His astrological colleagues were another matter. Lilly seemingly suffered no angst from attacks by the scientific scolds and religious fanatics of his day indeed, many of them sought his services. We may also covet his evident comfort with his metaphysical assumptions about why his astrology worked. Obviously, his busy (and lucrative) practice -in his heyday, he saw over two thousand clients a year- would be the envy of many contemporary astrologers. It seems our pictures of Lilly fill a need, but which need exactly? Certainly he reminds us of astrology's high water mark during its last great flowering in the West, when his advice and counsel was sought by men in the corridors of power and women wondering whether they would find a husband or recover one who had wandered off. It is not too much to say, that readers today have their choice of Lillys, from Thomas's assured and busy metropolitan professional, to Bernard Capp's “man of ingenuity but questionable ethics”, to Derek Parker's mildly roguish practitioner of the “now generally discredited” branch of horary astrology, to the divinatory savant of Geoffrey Cornelius, to Ann Geneva's master propagandist and political manipulator, to Patrick Curry's spokesperson for English culture's “radicalized and self-conscious elements”, to nearly everybody's consummate rule maker and horary practitioner.” 1 In recent years, Christian Astrology has been usefully annotated it has also been lovingly satirized, worshipped and described by Nick Campion as “an uncontroversial book, little different in tone and assumptions to so many previous works.” 2 What is the interested reader to do?Įver since the publication of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic in 1971, but especially with the republication of William Lilly's Christian Astrology in 1985, books about this singular astrologer and his work have issued from the presses with an almost saturnine regularity.
A third book, a richly annotated edition of Lilly's autobiography provides support for both views. Was William Lilly (1602-1681) the quintessential everyman's astrologer, or the last in the line of magus-practitioners whose true accomplishments are largely hidden from view? More pointedly, was he a technically gifted astrologer with a shameless talent for self promotion, or a serious occult practitioner, whose most famous predictions owed more to the hermetic arts than astrological skill? This appears to be the dichotomy presented by two recent books on England's most famous astrologer.
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