De astrologia

Moreover, it is not true, neither, that Jupiter put Saturn in chaines or threw him into Tartarus or otherwise mistreated him as men credit. Nay, Saturn moveth in the extream orbe, far away from us, and his motion is sluggish and not easy to be apprehended ocularly by human kind, whence they say that he holdeth still as if fettered ; and the vast abyss of the ayr is called Tartarus.

’Tis chiefly from the verses of Homer the poet and of Hesiod that we may learn that antiquity holdeth with the astrologers. When he describeth the chain of Jupiter[*](Homer, in the Iliad, VIII, 18-26: Zeus, boasting of his strength, says that if a golden “chain should be let down from heaven and all the other gods and ni agi should lay hold of it, they could not pull him down, but he could pull them up, along with the earth and the sea, fasten the chain about the peak of Olympus, and leave everything hanging. Socrates in the Theaetetus, 153A, says that by the golden chain Homer means nothing else than the sun; others, according to Hysteria (695, 9), took him to mean the orbits of the planets. ) and the kine of the Sun, which I con-

1. Nay, be it thine to control the delightsome duties of wedlock,

1. These shall all be the care of impetuous Mars and Minerva.

Discerning all these things, the ancients had divination in very great use and counted it no parergy, but would found no cities, invest themselves with no ramparts, slay no men, wed no women, untill they had been advised in all particulars by diviners. And certainly their oracles were not aloof from astrology, but at Delphi a virgin hath the office of prophet in token of the celestial Virgin, and a serpent giveth voice beneath the tripod because a Serpent giveth light among the stars, and at Didymi also the oracle of Apollo hath its name, methinks, from the heavenly Twins.[*](Modern philology soberly rejects the happy thought that Didyma (Dids i) owes its name to the constellation Didymi (Gemini), and explains that the name is Carian, like Idyma, Sidyma, Loryma, etc. (Birchner, in Pauly-Wissowa, 3.v.). )

So firmly did they believe divination a thing most sacred, that when Ulysses, wearied of wandering, took a phansie to learn the truth as touching his affaires, he went off unto Hell, not “to behold dead men and a land that is joyless,”[*](Odyssey, XI, 94. ) but because he would come to speech with Tiresias. And when he was come to the place whereunto Circe directed him, and had dug his pit and slain his sheep, although many dead that were by, and amongst them his own mother, were fain to drink of the blood, he suffered none of them, not even his very mother, until he had wet the throstle of Tiresias and constrained him to deliver the prophecy, verily enduring to behold his mother’s shadow athirst.

For the Spartans, Lycurgus drew from the skye his ordering of their whole polity and made it their law never to leave their country, even to go to the wars, before the moon should be at her full, for he conceited that the potency of the moon is not the same when she waxeth and when she waneth, and that all things are subject unto her sway.

The Arcadians, however, and none but they, would have naught of this and yeelded no honour unto astrologie ; and in their folly they affirm that they are older than the moon.

Whereas our forbears were so mightily enamoured of divination, among this generation there be some who say that it is an impossibility for mankind to conceive a useful purpose of astrologie. It is neither credible, say they, nor truthful, and Mars and Jupiter do not move in the skye for our sake, but are nothing

And others affirm that astrologie, although not untruthful, is unprofitable, insomuch as divination will not alter that which draweth nigh by decree of the fates.[*](Among those who so argue is Lucian’s Cyniscus in Zeus Catechized, 12-14 (II, 76f). )

To both these opinions I may answer that although the stars do verily absolve their own course in the skye, none the less as a parergy or incidental of their motion each event among us cometh to pass. Or will you have it that although if a horse run or birds or humans move, pebbles are flung up and strawes set astir by the wind of their motion, yet the gyration of the stars bringeth naught else to pass? And that whereas from a little fire an effluxion cometh to us, although the fire burneth not for our sake at all and is not a whit sollicitous that we be warmed, yet from the stars we receive no effluxion whatever? Furthermore, astrologie is indeed impotent to convert bad into good, or to effect mutation in any of the effluents, yet is it profitable to those that employ it, in so much as the good, when they know that it is to come, delighteth them long beforehand, while the bad they accept readily, for it cometh not upon them unawares, but in vertue of contemplation and expectance is deemed easie and light. That is my opinion in the matter of astrology.