Abstract
The history of astrology and the history of the extraterrestrial life debate are largely kept separate, for reasons both chronological and historiographical. In fact, there was a large period of overlap in which many historical actors seriously considered and wrote on the concepts of both celestial influence and celestial inhabitation. The history of astrobiology, understood broadly as the study of ‘life in a cosmic context’, offers a potential avenue for exploring the relationships between astrology and cosmic pluralism in the early modern period. The two main theses of the book are presented: (a) that evolving theories of celestial influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries encouraged speculation about extraterrestrial life, and (b) that as the seventeenth century progressed, certain thinkers began to consciously oppose the concepts of influence and inhabitation as rival teleological models for astronomical cosmology, with the latter emerging triumphant. The rest of the chapter comprises a literature review, a section on terminology, and a section on methodology, assessing the usefulness of Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’ and Lovejoy’s ‘unit-ideas’ in approaching the subject matter.
Astrobiology recognises that it is difficult to develop a full understanding of life on Earth without understanding its links to the cosmic environment.
(Cockell 2015, 4)
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On this topic, see also Leunissen 2009.
- 4.
For the modern history of astrobiology, see Dick and Strick 2005.
- 5.
NASA operates in tandem with many partner agencies and organisations. As a starting point, see the NASA Astrobiology website. Homepage, Astrobiology, https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ [accessed 10 November 2017].
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‘astro-, comb. form’, OED Online. Oxford University Press [accessed 12 January 2017].
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The French still use the term ‘exobiologie’.
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This is not to say that the use of ‘astrobiology’ as a disciplinary title implies that it has anything in common per se with historical or contemporary usages that are largely incongruent. The point is rather that the combination of the two roots ‘astro’ and ‘bio’ can signify various different ideas and activities, and we might draw interesting comparisons between them.
- 11.
On this point, see Chalmers 2016, 28: ‘Our current knowledge provides us with a way of putting questions to history, a strategy that need not be problematic provided there are ways of ensuring that it is history that provides the answers.’
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In his review of the English translation of Guthke’s Der Mythos der Neuzeit, David Lux alluded to the dangers of treating history as a ‘pursuit of origins’, an approach championed by the ‘New History’ school of the early twentieth century: ‘As critics of the New History pointed out all too clearly, an avowed presentism very often yields a telescopic effect, one in which the historian’s emphasis on modernity and progress can overpower important subtleties and nuances of historical action’ (Lux 1994, 121). The pejoratives ‘antiquarian’ and ‘presentist’ are used here only for rhetorical purposes, to highlight the potential benefits of a conjoined and comparative history. There is of course an irony in proposing an early modern history of astrobiology as an antidote to presentism. It is left to the reader to judge whether this is a useful hypocrisy.
- 13.
Paolo L. Rossi argued that the history of the dispute about inhabited worlds did not coincide with the narratives of either Lovejoy or Koyré, nor with the history of imaginary voyages, but was rather a history sui generis. See Rossi 1972, 157. The foundational text for histories of lunar voyage literature is Nicolson 1948.
- 14.
The English translation has an altered title: Karl Siegfried Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction (Guthke 1990).
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This idea is not original to Guthke. See Chernyshova 2004 [1972].
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The phrase ‘disenchantment of the world’ comes from the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). For an introduction to the historiography of disenchantment, see Walsham 2008.
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See also Hutchison 1982.
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You could of course say that astrology was the myth of pre-modern times. For an interesting discussion of myth and science more generally, see Carroll 1980.
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The depiction of astrology as the foolish daughter of astronomy was made by Kepler in his Tertius interveniens (1610). See Kepler 1937–, IV, 161.
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For a discussion of the terminology, see Rutkin 2002, 20–22.
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Christie, J.E. (2019). Introduction: Astrology, Extraterrestrial Life and Astrobiology. In: From Influence to Inhabitation. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 228. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22169-0_1
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