is worth remembering that a prediction vague enough always finds some event to confirm it.

On the technical side, London is also where the teaching got organised. The Faculty of Astrological Studies, founded in 1948, still runs classes and sets exams today, and much of the vocabulary that circulates in translated Portuguese came out of manuals from that lineage. England exported both extremes — the course with an exam and the little box with twelve compartments — and the second travelled far further.

One of the oldest technical texts written in English is about an astrological instrument. Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales, wrote around 1391 a Treatise on the Astrolabe dedicated to a ten-year-old boy, explaining step by step how to use the device — including how to find the degree rising on the horizon. The Tales are full of astrology, and the Wife of Bath explains her own temperament through Venus and Mars in her chart.

And there is an English line running through every birth chart in the world. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich was founded in 1675 for a practical purpose — solving longitude at sea — and the meridian running through it ended up as the world's reference point for time. When this site converts your birth time to calculate where the planets were, it converts to Greenwich time. The calculation starts in a London building built to help ships.

One last one, which is probably true and certainly good. Newton's first biographer says he bought an astrology book at a Cambridge fair, tried to read it and got stuck on the geometry — and that it was to understand those figures that he went looking for Euclid. If the story is accurate, Newton's mathematics began in a poorly understood astrology book.

And the sky of London is different — this can be measured

The part of astrology that depends on PLACE, not just date, is the Ascendant: the degree of the zodiac rising on the horizon at the moment of birth. It changes every two hours and depends on the city's latitude.

And the twelve signs do not rise at the same speed. Some take more than two hours to cross the horizon and others less than one, and this difference grows the further you are from the equator. I drew 200,000 instants at random between 1950 and 2010 and calculated the Ascendant for London, at 52° north:

Notice what this means: two people born at exactly the same time, one in London and one in a city at another latitude, can have different Ascendants — and the frequency of each Ascendant changes with the place. The city of birth is not an administrative detail on a form: it enters into the count.

The pattern across this series is pure geometry, and it fits in one sentence: the further from the equator, the more uneven the draw. In Copenhagen, at 56 degrees north, the gap between the most common Ascendant and the least common one is 4.3 times; in São Paulo, at 23 degrees south, it drops to 1.5.

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