Secondary Progressions: A Reformer’s Approach to Astrological Prediction

Currently, I’m knee-deep in copies of early English treatises that pick apart astrology’s Ptolemaic foundations. I’m particularly enamored with one so-called “reformer” who advanced a theory of Copernican heliocentrism in astrology, proposing a hypothetical system that replaces the glyph of the sun with a solid black dot (which stands for the earth) and reverses astrological aspects in an effort to put the sun at the centre of astrological thinking. Never mind that I can’t figure out how the model works in nativities or interrogations; for seventeenth-century reformers, aligning astrological theory with emerging “science” seems to have been as good an approach as any to legitimizing the long-standing tradition of “prediction through astronomy,” which dear old Ptolemy first set out in the second century.

Back in school, I learned that titans like Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were among those to whom we owe gratitude for advancing our knowledge of the heavens. These were the secular mathematicians and astronomers who — so the narrative goes — defied the Church fathers and worshipped at the temple of evidence, measurement and observation. There was no room for superstition in the learning that these avatars advanced. To think that they were somehow tied to the history of astrology is nigh impossible.