In ancient Greece, astrology was a source of interest to philosophers and intellectuals. It was thanks to the Greek differentiation between “hourly” astrology, (predictions), “genethliac astrology” (study of the themes of birth), and “medical astrology” (remarks on health status) as before, the sciences, were only astrology aids. Many ancient medical recipes were influenced by astrology, for example in the preparation of herbal decoctions ingredients should be mixed in the rays of the full moon. Ever since we witnessed the expansion of the astrological knowledge also thanks to the invention of the printing press that made a wide dissemination of astronomical ephemeris until modern times with the high-speed computers that have revolutionised the astronomical calculation.

Astrology, and especially his divination, horoscopes, captivate and fascinate millions of people around the world and, as supposed forecasting tool of the future, has had strong links with all peoples with different divination practices, such as palmistry, metoposcopy and geomancy. Astrology was once considered the “queen of the sciences” and was distinguished from astronomy since the seventeenth century, after the Copernican revolution. Galileo himself was an astrologer and it was not unusual to provide astrological advice to the powerful nobles of the time.

Western Astrology is based on famous and reliable texts such as “Tetrabiblos” Ptolemy, which sums up the astrological and astronomical traditions that developed in the Middle East and Europe from the eighth century BC, or the “Tractatus de Sphaera Mundi” by Giovanni Sacrobosco intended for students of the University of Paris. Among its practitioners and scholars we can count important characters of the time like Hypatia of Alexandria, alFadl ibn Nawbakht, AlZarqali (Arzachel), Omar Khayyam, philosopher and mathematician to whom we owe the calendar still used in Iran, Qotb Aldin Shirazi, the first scholar to write a correct explanation of the rainbow, alFazari and Guido Bonatti from Forlì, so much that, until the sixteenth century, some great astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Kepler, didn’t see any contradiction between the two disciplines, and some doctors, such as Girolamo Cardano, continued to apply astrology to medicine.