These constellations, then, assumed to a certain extent the good and the bad qualities of the mythical or historical beings that had been transferred upon them. For instance, the serpent, which shines near the northern pole, was the author of medical cures, because it was the animal sacred to Æsculapius.[[29]]
The religious foundation of the rules of astrology, however, can not always be recognized. Sometimes it is entirely forgotten, and in such cases the rules assume the appearance of axioms, or of laws based upon long observation of celestial phenomena. Here we have a simple aspect of science. The process of
assimilation with the gods and catasterism were known in the Orient long before they were practiced in Greece.
The traditional outlines that we reproduce on our celestial maps are the fossil remains of a luxuriant mythological vegetation, and besides our classic sphere the ancients knew another, the "barbarian" sphere, peopled with a world of fantastic persons and animals. These sidereal monsters, to whom powerful qualities were ascribed, were likewise the remnants of a multitude of forgotten beliefs. Zoolatry was abandoned in the temples, but people continued to regard as divine the lion, the bull, the bear, and the fishes, which the Oriental imagination had seen in the starry vault. Old totems of the Semitic tribes or of the Egyptian divisions lived again, transformed into constellations. Heterogeneous elements, taken from all the religions of the Orient, were combined in the uranography of the ancients, and in the power ascribed to the phantoms that it evoked, vibrates in the indistinct echo of ancient devotions that are often completely unknown to us.[[30]]
Astrology, then, was religious in its origin and in its principles. It was religious also in its close relation to the Oriental religions, especially those of the Syrian Baals and of Mithra; finally, it was religious in the effects that it produced. I do not mean the effects expected from a constellation in any particular instance: as for example the power to evoke the gods that were subject to their domination.[[31]] But I have in mind the general influence those doctrines exercised upon Roman paganism.
When the Olympian gods were incorporated among the stars, when Saturn and Jupiter became planets and
the celestial virgin a sign of the zodiac, they assumed a character very different from the one they had originally possessed. It has been shown[[32]] how, in Syria, the idea of an infinite repetition of cycles of years according to which the celestial revolutions took place, led to the conception of divine eternity, how the theory of a fatal domination of the stars over the earth brought about that of the omnipotence of the "lord of the heavens," and how the introduction of a universal religion was the necessary result of the belief that the stars exerted an influence upon the peoples of every climate. The logic of all these consequences of the principles of astrology was plain to the Latin as well as to the Semitic races, and caused a rapid transformation of the ancient idolatry. As in Syria, the sun, which the astrologers called the leader of the planetary choir, "who is established as king and leader of the whole world,"[[33]] necessarily became the highest power of the Roman pantheon.
Astrology also modified theology, by introducing into this pantheon a great number of new gods, some of whom were singularly abstract. Thereafter man worshiped the constellations of the firmament, particularly the twelve signs of the zodiac, every one of which had its mythologic legend; the sky (Caelus) itself, because it was considered the first cause, and was sometimes confused with the supreme being; the four elements, the antithesis and perpetual transmutations of which produced all tangible phenomena, and which were often symbolized by a group of animals ready to devour each other;[[34]] finally, time and its subdivisions.[[35]]
The calendars were religious before they were secular; their purpose was not, primarily, to record fleeting
time, but to observe the recurrence of propitious or inauspicious dates separated by periodic intervals. It is a matter of experience that the return of certain moments is associated with the appearance of certain phenomena; they have, therefore, a special efficacy, and are endowed with a sacred character. By determining periods with mathematical exactness, astrology continued to see in them "a divine power,"[[36]] to use Zeno's term. Time, that regulates the course of the stars and the transubstantiation of the elements, was conceived of as the master of the gods and the primordial principle, and was likened to destiny. Each part of its infinite duration brought with it some propitious or evil movement of the sky that was anxiously observed, and transformed the ever modified universe. The centuries, the years and the seasons, placed into relation with the four winds and the four cardinal points, the twelve months connected with the zodiac, the day and the night, the twelve hours, all were personified and deified, as the authors of every change in the universe. The allegorical figures contrived for these abstractions by astrological paganism did not even perish with it.[[37]] The symbolism it had disseminated outlived it, and until the Middle Ages these pictures of fallen gods were reproduced indefinitely in sculpture, mosaics, and in Christian miniatures.[[38]]