Posts Tagged ‘astrology’
“You are an alchemist; make gold of that”*…
From Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Public Domain Review, a macabre morality tale for mid-May…
The man in the oval frame here is Georg Honauer. On the left, we see his unusual execution. A Latinized inscription gives his pretended noble alias, Lord of Brunhoff and Grobeschütz, along with the year 1597 and his age: twenty-four years old. Honauer is richly dressed in an embroidered tunic and is wearing an extravagant plumed hat. Two little devils repose on cushions beneath him.
Spectators cluster round the elaborate gallows. The tall iron construction, complete with finial balls and dangling chains, stands on a specially cut stone plinth. In a gory detail, blood drips down from the hanging figure. There is reason both for the fancy dress and the fancy construction.
Honauer was born in Olomouc, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), in 1572. Passing himself off under his alias as a goldsmith and alchemist, in 1596 he entered the service of Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, in Stuttgart, claiming to be able to convert iron into precious metal using a process that combined alchemical transmutation with the bulk techniques of metal ore smelting.
Most ancient cultures with metallurgy have a version of alchemy, from the Chinese to the Egyptians. Alchemy flourished in medieval Europe, with its promise of divinely assisted immortality and its alluring sub-discipline, chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metal into gold. It came with its own compelling logic that metals in the earth exist naturally in a constant state of evolution toward gold. Ores were near the start of the journey; easily smelted base metals such as lead a little further along. Alchemists believed that with the right chemical agents they could accelerate the process. But others doubted these claims, and during the centuries when some were pursuing alchemy in all seriousness, others — from Chaucer and Dante to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Ben Jonson — made it a topic of derision and satire.
Alchemists nevertheless found patrons among men in urgent need of money, and the duke was certainly one of these. Before the end of the decade, Friedrich would raise the cash to persuade Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, to release his duchy from Austrian control, and was pursuing expensive utopian projects, such as building the new city of Freudenstadt as a Protestant refuge.
So Honauer’s arrival in Stuttgart was well timed. Friedrich was already offering a reward to subjects who discovered promising ore deposits. Honauer claimed he could produce eight hundred ducats’ worth of “fine gold” from a hundred pounds of iron, and a friend said he had seen him using a tincture to draw gold from a lead bullet at a military camp in Hungary. The duke demanded a small-scale demonstration, which Honauer duly performed, and the metallic product passed an assay by the duke’s mining adviser; it was “at least as good as ducat-quality gold.”
Driven by fascination with the subject of alchemy as well as his avarice, Friedrich immediately directed that his Stuttgart summerhouse be converted into a laboratory for Honauer, and granted him further facilities at Kirchheim unter Teck, a short ride away from the city. He placed a large initial order for 200,000 ducats of gold, but Honauer said he did not have a sufficient quantity of the reagents necessary for such a large undertaking. They agreed on a monthly target of 36,000 ducats, to run indefinitely. The duke then arranged for thirty-six hundredweight and eighteen pounds (nearly two tons) of iron to be transported more than 150 miles from his armoury in Mömpelgard (now Montbéliard in France) to provide Honauer with the “raw material” he needed. Honauer’s order for additional chemicals necessary for the operation was equally impressive: 1030 pounds of saltpetre, 1852 pounds of lead, as well as similar quantities of “white copper” (cupronickel) and “mountain antimony”, and other reagents.
However, when he finally saw the scale of the task before him, Honauer lost his nerve and fled the city. Keen to get him back, believing that he had seen transmutation with his own eyes, the duke had his court painter produce “wanted posters” for the vanished alchemist, who was soon apprehended and brought back to attempt the transmutation again. When this failed, Friedrich had Honauer interrogated. Although the duke clearly wanted to believe Honauer could do as he had claimed, the fact that the alchemist had run away could only add to suspicions he was a cheat — a Betrüger, to use a word adopted at this time specifically to categorize alchemists who had been found unsuccessful, and who might or might not have been deliberately fraudulent.
