Despite their separate historical origins, the philosophical underpinnings of both astrology and witchcraft most likely stem from the unique human affinity for desiring control when the most uncontrollable forces of nature exert their influences on human affairs. Witchcraft, following the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum and the inauguration of the witch hunts, became a specific legal category: it began with heresy, developed into a crime specific to female implementation of maleficent magic, and came to encapsulate a homogeneous legal classification. The importance for the persecutors was less in the act and more in the perpetrators of the act. This was a battle that women could not win. Astrology had at least a tenuously established position in the history of Western science, and its removal from the discourse of medieval and early modern thought was not something anyone could do by simply passing a law. Astrology was part and parcel of much broader and more heterogeneous classifications—along with astronomy, astrologia encompassed the entirety of the study of the stars and it could not be dismantled piecemeal without damage being done to the whole. The important dichotomies were too difficult to disentangle and, in fact, were not disentangled until well into the early modern era. Certainly, astrology was denounced by patristic writers often appealing to weighty evidence from scripture, but it was always denounced for its contravening of free will rather than anything specific about the practice. One medieval dictum, attributed to Ptolemy, sums up the qualified acceptance of astrology by medieval Christian scholars: “Sapiens homo dominabitur astris: The wise man will be master of the stars.”[1] However, witchcraft was the particular persecution of one segment of society, and women were far easier to track and harass than those practicing forms of astrology. Astrology, in general, survived only so long as it was taken to be a science, and after new advances in physics and astronomy disproved most of its premises, it quietly faded from the Western consciousness as a serious academic discourse. Religious authorities, on the other hand, attempted to forcibly remove witchcraft. One could argue appealing to rational discourse that the manifestations of God and astrological processes worked in concert with each other, whereas witches were interpreted as working in concert with demons. Despite the fact that judicial astrology and witchcraft possessed striking practical similarities, the ultimate nature of their practices and the medieval and early modern visions of the cosmos saved the former and condemned the latter.
[1] Tester, A History of Western Astrology, p. 177. Though it can be found no where in Ptolemy's writings, this was quoted by dozens of medieval writers and Tester gives several specific examples that can be found in the works of Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Gerard of Cremona, and Robert Recorde to name but a few.
So, there's the paper. I hope those of you who stuck around for the whole thing enjoyed it. As I mentioned, I've been working on it off and on for literally four years and for the most part it has been a labor of love. This is a pretty good barometer of my intellectual and academic interests, and I hope to explore this topic further and much more in depth while in graduate school. I may try to post more on the topic in the future as well.
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