Cardano's Astrology and Panpsychism

years. Cardano's idea, which drives him to enter such dangerous territory as the birth of the savior, is to find an authoritative and undoubted confirmation of astrological practice. Cardano realizes that apocalyptic astrological predictions and confessional struggles have damaged the relationship between the Catholic Church and Astrology. Astrology appears increasingly impoverished and the Catholic Church is precisely at this moment reorganizing with the Council of Trent and questioning what positions to take regarding the practice. For Cardano, the publication of Christ's Horoscope is the solution to the problem of authority and validity of Astrology. It is the divinity of Christ himself that confirms the value of astrology and Ptolemy's work. In Christ's natal horoscope, ten extraordinary and very rare signs are found that would confirm the extraordinariness of the character: And these are the ten singular and very rare elements of his birth: from whose almost divine concurrence an image of his works, so marvelous, established by eternal order, was shown in advance [...] What remains to be said then except that Ptolemy, who perhaps never saw this birth chart, composed his book, to confirm the art, so that it would agree with it. I don't understand what could be said more foolish, or devised more absurd. Unfortunately, Cardano's hope is misplaced and not only will his publication not achieve the hoped-for result of refounding judicial astrology and bringing it closer to the Catholic Church, which will declare it banned not even ten years later with the previously cited bull of the Council of Trent, but it will actually achieve the opposite effect. In 1570, with the implementation of the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition accuses Cardano of heresy and imprisons him according to a mechanism that would certainly have led him to much more serious problems if there had not been the providential intermediation of his friend Carlo Borromeo. Cardano manages to avoid death with a few months of imprisonment and a private abjuration on some points of his De rerum varietate. Cardano's Panpsychism The hoped-for astrological reform and its reassimilation by the Church will therefore never happen, however Cardano himself is at the origin of a philosophical movement whose influence will be felt later in the future of astrology: panpsychism. Girolamo Cardano was indeed the first philosopher after more than a millennium to explicitly propose a panpsychic philosophy in his De Natura and De Subtilitate. In his ontological system Cardano identifies every individual reality under three aspects: as part of the whole; as unity in itself; as compositions of sub-parts; The fundamental principle maintaining the unity of each part is identified by Cardano as the soul. It as a unifying and vivifying principle is therefore present in all things, indeed it is one of the three principles of the universe as he himself will say in his famous autobiography. In the universe we must distinguish three principles: space, matter, the soul of the world. For Cardano, the world soul covers the same function in nature that the particular soul covers in man. As man's soul organizes, vivifies and maintains the unity of the various parts of the body, in the same way all things are supported, vivified and united by the world soul. Similar doctrines were already widespread in the Renaissance as in Pico della Mirandola and in Francesco Giorgi probably in reference to some Jewish doctrines that had spread in that period as witnessed by a letter from Trevignano to Giorgi himself: You interpret according to the most secret doctrine of the Jews, that God would have first created a universal soul from which he would have subsequently drawn particular souls as from a mass of molten glass glasses are drawn. However, in Cardano the World Soul is not only relative to men but to all created beings. Everything that exists participates in this universal soul and everything in a certain way has its own soul, the universe in synthesis forms a Pan Psychia, to use Francesco Patrizi's expression who will develop the concept reintroduced by Cardano. The idea of panpsychism shifts attention in a certain way from what is external to man to what instead happens within some remote region of his consciousness. In particular, this also happens in the case of Astrology. After the advent of the Counter-Reformation, the interest and range of action of astrology shifts from an exterior and material dimension to a predominantly psychological and spiritual dimension. The End of Judicial Astrology Around the mid-16th century, therefore, the church found itself having to face two uncontrollable phenomena originating from astrology. With the spread of printing, astrology had become a mass phenomenon that, without control, could lead to easy changes of front and polarizations of public opinion potentially dangerous, as demonstrated by the event of the missed Flood, the return of Christ and confessional struggles. On the other hand, philosophical astrology that joined magical and hermetic movements that in some cases of understanding appeared in contrast with ecclesiastical positions and could lead to a distancing from Church life. Thus in the Council of Trent, the famous council held from 1545 to 1563 to reorganize the fate of the Church threatened by the rise of Protestant reform, the Church decided to change its attitude towards astrology and doctrines or practices related to it. With a resolution of 1563, the Church therefore sanctioned its will in the "control of astrological discourse": Bishops must also pay great attention that books, treatises or catalogs of judicial astrology that dare to affirm the certain occurrence of future events or casual situations or actions that depend on human will are neither read nor possessed. On the other hand, classifications and natural observations written for the benefit of navigation, agriculture, medicine are permitted. Council of Trent with the resolution of December 4, 1563. It should be specified that the move of this first bull sanctioned by the Council of Trent did not have the immediate intention of completely crushing judicial astrology, but rather that of placing control over it.