The trial that followed was complicated by the fact that Honauer was indicted for impersonating a member of the nobility as well as the alchemical Betrug. He was quickly found guilty and, despite a personal appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor, sentenced to hang in a unique public spectacle. On Friedrich’s orders, all the iron that Honauer had been unable to convert into precious metal was converted instead into his gallows. The thirty-foot structure was then gilded in mockery of his claimed abilities and, on April 2, 1597, Honauer was dressed in robes woven with gold brocade to humiliate him still further, and led out to his death…
“The Gilded Gallows of Georg Honauer,” from @HoooAW in @PublicDomainRev.
* Shakespeare, Timon of Athens (Act 5, Scene 1)
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As we tackle transmutation, we might note that today is the luckiest day of the year… or so suggests the alchemist’s cousin, the astrologer:
On May 18 at 2:36 p.m. EST, we will experience a once-a-year Jupiter cazimi.
Cazimi comes from the Arabic word kaṣmīmī, meaning “as if in the heart.” In astrological terms, a cazimi transpires when a planet is in close or exact conjunction with the sun, right in the infernal heart of it, if you will.
Also known as the “Day of Miracles,” a Jupiter cazimi occurs when the planet of good times, good luck, deep pockets, limitless potential, laughter, wisdom and diamonds on the soles of its proverbial shoes, is within one degree of the sun. A cazimi is something of a solar amplifier/purifier, where the inherent energy of a planet is hyped and heightened by its proximity to that show-boating death star.
On Saturday, the planet of growth, optimism, and abundance is getting a solar tongue kiss at 28 degrees and and we’re all primed to reap the benefits…
… It’s anyone’s guess what an unlucky ruler might do to punish an over-promising astrologer.
“Mathematics has not a foot to stand on which is not purely metaphysical”*…
Lest we forget…
A forgotten episode in French-occupied Naples in the years around 1800—just after the French Revolution—illustrates why it makes sense to see mathematics and politics as entangled. The protagonists of this story were gravely concerned about how mainstream mathematical methods were transforming their world—somewhat akin to our current-day concerns about how digital algorithms are transforming ours. But a key difference was their straightforward moral and political reading of those mathematical methods. By contrast, in our own era we seem to think that mathematics offers entirely neutral tools for ordering and reordering the world—we have, in other words, forgotten something that was obvious to them.
In this essay, I’ll use the case of revolutionary Naples to argue that the rise of a new and allegedly neutral mathematics—characterized by rigor and voluntary restriction—was a mathematical response to pressing political problems. Specifically, it was a response to the question of how to stabilize social order after the turbulence of the French Revolution. Mathematics, I argue, provided the logical infrastructure for the return to order. This episode, then, shows how and why mathematical concepts and methods are anything but timeless or neutral; they define what “reason” is, and what it is not, and thus the concrete possibilities of political action. The technical and political are two sides of the same coin—and changes in notions like mathematical rigor, provability, and necessity simultaneously constitute changes in our political imagination…
Massimo Mazzotti with an adaptation from his new book, Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity: “Foundational Anxieties, Modern Mathematics, and the Political Imagination,” @maxmazzotti in @LAReviewofBooks.
* Thomas De Quincey
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As we count on it, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Regiomontanus (or Johannes Müller von Königsberg, as he was christened); he was born on this date in 1436. A mathematician, astrologer, and astronomer of the German Renaissance, he and his work were instrumental in the development of Copernican heliocentrism during his lifetime and in the decades following his death.
“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”*…
(Roughly) Daily has looked at almanacs before (e.g., here and here), but never with an eye to their astrological underpinnings. Livia Gershon plugs that gap…
Some Christians today see astrology as a clear affront to their beliefs, and possibly a dangerous manifestation of the occult. And yet, as historian T.J. Tomlin writes, through the eighteenth century, it was a central aspect of the almanacs that were ubiquitous in Protestant American homes.
By 1800, Tomlin writes, U.S. printers produced enough almanacs to provide one to every household in the country. People turned to the books for a clear, simple idea of how the universe worked. Their astrological calculations helped readers gain practical know-how about agricultural management, weather, and personal health.
