Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/86

78 as the Arethusa, and there every four years, on the very days when the victims are slaughtered at the Olympian games, casts up filth from its depths. The themes Seneca discusses of course afford him less opportunity for the taking up of the magic properties of plants, animals and other objects, but he was probably less credulous in this respect than Pliny, unless his pretensions are even more deceptive.

Seneca did believe, however, that whatever is caused is a sign of some future event. He accepts divination in all its ramifications. Only he holds that each flight of a bird is not caused by direct act of God nor the vitals of the victim altered under the axe by divine interference, but that all has been arranged beforehand in a fatal and causal series. He believes that all unusual celestial phenomena are to be looked upon as prodigies and portents. But no less truly do the planets in their unvarying courses signify the future. The stars are of divine nature and we ought to approach the discussion of them with as reverent an air as when with lowered countenance we enter the temples for worship. Not only do the stars influence our upper atmosphere as earth's exhalations affect the lower, but they announce what is to occur. Seneca employs the statement of Aristotle that comets signify the coming of storms and winds and foul weather, to prove that comets are stars;