This book is divided int three parts. Part 1 is an edited transcript of a day seminar on the history of astrology I gave on 22 March 1992 for the Centre of Psychological Astrology (CPA) in London. The text provides a summary of the development of that western strand of astrology which originated in the sky-reading practices of Mesopotamia, progressed via the philosophy, mathematics, geometry and soul-theory of the classical Greeks, to the development of complex horoscopes, Roman astral religion, Christianity and Islam, through to Medieval Europe, the Renaissance, and popular astrology in the twentieth century.  

Part 2 is an edited transcript of a seminar I gave for the CPA on 10 March 1996 and Part 3 is a reproduction of a chapter I published in 1989 in The Astrology of the Macrocosm, edited by Joan McEvers, titled ‘The Age of Aquarius: A Modern Myth’. In Part 2 I explore the western claim that history can be divided into set epochs, and the prophecy that a future New Age (or Kingdom of God, or other utopia) is about to begin. In Part 3 I examine belief in the Aquarian Age as an example of this kind of perpetual philosophy. Astrological ideas about the basis and beginning of the age are diverse, and there is no agreement about it. I end by citing the German astrologer Walter Koch (p. 156) who concluded that: ‘All announcements about supposed Aquarian tendencies of the present are only wishful beliefs and expectations for the future, but not reality for today’.