Roy Willis and Patrick Curry. Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon, Oxford: Berg Publications, 2004. Pp. 170, bibliog., index. AUS$62.00 (Pb.), ISBN 1 85973 687 4.

The aim of this short book is both to justify a particular version of Western astrology, and to make academic study of that subject respectable as a 'relatively fundamental form of human experience' (p.3), largely by attacking the 'scientific' paradigm. Roy Willis gives the anthropological background and Patrick Curry the historical background. Each author wrote separate chapters and will be reviewed separately.

Willis's approach is through conjectural history. He ties the beginnings of astrology to the dawn of human consciousness, by asserting that markings on bones are records of lunar activity (p. 17). He then suggests that this implies that women were the originators of heavenly observation (p. 19). No evidence is presented that this heavenly observation was astrological in any recognisable sense, and he has to admit that astrology was redesigned by the time of the existing Mesopotamian or Egyptian documents (p.22)--both authors virtually ignore Indian and Chinese astrology.

The reasoning is that if people have cosmology, or a mythic relationship to the stars, then they have something similar to astrology. This is buttressed by references to Levi Strauss and by rather vague statements such as: in myth 'we see the human mind engaged in a constructive debate with itself on the nature of dialogical thought' and this includes the 'conversation of heaven and earth' (p.32-3), or 'the symbol strewn heavens are the very mind of the species made visible' (p.39). Later Willis will try to use phenomenology to show that subjectivity is always in dialogue with the cosmos. All of this may be true, but astrology is a very specific mode of using the symbol strewn world, and may differ from the examples given.

If we define astrology as a system of divination through observation of the motion of heavenly bodies (thus shading into weather forecasting), then the fundamental comparative questions (such as: What kind of societies have astrology? What kinds of ways is this knowledge organised? What kind of functions does astrology serve in different societies? How does astrology relate to, or compete with other divinatory or cosmological techniques?) are completely ignored by Willis.