The Stars of the North: Astrology in Scottish History
At the Wilfred Hazelwood Clinic, we often speak of the environment as a container for the psyche. Few environments are as imposing, or as vertically oriented, as Scotland. In a land defined by rugged mountains and long winter nights, the eyes are naturally drawn upward. It is no surprise, then, that Scotland possesses a profound, if often suppressed, astrological heritage that stretches from the Neolithic era to the Enlightenment.
The history of Scottish astrology is a dramatic oscillation between reverence and fear. It is a story that moves from the stone circles of the islands, through the royal courts of Europe, to the dark paranoia of the witch trials. Understanding this lineage helps us understand the "cultural shadow" that still hangs over the occult arts in Britain today.
The Stone Watchers: Callanish and the Moon
Long before the Babylonians codified the zodiac, the inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis were constructing one of the world's most sophisticated astronomical computers: the Callanish Standing Stones. Erected around 2900 BC, these stones are not merely religious monuments; they are a celestial observatory.
Unlike Stonehenge, which is primarily solar, Callanish is lunar. It is aligned to capture the "Major Lunar Standstill", a rare phenomenon occurring every 18.6 years when the moon rises at its most southerly position, appearing to skim the top of the horizon hills. Psychologically, this connects the ancient Scottish psyche to the Lunar principle: the domain of the unconscious, memory, rhythm, and the feminine. In our practice, we view these ancient sites as evidence that early humans sought to ground the chaos of the psyche by anchoring it to the predictable cycles of the heavens.
Michael Scot: The Wizard of Balwearie
If Scottish astrology has a patron saint (or sinner, depending on your view), it is Michael Scot (1175–1232). Known in folklore as a wizard who could cleave the Eildon Hills in two, the historical Michael Scot was a scholar of immense stature. He was the court astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and was instrumental in translating the works of Aristotle and the Arabic astrologers (like Averroes) into Latin.
Scot represents the peak of astrology as "High Science." He did not view the stars as magic in the crude sense, but as the mathematics of God. However, his intellect was so terrifying to the medieval mind that Dante Alighieri placed him in the Eighth Circle of Hell in the Divine Comedy, reserved for diviners who sought to look too far into the future. Scot embodies the Mercurial archetype: the bridge between worlds, the translator, and the one who walks the dangerous line between genius and heresy.
The Shadow Falls: King James VI and the Demonisation
The golden age of Scottish star lore came to a brutal end with the Reformation and the reign of King James VI (later James I of England). James was a man possessed by a deep, paranoid fear of the occult, culminating in his infamous 1597 treatise, Daemonologie.
Under James, the line between the scholar-astrologer and the witch was erased. The predictive arts were no longer seen as the study of God's clockwork, but as trafficking with spirits. This era represents a collective Saturnian constriction. The state and the church (Saturn) crushed the intuitive and the mystical (Neptune). The psychological trauma of the Scottish Witch Trials left a scar on the national psyche, driving astrology underground and associating it with fear, guilt, and the demonic, associations we still work to dismantle in therapy today.
The Enlightenment and the Divorce of Reason
By the 18th century, the Scottish Enlightenment produced giants of reason like David Hume and Adam Smith. In this new era of empiricism, astrology was not feared as demonic; it was dismissed as irrational. The "disenchantment of the world," as Max Weber called it, was particularly thorough in Edinburgh.
However, from a Jungian perspective, that which is repressed does not disappear. It merely changes form. The obsession with order, classification, and "systems" in the Scottish Enlightenment can be seen as a sublimation of the astrological impulse, the desire to find a hidden order behind the visible world.
Today, as we look back at the stones of Callanish or the texts of Michael Scot, we are reclaiming a lost part of the Scottish soul. We are remembering that before we were rationalists, we were star-gazers, finding our place in the cosmos not by looking down at our feet, but by looking up at the light.
