Chapter 5. Stoics, Kepler, and Evaluations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Even Kepler, who lived from 1571 to 1630, and indisputably was one
of the founders of modern astronomy and physics, even he cast horoscopes,
although he was opposed to much of the astrology of his time. He called popular astrology "a dreadful
superstition" and "a sortilegous monkey-play".
(Sortilege is prophesying by randomly casting or drawing
"lots", using pebbles, dice, etc., and interpreting the results.)
Many have tried to apologize for Kepler's astrology.
For example, Arthur Koestler, the novelist and essayist, claims that
Kepler "started his career with the publication of astrological calendars
and ended it as Court Astrologer to the Duke of Wallenstein.
He did it for a living, with his tongue in his cheek."
"In a typical outburst," Koestler says, "he wrote: 'A
mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty
foundations [of astrology] resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule,
until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty
puddle.'" (Arthur Koestler, The
Sleepwalkers, 1959, p. 243.) Still,
as Koestler continues, while Kepler "despised these crude practices, and
despised himself for having to resort to them, he at the same time believed in
the possibility of a new and true astrology as an exact empirical
science".
2. Kepler wanted not to
abolish astrology, but to reform it. He
wrote several short treatises specifically on astrology, and referred to it,
sometimes extensively, in his large major works. As Grard Simon emphasizes, Kepler regarded astrology -- a reformed
astrology -- as a legitimate branch of his science. Simon says: "Kepler
did not consider his astrological theories as less important or less true than
those which he
3. An outline of Kepler's reformed astrology has been given by the
physicist Wolfgang Pauli. According
to Kepler, individual souls have the ability to react to certain harmonious
proportions which correspond to specific rational divisions of a circle.
In music, this ability is revealed in our perception of euphony or
consonance in certain musical intervals.
Our souls are said to be able to react similarly to harmonious
proportions of angles which rays of stellar light make with each other when
they strike the earth. In the
case of planets, these are the aspects of traditional astrology,
considered already by Ptolemy. In
Kepler's view, these are what astrology should be based on.
For Kepler, the effective angles between two rays coming from different
planets are those that are found in the regular polygons, such as equilateral
triangles, squares or hexagons, with which a plane surface can be covered
without gaps ("tilings"), or in the "star"
4. Kepler holds that it is the light which comes from the other planets which produce certain
effects in our souls, and therefore in our bodies.
(The doctrine that light is a kind of force is an old idea, found, for
example, among the neo-Platonists of antiquity.) Furthermore, the earth itself has a soul, and the planets act
on this soul as well. The earth,
for Kepler, is a living thing. Pauli
describes Kepler's analogies: "As living bodies have hair, so does the
earth have grass and trees, the cicadas being its dandruff; as living
creatures secrete urine in a bladder, so do the mountains make springs;
sulphur and volcanic products correspond to excrement, metals and rainwater to
blood and sweat; the sea water is the earth's nourishment ... At the same time the anima terrae [soul of the earth]
is also a formative power (facultas formatrix) in the earth's interior
and expresses, for example, the five regular bodies in precious stones and
fossils ..... It is important that in Kepler's view the anima terrae is
responsible for the weather and also for meteoric phenomena.
Too much rain, for instance, is an illness of the earth."
(Wolfgang Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the
Scientific Theories of Kepler", especially p. 176 and p. 179-190, in The
Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955, by Carl Jung and Wolfgang
Pauli, translation by Priscilla Silz of Naturerklrung und Psyche,
1952.)
5. Field reports that Kepler
believed that the theory that the weather was affected by planetary aspects
was amply confirmed by observation. He
himself made many observations to this effect.
Field says: "Kepler's
success in obtaining observational confirmation of his belief in the efficacy
of Aspects may be partly due to the subjectivity of the data, but another
explanation also presents itself: Aspects are so numerous that for any given
change one could almost certainly find an appropriate recent Aspect.
This objection in fact occurred to one of Kepler's regular
correspondents, the physician Johann Georg Brengger, who mentioned it in a
letter to Kepler dated 7 March 1608."
(J. V. Field, Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology, 1988, p. 128-129.)
6. As Pauli says, Kepler offers light as a physical cause for
the effects of the planets on human beings, and indeed on other living
creatures. Furthermore, he argues
that properly speaking we should not say that the planets cause the effects
they have on us, but rather that it is the constitution of our souls, in their
ability to respond to the planetary light, which causes these effects.
Pauli notices a serious objection to Kepler's astrological theory, that
artificial light ought to produce astrological effects.
(Pauli, ibid., p. 190.) But
of course one can think up reasons for distinguishing between artificial and
planetary light. Or maybe
artificial light can produce astrological effects.
7. Simon observes that according to Kepler, it is possible to predict
the future from what takes place in the sky for three different reasons, one
physical, another psychological, and a third metaphysical.
The physical reason concerns the effect of light.
Simon says these are for the most part meteorological according to
Kepler, whereas Pauli emphasizes Kepler's belief in the effect of light on
living beings. The psychological reason results from emotions stirred in the
souls of living beings by the aspects and in the soul of the Earth by
the planetary aspects. This also
has an effect on weather changes, but also on the actions of nations and their
leaders, and on the destinies of individuals.
Finally, the metaphysical reason, which Kepler allows is much more
conjectural, arises from the value of certain rare celestial phenomena as signs
-- not as causes. Appearance
of a comet, or above all of a new star, are phenomena of this kind.
In the case of a new star, one may be in the presence of an indication
of a mutation in universal history.
8. Kepler takes the psychological reason, based on planetary aspects,
to be in the realm of nature to the same degree as the physical reason is.
The physical and psychological reasons
authorize forecasting much more than prophecy, Simon says, and although
Kepler reshaped the foundations of such prediction, he never seems to have
doubted the fundamental soundness of his technique based on aspects.
On the other hand, he wondered about the possibility of interpreting
signs which, if they are sent by God, can be understood only by prophets.
Kepler doesn't exclude the possibility that there are providential
signs in they heavens. Indeed, he
observes that they are attested to in the Bible and other ancient writers.
But he is skeptical about men being able to interpret these signs
correctly unless they are divinely inspired prophets.
Kepler wanted to substitute, as far as he could, an astrology of causes
for an astrology of signs. Astrology
would then become, he hoped, what it should never have ceased being, an
applied branch of natural science. The
astrological aspects result from the normal periodic
motions of the planets. From
time to time, however, events occur in the heavens which are not
periodic, and which therefore appear to be unpredictable.
