Horoscopes

The casting of horoscopes, diagrams containing information about the position of celestial bodies at a specific time and place that were consulted and reinterpreted over centuries, has a long history that goes back to antiquity: its origins can be firmly placed in ancient Babylonia, from where astrological practice spread to Egypt, Greece, and the Roman and Abbasid Empires, stretching as far east as India. After being condemned by the Christian emperors as a pagan divinatory practice in the third century AD, and having temporarily been eclipsed from sight within the confines of the Roman Empire by the sixth century, astrology and the casting of horoscopes flourished again in medieval and Renaissance Europe in the twelfth century, arguably reaching its peak in popularity in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This short Companion entry investigates the kind of information that was essential to the casting of horoscopes and the techniques and uses that led to their interpretations.