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Seventeenth-century England was a turbulent place to live. It was a century of civil wars, regicide, food riots and plague - a time of millenarian prophets and threatening witches, of radical sects and experiments in Commonwealth. It was also a revolutionary period. The lifting of printing press censorships created a veritable explosion of printed materials: from popular almanacs and calendars to handbooks of do-it yourself medicine, from vulgate Bibles to tomes of new, investigative natural philosophy and grimoires of occult science and ritual magic.
In the midst of all this, the astrologer-magicians of seventeenth-century England drew their charts of the heavens, divining answers and prescribing magical medicines.
In The Starry Rubric, Alexander Cummins shows how astrology and magic offered analysis, interpretation, and solutions - locating humanity in a shifting web of interrelation with the stars and, indeed, the cosmos as a whole. Through analysis and example, Cummins demonstrates the ways in which astrology and magic were crucial to early modern perspectives on human life, time, and meaning.
Alexander Cummins
Dan Harms is a librarian and author living in central New York. He has a masters in anthropology from the University at Buffalo, and a masters in library and information science from the University of Pittsburgh. His fascination with magical belief and practice has led him to research and publish a great deal in the areas of folklore, ritual magic, and their appearances in literature.His past works include The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, The Necronomicon Files (with John Wisdom Gonce), The Long-Lost Friend (editor), The Book of Oberon (with Joseph Peterson and Daniel Clark), William Dawson Bellhouse, Wax Images, Of Angels, Demons, and Spirits (with Daniel Clark), Balloonists, Alchemists, and Astrologers, and The Book of Four Wizards (with S. Aldarnay, forthcoming).His articles have been published in Abraxas, Folklore, Fortean Times, The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, The Journal of Scholarly Communication, The Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, Thanatos, and The Unspeakable Oath. He has spoken at Treadwell's in London, and at conferences at Oxford, Western Michigan University, and Waterloo University, among others. He is also an avid roleplaying gamer, and occasionally writes for publishers including Chaosium, Arc Dream, and others.
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