A Vibrant Celestial Atlas For Astrologers
- March 1, 2020
- 8:32 am
- One Comment
- Occult
Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660), celestial atlas for astrologers from the Dutch Golden Age of cartography, maps the structure of the heavens in twenty-nine extraordinary double-folio spreads. We are presented with the motions of the celestial bodies, the stellar constellations of the northern hemisphere, the old geocentric universe of Ptolemy, the newish heliocentric one of Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe’s eccentric combination of the two in a celestial atlas for astrologers — in which the Moon orbits the Earth, and the planets orbit the Sun, but the Sun still orbits the Earth. The marginal area of each brightly coloured map is a hive of activity: astronomers bent over charts debate their findings, eager youngsters direct their quadrants skywards, and cherubs fly about with pet birds in tow.
a celestial atlas for astrologers
The Celestial Atlas of Andreas Cellarius (1660)
The life of the Dutch-German creator of the folio, Andreas Cellarius, has only come down to us in skeleton form in his celestial atlas for astrologers. He was born around 1596 in a small town near Worms and spent his adult life as a schoolmaster in Amsterdam, the Hague and finally Hoorn. Around 1637 he was appointed rector of a Latin school in Hoorn where he wrote the Harmonia Macrocosmica and all his other scholarly works (including one on designing impregnable fortifications).
Intended as a historical introduction for two-volume treatise on cosmography, only this first part, printed by the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius in 1660, was ever realised. In 1708, some forty years or so after Cellarius’ death, the Amsterdam publishers Gerard Valk and Petrus Schenk the Younger published a version just containing the plates, and it is this later edition from which many of the images in this post come.
share | the aquarius bus
You also might be interested...
Aleister Crowley’s Elusive Esoteric Thoth Tarot
the hermetic order of the golden dawn There may be more divination card decks on the market than kombucha flavors, and they just keep coming
Interpretation of an astrological chart with cheat sheet
a free astrology video series This is the first in a video series teaching the interpretation of an astrological chart. This includes a description of
Find anything interesting?
Join others and get timely updates delivered straight to your inbox when we post unique content!
Cool atlas! I think every one is getting more from this web
site.