If they can be considered as signs addressed to mankind, then an
astrologer who undertakes to interpret them can no longer limit himself to
describing their physical and
9. In his work on the "new star" of 1604, De stella nova
(1606), Kepler speculates on whether or not the occurrence of a new star can
be assigned to chance. Furthermore,
in the same year, there was a "fiery trigon", that is, a conjunction
of the three superior planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Was it also a matter of chance that the new star appeared in
the same year as this "grand conjunction"? For those of an Epicurean turn of mind, this was so.
It was like a throw of two dice, one of which had the aggregation of
the atoms of the new star on a face, and the other of which had the grand
conjunction on a face. Throw the
dice enough times, and this pair of faces will come up.
The Aristotelians had a similar view.
The formation of the atoms into a new star was not a matter of chance
for them, but the causes of the star and the causes of the grand conjunction
had no connection with each other. The
two causal series leading to these events were considered to be independent.
But then they coincided by chance.
Kepler opposed both of these views.
He argues that neither the individual events nor their coincidence were
the result of chance. This would
be unworthy of God. (Simon,
ibid., p. 52-80.)
10. Kepler could not abide chance events. He says: "What
then is chance? It is the most
detestable idol, which is nothing else than mistrust of the supreme and
omnipotent God, and also of what he has created, the absolutely perfect World,
in which in place of a soul one takes a blind and unconsidered motion, and in
place of a body an infinite chaos. It
is impious to attribute to chance what belongs to God." (Johannes Kepler, De stella nova, quoted by Simon,
ibid., p. 62.) Kepler will not
admit a cosmology founded on chance, in which the creation would have no goal
or beauty, and would lose all meaning. Here
is a source of Kepler's concern for astrology.
To radically separate what happens in the heavens from what happens on
earth is to forget the perfection of the work of God and his solicitude for
people. It is to make the world
silent, and to prevent us from witnessing its source.
(Simon, ibid., p. 61-63.)
11. Kepler never stopped believing that the Earth has a Soul.
Still, Ernst Cassirer recalls Kepler's debate with Patrizzi over the
motions of the planets: "[Patrizzi] declared that any attempt on the part of
mathematical astronomy to determine the course of the planets by interlocking
orbits, cycles, and epicycles was vain because in reality the planets were
nothing other than animate beings, endowed with reason, who, just as
appearance indicates, describe the most diverse, strangely tortuous paths
through the liquid ether. It is
characteristic of Kepler's manner of thinking that he countered this
conception primarily by a methodological argument -- an argument he himself
characterized as 'philosophical.' To
resolve all seeming disorder into order, in every irregularity to seek the
hidden rule: precisely this -- he stressed in opposing Patrizzi -- is the
basic principle of 'philosophical astronomy.'"
(Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1953-1957,
translation by Ralph Manheim of Die Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen,
1923-1929, v. 2 (1955, 1925), p. 139-140.)
12. Cassirer quotes Kepler: "Among
the adherents of a sound philosophy there is none who is not of this opinion,
who would not congratulate himself and astronomy if he succeeded in disclosing
the causes of error and distinguishing the true movements of the planets from
their accidental orbits which rest only on sensory illusion, and in thus
proving the simplicity and ordered regularity of their orbits."
Cassirer concludes: In
these simple and profound words from Kepler's pamphlet in defense of Tycho
Brahe, and in the concrete confirmation they soon received through Kepler's
treatise on the movements of Mars, the planets were dethroned as the ancient
gods of time and fate, and the general view of time and of the temporal
process was transferred from the image-world of the mythical-religious
imagination to the exact conceptual world of scientific
cognition." (ibid.) Nevertheless,
Kepler believed that the planets, including the sun and earth, have souls, and
are alive. A dissolution of this
apparent discrepancy between Cassirer's analysis and Kepler's belief follows
from the doctrine, espoused by Kepler, that the souls of planets are guided
not by caprice or will or chance, but by laws or "hidden rules".
13. Simon admirably and enthusiastically summarizes the outlook of
Kepler: "Nothing is left to
chance in this world which forms a perfectly coherent system.
It is through and through crossed by a tightly woven network of
proportions which are the mark of the worker on his work; which are thus the
enchantment by which he gives to himself the spectacle of his own glory.
The cosmic harmonies make up the true hymn which the psalmist in his
prescience lent to the universe, and which one beautiful day an inspired
mathematician deciphered in the course of his astronomical contemplation..... Mathematical ratios are then the privileged and universal
language which the stars, people and God simultaneously speak and understand.
This is not astonishing since 'geometry before the birth of things was
co-eternal with the divine spirit ..... '" (Harmonice mundi, IV,
1)
14. "An immense play of mirrors thus exists in an immemorial way
between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the creation and the creature, the
creation and the Creator, the creature and the Creator; and it is made
possible by mathematics, because this is at the same time their common essence
and their common reason. It is
the only natural language, because it is the only one in which Nature
expresses itself. And it is
necessary to take literally this idea of expression:
Nature is not only full of meaning, but full of a meaning which is not
hidden, which on the contrary announces itself openly in the spectacle of the
heavens each hour, each day, provided one knows the language in which it
manifests itself. Far from being
contingent like the languages of man, mathematics conceals and reveals the
secret necessity of things. Because
of this, it is a sacred although natural language, or rather sacred because
natural; perhaps even the only truly sacred language, because it is the only
one which escapes from the cultural arbitrariness of the sign."
15. "Thus the heavens," Simon continues, "by the
equilibrium of their proportions and the harmony of their motions, write a
revelation as important and as worthy of confidence as that of the Bible.
God speaks there his own language rather than putting himself within
reach of man; and whoever knows how to understand it, has no need of any
interpretation or any tradition to penetrate their [the heavens'] secret
perfection. Far from being a
profane curiosity, the desire to probe the Mystery of the World arises from
religious concern and religious quest; and when little by little its secrets
reveal themselves, the meditation which they inspire led to prayer and the
actions of grace. Nothing is more
foreign to the spirit of Kepler than to place, as we do today, astronomy among
the positive sciences stripped of all mystical connotation; on the contrary,
it is for him a science of the sacred."
16. One understands better by means of this, as Simon observes,
Kepler's attitude with regard to astrology.
Simon says: "For its
status had nothing in common with what we confer on it today, we who have a
tendency to place it rather in the sphere of magico-religious productions.
