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Volume 9, No. 1

Review:

Anthony Grafton. Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 284.

Geoffrey Cornelius

"It is much worse for an Artist to conceive he knows those things which he is ignorant of; than to be ignorant of those things which he ought to know" - an apt thought for the interpreter of horoscopes, but no less apt for the whole project of scholarly interpretation. The observation is the fourth of the aphorisms of Jerome Cardan (Girolamo Cardano) appended in the Anima Astrologiae: or a Guide for Astrologers, translated by Henry Coley and edited by William Lilly in 1675. These aphorisms, spanning nativities, revolutions, elections, decumbitures and weather forecasting, are all that most modern practitioners are likely to know of the astrology of their illustrious sixteenth century forebear.
           

Apart from several biographies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the story of Cardano's life is immortalised in his autobiography, De Vita Propria Liber, translated into English as The Book of my Life in 1931. Cardano achieved his greatest repute as a physician, and this most important of his worlds has been revealed for us in Nancy G. Siriasi's The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine. Now her colleague and fellow 'Cardanophile', Anthony Grafton, has filled in a missing quadrant by taking up the theme of Cardano as astrologer.
           

Born in Pavia, Italy, in 1501, Cardano trained and practised in medicine, becoming a professor in 1534. As well as his legendary skills as a physician he studied a compendious range of subjects, achieving an international reputation in mathematics, astrology, and philosophy. He published a commentary on Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, with the intention of reforming and purifying astrology. He produced an acclaimed encyclopedia of natural philosophy and an influential treatise on moral philosophy. His treatise on algebra included the first printed solution for cubic quadratic equations; although he was not the original author of this solution, it is still in modern times occasionally referred to as 'Cardan's theorem'. His abilities extended to technology: there is a universal joint that goes by his name in French and German. Add to his technical and philosophical writings the literary accomplishment of his autobiography, and we discern the kaleidoscopic ideal of the renaissance polymath.
           

Amongst these accomplishments, astrology appears as a central motif, and in Cardano's Cosmos, Grafton describes the cultural context as well as the development of Cardano's career as an astrologer, through his publications, his clientele, his intellectual friendships and his disputes. This career opened on a less than successful foray into astrological publishing in 1534, with a pamphlet of mundane predictions and weather forecasts. His climb to professional success began in earnest in 1538 with a textbook for the celestial observer, astronomer and astrologer alike. He discussed theories of planetary motion and at the same time provided aphorisms for horoscope interpretation. He showed mundane astrology, including its application to the growth of religions. One likely reason for this text's wide appeal was its inclusion of ten example genitures, mostly of famous individuals, together with brief interpretations. This casebook approach, although historically not unknown, set a precedent for both contemporary and later astrologers. In the 1543 edition this had expanded to sixty-seven horoscopes, and for the first time he included his own geniture. Thus began the pattern whereby Cardano used his own body, life and character, exposed and analysed in the interests of science, as a perfect demonstration of astrology. Anthony Grafton follows Cardano in making astrology the centre of his concern, and he sets himself an ambitious but specific task: 'I will examine Cardano's own lifelong efforts to use the stars to find the order in the apparent chaos of his own life and the world in which he lived it' [p5].
           

This concern necessarily raises the question of the assumptions and philosophy on which Cardano's astrology rests and which it in turn supports. These assumptions may themselves be inconsistent, and in flux, changing over his lifetime. Cardano may also not give the most reliable account of his own motivations, so we need to seek various confirmations before we can be reasonably sure we understand something of his beliefs and attitudes. Grafton has brought together a number of evidences to help us make an interpretation. An important conclusion is that 'like most specialist astrologers before and after him' he was not a determinist, and in this he was consistent with Ptolemy [p85]. Predictions are seen as probabilistic rather than absolute, and providence and divine judgment could in any case intervene, whatever the apparent determination of the stars. There is no imperative, therefore, to attempt to reduce all causes to the astrological, in theory or in practice. This helps to explain his pragmatic approach to the relation between medicine and astrology, which despite being frequently intermixed are seen as disciplines with distinct foundations: 'he admitted that medicine, though epistemologically less profound than astrology, was practically superior to it'[p161].
           

