Johan Bayer's celestial atlas, Uranometria,
was published in 1603 and therefore pre-dates the Age of the
Enlightenment by a good 50 years, if not more. And Newton was not yet
even born. Nevertheless, I think that the atlas is one of the harbingers
of what would be in the offering during the decades to come - the philosophy of a strictly organized,
gridded, partitioned, immutable universe - one that we can understand and
measure and chart, like we (supposedly) can anything else as well.
The irony for me is that this very condition which makes us the masters of the universe also constitutes the basis of Western astrology which decrees that we are the slaves of those very stars that we can measure and classify and thereby gain ascendancy over.
The flip side of the coin therefore says that we are nothing but the victims of our unchangeable fates/personalities which are cast by those self-same stars...
The irony for me is that this very condition which makes us the masters of the universe also constitutes the basis of Western astrology which decrees that we are the slaves of those very stars that we can measure and classify and thereby gain ascendancy over.
The flip side of the coin therefore says that we are nothing but the victims of our unchangeable fates/personalities which are cast by those self-same stars...
