Nicholas Campion
University of Wales, Lampeter

Modern, Premodern or Postmodern: Astrology’s Place in Historical Periodisation

External critics of astrology, as well as some internal commentators, have struggled to define astrology’s relationship with the modern world. To Enlightenment philosophers and nineteenth-century anthropologists it was premodern, its strange survival in the modern world being an anachronism, posing a problem for scholars to explain using models of social marginality or psychological inadequacy. To contemporary sociologists it is usually postmodern, a reaction to the modern which is generally seen as a product either of social marginality or psychological inadequacy. For some who are sympathetic to astrology, though, the escape from modernity into postmodernity is viewed positively, liberating astrology from what are seen as the oppressive and distorting norms of modernity. This paper will suggest that all three positions are based on the notion of a single ‘astrology’ conforming to a single ‘truth’ about the nature of modernity, and will argue that most twenty-first century astrology is modernist in nature and modern in its historical affiliation.

Nicholas Campion is Director of the Sophia Centre, University of Wales, Lampeter, senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, and course director of the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. His books include A History of Western Astrology (London: Continuum, 2009) and Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2011).