Cardano's Ptolemaic orientation is perhaps insufficiently explored by Grafton, but on all the evidence this goes together with an attitude of reserve towards (although not outright rejection of) explicitly divinatory and katarchic forms of practice, such as horary, and he seems to have disapproved of magical uses of the art, as in the preparation of talismans [p159]. He recognised the falsity of the attribution of the Centiloquium to Ptolemy because of its inclusion of katarchic aphorisms, rendering it conceptually inconsistent with the Tetrabiblos [p137]. We should not read this as evidence of a rationalistic attitude, however. Despite his classical and Aristotelian leaning, by the end of his life Cardano acknowledged that some of his actions and his interpretations of signs were guided by his guardian angel, and he hinted that he might on occasion be in possession of a divine or semi-divine illumination [p169]. What emerges as characteristic of his world is an open fabric of signifiers, modes of comprehension and theories, sometimes contradictory, with astrological constructs and cosmological symbolism forming a primary but not exhaustive or fully-determining function of reality.

In Cardano's hands astrology gives its own distinctive fold to this open fabric by offering an unrivalled means of constructing a narrative of a life, and especially of his own life. His autobiography and his interpretation of his natal horoscope went through at least three revisions between the mid 1540's and the final draft of his De Vita the year before his death in 1576 [p181ff]. The details of his illnesses, his early impotence, his gambling habits and his character traits, pleasant and unpleasant, were all laid out for his reader's contemplation. He claims complete honesty, although suspicion is aroused that there is an undisclosed aspect of his sexuality, indicated by the accusation of paedophilia levelled against him around 1562. Despite this understandable lacuna, if indeed the accusation were true, Cardano's desire to demonstrate the working of his natal horoscope allowed him to achieve a seemingly modern and even psychological self-analysis. Grafton suggests that 'by concentrating less on the long-term movement of his career than on the forces which recurred throughout his life, he produced an autobiography which did not make the author's life fit the teleological narrative logic of an adventure or a conversion, but set out to isolate permanent traits of his character'[p184].

The Raw Data
In the best tradition of modern liberal scholarship, Grafton gives every indication of sympathy for his subject, and declares his intention to take seriously Cardano's involvement in astrology as a major intellectual discipline; this involvement is not considered to be some aberration of reason, nor is it to be understood simply by reference to the social and cultural contexts in which it appears. 'I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to develop my specific analytical questions not in advance, but as I worked through primary sources: to put them to raw data assembled not in accordance with a modern archivist's or historian's choices, but by an early modern scholar'[p15].

But has Grafton really achieved this? What should be remarked here is his understanding of 'raw data'. This is taken to mean original accounts in writing by and about Cardano, including his own life story; but it includes neither the raw astrological data, the horoscopes he worked with, especially his own, nor, except incidentally and tangentially, does it include Cardano's specific moves of interpretation point by point through those astrological data. It is a frustrating omission that Cardano's natal horoscope is not included, nor are data provided to allow us to reconstruct it, and we are given only the most incidental indications of how he interpreted it, which is clearly not a theme of particular interest for Grafton. It is exactly at this point that we are brought up short by an inherent limitation in the analysis: it appears not to occur to Grafton that the astrological interpretations must necessarily be, both in themselves and in the way they have been employed, the most primary of raw data for an insight into Cardano's understanding of his astrological cosmos. The missing horoscope is eloquent: we learn much of interest about Cardano from these researches, but as to Cardano the astrologer, the figure remains obscure.

Prejudicial knowledge: Cardano's fortieth year
As an indication of what can be lost when the astrological raw materials are ignored, we need only turn to Cardano's own understanding of his life, in the De Vita Propria Liber. He speaks eloquently of his opportunistic nature and of his early ambition to seek fame; he also observes that his own early knowledge of astrology hurt him:

Here are details of the damaging failed prediction which must have severely shaken his trust:

