Abu Ma'shar

ah-boo mah-SHAR

Definition

Abu Ma'shar Jaʿfar ibn Muhammad al-Balkhi (AD 787 – AD 886) was a Persian-born astrologer and polymath who spent most of his life in Baghdad. The Latin West knew him as Albumasar. Yamamoto and Burnett, in their Brill 2019 critical edition, call him "the best-known astrologer of the Middle Ages."

In Tradition

In the Arabic-Persian tradition, Abu Ma'shar is remembered as the first astrologer to weave Greek, Persian, and Indian astrology into a single framework. He cast himself as the one recovering an ancient blended wisdom, passed down through a line of three figures named Hermes (in Egypt, Babylonia, then Egypt again), and he drew on Ptolemy, Dorotheus, Valens, and a Hermetic treatise on the lots alongside his Middle Persian and Indian sources.

In Practice

You meet Abu Ma'shar mainly through his three central books. The *Great Introduction to Astrology* (*Kitāb al-madkhal al-kabīr*) lays out natal and foundational doctrine, including the orderly 97-lot scheme in Part VIII. The *Book of Religions and Dynasties* (*On Conjunctions*) is the core Arabic source on Jupiter–Saturn great conjunctions and mundane astrology — the astrology of nations and eras. The *Book on the Revolutions of the Years of the Nativities* sets out solar-return practice, the chart cast each year as the Sun returns to its birth position. Today you reach the corpus through Benjamin Dykes' modern English translations and through Yamamoto & Burnett's Brill critical edition of the *Great Introduction*.

Historical Origin

Abu Ma'shar was born in Balkh (in Khurasan, now Afghanistan) in AD 787. According to Ibn al-Nadim, he turned to the study of the stars at age 47 (c. AD 834), reportedly through the mathematician al-Kindi, and he died at al-Wasit in central Iraq in AD 886. Two medieval Latin translations carried his work into European astrology: one by Hermann of Carinthia (*Introductorium in Astrologiam*, 1140) and one by John of Seville (c. 1133).

Further Reading

  • Abu Ma'shar, The Great Introduction to Astrology
  • Benjamin N. Dykes, Abu Ma'shar: Persian Nativities (Vols 1-3)
  • James H. Holden, A History of Horoscopic Astrology