How mind and soul are affected
The heavens influence the human mind as well as body, therefore. The stars alter the elements, through these our bodies, and through these our souls.[2976] Certain signs of the zodiac are called human or rational “because they dispose man to reason” and “he will possess eloquence mingled with reason.” A person who is born under one of the vicious and tortuous signs, namely, the ram, crab, bull, scorpion, and goat, will have a tortuous and vicious disposition, plotting evil and detracting from others, such a person as the physician Gualfridinus, by which name, as Boffito has already suggested, Dino del Garbo, the noted medical writer of Florence, is probably indicated. When the moon is in one of the common signs, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, or Pisces, persons who make advances to you are liable to prove fraudulent; marriages contracted then are liable to be dissolved; if one escapes from prison, it will be only to be retaken; but if one is accused of some crime, he will soon be acquitted; and so on. In some signs secrets will be kept, in others immediately revealed. When the moon is in the first facies of Scorpion, all news reports are false.[2977] The influence of the stars explains the puzzling fact, concerning which his fellow-townsmen of Ascoli have often questioned Cecco, why a man will choose a silly girl of low birth as his wife rather than another who is more beautiful, noble, and intelligent. The answer is that when the stars of two persons come into certain positions relative to each other, love which cannot be dissolved except by death results, regardless of beauty and social rank.[2978]
The stars and dreams.
Cecco also ascribes the prophetic quality of dreams to astrological influence, which permits the union of the soul of the dreamer with the superior intelligences or spirits of the sky. Such revelation is, however, impressed upon the soul of the dreamer “under some similitude or figure.” Dreams come true when the moon is in the fixed signs, Taurus, Leo, Aquarius, and Scorpio; when the moon is in the common signs, dreams are partly true and partly false. The length of time to elapse before the dream is fulfilled can also often be determined. Cecco says that “minds ill-constituted and false and homicidal do not have true dreams because they are indisposed to receive the action of the intelligences.” Robbers and homicides may, however, have true dreams prophetic of their own deaths as in the tale of the malefactor, the beetles, and the scythe already recounted, and in the case of a native of Ascoli whom Cecco knew personally and “who was named Angelus and consequently was a devil.” Dreaming when the moon was in Leo that he would be hanged in Roman territory, he became so frightened that he turned friar, but after two years was dismissed from the Order, went to Viterbo, robbed a man, and was there hanged for it.[2979]
Astrological images.
Cecco alludes to astrological images twice in his commentary on the De principiis of Alcabitius. To illustrate how images work which are made as love charms, or to gain honor, and the like, he states that if an image for purposes of love is made in the hour of Venus when that planet is in Pisces or in Taurus, as the tin is poured out it acquires under the moulding influence of that constellation the due proportion of the elements essential to produce the desired property.[2980] Later Cecco tells us of an image which Vergil made at Naples to drive away flies. When the second facies of Aquarius is in the ascendant an image of a fly should be engraved on the stone in a ring.[2981] In his Commentary on the Sphere Cecco even goes so far as to tell how to construct an astronomical image which will enable one to receive responses from demons.[2982]
Did Cecco deny human free will?
Returning to the charges made against Cecco’s astrological teaching by Villani and the later manuscripts, especially the assertion that he ascribed necessity to the stars, we have to note that, although many of the astrological teachings just listed may seem to ascribe something closely approaching to necessity to the stars, nevertheless Cecco expressly asserted that he believed in freedom of the will. Many of the statements from his commentaries which we have thus far presented are cited by him from Ptolemy, Hermes, Zaël and other astrological writers, and perhaps are not always to be taken as his own opinion, especially when he quotes Hermes as saying, “The heavens are the cause of moral virtues and of all.”[2983] At any rate he now informs his students that according to “our and the true Faith” the circle of the zodiac, “though it may be the cause of life, yet is not the cause of our will or intellect except as a tendency (nisi dispositive), and so I hold and truly believe, although other astrologers hold the contrary, saying that all things which are generated and corrupted and renovated in the inferior world of generation and corruption have efficient causes in the superior world which is ungenerated and incorruptible.... That argument I will overthrow in my glosses to the Centiloquium”[2984]—a work by Cecco which seems to have been lost or never completed.
Founders of new religions said to be born of incubi and succubi at astrological periods.
The charge that in his Commentary on the Sphere Cecco said that under certain constellations happy divine men would be born like Moses, Hermes, Merlin, and Simon Magus, and that Christ and Antichrist were alike under the rule of the stars, appears from the text of the Commentary as it has reached us to be an unjust one. Cecco, it is true, quotes Hipparchus in the book on hierarchies of spirits to the effect that in the coluri, or circles whose purpose according to Sacrobosco is to distinguish the solstice and equinox, there are incubi and succubi by whose virtue there are born in a major conjunction as if from the deity men who seem divine and who establish religions in the world and work miracles. Such a man was Merlin and such an one will be Antichrist who will be conceived by a virgin and work many miracles.[2985] Of Antichrist Cecco promises to say more at the close of his lecture and he there quotes a treatise by Zoroaster on quarter-revolutions of the eighth sphere. According to this Pseudo-Zoroaster, whenever the eighth sphere completes one quarter of a revolution, which happens once in twelve thousand years, there are born by the virtue of incubi and succubi men supported by divinity who introduce new religions and by whose death even the heaven is perturbed. At the end of twelve thousand years the Mosaic law was terminated thus by the Christian religion, and “ours would be terminated in this way by Antichrist.”[2986] But Cecco does not necessarily subscribe to these statements of Hipparchus and Zoroaster. Indeed he has already declared the art of the latter contrary to the Christian faith and he now continues, “Whence that beast Zoroaster and some following him say that Christ was born under the dominion of those quarter-revolutions from the virtue of incubi and succubi, of whom I have spoken to you above, but it seems horrible to me even to write such words.”[2987]