CHAPTER XX.
CELESTIAL INFLUENCES—OMENS—CLIMACTERICS—PREDOMINATIONS—LUCKY AND
UNLUCKY DAYS—EMPIRICS, &C.
Astrologers, among other artifices, have used their best endeavours, and employed all the rules of their art, to render those years of our age, which they call climacterics, dangerous and formidable.
The word climacteric is derived from the Greek, which means by a scale or ladder, and implies a critical year, or a period in a man's age, wherein, according Ficinusological juggling, there is some notable alteration to arise in the body, and a person stands in great danger of death. The first climacteric is the seventh year of a man's life; the others are multiples of the first, as 21, 49, 56, 63, and 84, which two last are called the grand climacterics and the danger more certain. The foundation of this opinion is accounted for by Mark Ficimis as follows:—There is a year, he tells us, assigned for each planet to rule over the body of a man, each of his turn; now Saturn being the most maleficient (malignant) planet of all, every seventh year, which falls to its lot, becomes very dangerous; especially those of sixty-three and eighty-four, when the person is already advanced in years. According to this doctrine, some hold every seventh year an established climacteric; but others only allow the title to those produced by multiplication of the climacterical space by an odd number, 3, 5, 7, 9, &c. Others observe every ninth year as a climacteric.
Climacteric years are pretended, by some, to be fatal to political bodies, which, perhaps, may be granted, when they are proved to be so more than to natural ones; for it must be obvious that the reason of such danger can by no means be discovered, nor the relation it can have with any other of the numbers above mentioned.
Though this opinion has a great deal of antiquity on its side; Aulus Gellius says—it was borrowed from the Chaldeans, who possibly might receive it from Pythagoras, whose philosophy teemed much in numbers, and who imagined a very extraordinary virtue in the number 7. The principal authors on climacterics are—Plato, Cicero, Macrobius, Aulus Gellius. Among the ancients—Argal, Magirus, and Solmatheus. Among the moderns—St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Beda and Boethius, all countenance the opinion.
There is a work extant, though rather scarce, by Hevelius, under the title of Annus Climactericus, wherein he describes the loss he sustained by his observatory, &c. being burnt; which it would appear happened in his grand climacteric, of which he was extremely apprehensive.
Astrologers have also brought under their inspection and controul the days of the year, which they have presumed to divide into lucky and unlucky days; calling even the sacred scriptures, and the common belief of christians, in former ages, to their assistance for this purpose. They pretend that the fourteenth day of the first month was a blessed day among the Israelites, authorised, as they pretend, by the several passages out of Exodus, v. 18:—
"In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at even, ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the one and twentieth day at even," v. 40. Now, the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.
41. "And it came to pass, at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the self same day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt."