Ars, Technē, Śāstra, ʿIlm: What’s in a Name?

The designation of astrology as an art raises some simple but fundamentally im-portant historical questions. How old is this designation, and, given that earlier generations of astrologers wrote in different languages, what words did they use that we translate as ‘art’? What are the connotations of those different words in their historical contexts? What other designations than ‘art’ would have been possible, and were such alternative labels used as well? Was astrology ever practised in cultural contexts where distinctions like that between ‘art’ and ‘science’ were not made? And if calling astrology an ‘art’ was not originally a question of aesthetics, was there still an aesthetic dimension to the practice of astrology, and how might we define or understand that dimension?