Today astrology lives in Instagram stories and newspaper columns. For most of history, it lived in throne rooms and war councils. The degradation is recent. The pedigree is not.
What follows is a short history of astrology as a strategic instrument — the kind of tool that emperors and popes and billionaires kept close, and that no one advertised.
Babylon: State Property
The oldest surviving astrological texts are not personal horoscopes. They are advisories to a king.
The Enūma Anu Enlil is a collection of roughly 70 tablets compiled in Babylonia, with roots going back to approximately 1800 BCE. The tablets catalog celestial omens — eclipses, planetary positions, meteor showers — and their significance for the kingdom. The emphasis is entirely on collective and state affairs: the fate of the harvest, the outcome of military campaigns, the health of the dynasty.
Babylonian astrologers (ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil, “scribes of the Enūma Anu Enlil”) were court officials. They submitted written reports to the king describing current celestial conditions and their probable implications. The correspondence archive of the Assyrian kings from around 700 BCE, preserved in Nineveh, contains hundreds of such reports — memos from specialists to heads of state.
Ordinary people did not consult these specialists. They consulted local diviners for minor matters. The systematic observation of the heavens, the trained interpretation of planetary behavior, was royal infrastructure. It belonged to the state the way a treasury did.
Rome: Dangerous Knowledge
The Roman relationship with astrology was complicated by how seriously Rome took it.
Augustus — Rome’s first emperor — had his birth sign, Capricorn, minted on coins. His biographer Suetonius records that he used the sign as his personal seal and published his natal horoscope publicly. His successor Tiberius kept an astrologer, Thrasyllus of Mendes, as a close personal advisor throughout his reign. Thrasyllus’s predictions reportedly saved his own life: Tiberius, about to have him thrown off a cliff to test his accuracy, stayed his hand when Thrasyllus predicted the arrival of a favorable ship — which appeared.
The Roman Senate periodically expelled astrologers from Rome. The first formal expulsion was in 139 BCE. The last major one came under Diocletian in 294 CE. These expulsions were not the actions of skeptics. They were the actions of rulers who understood that a skilled astrologer advising a rival faction represented a genuine threat to political power. If an astrologer could tell you when to act and when to wait, that was military intelligence.
The ban on astrology in the late Roman Empire was, in an oblique way, a measure of its influence.
India: A Limb of the Vedas
Jyotiṣa — the name itself means “science of light” — is classified in Sanskrit scholarship not as occult practice but as a Vedāṅga: a limb of the Vedas, as essential to the tradition as grammar or phonetics or ritual procedure. It is, within the classical framework, a technical discipline on the same plane as astronomy.
The evidence in the classical texts is consistent. The Arthaśāstra — Kauṭilya’s treatise on statecraft from roughly the 4th century BCE — includes the astrologer (jyotiṣika) among the specialists a king should maintain at court. The Navaratna — “nine jewels” — that traditionally adorned a Hindu royal court included the Jyotiṣī as one of nine essential advisors, alongside the poet, the minister, and the commander.
The most cited example is Varāhamihira (roughly 505–587 CE), who served at the court of Vikramāditya. His Bṛhat Saṃhitā — an encyclopedic work covering astronomy, astrology, architecture, agriculture, and statecraft — was addressed explicitly to rulers and administrators, not to private individuals seeking personal guidance. Varāhamihira was not a mystic performing readings. He was a scholar synthesizing a technical tradition for practical application.
The selection of an auspicious moment — muhūrta — for major events (coronations, the founding of cities, the signing of treaties, military departures) was routine practice at Indian courts for over a thousand years. It was not optional. It was part of correct statecraft.
The Islamic Golden Age: An Elected Capital
When the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur decided to found a new capital in 762 CE, he did not simply choose a site and begin building. He commissioned astrological advice on the date to lay the first brick.
The astrologer responsible was Nawbakht, assisted by Māshā’allāh ibn Atharī. Their elected chart for the founding of Baghdad — Madīnat al-Salām, “City of Peace” — was calculated to favor the duration and prosperity of the empire. The city was built according to that election. The Abbasid Caliphate, founded on that date in that location, lasted for five centuries.
This was not unusual for Islamic courts of the period. Al-Kindi (801–873 CE) and Abū Maʿshar (787–886 CE) — the two most influential astrologers of the Islamic Golden Age — were court intellectuals in Baghdad, regarded as philosophers and scientists as much as diviners. Abū Maʿshar’s Kitāb al-mudkhal al-kabīr (Great Introduction to Astrology) was later translated into Latin and became foundational to medieval European astrological practice. The knowledge transmission was deliberate: Islamic scholars preserved and extended Hellenistic and Indian astrological theory, and European scholars sought that knowledge out.
John Dee and Elizabeth I
John Dee (1527–1608) was a mathematician, cartographer, cryptographer, and natural philosopher — the kind of polymath who, in the 16th century, saw no contradiction between calculating planetary positions and calculating the trajectories of navigational routes. He served as a scientific advisor to Elizabeth I.
Dee chose the date for Elizabeth’s coronation on January 15, 1559, by astrological election. He selected a time he judged favorable for her reign. Elizabeth’s reign lasted 44 years. Whether the coronation election contributed to that longevity is a question no one can answer; what is not in question is that the practice was considered legitimate and was sought out by one of the most intellectually sophisticated monarchs in English history.
Dee was not a fringe figure. He corresponded with the leading mathematicians and navigators of his day. His library at Mortlake was one of the largest private collections in England. His inclusion of astrology in his practice reflected a coherent natural philosophy — the view, standard for the period, that celestial and terrestrial phenomena were systematically connected.
The Vatican Paradox
The Catholic Church has an official position against astrology. It has also had multiple popes who used it.
Sixtus IV (1471–1484) introduced astrology to the Vatican, reportedly consulting natal charts for political decisions. Julius II (1503–1513) used astrological timing to set the date of his coronation. Paul III (1534–1549) — who commissioned Michelangelo and convened the Council of Trent — scheduled consistories by planetary hours. Leo X, trained in part under the physician and astrologer Antonio Benivieni, maintained court astrologers throughout his papacy.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed under Julius II, contains imagery that scholars have identified as astrological: particular constellation groupings and planetary associations embedded in the iconographic program. Whether Michelangelo intended these as allegory, decoration, or genuine astrological signification is debated. Their presence is not.
The official ban and the private practice coexisted for centuries because the people who held institutional power found astrology useful, regardless of what they said about it publicly.
JP Morgan and Wall Street’s Private Timing
“Millionaires don’t use astrology; billionaires do.” The attribution to JP Morgan is probably apocryphal, or at least unverifiable. The relationship is not.
Evangeline Adams (1868–1932) was the most famous American astrologer of her era — famous enough to be prosecuted under New York’s fortune-telling law in 1914 and acquitted after the judge reportedly found her analysis of a horoscope she had prepared (without knowing it was his son’s chart) indistinguishable from “the work of a scientific analysis.” She attracted clients from finance, society, and the arts. Among them, according to her own account and several contemporaneous sources, was J. Pierpont Morgan.
The story, taken seriously or not, reflects something real about the private behavior of people with large amounts at stake. Public statements and private practices diverge. The same Wall Street executives who would never acknowledge consulting an astrologer were, in some documented cases, doing exactly that — because the question of timing is always relevant to the question of capital.
Reagan: Air Force One Departure Times
The Nancy Reagan case is not speculation or gossip. It is documented in a memoir by a White House official.
After the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan began regular consultations with Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer. According to Don Regan — Reagan’s Chief of Staff from 1985 to 1987 — Quigley’s advice influenced the scheduling of press conferences, the timing of presidential travel, and the departure times for Air Force One. Regan describes this in his 1988 memoir For the President’s Eyes Only, a source with no incentive to exaggerate the influence of astrology.
Quigley herself confirmed the relationship in her 1990 book What Does Joan Say? The astrological sessions apparently began as protective scheduling after the shooting and became institutionalized over the course of the second term.
The sitting president of the United States had his schedule influenced by a professional astrologer. This is not a story about superstition at the margins. It is a story about timing counsel at the center of power.
The Pattern
The pattern across these cases is not superstition. It is optionality.
The people with the most to lose — emperors deciding whether to march, caliphs founding capitals, CEOs timing acquisitions, presidents scheduling announcements — understood that a good decision at the wrong moment produces a different outcome than the same decision at the right moment. Timing is a variable. Managing timing is a skill. For most of recorded history, one school of thought about how to manage timing was astrological.
The shift from strategic counsel to mass entertainment happened in the 20th century, when newspapers began printing Sun-sign horoscopes for general audiences. The format required simplification to the point of uselessness. The depth disappeared. The audience became everyone — which is another way of saying the audience became no one in particular.
The Pañchāṅga Was Never a Horoscope
When Nawbakht elected the moment to found Baghdad, he was not consulting a Sun-sign column. He was computing the positions of the planets with the best tools available to him and applying accumulated classical doctrine to identify a moment of maximum favorable configuration.
The Pañchāṅga — the classical Hindu almanac — operates in the same tradition. It is a set of five calculated astronomical quantities that describe the quality of a given moment: the lunar day, the lunar mansion, the day of the week, the yoga, the karaṇa. These are measurable. They are computed. They are the raw material for a trained practitioner to assess timing — for a ceremony, a departure, a business decision, a medical intervention.
It was never a horoscope in the popular sense. It was an operating manual for navigating time — the kind of instrument that belonged in a palace library, not a newspaper column.
That is where we return it.