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Reviewing a book on astrology, I thought I would be reaching for words like ‘symbolic’ or ‘projection’ and would be forgiven for that. This book, by its very inadequacies, made me decide to use its material to look at some of the issues that get talked of in connection with astrology.
It is possible to take an historical approach. Until Renaissance science cut away its intellectual foundation, astrology was omnipresent in the various cultures of the world. It linked rich and poor, educated and ignorant. Of course, each group or individual used the body of folklore, myth, wisdom and prediction in a different way—from fairground fortune-telling to decide when to build a bridge or sow a crop to abstract speculation on the nature of the universe. This approach is the one Mr Kenton follows most strongly and his thirty-odd pages of introduction form an admirable compression of knowledge.
Another way of proceeding is to consider astrology from a philosophical or metaphysical angle. The main appeal of this way of thinking was and is that it permits a linking of things