William Lilly
A seventeenth-century English astrologer, the most famous of his age. His Christian Astrology (1647) was the first major textbook of astrology written in English rather than Latin, and his name is bound up with horary astrology — answering a question from the chart of the moment it is asked.
Christian Astrology
Published in 1647, Lilly’s textbook made the technical craft of astrology available to English readers for the first time. It is still studied by practitioners of traditional astrology today.
Horary astrology
Lilly is especially associated with the horary branch, which casts a chart for the exact moment a question is asked and reads the answer from it — a method he practised and taught at length.
Reputation
Enormously well known in his lifetime, Lilly was consulted across English society during the turmoil of the Civil War, and his work is a bridge between the classical tradition of Ptolemy and the astrology of the modern era.
Connections
- Claudius Ptolemy — A Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer and astrologer of the second century, working in Alexandria. His Almagest set out the geometry of the heavens that Europe and the Islamic world used for over a thousand years, and his Tetrabiblos became a foundational text of Western astrology.