Astrology is generally divided into natural astrology, the science which predicts the motions of heavenly bodies and eclipses of sun and moon, and judicial astrology, which étudiés the influence of constellations on the destiny of men and empires. But it is obvious that both of these branches presuppose an advanced stage of astronomical knowledge, and a state of society not necessarily better, but more complex than that in which the first worshippers of the heavens were placed. It follows, then, that both natural astrology and judicial astrology must have been preceded by a science less learned in heavenly motions, and at the same time (as we shall attempt to show) more moral in the best sense of the word. Astronomers have taken very little pains to trace their favourite science to its source by help of the copious astrological commentaries in which the earliest observers embodied their theories of the heavens. Philosophers, with the single exception of Schopenhauer, have shown the same indifference. Of modern writers who have treated of astrology, some, like Μ. Alfred Maury, have sought to place its errors in a ridiculous light; others, like Eusèbe Salverte, have exposed the quackerie3 which rendered it a possible profession; and lastly, a few, like Eliphas Lévi and Μ. P. Christian, simply attempt to build up again with words a belief which has ceased to rest either on facts or ideas. Neither class of writers is likely to advance the history of human reason. The time has come for a calm and dispassionate survey of an illusion which for a while seemed probable, and may even be said to have done good service in its day. How did the error arise! Whence its persistency Î These are questions which demand an answer, if only in order to preserve modern science from illusions which, though differing in form, are in their essence similar.

Μ. Alfred Maury begins his treatise by examining what are the beliefs of savages on the subject of magic and astrology. So too Μ. F. Höfer, in his History of Astronomy, well remarks: “If we wish to seek for the origin of the science, let us place a child or a savage in presence of the earth and the heavens, and ask what thoughts these suggest to him. We shall then obtain a clue to guide us on our path.” We shall do well to follow the example of MM. Maury and Höfer, provided we do not confuse the savage of a superior and the savage of an inferior race, or the ancient savage and the modern child. But how can we question the ancient savage? Only by help of his cosmogonies.

It was long before man learned to distinguish the planets from the fixed stars; even then, as the word πλανήτες proves, he assigned to them an erratic instead of a regular motion. Further, we must bear in mind that the first star-gazers had no knowledge of optics, physics, or meteorology, to teach them that the blue of the firmament is a subjective phenomenon caused by the light traversing our atmosphere before it strikes the optic nerve; that its regular spherical form is an effect of perspective; that winds, clouds, and northern lights are terrestrial phenomena related to astronomy, but distinct from the science of the true heavens. The ancestors of the sublime and childlike bards of the Rig-Veda deified the morning glow Arustra, and the diurnal and nocturnal heavens as the twin brethren who had been nursed on the bosom of Aditi. Aditi with them is the space beyond the horizon. Aditi is the sky, heaven. Aditi is mother, father, son. The gods were Adityas, i.e., children of Aditi. Aditi, in a word, was boundless space, but space endowed with life, form, and power,—the power, namely, of delivering men from the heaviest of their chains, that is, sin. Aditi, too, is the mother of storms (Rudras). With the original Aryans storms represented the fecundating principle. Thus they pictured the storm among the clouds under the lively image of a bull among cows. Hence the celestial animals. The horse had been already placed in heaven to represent the sun (Asva). The fire of the hearth, too, which they produced by rubbing two sticks together, was as much a god as Varuna and Mitra, and worshipped as Agni, one cf the Adityas. Such was the innocent childhood of the Hindus, which originated a poetical mythology so closely allied to science, so rich in moral lessons,—could such innocence last!

