[118] Many of the ancients speak of music as a recipe for every kind of malady, and it is probable that the Latin was praecinere, to charm away pain, incantare to enchant, and our own word incantation, came from the medical use of song.
[119] M. Burette, with Dr. Mead, Baglivi, and all the learned of their time throughout Europe, seem to have entertained no doubt of this fact, which, however, philosophical and curious enquirers have since found to be built upon fraud and fallacy. Vide Serrao, della Tarantula o vero falangio di Puglia.
[120] Pope's translation of the Iliad, Book 1.
[121] See a curious Dissertation on the musical modes of the Hindoos by Sir W. Jones.
CHAPTER XV.
PRESAGES, PRODIGES, PRESENTIMENTS, ETC.
The common opinion of comets being the presages of evil is an old pagan superstition, introduced and entertained among Christians by their prejudice for antiquity; and which Mr. Bayle says is a remnant of pagan superstition, conveyed from father to son, ever since the first conversion from paganism; as well because it has taken deep root in the minds of men, as because Christians, generally speaking, are as far gone in the folly of finding presages in every thing, as infidels themselves. It may be easily conceived how the pagans might be brought stedfastly to believe that comets, eclipses, and thunderstorms, were the forerunners of calamities, when man's strong inclination for the marvellous is considered, and his insatiable curiosity for prying into future events, or what is to come to pass. This desire of peeping into futurity, as has already been shown, has given birth to a thousand different kinds of divination, all alike whimsical and impertinent, which in the hands of the more expert and cunning have been made most important and mysterious tools. When any one has been rogue enough to think of making a penny of the simplicity of his neighbours, and has had the ingenuity to invent something to amuse, the pretended faculty of foretelling things to come, has always been one of the readiest projects. From hence always the assumption of judiciary astrology. Those who first began to consult the motions of the heavens, had no other design in view, than the enriching their minds with so noble a knowledge; and as they had their genius bent on the pursuit of useful knowledge, they never dreamed of converting astrology or a knowledge of the stars to the purpose of picking the pockets of the credulous and ignorant, of whose blind side advantage was taken by these sideral sages to turn them to account by making them believe that the doctrine of the stars comprehended the knowledge of all things that were, or are, or ever shall be; so that every one, for his money, might come to them and have their fortune told.
The better to gull the world, the Star-gazers assert that the heavens are the book in which God has written the destiny of all things; and that it is only necessary to learn to read this book, which is simply the construction of the stars, to be able to know the whole history of what is to come to pass. Very learned men, Origen and Plotinus among the rest, were let into the secret, and grew so fond of it, that the former,[122] willing to support his opinion by something very solid, catches at the authority of an Apocryphal book, ascribed to the patriarch Joseph, where Jacob is introduced speaking to his twelve sons: "I have read in the register of heaven what shall happen to you and your children."[123] But comets were the staple commodity that turned principally to account. In compliance, however, with the impressions of fear which the strangeness and excessive length of these stars made upon mankind, the Astrologers did not hesitate to pronounce them of a malign tendency; and the more so when they found they had, by this means, made themselves in some degree necessary, in consequence of the impatient applications that were made to them as from the mouth of an oracle, what particular disaster such and such a comet portended.
Eclipses furnished more frequent occasions for the exercise of their talent. From this worthy precedent of Judicial Astrology, others took the hint and invented new modes of divination, such as Geomancy, Chiromancy, Onomancy, and the like; till the world by degrees became so overrun with superstition, that the least trifle was converted into a presage or presentiment; and the more so when this kind of knowledge became the business of religion; and when the substance of divine worship consisted in the ordinances of Augurs who, to make themselves necessary in the world, were obliged to keep up and quicken men's apprehensions of the wrath of God, took special care to cultivate comets, and bring it into a proverb, that "so many comets so many calamities." They knew, as Livy expresses it, that it was best to fish in troubled waters, where, speaking of a contagious distemper, which, from the country villages, spread over the city, occasioned by an extraordinary drought in the year of Rome 326, he observes how, at last, it infected the mind,[124] by the management of those who lived in the superstition of the people; so that nothing was to be seen or heard except some new fangled ceremony or other in every corner. "The devil," as Bayle says, "who had a hopeful game on't, and saw superstition the surest way to get himself worshipped under the name of the false gods, in a hundred various ways, all criminal and abominable in the sight of the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, never failed, on the appearance of any rare meteor, or uncommon star, to exert his imposing arts, and make idolaters believe, they were the signs of divine wrath, and that they were all undone unless they appeased their gods by sacrifices of men and brute beasts."
Politicians have also lent a helping hand to give presages a reputation, as an excellent scheme, either to intimidate the people, or to raise their drooping spirits. Had the Roman soldiers been free thinkers, Drusus, the son of Tiberius, had not been so fortunate as to quell a desperate mutiny among the legions of Pannonia, who utterly refused to obey his commands; but an eclipse, which critically intervened, broke their refractory spirits to such a degree, that Drusus, who managed their panic fear with great dexterity and address, did what he liked with them.