What he reproaches the popular astrology of his time for is its lending
to Nature, and therefore to God, one of the arbitrary languages with which
people express their passions, their interests and their anxieties; that is
why he criticizes at length the traditional encodings, dominations of the
planets, divisions of the zodiac, and above all domifications of the themes by
which one has sought to make the world speak according to artificial and
naively anthropomorphic symbols. To
this art of the charlatan, he opposes the science which results from
mathematical knowledge of the harmonies and of the effect of the celestial
configurations on terrestrial faculties and human souls, both in their
immediate activities and their later developments.
It is not in projecting into the world the cares and words of people,
but in grasping the causal relations which are established between the
sublunary and the supralunary that one can understand the effects of stars on
earthly things." (Gérard
Simon, ibid., p. 440-442.)
17. Simon goes on to describe Kepler's aversion to applying astrology
to profane activities -- harvests expected, projects under way, ambitions
thwarted -- rather than for contemplating the work of the Creator.
This was one of Kepler's objections to judicial astrology, that it was
a utilitarian and basely positivistic science, which usurped the place of a
higher and purer discipline which concerned the sacred.
18. Kepler never gave up hope that astrology could be reformed and made
into a genuine science. "No
man," he says, "should hold it to be incredible that out of the
astrologers' foolishness and blasphemies some useful and sacred knowledge may
come, that out of the unclean slime may come a little snail or mussel or
oyster or eel, all useful nourishments; that out of a big heap of lowly worms
may come a silk worm, and lastly that in the evil-smelling dung, a busy hen
may find a decent corn, nay, a pearl or a golden corn, if she but searches and
scratches long enough." (quoted
by
19. Simon says: "We
can in no way compare Kepler's intellectual reactions with our own.
Unlike us, Kepler could not but take astrology seriously, because if it
is the mirror image of astronomy it consequently has the same level of
plausibility. Far from being
completely resolved, the question of whether astrology was valid was then
still quite a pertinent one. Again,
unlike us, who would be inclined to associate astrology with magico-religious
thought, and astronomy with positivism, for Kepler it is astrology that is the
profane utilitarian activity, while astronomy is the science of the sacred,
the science of Creation..... the idea of a language of the World, of a book of
Nature, is, as we see, found in all the systems of thought of the time, and
reveal a very archaic type of reasoning.
With a Kepler, with a Galileo, this language is transformed and becomes
mathematical: nothing seems to be changed,
but nevertheless everything is about to change."
(Gérard Simon, "Kepler's Astrology:
The Direction of a Reform", in Kepler, Four Hundred Years,
1975, edited by Arthur Beer and Peter Beer, p. 447-448.)
20. The less mystical Francis Bacon also thought that astrology was
reclaimable. In the De
augmentis scientarum (The Advancement of Learning) (1623), he says:
"As for Astrology, it is so full of superstition, that scarce
anything sound can be discovered in it. Notwithstanding,
I would rather have it purified than altogether rejected."
He goes on to speak of a "Sane Astrology", with which one
will be able to predict with a great degree of accuracy "floods,
droughts, heats, frosts, earthquakes, irruptions of water, eruptions of fire,
great winds and rains, the various seasons of the year, plagues, epidemics,
diseases, plenty and dearth of grain, wars, seditions, schisms,
transmigrations of peoples, and
in short of all commotions or greater
revolutions of things, natural as well as evil."
(quoted from Bacon's De augmentis scientarum, 1623, by Don Allen
Cameron in The Star-Crossed Renaissance, 1941, p. 152.)
Cameron goes on to observe that Bacon announces that once the
foundations of "Sane Astrology" are established, one will be able to
predict such things as what seasons will be especially dangerous for monks and
courtiers, or more ominous for scholars than soldiers.
The idea of reforming astrology is not new: "So it is with all
astrologers (says the Talmud): they see something but do not understand what
they see." (Rashi, Commentaries
on the Pentateuch, Numbers, quoted in Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish
Quotations, 1971, p. 106.)
21. The physicist Paul Davies says (1980): "Practical science proceeds apace, on the basis that the
influence of, say, Jupiter on the motion of a motor car is less than any
instrument could conceivably measure. However,
when it comes to making observations, it is precisely these minute forces
which play the vital role. If it
were not for the fact that some influence from Jupiter had a detectable
effect we could never know of its existence.
The inescapable conclusion is that all observation requires
interaction, of some sort. When we see Jupiter, photons of sunlight reflected from atoms
in the Jovian atmosphere traverse the Earth's atmosphere and impinge on cells
in the retina where they dislodge electrons from the atoms therein.
This merest brush of a disturbance sets up a tiny electric signal
which, when amplified and propagated to the brain, delivers the sensation
'Jupiter'. It follows that,
through this chain, our brain cells are linked by electromagnetic forces to
the atmosphere of Jupiter. If the
chain of interaction is extended by incorporating telescopes, our brains can
couple to the surfaces of stars billions of light years away."
Interactions are not one-way.
22. Davies continues: "An
important feature of all types of interaction is that if one system disturbs
another, thereby registering its existence, then there will be an inevitable
reaction back on the first system, which in turn disturbs it.....
in order to get any information at all [about a physical system], some
sort of influence must pass from object to observer, though its reaction may
be utterly negligible for practical purposes.
In the case of Jupiter, it would be invisible if it were not for its
illumination by sunlight. This
same sunlight which, when reflected, stimulates our retinas, also reacts on
Jupiter by exerting a tiny pressure on its surface.
(Sunlight pressure leads to a noticeable and spectacular effect by
producing the tails of comets.) Thus,
we do not, strictly, see the 'real' Jupiter, but one disturbed by light
pressure. Similar reasoning can
be applied to all our observations of the world about us.
We can never, even in principle, observe things, only the
interaction between things. Nothing
can be seen in isolation, for the very act of observation must involve
coupling of some sort." (Paul
Davies, Other Worlds, 1980, p. 56-7).
As far as I know, astrologers do not cast horoscopes for the planets
themselves.
23. But what about Kepler's belief that the planets (including the sun
and moon) have souls? This too is
ancient idea, as is the idea that the universe itself has a soul.
In the third section of the second of his Enneads, the
philosopher Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) begins by ridiculing the idea that the
stars _cause_ events to come to pass. Countless
myriads of living beings continue to be born, he says.
How can one think that the stars can minister to every single one of
these people -- to make them famous or obscure, rich or poor, lascivious or
chaste? "What kind of life
is this for the stars," he says, "how could they possibly handle a
task so huge?"