Let us pass on to astrology as we find it among the Etruscans. We shall see the moral astrology of the primitive Aryans changed into political astrology. The word templum, the diminutive of tempus, as Varro tells us (de Ling. Lat. lib. vi.), signified—1, a division of the sky; 2, a spot on earth marked out by auspices; 3, by analogy, a spot below the earth. The augur with a staff (lituus) traced a line from north to south called cardo, and another from east to west called decumanus. Thus a temple consisted in marking out a spot; the entry was from the south, the sanctuary was at the north, propitious signs came from the east, unpropitious from the west. The same precautions which, according to Columella, agriculturists took in transplanting a tree to preserve the same aspect for roots and branches, the Romans, as disciples of the Etruscans, observed in fixing the site of their camps, their towns, &c., and not only this, but their observation of the flight of birds, their curious commentaries on the various forms of thunder and lightning, may all be reckoned as parts of astrology, inasmuch as to the Etruscan bards air and thunder appeared celestial phenomena. Just as Chinese astrologists professed the power of producing or averting eclipses, the Etruscan priests asserted that they could draw down or divert lightning. In fact, such claims are a common characteristic of what we have ventured to call political astrologies: everywhere political astrologists have laid claim to the production of phenomena which calculation, empiricism, or good fortune has enabled them to predict. If perchance their prediction failed, they saved their credit by saying that by their art they had averted the impending disaster. The Etruscans called their deities consentes, sharers of the destinies of their race, and believed that they were fated to perish after a reign of 6000 years. This doctrine of the renovation of heaven, earth, and gods, is found to prevail wherever politics, the growth of conquest, have supplanted the simple and childlike faith which springs up of itself among an innocent and unconquered race. When a nation left its home,—that land and sky which both witnessed the birth of its religion, and was part and parcel of that religion,—its priests gradually lost faith in their religion, and began to mix up politics with religion; its astrologers, whose business it was to interpret the signs of the heavens, felt that their power was doomed, and predicted a universal ruin, in which the nation, its religion, its gods, and heaven itself, were involved. But hope, which springs eternal in the human breast, made them add to their prophecy, that after the exhaustion of evil and the death of perverted races, a new order of things should be born. This is the creed of Hesiod’s sublime cosmogony: this is the burden of the 4th eclogue, in which Virgil has clothed the solemn strains of Etruria with a tenderness that is all his own. India, Egypt, Arabia, have all held the same belief, though the period between each palingenesis is different with each. Later on we shall meet with the same doctrine in the subtle doctor Cardan, though strangely disguised. With the Romans, before they were initiated into the learning of Greece, astrology was only another name for sorcery. Most readers will remember the picture in Tibullus of the witch who can draw down the moon by her charms, or succour the labouring moon. They can understand the idea of Heraclitus (for Greece, too, passed through this stage of meteorological psychology), who thought that truth is mixed up with the atmosphere, and that the sage breathes it. The same idea is thus rendered by Ovid, Fasti i. 473,— “Quae, simul aethereos animo conceperat ignes, Ore dabat vero carmina plena dei.”

This is the genuine Ινθουσιασμός. Nearly every one is familiar with the famous passage in the fourth Géorgie, beginning “Esse apibus partem divinoe mentis et haustus,” and the noble commentary of the poet which follows.

It was the sober belief of primitive Greece that the sun was a torch, and the stars candles periodically lit and extinguished. Xenophanes was the first philosopher who developed this astrological idea, and expounded the connection of the stars with the earth. Xenophanes thought that the stars were meteors, that is, terrestrial effluvia. This enables us to explain the malignant influence on plants and animals which both Greeks and Romans attributed to the stars, and expressed respectively by the words d<rτpo- βολάσθαι and siderari. The latest development of this belief is to be found in an English philosopher, who has written a book which proves that epidemics are due to the shocks of comets (Forster, Illustrations of the Astronomical Origin of Epidemic Diseases, Chelmsford, 1829). An American, in a work which shows some lucid intervals, borrows directly the thesis of Xenophanes, and demonstrates that wicked men contaminate the heavens and stars by their breath. Modern hallucinations are often the best commentary on ancient errors.

