William Lilly

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William Lilly (1602–1681) was the most prominent English astrologer of the seventeenth century, the author of Christian Astrology — the first major textbook of the art written in English rather than Latin — and the writer of a yearly almanac, Merlinus Anglicus, that sold in tens of thousands across the decades of the English Civil War. He came late and from nowhere to the work: a Leicestershire farmer’s son who arrived in London as a servant, married his employer’s widow, and only in his thirties took up the study of astrology under a succession of practitioners then working in the city.

His rise tracked the collapse of the censorship that had kept such material in check. When the press fell open in the 1640s, Lilly turned astrology into a public, partisan instrument. His almanacs read the heavens for the political moment, and they read them, for the most part, for Parliament; he was consulted, paid, and at times protected by men on the winning side, even as royalist astrologers answered him in print. Whether he believed his own forecasts or supplied what his patrons wanted is a question his contemporaries already asked, and one the surviving record does not settle.

Christian Astrology, published in 1647, is the work he is remembered by. It laid out the technical apparatus of judicial astrology — the casting and reading of figures for nativities and for specific questions, the branch called horary — in plain, teachable English, and it remained a reference for practitioners of the art long after his death. The title’s adjective was not incidental: Lilly presented the practice as compatible with Christian piety, a reading of providence rather than a rival to it, at a moment when many divines held it to be at best vain and at worst diabolical.

He is bound, in popular memory, to the Great Fire of London. A 1651 pamphlet of his carried an emblem showing a city in flames, and after the fire of 1666 he was summoned before a parliamentary committee to explain whether he had known of it in advance — or helped bring it about. He was dismissed without charge. The episode captures the ambiguous standing such figures held: taken seriously enough to be questioned by the state, not seriously enough to be believed.

Lilly belongs to a tradition far older than himself — the astrology of the Hellenistic and medieval worlds, transmitted through Arabic and Latin intermediaries — but he stands at its English close. Within a generation the new natural philosophy had pushed judicial astrology to the margins of respectable learning, where it has largely remained. His own Life and Times, written for a friend near the end, leaves an unusually candid self-portrait of a man who made a living reading the sky in a century that was beginning to stop listening.

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