Can astrology serve as an organ of providence?
"And if we cannot deny but that God hath given virtues to springs and fountains, to cold earth, to plants and stones, minerals, and to the excremental parts of the basest living creatures, why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers? For, seeing they are many in number and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think that in the treasury of his wisdom who is infinite there can be wanting, even for every star, a peculiar virtue and operation ; as every herb, plant, fruit, and flower adorning the face of the earth hath the like. For as these were not created to beautify the earth alone and to cover and shadow her dusty face but otherwise for the use of man and beast to feed them and cure them; so were not those uncountable glorious bodies set in the firmament to no other end than to adorn it but for instruments and organs of his divine providence, so far as it hath pleased his just will to determine."
/Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, 1614/
But how closely can astrology predict such things as disasters, devastations, scourges, wars and so on? There are examples when astrologers are rather accurate in their prophecies. On the other hand, some of such "predictions" are far from the truth.
One of Europe's greatest calamities-the Black Death of 1348-was foreseen by two medieval astrologers. John of Bassigney, an English scholar writing in the 1340s, proclaimed that in the year 1352 (a few years late), a pestilence would cover the whole world that would kill about two thirds of the population. His prediction, he said, rested partly on information that he had obtained from other scholars on his travels, and partly on his study of the stars. (It should be mentioned that almost all of John's predictions concerned disasters, devastations, scourges, wars, and the like.)
Another 14th-century scholar, England's John of Eschenden, is supposed to have predicted the Black Death from an eclipse of the Moon and certain planetary conjunctions that occurred in 1345. He stated that the effects of the eclipse would last for eight years and six months, during which time "men and beasts will suffer long diseases and there will be death and many wars and flight; . . . great corruption in the air, and great scarcity of crops from excessive cold and rains and worms."