But the true source of astrology must be sought for in a remoter age than any we have yet reached. So far we have seen men grouped together as nations, possessing laws, reckoning more or less perfectly the course of time, making capital out of the defects of their calendar, like the Romans, or, it may be, complaining of those defects, and hailing the advent of a Meton like the Athenians in Aristophanes’s Clouds. But there must have been long preceding ages during which the passage of time was unmarked and unrecorded. Does not this idea of time mark the first stage of civilisation 1 Some savages cannot reckon at all; others, like children, cannot go farther back than yesterday, or the day before yesterday; others, again, can only mark the year by the changes of the seasons, and their only landmarks for the past are great calamities which have befallen the tribe. But it would be a great mistake to conclude that Chaldeans, Persians, Egyptians, &c., set to work methodically to invent a system of notation, and to map out time into years and months. Assuredly, if men had had no other end in view than the possibility of some day or other keeping double entry, figures would be still to seek. Similarly, if men had thought that the chief result of the various researches and discoveries which a calendar presupposes, would be to enable them to make an appointment a month beforehand, the inducement would have proved insufficient. Fortunately, there were other and higher motives to urge on our ancestors of various races in the path of discovery—those of religion and of astrology. The earth, as Hesiod tells us, was once a common abode of gods and men. These are two remarkable lines of Homer (f)d, xviii. 136), which Aristotle quotes, and Cicero has translated :— “τoιs yap vios lστ∖v tπιχθovlωv ανθρώπων oιov tπ' %μap &γρσι πατήρ avδpωv τe θeωv τe."

Such w as Homer’s astrology. But as, in course of time, each superior race in turn degenerated through the effects of conquest, either by mixing -with inferior races, or by oppressing their equals (thus, for instance, the Lacedaemonians mixed with the Messenians or Helots, and thus the primitive Aryans oppressed the Dravidian tribes), as each race passed from the age of gold, the age of innocence, to the age of bronze or iron, of Krali or evil, so, to compensate in some way for the loss of morality, we find them making discoveries in science and art. Thus swords were forged of iron, notwithstanding that iron (according to the Finnish legend) had sworn never to slay men. Thus, too, they began to distinguish the several constellations through which the sun appeared to pass. Let us turn to the strange Theogony of Hesiod (1. 119 seg ∖ we shall find that Chaos is the parent of Night and Erebus; but the Earth,—seemingly because it had been the peaceful abode of the Immortals who dwell on the snowy peaks of Parnassus, partly, too, because the fairest of the Immortals is Love,—the Earth is the parent of the Heavens: — “Tellus vero primum quidem genuit parem sibi Coelum stellis ornatum ut ipsam totam obtegat, Utque beatis sedes Divis tuta semper,” &c.

That the gods inhabited the mountains or groves before they migrated to heaven is a universal belief. But in what can this heaven of the gods be said to resemble earth Î A tradition, which Manilius has preserved, informs us that when Justice was banished from the earth she took up her abode, not in the heart of a king of France (there wa3 then no France or king in the modern sense of the word), but in heaven as one of the constellations of the zodiac.