Despite its significance, Grafton does not discuss this crisis of interpretation. On observing Cardano's horoscope, it will not take a proficient astrologer, renaissance or modern, long to discern the simple outline of the prejudicial knowledge. In his natal horoscope his ascendant is at 6°10' of Taurus and (according to his computation) Saturn is at 25°28' of Gemini; the ascendant is directed to the conjunction of Saturn, without latitude, by an arc of direction of 39¼°. The classical Ptolemaic equation of arc to time of a degree for a year was adopted by all astrologers of Cardano's day. The arc of direction of the ascendant to Saturn therefore measures 39¼ years: that is why Cardano says 'I would not pass my fortieth year'. The symbolism is transparent. Saturn, the greater malefic, is anaretic, that is, a destroyer of life. When the primary significator of life, the ascendant itself, joins this evil planet, there will be death. However misplaced Cardano felt his earlier understanding to be, he appears to have structured his view of his life around this event and its signification, with the result that the life we now read about is ordered by Cardano's view of Saturn, and the melancholy shadow it casts backwards from his fortieth year. It is a story of a life in two halves. As Jean Stoner observes in her introduction to the De Vita:

That Cardan's forty-year struggle with poverty, disgrace and ill health should have left a deeper mark upon the man than his swift rise to fame and affluence is natural. We are permitted to trace every step of the difficult road down to that nadir of need when Cardan 'ceased to be poor' because he 'had nothing left to lose,' but we are scarcely aware of the swift turns of success whereby, after 1539, he became the most popular, fashionable and sought-after physician in North Italy.

Inexpressible complexity
The play of symbolism in the astrologer's imagination is the missing dimension in Grafton's study. Much of what follows in this review develops this critique. I regret having to sound such a negative note, which scarcely does justice to the substantial and painstaking scholarship Grafton has undertaken in bringing Cardano to life and placing him in his intellectual and social milieu. The problem of the missing astrology has to be addressed however, both for the sake of the astrologer and the history of culture. No doubt despite the author's best intentions, with the core of the astrologer's imagination downvalued or missing, the astrologer becomes a hollow man, and we are left with a surface of ambition, vanity, boastfulness, credulity, trickery and intellectual self-deception. This is reflected by the status of astrology in the text. Bits of astrology are scattered throughout, but apart from a couple of useful instances they are generally too slight to allow the astrologically educated reader to get to grips with Cardano's understanding. As so often happens in historical studies involving astrology, where symbolism is quoted it is not usually integral to the historical argument; like the occasional illustration of horoscopes the bits of astrology seem to be embellishments to the text, or alternatively curiosities (what odd things these people believed!).
           

Inevitably, the missing dimension renders an essential part of Cardano's practice of astrology incomprehensible to us, and Grafton falls into the habit of a generation of historians before him, in positing an unfathomable and even absurd complexity to astrological judgment. We learn that when Cardano fudged his data to make the symbolism fit, 'from his own point of view... he was simply operating in full awareness that horoscope interpretation required an inexpressibly complex, partly intuitive balancing of factors'[p121]. For the post-Enlightenment interpreter, guided by an assumption amounting to certainty that there never was, and never could be, any real substance of knowledge in astrology, then every manipulation made by an astrologer is a castle built on the sands of an illusory epistemology. Inexpressible complexity arises from the artful astrologer's attempts to weave substance out of fiction, and interpret and rationalise something that was never truly there.
           

Given such complexity, the master astrologer is located as akin to an initiate in the mysteries, for no ordinary reader or student could hope to negotiate the impossibilities of the art. Grafton's view here is close in spirit to that of Tamsyn Barton, in her study of astrology under the Roman Empire. He refers to her thesis that 'the labyrinthine technical complexity of ancient astrology - its emphasis on the multiple intersection of stellar and planetary influences, impossible to analyze fully in any written text - served above all to reinforce the astrologer's authority, since no amateur could hope to reach the jewel at the center of the maze without expert guidance.' [p145]
           

This image of an interpretive labyrinth founded ultimately on illusion provides the underpinning for Grafton's intimation that 'methodological incoherence' is characteristic of Cardano's work.[p89] We can see that one must follow as a consequence of the other. The comment is made in the context of a case that is instructive to follow through. Grafton cites criticisms from a reader's marginalia appearing in a copy of the 1547 edition of Cardano's collection. He explains that one of Cardano's standard practices 'consisted of using one or two aphoristic statements about the powers and effects of individual planets and configurations to identify the central features of a geniture, without explaining what criteria defined the aphorisms in question as the most relevant ones to the case in question'. Cardano informs us that Mars appearing in a prominent position tends to cause violent death. Yet, as the dissatisfied reader observed, in the horoscope of the poet and humanist Poliziano, with Mars lord of the ascendant but opposing the ascendant from the seventh house, Cardano interpreted this instance of a prominent Mars as showing that Poliziano lived away from his native land, with no mention of the fact that he did not die by violence.

