Astrology remains a feature of popular culture in the modern west. Most histories of the subject, from Thorndike (1923–1958) to Tester (1987), assume a fundamental conceptual and technical break between Babylonian and Greek astrology in the last centuries BCE and that western astrology also effectively came to an end in the late seventeenth century, when it lost its intellectual respectability. The Encyclopaedia of Religion (Culianu, 1987, p. 472) states categorically that “astrology, a product of Hellenistic civilisation, appeared at the end of the third century BCE,” completely denying any Mesopotamian connection. Chambers’ Encyclopaedia is more circumspect, considering that “It was in Greece, about the fourth century BCE that astrology underwent a great development and was regarded as regulating all things in the universe, including the fates of men (1970, p. 724).” However, while it is clear that astrology, like any other belief system, experiences periods of reinvention as it...
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Campion, N. (2014). Astrology in Babylonia. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8467-2
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