According to Seneca, the tradition of the Chaldees announced that a universal deluge would be caused by the conjunction of all the planets in the sign of Capricorn, and that a general breaking up of the earth would take place at the moment of their conjunction in Cancer. "The general break-up of the world," they said, "will happen when the stars which govern the heaven, penetrated with a quality of heat and dryness, meet one another in a fiery triplicity."
Everywhere, and in all ages of the past, men have thought that a protecting providence, always watching over them, has taken care to warn them of the destinies which await them; thence the good and evil presages taken from the appearance of certain heavenly bodies, of divers meteors, or even the accidental meeting of certain animate or inanimate objects. The Indian of North America dying of famine in his miserable cabin, will not go out to the chase if he sees certain presages in the atmosphere. Nor need we be astonished at such ideas in an uncultivated man, when even among Europeans, a salt-cellar upset, a glass broken, a knife and fork crossed, the number thirteen at dinner, and such things are regarded as unlucky accidents. The employment of sorcery and divination is closely connected with these superstitions. Besides eclipses and comets, meteors were taken as the signs of divine wrath. We learn from S. Maximus of Turin, that the Christians of his time admitted the necessity of making a noise during eclipses, so as to prevent the magicians from hurting the sun or moon, a superstition entirely pagan. They used to fancy they could see celestial armies in the air, coming to bring miraculous assistance to man. They thought the hurricanes and tempests the work of evil spirits, whose rage kept them set against the earth. S. Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the thirteenth century, accepted this opinion, just as he admitted the reality of sorceries. But the full development, as well as the nourishment of these superstitious ideas, was derived from the storehouse of astrology, which dealt with matters of ordinary occurrence, both in the heavens and on the earth—and to the history of which our next chapter is devoted.
Plate XIV.—Prodigies in the Middle Ages.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE GREATNESS AND THE FALL OF ASTROLOGY.
Our study of the opinions of the ancients on the various phenomena of astronomy, leads us inevitably to the discussion of their astrology, which has in every age and among every people accompanied it—and though astrology be now no more as a science, or lingers only with those who are ignorant and desirous of taking advantage of the still greater ignorance of others—yet it is not lacking in interest as showing the effect of the phenomena of the heavens on the human mind, when that effect is brought to its most technical and complete development.