Fit signification and astrological judgment
The attitude of our marginalia critic - and also, we suspect, of Anthony Grafton - bears on the role of the aphorism, both in Cardano and in the astrological tradition as a whole. It is a common misunderstanding to assume that the aphorism is a type of axiom, as if it is a rule or first principle of interpretation, or is directly derived from a first principle. It takes a minimum of reflection or practical experience to demolish this suggestion; we shall soon run across horoscopes that do not bear out such an axiom, as with Poliziano and his non-violent death. A more plausible possibility is to assume that aphorisms represent more or less strong indicators or probabilities of the occurrence of whatever they signify, and there is some evidence that Cardano may have seen them this way. In this case the astrologer has to apply an intuitive synthesis of potentially relevant aphorisms to arrive at a judgment. However, the approaches discussed above assume that the aphorism embodies a top-down determination of stellar influence, with the aphorism occupying a place close to the epistemological first principles of astrology, producing through the symbolic form described by the aphorism its effect - or tendency to an effect - in the world below.
           

However, we get a rather different picture if we examine closely how in practice Cardano has employed his aphorisms. I suspect that it is in the demonstration of this practice, which may be termed 'fitting signification', that he has been innovative, and this may be the quality that helps to explain why his horoscope collection (like that of Guarico after him) should capture the imagination of astrologers of his day. In these examples, rather than a top-down determination we find a bottom-up demonstration, a move of induction from the particular salient feature of the life story under discussion, to the fit signification in the horoscope of that native.
           

To return to the marginalia debate, the symbolist, ancient or modern, will immediately recognise that 'Mars prominent' is a fit signification for violence and a violent death for those cases in which there has been violence or a violent death. The obvious symbolism is that Mars is a slayer, a bringer of death, as well as being a bringer of war and aggression. Taken together these associations 'over-determine' the aphorism linking Mars prominent with violent death.
           

Poliziano did not die a violent death, and a quite different salient feature engages Cardano: the fact that the poet lived away from his native land. Any astrologer will immediately appreciate his move: the lord of the ascendant opposite the ascendant (and therefore in detriment by sign) is a fit signification for one who is not in his own place. Here are some of the associations of symbolism that when compounded serve to overdetermine Cardano's interpretation: the ruler of the ascendant shows the native, but it is both in opposition aspect to his own place (the ascendant) and is in its own opposite sign (detrimented or alienato); this is the fit signification for Poliziano's alienation from his natural place.
           

It has been necessary to labour these essentially simple examples of interpretation to arrive at a significant conclusion which would otherwise remain obscure if we followed the opinions of some of our historians. The conclusion is that far from being arbitrary and unmethodical, far from being unfathomable and impossibly complex, Cardano's interpretations are relatively simple and show a coherent and consistent method, recognisable to any other astrologer.

The question arises of the purpose of demonstrating such significations, especially if their ex post facto nature, and their dependence on the unique and contingent circumstance of the native, reduces their universality as axioms. This topic requires a more extensive analysis than can be attempted here, but an indication can be suggested. First we observe that the move of 'fit signification' is fundamental to effective astrological interpretation. Further, Cardano appears fully aware of the problem of 'infinite interpretation' flowing from a top-down axiomatic approach to the 'rules of astrology'; infinite interpretation points to the impossibility of deciding exactly how an astrological doctrine or a particular element of symbolism might manifest in the subject-matter to which the horoscope is supposed to refer. There is a practically limitless array of possible ways in which 'Mars prominent' could show itself in real life. The student will, however, flounder perpetually and never move beyond contradictory theoretical speculations until he sees symbolism working, and the primary moment of seeing it working is the recognition of the true fitness of signification in the unique and particular case. The recognition is comparable to an aesthetic appreciation. Cardano's simple observations are rooted in salient features in life matched to fit significations in the horoscope; they ensure that once seen, the student will have a sense of what it is like for symbolism to work and spring to life. This is known only by encountering it in practice. Its principle cannot be axiomatically propounded, and it cannot therefore be directly taught in a textbook; it can however be demonstrated in actual cases and examples, and this we may infer is what Cardano has attempted to do. He explains that he 'did not add any of these genitures without due consideration or a significant cause, since each of them had some remarkable property or other'[p66]. This type of demonstration requires us to work from the detail of life and the world as significant, back to the astrology that shows it, rather than from the astrology to the world. We should not be surprised that, as Grafton observes, Cardano proceeds 'without explaining what criteria defined the aphorisms in question as the most relevant ones to the case in question'. Such an explanation would be appropriate for a top-down deduction from first principles, showing how the particular case is to be brought into accord with those principles. By contrast, the demonstration of fit signification involves a move which is the inverse of speculative deduction from an axiom.