24. Still, Plotinus says, stars do announce the future,
evidently taking this to be a fact attested to by experience. How can this happen? Plotinus's
answer is that the stars are signs,
by virtue of the fact that everything is related to everything else.
He says: "We may
think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or
inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted
to them: upon these main tasks
will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying
any living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for
example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by
indications in the eyes or in some other part of the body.
If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we: in different
ways the one law applies. All
teems with symbol; the wise man is the one who in any one thing can read
another, a process familiar to all of us in not a few examples of everyday
experience. But what is the
comprehensive principle of co-ordination?
Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not
only by stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive
guidance in our varied concerns." (Plotinus,
The Six Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna, 1921-1930, reprinted
1952, p. 44.)
25. Plotinus describes "the comprehensive principle of
coordination" as follows: "All
things must be joined to one another, not only must there be in each
individual part what is well called a single united breath of life but before
them, and still more, in the All. One
principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from
all; and just as in individual organisms each member undertakes its own
particular task, so the members of the All, each individual one of them, have
their individual work to do; this applies even more to the All than to
particular organisms, in so far as the members of it are not merely members
but wholes, and more important than the members of particular things.
Each one goes forth from one single principle and does its own work,
but they also co-operate one with another; for they are not cut off from the
whole. They act on and are
affected by others; one comes up to another, bringing it pain or pleasure.
Their going out has nothing random or casual about it. Something else proceeds again from these; and something else
in succession from that, according to the order of nature."
(Plotinus, translation by A. H. Armstrong of the Enneads,
1966, v. 2, p. 71). E. R. Dodds reports of this passage: "Plotinus wrote an essay to show that while in virtue of
the universal _sympatheia_ the stars may _indicate_ the future,
they cannot _determine_ it -- and when shortly afterwards he died of an
unpleasant disease, the astrologers saw in it the vengeance of the offended
star-demons." (E. R. Dodds, Pagan
and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, Some Aspects of Religious Experience from
Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, 1968, p. 15.)
26 James Lovelock expounds a theory of Earth as a living being,
regulated by the lives on it, in his book Ages of Gaia, A Biography of Our
Living Earth, 1988. Lynn
Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in their book Micro-cosmos, Four Billion Years
of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, 1986, say (p. 265): "Gaia,
the superorganismic system of all life on Earth, hypothetically maintains the
composition of the air and the temperature of the planet's surface, regulating
conditions for the continuation of life.....
On earth the environment has been made and monitored by life as much as
life has been made and influenced
by the environment." We see
that for Plotinus, as for others in antiquity, the whole universe is a living
being, although, to be sure, the number of scientific details of certain kinds
encompassed in their theories was much smaller than nowadays.
27. Earlier than Plotinus, Plato had said in his Timaeus:
"All this, then, was the plan of the god who is for ever [the
Demiurge, the Creator] for the god who was sometime to be [the Universe].
According to this plan he made it smooth and uniform, everywhere
equidistant from its centre, a body whole and complete, with complete bodies
for its parts. And in the centre
he set a soul and caused it to extend throughout the whole and further wrapped
the body round with soul on the outseide; and so he established one world
alone, round and revolving in a circle, solitary but able by means of reason
of its excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or
friend but sufficient to itself. On
all these accounts the world which he brought into being was a blessed
god." (Plato, Timaeus,
translated by Francis Cornford in Plato's Cosmology, 1937, p. 58 of
reprint of 1957.)
28. On the basis of the Timaeus, the Laws and other
writings of Plato, Cornford comments: "The
visible universe is a living creature, having soul (psyche) in body and
reason (nous) in soul. It
is called a god in the same sense in which the term is applied to the stars,
planets, and Earth -- the 'heavenly gods'. All these gods are everlasting, coeval with time itself;
though theoretically dissoluble, because composite of reason, soul, and body,
they will never actually be dissolved. Man
is also composed of reason, soul, and body; but his soul will be dissolved
back into the elements, and the two lower parts of his soul are also mortal.
Only the divine reason in him is imperishable.
Thus there is a contrast between macrocosm and microcosm, but also an
analogy, which runs all though the discourse.
The world itself, like the heavenly gods and man, is divine because it
contains the divine element, reason.....
There is, then, in the soul and body of the universe a divine Reason
analogous to man's; and we shall find that the unchanging movement of its
thought is symbolised, or even visibly embodies, in the circular revolutions
of the heavenly gods and of the universe as a whole."
(Francis Cornford, Plato's Cosmology, 1937, p. 38-39 of the
reprint of 1957.)
29. Thus according to Plato, not only is the whole universe alive, but
so are Earth, Sun, Moon and the other planets.
However, this doctrine is also older than Plato, probably much older.
Still, according to Pliny, "Hipparchus can never be sufficiently
praised for having better than anyone else proved the kinship of the stars
with man and that our souls are part of the heavens."
Hipparchus flourished about 160-125 B.C.
He was one of the great astronomers of antiquity.
He is credited, among other things, with having discovered the
precession of the equinoxes; with having compiled the first catalog of stars
using a system of coordinates; with having compiled a table of chords of
circles (not the musical kind), thus advancing trigonometry;
and with having established a system of latitude and longitude for
locating positions on earth.
30. The Stoics too believed that the universe is a living being.
They extrapolated their biological theories to the whole cosmos.
David Hahm comments: "This
procedure rests on the deep conviction that the cosmos is a living animal.
This idea cannot be traced to a specific philosophical predecessor, but
was a conviction rooted in the consciousness of the Greek people, as well as
of other ancient peoples. Though
philosophy, especially in the late fourth century, shunned this idea in its
literal sense, it could not, or would not, uproot this fundamental outlook
from the Greek mind." (David
Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology, 1977, p. 210.)
Plato develops the idea in the Timaeus, but treats it as an
explanatory myth rather than a scientific theory in the sense, say, of
Aristotle. Aristotle himself
treats such ideas as kinds of analogy, or metaphor.
Some of the Stoics, it appears, took the conception for literal truth:
the universe is alive, sensitive, intelligent, and has a material soul.
31. Samuel Angus says: "Because
[for Stoics] one spirit pulsated in the whole life of the universe there
obtained a mysterious 'sympatheia of the whole,' by means of which man
could enter into fellowship with the cosmic process.
The soul was a fragment of the celestial fires with which it maintained
its kinship and to which it would return.
Men are not merely members of one another, but of the whole cosmic
order. The world is the image of
God and man the image of the world. Man
as part of the cosmos is sympathetic with it as a whole.....
