Top 10 Astrologers of All Time

This is a list of the most famous and most influential astrologers of all time.

The list mainly covers astrologers who played an important role in the astrological tradition over the past 3,000 years, and it does not include any astrologers who are still alive today, or who lived relatively recently. I plan to compile a list of the most famous contemporary astrologers in a separate article.

There is often a distinction between astrologers who were famous or influential within the astrological community versus those who were famous outside of it. This list contains a bit of both, with some of the names belonging to very famous people, and others belonging to people who were influential within the astrological tradition but not very famous outside of it.

I’m going to focus primarily on the western astrological tradition here, since I’m not familiar enough with the history of Indian astrology to rank astrologers from that tradition yet. At some point I will try to compile a list for that tradition though.

With those prefatory remarks out of the way, let’s get started with the list of top 10 astrologers of all time:

10. Nechepso & Petosiris
In the 1st century BCE an extremely influential series of books were written which became the foundational texts of the Hellenistic tradition of astrology. These books contained some of the core concepts that are still used in western astrology to this day.

For some reason the author of these works decided to remain anonymous, and instead he ascribed the compilation or series to an Egyptian king named Nechepso, and to a priest named Petosiris.

Sometimes Nechepso and Petosiris are mentioned separately, which seems to indicate that there were specific books that were specifically ascribed to one figure or the other, but most of the time they are mentioned together, as if they were portrayed as a team.

Just about every subsequent astrologer during the Hellenistic and Roman period drew on or mentioned these two figures in one way or another. Unfortunately their works did not survive into the present time, and so all we have is a handful of quotes and references from later authors. The sheer number of these references leaves no doubt that their compendium was extremely influential though.