Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/806

740 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,— &quot; Quse, si mul rethereos ammo conceperat ignes, Ore dabat vero carmina plena del.&quot; This is the genuine [ Greek ]. Nearly every one is familiar with the famous passage in the fourth Georgic, b3ginning &quot; Esse apibus partem divince mentis et hausttis,&quot; and the noble commentary of the poet which follows. {{ti|1em|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 con nection 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 currpo- {$o(.l&amp;lt;r6ai 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 land marks 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 pre supposes, would be to enable them to make an appointment a month beforehand, the inducement would have proved insufficient. Fortunately, there were othnr 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 (Od. xviii. 136), which Aristotle quotes, and Cicero has translated:— [ Greek ] [ Greek ] Such was Homer s astrology. But as, in course of time, each superior race in turn degenerated through the effecta of conquest, either by mixing with inferior races, or by oppressing their equals (thus, for instance, the Lacedae monians 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 com pensate 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 constella tions through which the sun appeared to pass. Let us turn to the strange Theogony of Hesiod (1. 119 seq.), we shall find that Chaos is the parent of Night and Erebus ; but the Earth, seemingly because it had been the peace ful abode of the Immortals who dwell on the snowy peaks of Parnassus, partly, too, because the fairest of the Im mortals is Love, the Earth is the parent of the Heavens:— &quot; Tellus vero primum quidem genuit parem sibi Coslum stellis ornatum ut ipsam totam obtcgat, Utque beatis sedes Divis tuta semper,&quot; &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 1 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 was 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 pro tected 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 con ception, 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&amp;gt; born is always the ram, as in our almanacs it is the first sign of the year. Thus, too, the sign of Jupiter If- 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, bufe 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 pro tection of some stellar deity, that the priests regulated the whole civil life of a nation, its law courts, its markets, and marriages. The primitive week began with the day of Saturn, the ancient Bel of the Assyrians, so called in dis tinction 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 