This cosmic harmony and universal sympathy were dear to the adherents
of astral religion..... It takes
an effort of the imagination fully to realize how this science-religion evoked
such exalted feeling and moulded to virtue and beauty the lives of its
adherents .... Cosmic emotion was
not a torrent picturesquely rolling over precipices of ecstasy and exaltation:
it was harnessed to moral life. 'The
love of heaven makes us heavenly,' was its credo."
(Samuel Angus, The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World, A
Study in the Historical Background of Early Christianity, 1929, p.
263-264, 270.)
32.The Stoics were apt to identify the soul of the universe with God.
The Stoic Cornutus says: "Just
as we ourselves are controlled by a soul, so the world possesses a soul
holding it together, and the soul is designated God, primordially and
ever-living and the source of all life."
According to the Stoic Marcus Aurelius:
"The world is one living organism with one substance and one
soul." Cleanthes maintains
"there is one soul interpenetrating the whole cosmos, by participation in
which we too become endowed with soul."
Angus reports that the modern Platonist T. Taylor says:
"I confess that I am wholly at a loss to conceive what could
induce the moderns to controvert the dogma that the stars and the whole world
are animated, as it is an opinion of infinite antiquity, and is friendly to
the most unperverted, spontaneous, and accurate conceptions of the human mind.
Indeed the rejection of it appears to me to be just as absurd as it
would be in a maggot, if it were capable of syllogizing, to infer that man is
a machine impelled by some external force when he walks, because it never saw
any animated reptile so large." (Angus,
ibid., p. 264-266.)
33. Cicero presents arguments of the Stoics for the divinity of the
universe, hence for the universe being alive and having a rational soul.
This divinity is extended to the stars.
Cicero says: "Having thus perceived the divinity of the world, we
must also assign the same divinity to the stars, which are formed from the
most mobile and the purest part of the aether, and are not compounded of any
other element besides; they are of a fiery heat and translucent throughout.
Hence they too have the fullest right to be pronounced to be living
beings endowed with sensation and intelligence ....
Again the consciousness and intelligence of the stars is most clearly
evinced by their order and regularity; for regular and rhythmic motion is
impossible without design, which contains no trace of causal or accidental
variation; now the order and eternal regularity of the constellations
indicates neither a process of nature, for it is highly rational, nor chance,
for chance loves variation and abhors regularity; it follows therefore that
the stars move of their own free-will and because of their intelligence and
divinity .... The regularity
therefore in the stars, this exact punctuality throughout all eternity
notwithstanding the great variety of their courses, is to me incomprehensible
without rational intelligence and purpose.
And if we observe these attributes in the planets, we cannot fail to
enroll even them among the number of gods."
(Cicero, De natura deorum, translated by H. Rackham, 1933, p.
161, 163, 175.)
34. Earlier, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) put it this way:
"On all these grounds, therefore, we may infer with confidence
that there is something beyond the bodies that are about us on this earth,
different and separate from them; and that the superior glory of its nature is
proportionate to its distance from this world of ours.....
The reasons why the primary body is eternal and not subject to increase
or diminution, but unaging and unalterable and unmodified, will be clear from
what has been said to any one who believes in our assumptions.
Our theory seems to confirm the phenomena and to be confirmed by them.
For all men have some conception of the nature of the gods, and all who
believe in the existence of gods at all, whether barbarian or Greek, agree in
allotting the highest place to the deity, surely because they suppose that
immortal is linked with immortal and regard any other supposition as
impossible. If then there is, as
there certainly is, anything divine, what we have just said about the primary
bodily substance was well said. The mere evidence of the senses is enough to convince us of
this, at least with human certainty. For
in the whole range of time past, so far as our inherited records reach, no
change appears to have taken place either in the whole scheme of the outermost
heaven or in any of its proper parts. The
name, too, of that body seems to have been handed down right to our own day
from our distant ancestors who conceived of it in the fashion we have been
expressing. The same ideas, one
must believe, recur in men's minds not once or twice but again and again.
And so, implying that the primary body is something else beyond earth,
fire, air, and water, they gave the highest place the name of aether,
derived from the fact that it 'runs always' for an eternity of time."
(Aristotle, De caelo (Peri ouranos, On the Heavens), translated
by J. L. Stocks, 269b12-16, 270b1-23.)
35. Richard Lemay tells us: "The
notion that the whole Universe was one single body animated with a living soul
was an essential part of the Platonic tradition of early medieval times, and
still received much attention during William of Conches' lifetime."
(Richard Lemay, Abu Ma'shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth
Century, The Recovery of Aristotle's Natural Philosophy through Arabic
Astrology, 1962, p. 188.) Among
the 12th century writers who accepted this theory in some form, besides
William of Conches, were Adelard of Bath, Ablard, Thierry of Chartres, Bernard
Silvester amd Raymond of Marseilles. Some
went so far as to identify the World-Soul with the Holy Ghost.
This was one of the opinions which Adelard and William of Conches were
forced to recant, as being sacrilegious and heretical, although evidently
Raymond of Marseilles and Bernard Silvester held the view unscathed.
"Theologians and mystics," Lemay says, are always opposed in
principle to any non-theological or non-mystical Weltanschauung",
and William of Thierry's attacks
on William of Conches are said by Lemay to have "opened an important
phase of the conflict of Natural Philosophy against Theology which raged
during the entire course of Scholasticism in the next three or four
centuries." (Lemay, l.c., p. 193-194.)
Lemay recommends for a good account of this conflict the work of Andrew
D. White, _A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom, 1896, whom we quoted earlier.
36. All of these authors were strongly influenced by a work of the
Arabian astrologer Abu Ma'shar (Albumasar) written in the 9th century A.D. in
Baghdad, and translated into Latin in the 12th century by European scholars.
For Abu Ma'shar, the sky and planets are alive and govern the world
below. Abu Ma'shar, in turn,
based his theory of animation of the planets and the existence on certain
works of Aristotle. For William
of Conches, the animation of the sky and planets is explained as a result of
an act of God's Intelligence and Will, but for Abu Ma'shar, it is a
consequence of observed fact. Raymond
of Marseilles, in the spirit of Aristotle, argued that the planets move by
themselves, what moves by itself must be alive, hence the planets are alive.
Even in William of Conches' work, there is a tendency toward a more
physical and astrological interpretation of the World-Soul, even an
identification of it with our Sun, although William of Conches himself didn't
accept this identification. More
radical was the view of Raymond of Marseilles.
