Who Was William Lilly?

The rules of horary astrology as practised today come largely from a single book: Christian Astrology, 1647. Its author, William Lilly, was the best-known astrologer in seventeenth-century London.

The book's importance is not only in its contents. Lilly wrote it in English — until then serious astrological texts were written in Latin, and so were open only to a university-educated minority. Lilly put the subject within reach of anyone who could read. That was knowledge changing class, and some astrologers of his day never forgave him for it.

He was born in 1602 in Diseworth, a village in Leicestershire. The family was poor; his father was imprisoned for debt. At eighteen Lilly walked to London with very little money and took work as a servant to a merchant named Gilbert Wright.

In 1627, after his employer's death, he married the widow, Ellen. The marriage brought him a fortune of around a thousand pounds and — more importantly — time to study. He began learning astrology in 1632. He was thirty, and within a decade he would be the most widely read astrologer in England.

The three-volume work is structured like this:

Volume 1 — Fundamentals

Planets, signs, houses, aspects, dignities. An introduction a student can begin from nothing.

Volume 2 — Question astrology (horary)

The heart of the book and its longest part. Each house is taken in turn, the questions belonging to it are set out, and real charts illustrate them. This is still the text anyone learning horary reads today.

Volume 3 — The natal chart

Natal astrology and directions. It has had less influence than the other two.

What distinguishes the second volume is that it does not settle for stating rules in the abstract. Lilly put hundreds of real cases from his own consulting records into the book — chart, question and outcome together. From “shall I buy the fish?” to “will the King win the war?”

What sets Lilly apart is not his technique but the way he kept records. In a number of the cases he states plainly that the judgment turned out wrong — and often tries to work out where he went astray.

This is not customary behaviour in the prophecy business. The reliability of a method is measured not by how highly its defenders speak of it but by whether they can point at the places it failed. Lilly did that three hundred and fifty years ago, and the best part of modern horary is inherited from that habit.

This is the most-told episode of his life. His 1651 book Monarchy or No Monarchy in England contained a series of symbolic engravings, one of which showed a city in flames.

Fifteen years later, in September 1666, much of London burned. That October Lilly was summoned before the parliamentary committee investigating the causes of the fire. The question put to him was technically “how did you know,” but by implication “did you have a hand in it?”

Lilly answered that the engraving named neither a date nor a place and was a general image of calamity, and he was released. The episode says more about the cultural power of prophecy than about prophecy itself: a drawing could become the subject of a state inquiry fifteen years after publication.

Lilly died in 1681. Over the following century the Enlightenment pushed astrology out of intellectual life, and by the nineteenth the classical techniques were largely forgotten. Twentieth-century astrology turned psychological and natal — horary fell almost entirely out of use.

The return came in the 1980s. The English astrologer Olivia Barclay arranged for Christian Astrology — by then surviving in only a handful of copies — to be republished in facsimile in 1985, and built a course of study around it. The present revival of classical horary follows directly from that.

Applying the text as written is not possible, and nobody tries. There are several reasons:

The world changed

Lilly's case examples include runaway servants, the plague, sea voyages and lost sheep. The rules hold; the context of the examples does not.

Some judgments are unacceptable now

Seventeenth-century texts carry their era's assumptions about sex, class and race. Taking the technical rules does not require taking those with them.

Medicine and law are no longer astrology's business

Lilly diagnosed illness; in his day that was part of medical practice. A horary reading today does not diagnose, and should not.

He bent his own rules

There are many places in the book where he states a rule and writes its exception a few pages later. To take Lilly for a rigid rule-maker is to have not read him.

The backbone of the rule engine is classical: significators found by house rulership, the distinction between applying and separating aspects, the essential dignities, translation of light, the considerations before judgment, and Regiomontanus as the house system — the one Lilly used.

What is not taken is the text's period judgments and its habit of ruling on medical and legal matters. Health questions look at a tendency, not a diagnosis; legal questions at the strength of the parties, not the outcome of a case.

And what is genuinely inherited is not technique but keeping an honest record. If the answer is no, it is written as no. If the chart cannot answer, that is said. If a rule fired, it is named inside the reading. That was the most modern thing Lilly did, three and a half centuries ago.