The zodiac was the heaven which exactly corresponded to the earth (the first astronomers, we need not remark, knew nothing of declinations); it was the zodiac which protected the earth, taught the earth its duties, pointed out not only days and seasons, but the proper work for each day and season. The zodiac was the first book that lay open for all to read, written in runes, as the Scandinavians thought,—in mim and clif as the Arabs interpreted it,— and in the hieroglyphics of animals and symbols, according to Assyrians and Egyptians. But, alas! this grand conception, which seemed so true to the first astronomers, was obscured by the continual displacement of the zodiac. Thus, in judicial astrology the sign under which a child is born is always the ram, as in our almanacs it is the first sign of the year. Thus, too, the sign of Jupiter ÿ in a slightly altered shape, still heads our prescriptions. Nor is this the only remaining trace of zodiacal belief. For not only was agricultural and political life regulated at first directly by the zodiac, and then through the calendar, but the zodiac applied no less to civil life. Hence the Roman ides and kalends, hence the Greek decade, hence the week of the Jews and other nations. This is not the place to discuss the difficult question of the relation of the zodiac to the week; for our purpose it is enough to observe, that it was by the days of the week, each placed under the protection of some stellar deity, that the priests regulated the whole civil life of a nation, its law courts, its markets, and marriages. The primitive w eek began with the day of Saturn, the ancient Bel of the Assyrians, so called in distinction from the younger Bel, i.e., Jupiter, and it ended with the day of Venus, the Assyrian Mylitta. This day, which was afterwards held accursed by the Christian Fathers, was probably consecrated to marriages. Saturn’s day, or the day of Soetere, was identified with the Sabbath, and Sunday with the Lord’s day; the day of Venus with that of Friga, the goddess of love (Friday); Jove’s with that of the Norse Thor (Thursday); Mercury's with that of Woden, the god who grants wishes (Wednesday); and Mars’s with that of Tiw, the god of war (Tuesday). The Latin division of days into dies fasti and nefasti has perpetuated the same distinction of lucky and unlucky days which inspired Hesiod’s Works and Days. Many a tradesman at Home must have made the same complaint as La Fontaine’s cobbler, “On nous ruine en fêtes." With the Arabs Tuesday and Wednesday were the days for blood-letting, Mars being the lord of iron and blood, and Mercury of the humours. Even at the present day, travellers tell us, when an auspicious day has been proclaimed by the astrologers, the streets of Baghdad may be seen running with blood from the barbers’ shops. We see how soon the invention of the week became the engine of politicians and astrologers.

Our investigations have now brought us to judicial astrology, which is nothing else than the corruption of the purer astrology, the various phases of which we have attempted to trace. In a book published at Geneva in 1643, the year of Condé’s great victory, and of the succession of Louis XIV., entitled Janua Aurea reserata quatuor linguarum, 12mo, by J. A. Comenius, we find the following definition:—“Astronomus siderum meatus seu motus considerat : Astrologus eorumdem efficaciam, influxum, et effectum." Kepler was more cautious in his opinion; he spoke of astronomy as the wise mother, and astrology as the foolish daughter, but he added that the existence of the daughter was necessary to the life of the mother. Tycho Brahe and Gassendi both began with astrology, and it was only after pursuing the false science, and finding it wanting, that Gassendi devoted himself to astronomy. In their numerous allusions to the subtle mercury, which the one makes when treating of a means of measuring time by the efflux of the metal, and the other in a treatise on the transit of the planet, we see traces of the school in which they served their first apprenticeship. Huyghens, moreover, in his great posthumous work, Cosmotheoros, seu de terris coelestibus, shows himself a more exact observer of astrological symbols than Kircher himself in his Iter exstaticum. In that remarkable discussion on the plurality of worlds, which was at once translated into French, and afterwards reproduced in a popular form by Fontenelle, Huyghens contends that between the inhabitants of different planets there need not be any greater difference than exists between men of different types on the earth. “There are on the earth,” continues this rational interpreter of the astrologers and chiromancers, “men of cold temperament who would thrive in Saturn, which is the furthest planet from the sun, and there are other spirits warm and ardent enough to live in Venus.” Astrology among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and at Alexandria, had established a complete parallelism between men of different types and the planets, on the basis of their relative distance from the sun. These different types of character had been fixed by the Greeks in their conception of the planetary gods, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. To these the cabalists added the moon, as the planet corresponding to the phlegmatic temperament of the northern races. Apollo represented the nervous physique which Carus has rightly pronounced the most intellectual. But whence did the notion of this parallelism originate 1 The βolution of this problem will elucidate the practical side of astrology.

Let us once more revert to the first infancy of science. From the general tendency of primitive man to bring all knowledge under a single head, we may safely conclude that the first study of the heavens embraced and dominated over every other attempt at science. The cosmogonists pretended to explain the...