Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - August 31, 2025


Pine Cones： Judicial Astrology ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Spill the Tea Leaves #3 ｜Astrology Birth Chart Bonding Episode Forty-Seven： Selkies (collab with It Came From The Maritimes) - weird uncle stories

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

137.46

Word count

2,224

Sentence count

114

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 The year is 1607. A child has gone missing from a small English parish. There are no police to
00:00:14.740 search, no telegraph to spread the alarm. His family has nothing but their grief and their
00:00:19.840 faith. So they do what countless others did in those years. They carry their question to an
00:00:26.100 astrologer. It might sound strange to us now, but in those days when life was precarious and
00:00:39.240 sudden death common, such questions were ordinary. People asked the heavens who had stolen their
00:00:45.260 livestock, who had poisoned their bread, or who had fathered a child. They asked which road was
00:00:51.680 safe to travel, which neighbour to trust, and whether the law would favour them. And
00:00:57.040 when the chart was cast, they believed the answer. No witnesses, no proof, no earthly
00:01:03.620 evidence at all. Just the judgement of the skies. In a world without our comforts, when
00:01:09.880 justice was even slower and more uncertain, the stars provided guidance.
00:01:14.280 the study of the stars was once split in two there was natural astrology respectful sober
00:01:28.200 almost scientific it governed the tides and the weather the best time to sow a seed or bleed a
00:01:34.640 patient people put their faith in it like we do today in the weather forecast and then there was
00:01:41.440 Judicial Astrology, the judging of human fate. This was the branch that dared to say who would
00:01:49.140 marry, who would sicken, who would win a war, or who had blood on their hands. It dealt with politics,
00:01:56.060 law, crime and medicine, and to many it looked less like science and more like sorcery.
00:02:04.320 Within Judicial Astrology lay two darker crafts. Horary Astrology, where a chart was cast for the
00:02:10.520 very moment a question was asked and the stars were made to give their verdict. And electional
00:02:15.640 astrology which sought the most fortunate art act, when to wed, when to fight or when to hang a man
00:02:22.240 so that the punishment would truly take. For centuries this practice held sway. Courts and
00:02:29.640 kings alike listened to it but with the enlightenment the stars were stripped of their
00:02:34.140 authority. Natural astrology was reborn as astronomy and, to an extent, meteorology,
00:02:40.360 while judicial astrology slid further into disrepute, dismissed as fortune-telling.
00:02:46.220 Today, historians use the old phrase to mean the predictive pre-modern art,
00:02:50.200 the serious branch once called into courts and sick rooms, to pronounce on matters of law and
00:02:55.020 life. Modern astrologers prefer other names, horary, mundane, even forensic. But when we
00:03:02.200 speak of how the stars judged crime and justice in the past, the old title is the truest, judicial
00:03:07.700 astrology. Simon Foreman was one of the most infamous astrologer physicians of Elizabethan
00:03:20.360 London. Born in Wiltshire, he abandoned a career as a schoolmaster and, from the 1580s until his
00:03:26.580 death in 1611 built up a thriving and controversial practice in the city. He was a physician without
00:03:34.400 a license, a self-proclaimed alchemist, magician and reader of the stars. For that he was hounded
00:03:40.060 by the church and the Royal College of Physicians alike, suffering several short spells in prison.
00:03:44.960 But none of this dimmed his popularity. Foreman kept diaries, now digitised by the Casebooks
00:03:50.800 project, which give us a remarkable window into the lives, secrets and fears of his clients.
00:03:57.620 They are filled with medical cases, gossip and even the darker affairs of Londoners.
00:04:03.440 One entry from 1595 records the loss of a nobleman's greyhound which had slipped its
00:04:08.660 collar in Water Lane. Other cases are bleaker still. The record of Alice Barton of North Crawley
00:04:14.840 describes how she drowned herself, suspected of having broken her sister's neck beforehand.
00:04:20.800 murder suicide and accidents appear alongside fevers and childbirth making his books a strange
00:04:28.460 litany of both healing and doom and foreman was far from alone records from the 16th and 17th
00:04:35.360 centuries show the extraordinary reliance people placed on astrologers not only for matters of
00:04:40.600 health and fortune but for crime in the winter of 1569 a stationer named william bedo tried to
00:04:47.640 trace money stolen from a friend's house in Kent. He was referred to an Oxford astrologer who cast
00:04:53.180 a figure for him, though without success. Most consultations of this kind were less dramatic
00:04:59.400 than murder. Housewives fretted over misled crockery or stolen linen. Servants from grand 1.00
00:05:05.140 houses came seeking the fate of missing silver. At St John's College, Oxford, in the 1590s,
