and is independent of our perception of the corresponding notes. A concert played before a deaf assembly would be a concert still. If one note is made by 10,000 vibrations per second, and another by 20,000, we should hear them as an octave, but if one had only 10 and the other 20, they would still be an octave, though inaudible as notes to us; so too we may speak even of the harmony of luminous vibrations of ether, though they do not affect our ears.
The velocities of the planets do not coincide with the terms of this series. The nearer they are to the sun the faster is their motion, Mercury travelling at the mean rate of 55,000 metres a second, Venus, 36,800, the earth 30,550, Mars 24,448, Jupiter 13,000, Saturn 9,840, Uranus 6,800, and Neptune 5,500, numbers which are in the proportion roundly of 100, 67, 55, 44, 24, 16, 12, 10, which have no sufficient relation to the terms of an harmonic series, to make any harmony obvious.
Returning, however, to the ancient philosophers, we are led by their ideas about the soul of the universe to discover the origin of their gods and natural religion. They were persuaded that only living things could move, and consequently that the moving stars must be endowed with superior intelligence. It may very well be that from the number seven of the planets, including the sun and moon, which were their earliest gods, arose the respect and superstition with which all nations, and especially the Orientals, regarded that number. From these arose the seven superior angels that are found in the theologies of the Chaldeans, Persians, and Arabians; the seven gates of Mithra, through which all souls must pass to reach the abode of bliss; the seven worlds of purification of the Indians, and all the other applications of the number seven which so largely figure in Judaism, and have descended from it to our own time. On the other hand, as we have seen, this number seven may have been derived from the number of the stars in the Pleiades.
We have noticed in our chapter on the History of the Zodiac how the various signs as they came round and were thought to influence the weather and other natural phenomena, came at last to be worshipped. Not less, of course, were the sun and moon deified, and that by nations who had no zodiac. Among the Egyptians the sun was painted in different forms according to the time of year, very much as he is represented in our own days in pictures of the old and new years. At the winter solstice with them he was an infant, at the spring equinox he was a young man, in summer a man in full age with flowing beard, and in the autumn an old man. Their fable of Osiris was founded on the same idea. They represented the sun by the hawk, and the moon by the Ibis, and to these two, worshipped under the names of Osiris and Isis they attributed the government of the world, and built a city, Heliopolis, to the former, in the temple of which they placed his statue.
The Phenicians in the same way, who were much influenced by ideas of religion, attributed divinity to the sun, moon, and stars, and regarded them as the sole causes of the production and destruction of all things. The sun, under the name of Hercules, was their great divinity.
The Ethiopians worshipped the same, and erected the famous table of the sun. Those who lived above Meroë, admitted the existence of eternal and incorruptible gods, among which they included the sun, moon, and the universe. Like the Incas of Peru, they called themselves the children of the sun, whom they regarded as their common father.
The moon was the great divinity of the Arabs. The Saracens called it Cabar, or the great, and its crescent still adorns the religious monuments of the Turks. Each of their tribes was under the protection of some particular star. Sabeism was the principal religion of the east. The heavens and the stars were its first object.
In reading the sacred books of the ancient Persians contained in the Zendavesta, we find on every page invocations addressed to Mithra, to the moon, the stars, the elements, the mountains, the trees, and every part of nature. The ethereal fire circulating through all the universe, and of which the sun is the principal focus, was represented among the fire-worshippers by the sacred and perpetual fire of their priests. Each planet had its own particular temple, where incense was burnt in its honour. These ancient peoples embodied in their religious systems the ideas which, as we have seen, led among the Greeks to the representation of the harmony of heaven. All the world seemed to them animated by a principle of life which circulated through all parts, and which preserved it in an eternal activity. They thought that the universe lived like man and the other animals, or rather that these latter only lived because the universe was essentially alive, and communicated to them for an instant an infinitely small portion of its own immortality. They were not wise, it may be, in this, but they appear to have caught some of the ideas that lie at the basis of religious thought, and to have traced harmony where we have almost lost the perception of it.