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William Lilly's Mundane Astrology

1 by sworm09
I've been studying Renaissance astrology and I currently find Lilly to be my favorite. I've been wanting to learn the mundane astrology from that period. ..but almost no one wrote on it. I know that Lilly did mundane astrology but I can't find any writings of his on the matter. Henry Coley is a close second, but his writings on mundane are a little shorthanded and vague.

Anyone got any ideas?

3 by Mark
sworm09 wrote:
Anyone got any ideas?
Several. I will feed back tomorrow now as its very late here.

Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly

5 by Tom
Not that it matters very much given the nature of the question, but is mid 17th century still considered the Renaissance? I'm not saying that is out of line, but I always considered it early modern which would be post Renaissance. I could be wrong.

Lilly wrote quite a bit on mundane astrology. I have a reprint of England's Prophetical Merlin (1644) which is mostly mundane astrology. I probably bought it from John Ballantrae, but I don't know if he is still in business.

He also wrote The Prophecy of the White King in 1644. I love Frawley's critique, "Goodness knows what he was smoking when he wrote that." You'd have to hunt for it. I've never read it, so I don't know if Frawley is accurate or if he is just being John Frawley.

There are some mundane predictions in CA notably "Will the Presbytery Stand?"

During the English Civil War Astrology was used as a propaganda tool and both Lilly and Gadbury participated.

I don't know if Cardan wrote much on mundane astrology, but it really doesn't matter since so little of what he wrote has been translated into English.

Last but never least is the astrology of Jean Baptiste Morin deVillefranche (1583 - 1656). Book 25 of the 26 volume Astrologia Gallica is devoted to what we would call mundane astrology. It is titled The Universal Constitutions of the Caelum. He covers everything, ingress charts, eclipses, comets, great conjunctions (in which he includes not only Saturn Jupiter but Mars Jupiter and Mars-Saturn conjunctions as well) etc.

Unfortunately he is very difficult to read if you start with Book 25 as he assumes the reader is familiar with everything that came before, which is quite a bit. You would have to either find someone who is familiar with Morin and have him or her explain him to you as you go along, or read Book 21 first, preferably with someone who is familiar with him. We had a discussion here not too long ago concerning a 20th century astrologer's use of his methods to predict WWII. You can read that here:

http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7991

6 by Mark
As James has already pointed out Benjamin Dykes has just started a major series of translations of mundane astrological texts from the ancient and Perso-Arabic period entitled Astrology And the World.In further translations he will be offering some the major Perso-Arabic mundane texts.

Probably the key astrological text to deal with mundane astrology from the early modern period in English is Astrology Restored by William Ramesey.

The book covers both mundane and electional astrology. Fortunately, Steven Birchfield retyped out the mundane part of the text with a generous set of annotations:

You can access it here on Skyscript for free:
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/pdf/Ramesey_Birchfield.pdf

However, Steven Birchfield is rather critical of much of the text and implies that it is really just an inferior, diluted version of mundane astrology sourced from essentially Perso-Arabic sources such as Massah?Allah and Abu Ma?shar.

Another text you might consider is Bonatti?s Book of Astronomy. Bonatti was also a major influence on later astrologers like Lilly. Benjamin Dykes has put out the chapter of the book covering mundane astrology as a separate book.

http://www.bendykes.com/boa.php

Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly

7 by james_m
marks suggestion on the bonatti book is a good one.. you can buy a reprint of ''bonatti on mundane astrology"" which is a section of the 'book of astronomy' for about 30$US. it seemed like bonatti got a lot of his ideas from abu mashar, and perhaps to a lesser extent from mashallah too.. apparently some data on mundane astro from mashallah is in the other translation by ben dykes called 'sahl and mashallah'.. i haven't read it yet.. dykes mentions in the beginning of his reprint of ''bonatti on mundane astrology'' that one would want to consider reading it as well. might not be the cats meow from lilly, but if you are interested in mundane astrology, i think you need to back up a few hundred years or more, historically..

8 by Deb
There is actually a lot to be got from reading the works by Lilly, since Masha'allah, Sahl and Bonatti were three of his main sources. Along with Tom's suggestions, most of his annual almanacs included examples of mundane predictions based on ingresses and Saturn-Jupiter cycles, etc. They are really valuable to show the techniques in traditional practice. You probably do need the interest in Lilly's work to appreciate them fully, because the examples are loaded with informative details, but because they involve 17th century matters, it helps to have an interest in that time period.

You can buy a collection of 51 texts by Lilly - probably far more than you will find time to read - on Christopher Warnock's 'Lots of and Lots of Lilly' CD, which costs about $40 + p&p - see details on this page of his site: http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/cdlibrary.html

It is packed with pdf facsimiles of Lilly's work - but be warned, these show the original texts, so they are not easy modern-print reads. Still, its a treasure trove, and I think it is well worth the investment for anyone who is drawn to Lilly's style.

9 by james_m
deb - do you know when someone is going to convert them so they are easier to read... this from the guy who uses small caps all the time, lol! this is one of my problems with lilly.. i have ca and have still not read them..

10 by Deb
No idea - what we need is more legs on the ground. No one can hope to make a profit from that kind of work; has to be a labour of love, but its a productive one because you learn so much when dwelling over the little details.

I would love to be able to spend my life doing it - I really get great pleasure from doing that sort of thing, but I am backed up with other projects. Sue Ward has done a number of the Lilly texts (see link below), but I don't know that anyone is currently active in making modern type reproductions of others. If anyone else has information hopefully they'll let us know.

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~sueward/books.htm

Addition - of course, as epurdue says above, Chris Warnock's site is a great resource for Lilly's work too.

11 by sworm09
Thanks a lot!

I've got quite a few sources to look at.

james_m: Something I'm starting to figure out about Lilly is that he seems to have been highly motivated to trace astrological knowledge backwards. Sure many of the things that he says seem a little made up, but the vast majority of it is taken from Ptolemy. He seems to have taken quite a few ques from Ptolemy, which if fantastic for Lilly but bad for me....because it involves me attempting to read Tetrabiblos :shock:

Mark: Yup! I know of Warnock and I've considered a few times buying some texts from him. Ramsay is definitely my most immediate option for learning Mundane as of now despite the fact that Birchfield talks so negatively about it. To be honest his comments were what was keeping me from studying Ramsay.

Tom: I know of those charts in the horary section and I've always thought that they were a little out of place. I'm going to have to study them a bit more.

Deb: Thanks for the link! I feel like I want to get more of Lilly and the most that I've read from him outside of CA was a little of Starry Messenger (I think?) that I found online.
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