Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/69

61] as the source of health and plenty for vegetation, beasts and men. Their "wanton love" he made the cause of pestilence and disease. To understand both varieties of love "in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the seasons of the year is," he tells us, "termed astronomy." This suggests that he believed in astrology—in the potent influence of the stars over all changes in earthly matter. He called the stars "divine and eternal animals, ever abiding." The "lower gods," of whom many at least are identical with the heavenly bodies, form men who, if they live well, return after death each to a happy existence in his proper star. The implication is, though Plato does not say so distinctly, that the stars influence human life. Aristotle's doctrine was similar. Windelband has well expressed his view:

The stars themselves were for Aristotle beings of superhuman intelligence, incorporate deities. They appeared to him as the purer forms, those more like the deity, and from them a purposive rational influence upon the lower life of the earth seemed to proceed—a thought which became the root of mediæval astrology.

Moreover, "his theory of the subordinate gods of the spheres of the planets provided for a later demonology." And a belief in demons fosters a belief in magic. For such subordinate gods—on the one hand movers of nature's forces, and on the other hand subject to passions like man and open to influence through symbols and