Ovanes Akopyan: Magic, Astrology, and the Quest for Harmony

About the Lecture

For a long time, it was believed that after centuries of a “dark” Middle Ages steeped in superstition, European scholars from the 15th century onward began exploring new forms of intellectual inquiry. Linked with the “enlightened,” human-centered Renaissance, this movement became known as the Scientific Revolution. At first glance, even the chronology seems to confirm this shift: two of the most significant works in the history of science — Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres and Andreas Vesalius’s On the Structure of the Human Body — were published in the same year (1543), marking a sharp turn from medieval natural philosophy to the “rational” sciences of the early modern era.

This lecture challenges that conventional view. We will see that nearly all the fathers of the Scientific Revolution were deeply engaged in what we would today call magic or the occult — particularly astrology and alchemy. Their scientific pursuits were often driven not by a quest for mathematical precision, but by a desire to uncover the hidden harmony of the universe, invisible to the uninitiated. Using astronomy and astrology as examples, we’ll explore how early modern thinkers pursued this goal — and what intellectual and cultural consequences their efforts produced.