00:05:11.440 Robert Flood was asked by his tutor to use astrology to discover who had robbed him.
00:05:15.980 In 1637, John Rogers, an apothecary, went straight to an astrologer when a copy of an important book was stolen from his shop.
00:05:25.200 These stories show the peculiar hold of judicial astrology.
00:05:29.380 In an age before detectives, fingerprints or police, the stars themselves were treated as witnesses.
00:05:36.120 Neighbours and nobles alike placed their faith in horoscopes,
00:05:39.280 believing that theft, betrayal and even murder could be solved by reading the heavens.
00:05:45.320 If Simon Foreman was the shadowy figure of Elizabeth's London, then William Lilly was
00:05:55.300 the great astrologer of the Civil War. He rose to fame in the 1640s and 50s, his almanacs read
00:06:02.440 by tens of thousands, his name known in every tavern and marketplace. Soldiers and statesmen
00:06:08.900 came to him, but so did servants and merchants. He cast horoscopes not just for the fate of
00:06:14.500 individuals, but for missing purses, stolen silver, and even the destiny of whole cities.
00:06:25.160 His case books show how ordinary the questions could be, and how strange. In 1647, he was asked
00:06:32.340 to find a plate lost in Grey's Inn, to track £150, vanished from a Spanish merchant ship,
00:06:38.600 to identify a thief who had robbed the public house known as the Cardinal Wolseley, even to
00:06:43.440 trace the fate of £20 stolen from a, quote, fat woman in Southwark. Nothing was too trivial,
00:06:50.060 nothing too sordid for the stars. But it was a prophecy of catastrophe that sealed Lily's fame
00:06:56.880 and nearly his ruin. In his 1652 almanac, he printed a pair of cryptic hieroglyphs.
00:07:03.400 They showed a city, tormented first by plague, then consumed by fire. Quote,
00:07:09.640 Having found the city of London should be sadly afflicted with a great plague,
00:07:13.860 and not long after with an exorbitant fire.
00:07:16.880 I framed these two hieroglyphs, in which effect have proved very true.
00:07:21.760 And prove true they did.
00:07:23.620 In 1665, a plague came, and in 1666, London burned.
00:07:31.520 Lily's eerie accuracy did not go unnoticed.
00:07:35.620 That year, Parliament summoned him to testify before a special committee
00:07:39.460 appointed to discover the cause of the Great Fire.
00:07:43.320 Had he, by his occult practices, kindled it himself?
00:07:47.300 Could he have called it down?
00:07:49.240 In that tense chamber, he defended himself.
00:07:52.540 Helped by his friend and patron, alchemist Elias Ashmole,
00:07:56.360 he explained that he had not caused the fire, merely foreseen it in the heavens.
00:08:01.640 He walked free, but his legend only grew.
00:08:11.900 In 1555, Nostradamus wrote his first collection of centuries, consisting of 100 quatrains.
00:08:19.760 He used his knowledge of judicial astrology to create his prophecies,
00:08:24.240 completing a total of 10 centuries over the years,
00:08:27.060 written in French with influences from Italian, Greek, and Latin, were full of symbolism and
00:08:33.160 metaphor. This was done to avoid accusations of witchcraft, and to allow various interpretations
00:08:39.740 of his work. Supporters claim he predicted events like the Grey Fire of London, the French
00:08:46.660 Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and Hitler, both world wars, and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima
00:08:52.880 and Nagasaki. However, his writings were used for propaganda during World War II by both Nazi
00:08:59.940 Germany and the Allies. Joseph Goebbels wrote that his friend, Nazi journalist Alfred Ingmar
00:09:05.880 Berndt, had, quote, drawn up a plan demonstrating how we could enlist the aid of the occult in our
00:09:11.480 propaganda. The Americans and English fall easily for that type of thing.
00:09:15.660 on july 1st 1566 nostradamus made his last prediction telling a priest you will not find
00:09:27.060 me alive at sunrise he died that same night astrologers in the 16th to 17th centuries
00:09:36.140 often give physical descriptions of culprits rather than names this could lead to disastrous
00:09:41.720 mistakes. One regarded case is from 1505. A London astrologer described a thief's general appearance
00:09:49.900 and noted him as having bad teeth. Acting on that description, a robbed carrier arrested
00:09:56.040 an innkeeper's son at St. Ives. But when the boy was made to open his mouth, his teeth were found
00:10:02.640 to be perfectly sound, a complete departure from the initial description. The carrier was humiliated
00:10:09.880 and faced a countersuit for wrongful arrest.
00:10:15.660 Simon Foreman's own consultation sometimes skirted this problem.
00:10:20.080 He would give clients images of a suspect,
00:10:22.700 a man of such and such age,
00:10:24.500 dark hair, a mole by the eye,
00:10:26.680 rather than naming names.
00:10:28.940 If a neighbour fit the bill, suspicion followed.
00:10:32.000 The danger, of course, was that more than one person
00:10:34.640 might fit the star's description.
00:10:37.740 William Lilly, too, was wary.
