After him the abyss opened up, which he would surely have regarded as a more terrible thing than the religious disputes of his day. He was, quite simply, the last Western astronomer of note to believe in astrology. Like Ptolemy, Kepler regarded the twin themes of astronomy and astrology as being of equal interest and value - but he was the last of this tradition. With the passing of that generation they are never heard of again. They stopped with Kepler or with men like Fludd. Was it indeed the case, as one scornful academic has argued, that "Kepler's remedy was one of those that in the end kill the patient"? Historians seem agreed that Kepler's beliefs have had small effect upon posterity, being against the tide of events.Ĭould not endure nor gratify in an age of expanding experimentation … proved very shaky supports and were worth no more than straws to drowning men. That one of the great creative founders of modern science struggled for decades to relate together astronomy and astrology is a matter of no small importance. In recent years, however, modern translations of one of Kepler's seminal works on the theory of how astrology works have appeared, which have been made available for the first time to English readers a perspective on what he really believed. Very few of Kepler's astrological works have been translated into English down the centuries, which has permitted a radically one-sided interpretation of his work to flourish. At the quatercentenary of his De Stella Nova of 1606 about the new star and his theories of how astrology worked, this seems an appropriate time to re-examine the achievement. The year 1987 saw the first visible supernova since Kepler's star of 1604. Kepler's lifelong attempt to recast astrology within a harmonic-Pythagorean framework has relevance today.
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