Luis Vilhena and the world of astrology

This article can be freely downloaded here: https://www.cultureandcosmos.org/pdfs/12/12-2_douglas_world_astrology.pdf

It was published in the journal Culture and Cosmos Vol 12 (2): 43-58 (2008).

Abstract. This article consists of a translation of the introduction and conclusion to Luis Rodolfo Vilhena’s book, O Mundo da Astrologia: Estudo Antropológico (The World of Astrology: an Anthropological Study), published by Jorge Zahar Editor (Rio de Janeiro, 1990), as part of the series: Coleção Antropologia Social, edited by Gilberto Velho, here translated and introduced by Graham Douglas.

1.                Translator’s Introduction

Luis Vilhena died in an accident in 1997 at the age of 33. O Mundo da Astrologia, an anthropological study of Brazilian astrology and astrologers, was based on his MA thesis at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; his influential book describing the history of the Brazilian Folklorist movement, Projeto e Missao: O Movimento Folklorico Brasileiro 1947-64, based on his doctoral thesis, was published posthumously. While introducing Vilhena’s work, which I came across by chance in a Lisbon bookshop, it is useful to mention two other theses covering the same topics. Alie Bird has completed a thesis entitled ‘Astrology in Education: an Ethnography’ at the University of Sussex, and Kirstine Munk recently submitted her thesis at the University of Southern Denmark, entitled ‘Signs of the Times: Cosmology and Ritual Practice in Modern Western Astrology’. Another important publication which addresses astrology as a cultural phenomenon is Astrology, Science and Culture: Drawing Down the Moon by Roy Willis and Patrick Curry. These three academic studies adopt anthropological and cultural tools of analysis. The first two are based on field work interviews with astrologers and students of astrology. Each of the studies provides valuable discussion of the relation between the practice of astrology and the practitioner’s sociological and religious situations and needs. Bird uses a distinction drawn by Charles and Suzi Harvey to label taught astrology in the UK as real and contrast it with ‘merely derivative’ and ‘uninformed’ astrology ‘adapted for mass consumption’. Vilhena by contrast gives attention to the difference between created and consumed astrology using concepts derived from Georg Simmel and Herbert Gans. All three, Kirsten, Munk, and Vilhena, draw on the work of the early authors Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, but in different ways. Bird and Munk value these authors for their theorising of magic, while Vilhena is unique in using the analysis developed in Primitive Classification as a tool for examining the structure of the symbolic language of planets, signs, and houses.