Catherine Blackledge

When The Luminaries Meet

Abstract

Eclipses are the greatest of all celestial events and have been understood as the most ominous of messages from the gods since the people of Mesopotamia began observing ‘the writing of heaven’ in the third millennium BCE (Before the Common Era). The fear and awe that they inspire has led to the creation of elaborate death rituals, stellar safe rooms and the most striking example in British history of the power of prophecy. For the Babylonians, eclipses portended the rise and fall of dynasties. However, if the divinities were mollified through the practice of namburbi - prophylactic rites—a royal death was not inevitable. The state archives of Assyria record the most barbaric rite was the substitute king ritual, in which a commoner and his consort were slaughtered in place of the real sovereign. Eclipses continued to panic the ruling elite. In Italy, Pope Urban VIII believed solar and lunar eclipses in 1628 signalled his imminent demise and commissioned Tommaso Campanella to build a room at his palace Castel Gandolfo that counteracted malign rays and pulled down benefic ones. In England, the words of the nation’s first media celebrity and its greatest astrologer William Lilly about the solar eclipse of 29 March 1652 triggered widespread chaos and brought the country to a standstill. The day became known as Black Monday; its legacy lives on today in the Black moniker we attach to dire financial or shocking days. Lilly’s professional organization The Society of Astrologers first met at Gresham College in 1647.

Biography

Dr Catherine Blackledge is an internationally-acclaimed non-fiction author and award-winning journalist whose career and interests span the worlds of science and the celestial realm. Her most recent book is The Man Who Saw the Future: a biography of William Lilly (Watkins, February 2015). Her first book The Story of V: a cultural history of the vagina (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) has been translated into ten languages.
Dr Blackledge has a science degree and PhD and has worked as a science writer since 1993. She has been a student of astrology for over a decade, since studying the history of science and magic fanned a fascination with the arcane art.
She has extensive experience of lecturing: appearances include Cheltenham and Manchester science festivals, Glastonbury Goddess festival, and Café Scientifique in Bristol, Newcastle and London. She has given talks, readings, done live radio and television, and appeared in debates nationally and internationally.