Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to the astrology podcast. In this episode I'm going to be talking with astrologer Penelope Sitter about the life and work of the 17th century astrologer John Baptiste Morin de Villifronge, otherwise known as Morinus.

So Penelope just translated Book 21 of Morin's major work that was written in Latin in the 17th century called the astrology a galica which means French astrology and the title of this new translation is Marin's book 21 of the active determination of the celestial bodies and the passive

determination of the sublunary. So hey Penelope, thanks for joining me today.

Glad to be here, Chris. Yeah, I'm excited to have you.

So this book, this translation of yours just came out two days ago.

We're recording this on May 15, 2024, starting at 12.7 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this just came out on May 13th.

So why don't we talk a little bit about Marin's biography and situate him historically first before we get into talking about his astrological text.

So Marin was a French astrologer who lived in the 17th century, right?

Yes. Okay. Born in 1583, died in 1656, and as you mentioned, a near contemporary of Lily born about 19 years before Lily.

Okay, so he's like roughly living at the same time period as William Lily just to give people a reference point.

I just talked about Lily in an episode two episodes ago with Nick Campion and

Patrick Curry so it's interesting then to see another astrologer from a different

country who's you know in Europe and who's participating in

astrology roughly in the same time period but it has a very different background

than Lily did what were some of the things that Marin, what was his background in terms of his academic

training?

He studied, well clearly he studied mathematics, but he got the, received a medical degree in 1615 from Avignon, a university there, and also wrote on astronomy and practiced it and was very interested in cosmology and in an essentially Aristotelian natural philosophy.

And so he was he was a trained as a physician and he worked as a doctor basically for many

eminent people in Europe and in France, including Kings and Queens.

He was also a mathematician.

He was an astronomer, and he's known for some scientific contributions about how to find like longitudes and latitudes at sea, right?

Longitudes specifically. This became a very big issue during the mercantile period and the period of colonialism in Europe.

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