Good evening everybody, it's so nice to see everybody here and we all know each other

so I'll just jump right in.

I'd like to actually start with bringing up a certain word that we often know about.

We use this word quite a bit and its origin, you might not know, is actually astrological

in its original meaning. So disaster, dis as in like disrespectful and so on as a prefix,

and astor as in asterism, so bad starred or ill starred. So when we say that something

is disastrous we're saying that it's ill starred or bad starred. But why am I bringing this

up? Because I hope my talk is not a disaster. So let's check the current astrological weather

right now. So this is the horoscope for Erlangen right now. Any opinions? Now the reason I'm

also bringing this up is because this form of horoscopy would not have been so alien

to somebody in Tang China who is practicing the horoscopy that we will discuss today.

And it also, this sort of horoscopy was also practiced throughout China, Korea, and Japan

in the medieval period. And so it's very fascinating that actually we have Western astrology which

is an extension of the same tradition that ended up in East Asia in the medieval period.

So the beginning of our story really actually begins in Alexandria in Egypt. So this part

of the world, the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean. So after the conquest of the Iranian-acumented

empire by Alexander the Great, the Greek world kind of brought together multiple civilizations.

The Greek-speaking world, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the Babylonians and so forth, all

came together. And Greco-Egyptian astrology was, as David Pingree says, a union of aspects

of advanced Babylonian celestial divination with Aristotelian physics and Hellenistic

astronomy. And so this is where astrology begins in about the second century BCE. And

then from there it was translated into Latin. And then in subsequent centuries, as we'll

see, it also ended up in India and also the Persian-speaking world. But what about horoscopy?

What is horoscopy? So the production of a horoscope, as in that chart we saw just a

few moments ago, requires calculation of the positions of planets and stars. And you have

to have knowledge of planetary orbits and their motions. So motions is pro-grade, that

means moving forward, retrograde, moving backwards and stationary. One of the other aspects is

that you have to know the hour of your birth. So you have to live in a community where people

keep track of time. As you can imagine in pre-modern times, knowing the hour of your

birth would have been much more difficult without the use of clocks and so on. And we

know in, for example, Alexandria, people had sundials, but they also had water clocks and

they also had mechanical clocks as well. But what this also demonstrates though is that

this is most likely an art that is for people living in cities. Because if you live in the

countryside it's unlikely you're going to have a water clock working when a woman is

giving birth to a child. And so it's actually an elite form of divination. And it's really,

in many ways, it's restricted to the elite members of society or at least the urban middle

class. And there's two main branches of classical astrology. The first one is natal. And so

that's predictions concerning an individual's life. So if you know the hour of your birth

and we can produce a horoscope chart that would indicate the positions of the planets

when you were born. And we would make various predictions about your life, your personality,

your fate, as well as your death based on that horoscopic chart. And then there's also

something called electional or catarchic astrology. And that attempts to determine the opportune

times for various activities. So you might come to me and you would ask, well, what's

a good time to get married? Or when is a good time to invade this other country? Or when

is a good time to do this? Or also when should I not do something? That's another thing.

So when would be times to avoid carrying out certain activities? And then there's also

a magical aspect to this as well because classical magic, both in antiquity and the medieval

period, is very much involved or very heavily relies upon astrological knowledge. So if

you're going to produce a talisman, for example, an amulet or a ring, you have to look at the

proper timing and then you can cast the ring or you can cast the amulet in metal when it's