…
Like the study of the natural world in general in that time and place, almanacs were rooted in Protestantism. They presented simple, widely held religious ideas—God’s power, redemption through Christ, the promise of heaven—to an increasingly literate public. “This was the liturgy of early American popular culture,” Tomlin writes.
But there were debates about what sort of astrology was compatible with this religious belief. “Natural astrology,” using the movements of heavenly bodies to draw conclusions about agriculture, medicine, and the weather, was widely regarded as “a way to illuminate God’s creative impulse in the universe,” Tomlin writes. But “judicial astrology,” predicting the events of individual lives or political affairs, might be seen as blasphemous…
Wildly popular, almanacs helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with their faith: “The Protestant Astrology of Early American Almanacs,” from @LiviaGershon in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Arthur C. Clarke
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As we study the stars, we might send multi-faceted birthday greetings to the painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, physicist, chemist, anatomist, botanist, geologist, cartographer, and writer– the archetypical Renaissance Man– Leonardo da Vinci. Quite possibly the greatest genius of the last Millennium, he was born on this date in 1452.
While Leonardo’s attention (and thus his notebooks) extended to astronomy, there’s no evidence that he believed in astrology. That said, his chart has been cast myriad times (e.g., here).
Self-portrait in red chalk, circa 1512-15 [source]
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust”*…
Beyond the Prisoner’s Dilemma— an interactive guide to game theory and why we trust each other: The Evolution of Trust, from Nicky Case (@ncasenmare), via @frauenfelder@mastodon.cloud in @Recomendo6.
* J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
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As we rethink reciprocal reliance, we might send far-sighted birthday greetings to Michel de Nostredame; he was born on this date in 1503. Better known as Nostradamus, he was an astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties (published in 1555), a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
In the years since the publication of his Les Prophéties, Nostradamus has attracted many supporters, who, along with some of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events. Other, more critical, observers note that many of his supposed correct calls were the result of “generous” (or plainly incorrect) translations/interpretations; and more generally, that Nostradamus’ genius for vagueness allows– indeed encourages– enthusiasts to “find” connections where they may or may not exist.
“I’ve always lived by signs”*…
Justin McElroy, Municipal Affairs Reporter for CBC Vancouver, has taken to Twitter to perform an important public service…
I’ve identified 185 communities in the province of British Columbia that have welcome signs.
And in this thread, I’m going to rank every single one.
You can follow the thread, which is underway now: Rating the Welcome Signs of British Columbia, from @j_mcelroy. Via @broderick.
* Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato
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As we contemplate connoisseurship, we might might send significant birthday greetings to a master of a different kind of sign, William Lilly; he was born on this date in 1602 (O.S.). Described as a genius at something “that modern mainstream opinion has since decided cannot be done at all,” he was an astrologer who was powerfully influential in his own time and hugely impactful on the future course of Western astrological tradition.
Lilly’s autobiography, published towards the end of his life in 1681, at the request of his patron Elias Ashmole, gives candid accounts of the political events of his era, and biographical details of contemporaries that are unavailable elsewhere. It was described, in the late 18th century, as “one of the most entertaining narratives in our language”, in particular for the historical portrayal it leaves of men like John Dee, Simon Forman, John Booker, Edward Kelley, including a whimsical first meeting of John Napier and Henry Briggs, respective co-inventors of the logarithm and Briggsian logarithms, and for its curious tales about the effects of crystals and the appearance of Queen Mab. In it, Lilly describes the friendly support of Oliver Cromwell during a period in which he faced prosecution for issuing political astrological predictions. He also writes about the 1666 Great Fire of London, and how he was brought before the committee investigating the cause of the fire, being suspected of involvement because of his publication of images, 15 years earlier, which depicted a city in flames surrounded by coffins… To his supporters he was an “English Merlin”; to his detractors he was a “juggling wizard and imposter.”…
Wikipedia
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