Lemay says: "To him
the divine vigor infused in the World-Soul and animating the whole Universe
resided principally in the heavenly bodies.
Astrology thus received a divine sanction and an edifying character on
which Raymond of Marseilles tarries with confidence and a sense of
satisfaction." (Lemay,
ibid., p. 149-157, 188-195.)
37. Such ideas were also prevalent among certain writers during the
European Renaissance, who had been inspired by the works of Plato, the Stoics,
Plotinus, the Hermeticists, the Kabbalists, and such medieval writers as Abu
Ma'shar and Raymond of Marseilles. For
example, speaking of the De vita coelitus comparanda (Guiding One's Life by
the Stars, or perhaps On Obtaining Life from the Heavens) (1489) by
Marsilio Ficino, Wayne Shumaker says that for Ficino, "the whole world is
in fact alive and filled with soul."
Also, the Hermeticists tell us again and again that the whole world is
alive. From the Hermetic work Asclepius:
"If therefore the world is always a living animal -- was, and is,
and will be -- nothing in the world is mortal.
Since every single part, such as it is, is always living and is in a
world which is always one and always a living animal, there is no place in the
world for death." (Wayne
Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance, A Study in Intellectual
Patterns, 1972, p. 122 and 225.)
38. Today, of course, the stars are considered by physicists and
astronomers to be no more alive than, say, hydrogen atoms or electrons
(however alive they may be). Correspondingly,
while there is no lack today of astrologers and people who consult them, few
astronomers now believe there is anything worthwhile in astrology.
Here are the concluding words of a book on astrology called The
Gemini Syndrome, Star Wars of the Oldest Kind, by two astronomers (not
astrologers!) Roger B. Culver and Philip A. Ianna, published in 1979:
"We suspect the reasons for the current return to astrology, as
well as other occult systems, range from simple curiosity to a desperate
groping for miracle solutions so the real problems of life and society may be
avoided. Any such massive rejection of rationality stemming from
ignorance of the facts, however, should be a matter of grave concern.
A scan of human history reveals that when a society begins to embrace
such irrational and fatalistic views, the end is close at hand. ... [We]
propose that the rise of astrology in a culture does not
39. Nancy Reagan, wife of President Reagan, says in her memoirs,
concerning her attachment to astrology: "I
should say, too, that the idea of consulting an astrologer never struck me as
particularly strange. I used to
look at my horoscope every morning as I read the paper, although fifteen
minutes later I usually forgot
what it said. And although I'm
far from a true believer, I do think there are certain characteristics that
tend to be true of individuals born under a particular sign .....
I was born on July 6, which makes me a Cancer. It is often said that people born under the sign of Cancer
are above all homemakers and nesters, which is exactly how I would define
myself. Cancers also tend to be
intuitive, vulnerable, sensitive, and fearful of ridicule -- all, of which,
like it or not, I am. The Cancer
symbol is the crab shell! Cancers
often present a hard exterior to the world.
When they're hurt, Cancers respond by withdrawing into themselves.
That's me, all right." (Nancy
Reagan, My Turn, The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan, 1989, with William Novak,
p. 50.) But of course, all of these are common human characteristics,
not confined to people born under a particular sign of the zodiac.
40. We may compare this with the description given by E. R. Dodds:
"The real vogue of astrology appears to have begun in the second
century B.C...... Why did it
occur then and not sooner? The
idea was by then no novelty, and the intellectual ground for its reception had
long been prepared in the astral theology which was taught alike by
Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics, though Epicurus warned the world of its
dangers. One may guess that its
spread was favoured by political conditions: in the troubled half-century that
preceded the Roman conquest of Greece it was particularly important to know
what was going to happen. One may
guess also that the Babylonian Greek who at this time occupied the Chair of
Zeno [the Stoic] encouraged a sort of "trahison des clercs" (the
Stoa had already used its influence to kill the heliocentric hypothesis of
Aristarchus which, if accepted, would have upset the foundations of astrology
and of Stoic religion). But
behind such immediate causes we may perhaps suspect something deeper and less
conscious: for a century of more the individual had been face to face with his
own intellectual freedom, and not he turned tail and bolted from the horrid
prospect -- better the rigid determinism of the astrological Fate than that
terrifying burden of daily responsibility.
Rational men like Panaetius and Cicero tried to check the retreat by
argument, as Plotinus was to do later, but without perceptible effect; certain
motives are beyond the reach of argument." (E. R. Dodds, Greeks and
the Irrational, 1951, p. 245-246). This
brings to mind the remark reported by John Paulos in his book Innumeracy
(1988, p. 49): "When asked
why he doesn't believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds
that he's a Gemini, and Geminis never believe in astrology."
41. Of course, we still have defenders of astrology.
For example, Rupert Gleadow says: "Usually astrology is thought by
astronomers to be a delusion, but obviously it is not possible to recount the
history of a subject while affecting towards it an attitude of superior
disbelief. It will be necessary
therefore to assume that the claims of both astronomy and astrology deserve to
be taken seriously..... The study of the future is a perfectly normal human
practice, and has been almost universal on earth.
Only the current fashion for materialism has decreed that predictions
of the future must be impossible..... It
is argued that a man cannot 'know' the future because it has not yet happened.
This may appear to be good logic, yet the trend of the future is often
regrettably plain. It is
sometimes quite easy to foresee the future, without needing to call on any special faculties..... [A] possible explanation of how there could be a
correspondence between events in the zodiac and events on earth might be
'synchronicity'. By this word,
coined by C. G. Jung, is meant that every event -- in so far as it is produced
not by one urgently over-riding force, but by various approximately equal but
not quite constant or calculable forces -- is characteristic of the moment at
which it occurs and of the interacting forces then in play."
(Rupert Gleadow, Origin of the Zodiac, 1969, p. 15,
42. Underlying a rejection of astrology, there is a fundamental
historical question we have already touched on. If astrology is a farrago of mistakes and nonsense, how is
that some people of considerable intelligence (along with many not so gifted)
have believed in it for more than 2000 years (or 4000, starting from
omen astrology), or at least thought there's something in it if we could only
find out what that something is? Pico
della Mirandola, writing in 1495, offered the following explanation: "How
many people are immersed in a theory, are used to reducing everything to it,
and not because of a desire to explain everything by it, but because things
really seem like that to them. What
happens to them is like someone who walks immersed in snow and to whom
everything ends up appearing white..... like
someone who loves in vain and sees the face of his beloved in everything.....
