Our planet is immersed in a seemingly invisible yet exotic and inherently hostile environment. Influenced by Abu Ma‘shar, Heydon’s adoption of astral causation and homocentricity as bases for his epistemological approach to astrology enabled him and other seventeenth- century astrologers to “naturalise” its theory as a response to the compromised theoretical integrity of astrology in a heliocentric universe. Though set in a geocentric universe, the location of the earth is irrelevant and the homocentricity of astrology is emphasized. Astrology becomes the etiological study of the inclinations of terrestrial events as a result of the astral/formal links. In his Al-Madkhal al-Kabir, Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi (787-886), influential throughout the Renaissance, proposed a unique theory of astral influences according to which the heavenly bodies are efficient causes, not just signs, of generation and change. This paper will discuss the appropriation of medieval Arabic notions of astral causation in seventeenth-century English defences of astrology, paying special attention to the Defence of Judiciall Astrologie by Sir Christopher Heydon (1561- 1623).
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