Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany

Abstract

Lutheran orthodoxy of the later sixteenth century was marked by a sense of pessimism and anxiety. This was due in part to the apocalypticism at the heart of Luther's theology, but it was also the heritage of failed expectations. At the century's end, Lutheran clergymen doubted whether the movement had succeeded in its essential task, that of winning hearts and minds to the new faith. In the face of this perceived failure, and inspired by the urgency of their moral crusade, the clergy turned to other media in order to preach the faith. One such forum was popular astrology. Lutheran clergymen and almanac writers used almanacs and prognostications to relate the essentials of Luther's moral message. This ‘preaching of the stars' projected an image of the natural world ordered and affected by human conduct, and it detailed in signs and wonders a divine anger which could only be overcome through a turn to improved moral conduct and intense faith. The logic of Lutheran theology was writ in the stars. Far from the desacralized universe of popular perception, the Protestant world was infused with its own forms of sacrality.