So he who is a theologian, and nothing but a theologian, takes
everything back to divine causes; he who is a doctor takes everything back to
corporal states, the physician [physicist?] to the natural principles of
things, the mathematician to numbers and figures, like the Pythagoreans.
In the same way, as the Chaldeans were entirely occupied with the
measurement of celestial movements and the observation of the positions of the
stars ... all things were stars to them, and they willilngly took everything
back to the stars." (Quoted
by Eugenio Garin in _Astrology in the Renaissance_, 1983, p. 89, translation
of
43. Part of the force behind astrology stems from the astral religion
which developed in antiquity, especially on the basis of works of Plato.
Walter Burkert maintains that in Plato's later work, after the Republic,
a double change can be detected. There
is a strain of logical self-criticism which shakes the foundations of the
theory of ideas. There is also a turning toward nature and natural philosophy.
From this change there developed a formative force in the history of
religion. The religion of
transcendence finds a complement in the perceivable world, in visible gods.
This holds for the cosmos as a whole, and especially for the stars.
The cosmos, according to the later Plato, obeys unchangeable
intelligible laws that are mathematically formulated.
44. Two bold conclusions resulted, says Burkert.
First, the cosmos is eternal, since in many centuries of observation no
change has been detected. Nor do the mathematical laws admit change.
The old cosmogonic hypothesis that the cosmos arose at some time and
will decay at some time in the future must be false.
Secondly, mathematically exact movements are rational, hence the cosmos
is rational. In the _Laws_ the Athenian who speaks for Plato himself
asserts that he learned this "not as a young man nor a long time
ago." Plato had earlier
criticized the system of Anaxagoras on the grounds that although Anaxagoras
introduced nous intelligence) as an agent which moves the cosmos, he
embraced a mindless materialism in all the details.
But later natural philosophy gained an intellectual, mathematical
dimension in Plato's work. Thus
natural philosophy enters into a surprising alliance with piety.
The concept of the soul which had previously been confined to the
individual, as the subject of knowledge and moral decisions, received a new,
cosmic status. The movement of
the cosmos became of a psychic nature. Soul
is defined in a general way as that which moves itself.
The living are distinguished by their ability to move themselves, in
contrast to what is dead and without souls.
Soul as that which moves itself is primary in relation to all bodies
which are moved by something else. This
holds for the whole cosmos as well as for an individual's mortal body.
45. Plato in the Laws repeatedly emphasizes this important turn
in the history of philosophy, says Burkert.
Plato says: "The situation has been entirely reversed since the
days when thinkers thought of the stars as without souls.
Wonder, though, was awakened even then, and what now really holds was
suspected by those who embarked on exactness: that in no way could the stars
as soulless things keep so precisely to marvellous calculations, if they did
not possess intelligence. Some even then were bold enough to venture this very
proposition and they said that it was nous that had ordained everything
in the sky. But these very men
were deceived about the nature of the soul, namely that it is older than the
bodies; they imagined it as younger and thus so to speak ruined everything,
nay even more themselves. But
now, as we have said, the situation is entirely reversed.
It is no longer possible that any single mortal man will be god-fearing
for long if he has not grasped these two principles mentioned, that the soul
is the oldest of everything which participates in coming-to-be (and that it is
immortal, and that it rules over all bodies), and moreover (secondly) he must
grasp, as has now been said many times, the intelligence of being which is in
the stars, as mentioned, and in addition also the necessary preliminary
mathematical sciences."
46. Thus, says Burkert, astronomy became the foundation of religion
(shades of Charles Dupuis!). The Epinomis
of Philippos of Opus (often attributed to Plato) expounded this even more
energetically. It takes seriously
what is already hinted at in the Laws, the stars have claim to a real
cult with sacrifices, prayers, and festivals.
The most powerful account of the new philosophical world view,
fundamental to all subsequent cosmos piety, had been presented earlier by
Plato in his Timaeus. This
dialogue concerning the Universe, in which the spokesman is no longer Socrates
but a fictitious Pythagorean from southern Italy, develops into a hymn on the
animated, divine cosmos. Burkert
says that for the later Plato: "The
cosmos created after the model of the 'perfect living being' is itself a
living being with soul and mind. Its
soul, the 'world soul', is a harmony of mathematical proportions which are
manifested in the movements of the stars.
The stars are 'instruments of time'.
Time itself, chronos, arose with the heavens in the image of
ungenerated, timeless eternity, aion.
The visible cosmos is perfect insofar as something corporeal can attain
perfection. A second principle of
necessity, the 'nurse of coming-to-be', also called space, is a determining
agent in all that is corporeal .... Within
this comprehensive god further visible gods are created in accordance with the
perfect model, the stars in the heavens.
The fixed stars are divine living beings which move for ever in the
same way in the same place .... The
earth around which they revolve is 'the first and oldest goddess within the
heaven'..... In man himself Nous,
the power of intellectual comprehension, is planted as something divine, a daimon
in man .... The daimon's
purpose is 'to direct us upward from earth to kinship with heaven': the
upright posture distinguishes man, pointing him upwards; man is rooted in
heaven, a 'plant of heaven' on earth."
47. "Returning to
metempsychosis," Burkert continues, "it is said that each soul has
its own star from which it has come and to which it will return."
In the Timaeus, Plato says that the Demiurge created human souls
"equal in number to the stars and assigned each soul to a star."
The number of all souls remains constant.
The Nous in the world stands against necessity, ananke;
it can rationally persuade necessity but not annihilate it.
In the Laws, however, an evil world soul appears which is
engaged in an eternal struggle with the good world soul. "Since then," Burkert says, "monistic and
dualistic tendencies have been competing with each other in Platonism.
For all this, the Platonic project offers so much that is evident and
intuitive that its enormous impact is not surprising.
Never before had gods been presented in such manifest clarity ....
Man is at home in a world which is the best possible; rigorous science
and religious exaltation are the same. Cosmic
religion and star religion are henceforth, especially in the Hellenistic Age,
the dominant form of enlightened piety.....
The Stoics in particular were responsible for carrying this out in a
detailed way; many of their equations became the common property of all
educated people down to the age of the Baroque:
Zeus is the sky, Apollo the sun, Artemis the moon, Demeter the earth.
The planets, which are less obvious to the layman, failed to attain a
similar popularity; yet astrology, based on the calculation of their periods,
became from the Late Hellenistic period onwards, a dominant spiritual force as
a new kind of divination with scientific appeal.