00:10:39.880 He wrote that it was dangerous to declare a specific thief unless the chart was very clear,
00:10:46.100 for fear of ruining the innocent. But people pressed him for descriptions anyway.
00:10:53.700 These errors have potential to echo into the present. Modern forensic astrologers occasionally
00:10:59.660 claim to trace missing persons or killers, but law enforcement remains deeply sceptical.
00:11:05.460 Modern courts have never accepted astrology as true evidence, and the caution is well
00:11:10.380 founded.
00:11:11.440 History shows how easily the stars could mislead, sending suspicion against the wrong man, or
00:11:16.680 child, with real human costs.
00:11:19.540 In the 17th century, this could mean wrongful arrest or the ruin of a reputation.
00:11:24.460 Today, it would mean the miscarriage of justice on a far greater scale. 0.95
00:11:34.580 By the early 1900s, Evangeline Adams had New York Society in her thrall.
00:11:39.500 She gained national recognition when she predicted a disaster for the owner of the Windsor Hotel,
00:11:45.380 who ignored her warning. The hotel burned down the next day,
00:11:49.160 leading to widespread media attention and her newfound fame.
00:11:54.220 By 1927, she recognised the stock market's potential and gained immense fame as the market boomed.
00:12:01.700 Popular among investors who, along with Adams herself, profited from her prophecies,
00:12:07.580 her monthly newsletter offered predictions about stock movements based on planetary positions
00:12:12.240 and was marketed as a quote, guaranteed system to beat Wall Street.
00:12:17.700 For $20 a reading, she predicted the Dow Jones industrial trends and her popularity surged.
00:12:24.820 Despite facing three arrests for illegal fortune telling, she was never convicted.
00:12:30.380 Notably, she was acquitted in a May 1914 trial where a judge praised her abilities,
00:12:36.040 saying she had, quote, raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science.
00:12:41.960 Adams aimed to improve astrology's scientific image by narrating her progress in research.
00:12:48.000 In her autobiography, she noted her commitment to research
00:12:51.020 and emphasised the specific contributions she made to astrological practice.
00:12:56.840 Despite Adam's success, astrology never again quite gained the widespread faith and recognition
00:13:02.300 from the powers that be as her 16th century counterparts.
00:13:07.100 After all, Adam's most infamous, incorrect prediction happened shortly before the 1929 crash.
00:13:13.660 when faced with a devastating unknown missing child financial ruin a health crisis or romantic
00:13:29.820 devastation it's not hard to imagine why people are willing to take a leap of faith on someone
00:13:35.180 who can offer that little smidge of insight into the outcome of their query
00:13:39.260 Today, principled forensic astrologers are careful not to insert themselves into criminal matters
00:13:45.880 and view their practice as a separate and removed exercise in curiosity,
00:13:51.240 charting historic cases and high-profile perpetrators.
00:13:55.360 The wider astrological community is unwilling to encourage the use of astrology in such a delicate realm,
00:14:01.720 aware of the potential harm and the willingness of bad actors to exploit people at their most vulnerable.
00:14:09.260 astrology remains in the zeitgeist purely for the reassurance it may offer to those who believe
00:14:14.460 or even those who just desperately want to we want to know our loved ones are safe and happy
00:14:20.200 we want the comfort of financial success or the certainty of being loved
00:14:24.820 but certainty they say is the fool's dream and thus the charlatan's selling point
00:14:31.520 i hope you have enjoyed what we are calling astrology august part two of our astrology
00:14:41.840 episode hit a little bit of a snag for scheduling reasons but don't fret it will be coming to you
00:14:47.720 as soon as we can get together and talk it out in the meantime i hope you're geared up for
00:14:53.900 sea timber we have a really exciting collaboration coming up for any of you who listen to folklore
00:15:00.480 podcasts you may know who it is until next time beware of people promising too much 0.97
00:15:06.440 and who claim to know everything thanks for listening and fuck yeah 0.89
00:15:11.740 folklore looking for your next obsession the creators collective podcasts is your gateway 0.98
00:15:33.060 to the dark the chilling and the downright fascinating we're a community of independent
00:15:37.760 podcasts with one goal, to share the best in true crime, paranormal tales, folklore, and unexplained
00:15:44.060 mysteries. Whether you crave cold cases that won't stay closed, haunted histories that refuse to be
00:15:49.620 forgotten, or stories that make you sleep with the lights on, there's a show waiting for you
00:15:54.400 in the collective. And when you join us, you're not just listening to one podcast. You're stepping
00:15:59.400 into a world of creators who love this stuff as much as you do. Check out the Creators Collective
00:16:05.020 today. Follow the link in our show notes to discover your next favorite podcast. We'll be
00:16:10.000 waiting for you.