Radical interpretation and the poetics of astrology
By distinguishing the move of fit signification from the move of deduction from the axiom, I have argued the case that, as with the classical tradition of astrology taken as a whole, there is evidence of simplicity and coherence in Cardano's interpretations. It is worth considering why this simplicity so eludes many historians. One likelihood is that our view of science and rationality inclines us to think that axiomatic constructions, where particulars flow in a sequence of logical connections from primary causes, are necessary building blocks in any true system of knowledge. This is a view with a lineage that can be traced at least back to Aristotle, and the scientific enlightenment has not shaken it. For astrology in particular there is a hermeneutic penalty that goes with this axiomatic understanding: namely, the profusion of possible primary causes imposes an impossible calculus on practical interpretation, where each bit of astrological signification compounds with, contradicts or cancels out each other bit of signification, resulting in Barton's labyrinth of the initiates and Grafton's inexpressible complexity.
           

There is another move we can make which may help us understand the symbolic world of the classical, medieval and renaissance astrologers. This is to recognise that astrology has always had more in common with poetry than it has with science; and the idea of astrology as poetic and metaphoric language has been well argued by Ann Geneva. If we take the language analogy, then we observe that the astrologer's interpretation is not a piecemeal bit-by-bit affair, but involves a holistic process of radical interpretation, whereby the situation in the world is translated into the allegorical language of astrology, and back again. 'Radical interpretation' is a term used by Gerald L. Bruns, adapted from the concept of 'radical translation' defined by the philosopher W.V.O. Quine as translation between two languages not joined by cognate values. The attempt to make an ordinary-language rendering of the world from horoscope symbols is a perfect example of translation between non-cognate systems. Such translation proceeds contextually, not bit by bit or word by word, but passage by passage or at the very least sentence by sentence. It requires the astrologer to see a whole configuration in the horoscope all of a piece, and to set it as a metaphor or allegory of a particular description of the world. Cardano's interpretation of Poliziano's exile matches this holistic move.

The lexicon of astrology's significations constitutes an internally coherent field of interconnected meanings, and this is what has to be 'mastered' by the student in his or her study of astrological doctrine. When the astrologer finds the apt astrological phrase for the worldly condition, it is by virtue of the whole field of meanings, yet it is not determined in isolation at this or that point of contact by any one of those meanings. The act of interpetation is no more - and no less - mysterious than the act of the poet penning the perfect expression, or the act of the composer creating the perfect musical phrase. What is produced is often the epitome of simplicity and economy, yet these creative acts cannot be determined by an isolated rule of poetry and grammar, or by an isolated element of music theory. A notable feature of creative arts, like the art of astrology, is that they can be known and appreciated by the practitioner, but also by the educated reader or listener with a genuine commitment to that form. Similarly with the astrologer, who will know immediately whether another astrologer has made an apt or an inept interpretation.

So where does this leave the scholarly interpreter of such arts? Adopting this standpoint, it is reasonable to suggest that just as the historian of music had better not be tone deaf, and the historian of art would be well advised to enjoy looking at paintings, the historian of astrology needs to have genuine applied experience in an art of divination or symbolic interpetation, to have any hope of an authentic appreciation of a character such as Cardano, living and breathing in a world of signs and omens and the imaginative cosmos of astrology. Otherwise, our scholar will conceive that he or she has understood, but will in truth be ignorant.  

Geoffrey Cornelius

Endnotes