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[The role of ancient astrology in preparation for a secular natural science and medicine]. | Zur Rolle der antiken Astrologie in der Vorbereitung einer säkularen Naturwissenschaft und Medizin.

This article addresses the tendency of scholars of pre-Greek antiquity to assume that all knowledge (including ‘scientific’ knowledge) can be ascribed to religious thinking. We find in Mesopotamia, in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, a clear trend towards a secular view of the natural world and how it functioned. The engine for this increasing secularity was astronomy, which developed sophisticated new ways of predicting astronomical events. These advances were then channelled into astrology and novel ways of predicting the future, which replaced traditional forms of divination and forecasting. Predictable laws of nature rather than unpredictable gods were now in control.