A brief history of Western Astrology

The history of astrology in Europe is closely linked to that of astronomy, of which it is, in the words of Voltaire, "the foolish daughter of a wise mother" (Traité sur la tolérance, 1767). And if today the two disciplines are perfectly distinct, astronomy being a science and astrology a divinatory art, the distinction was for a long time much less clear. It should be remembered that astronomy had its muse, just like poetry, dance or song, that the boundary between ars and scientia was blurred throughout the Middle Ages and that astrology shares the same suffix with philology, sociology and biology, which are, unlike it, defined as sciences.