What was truly problematic about the success of cosmic religion, its
connection with a specific stage of natural science that would later be
superseded, led to an explosion only some two thousnad years after
Plato." (Walter Burkert, Greek
Religion, 1985, p. 325-329, translation by John Raffan of Griechische
Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche, 1977.)
48. Franz Strunz has written eloquently of the place of astrology and
alchemy in human culture. Their
activities are grounded in a religiously mystic attitude, and in them are
hidden "the desire for a better world and the child's dream of the
happiness of all mankind." (Franz
Strunz, Astrologie, Alchemie, Mystik, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
Naturwissenschaften, 1928, p. 11.) In
former times, especially in the Hellenistic era,
astrology was astral or cosmic religion, and it encompassed what we now
call astronomy, astrophysics, meteorology and geophysics.
"It rules astronomy, it is not its maidservant." (ibid., p.
21.) It permeated the forerunners of anthropology, medicine and
chemistry, as well as many religious views.
In those times, Strunk maintains, astrology, alchemy and mysticism were
bound together and can only be understood as an organic whole.
"Empirical astrology and alchemy are mysticism become practice and
technology, although each imagines for itself world pictures
or philosophical myths... " (ibid.,
p. 12.)
49. Mysticism is not a religion in itself, but a mode of religious
life. It is characteristic of
mystic feeling that it flows into the measurelessness and boundlessness of the
irrational and incomprehensible, where language and concepts become unsayable
and ungraspable. Mystics consider
with repugnance their earthly existence and their connections with the world
and its reality. They consider our times on earth to consist of difficult,
burdensome passages to the heights, journeys through death in order to arrive
at life. Every mystic harbors a
denial of the reality of this world, which is apt to foster a disconsolate
skepticism and pessimism about it. It
is in a mystic mode, says Strunk, that astrologers and alchemists customarily
worked. "They do not work
dispassionately toward pure knowledge, but obtain for themselves spiritual
stability and irrationally established categories for making judgments such as
thrive only in the
50. The historian Franz Cumont states beautifully how astrology came to
enchant so many people in later antiquity:
"Astral divination was often a visionary's discipline.
The theology on which it rests has as a fundamental doctrine the idea
of a kinship of a soul which warms and vivifies our mortal bodies with the
eternal fires which illuminate the heavens.
This conception, which, in all probability, was already held by the
"Chaldeans," became that of their successors and, in the 2nd century
B.C., found in Hipparchus a convinced defender.
Only this affinity with the stars permits the human spirit, an ignited
essence descended from the ether, to know the nature of the radiant beings
from which he has issued. The
contemplation of the heavens becomes therefore a communion.
Leaving its material envelope, reason raises itself to the choir of the
sidereal gods and receives from them a revelation of their character and the
causes of their harmonious movements. It
becomes the confidant of the stellar powers, who teach him the cosmic
phenomena, the course and duration of their revolutions, which rule with
numbers endowed with a suitable power ....
But, above all, these mystics of the astral religion, who have divined
the secrets of the celestial spheres, acquire the power to dissipate the
obscurity of the future; they arrive at "the science of future
things," they prophesy events to come, as if they were gods.
Astrology flatters itself that it can foresee the phenomena of nature
and the careers of humans with the same certainty as the recurrence of
eclipses. This learned divination
is for its adepts the queen of the sciences ....."
(Franz Cumont, L'Égypt des Astrologues, 1937, p.156-8.)
51. This doesn't mean that Cumont thinks that the astrologers' theories
were verified, or verifiable. In
another of his books, he says: "There
is something tragic in this ceaseless attempt of man to penetrate the
mysteries of the future, in this obstinate struggle of his faculties to lay
hold on knowledge which evades his probe, and to satisfy his insatiable desire
to foresee his destiny. The birth
and evolution of astrology, that desperate error on which the intellectual
labors of countless generations were spent, seems like the bitterest of
disillusions. By establishing the
unchangeable character of the celestial revolutions the Chaldeans imagined
that they understood the mechanism of the universe, and had discovered the
actual laws of life. The ancient
beliefs in the influence of the stars upon the earth were concentrated into
dogmas of absolute rigidity. But
these dogmas were frequently contradicted by experience, which ought to have
confirmed them. Unable to bring
themselves to deny the influence of the divine stars on the affairs of this
world, they invented new methods for the better determination of this
influence, they complicated by irrelevant data the problem, of which the
solution had proved false, and thus there was piled up, little by little in
the course of ages a monstrous collection of complicated and often
contradictory doctrines, which perplex the reason, and whose audacious
unsubstantiality will remain a perpetual subject of astonishment.
We should be confounded at the spectacle of the human mind losing
itself so long in the maze of these errors, did we not know how medicine,
physics, and chemistry have slowly groped their way before becoming
experimental sciences, and what prolonged exertions they have had to make in
order to free themselves from the tenacious grasp of old superstitions". (Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and
Romans, 1912, reprinted 1960, p. xiv.)
52. Cumont speaks of our souls as ignited essences which have descended
from the ether, and of this beautiful tradition (which was casually passed on
to me by my mother when I was a child, on an occasion of her sweeping the
living room rug): "The
Pythagoreans already believed that the glittering particles of dust which
danced ceaselessly in a sunbeam, were souls descending from the ether, borne
on the wings of light. They added
that this beam, passing though the air and through water down to its depths,
gave life to all things on earth. This
idea persisted under the Empire in the theology of the mysteries.
Souls descended upon the earth, and reascended after death toward the
sky, thanks to the rays of the sun which served as the means of
transport." (ibid., p. 103.) And
in his Lux Perpetua (1949) Cumont says (p. 79):
"... according to the popular ideas of the ancients, man lives
constantly surrounded by legions of spirits moving around him, tenuous demons
or aerial souls, whose favor he can win over and whose enmity he should dread.
One finds similar beliefs among all the Aryan people, in particular
among the Hindus and Persians, and even among those of other races, such as
the Semites. In our day still,
the desert Bedouins consider that a host of djinns swarm and prowl
around them, which intervene in the smallest incidents of their daily life and
whose malignity must be disarmed by means of offerings."
Cumont closes his book L'Égypt des Astrologues (p. 206) by
quoting an epigram often attributed to Ptolemy himself.
It is said by Neugebauer (ibid., 1975, p. 835) to have followed the
table of contents of copies of the Almagest from at least the 3rd century A.D.
on. It can also be found in the collection of