Sketches of Imposture, Deception, and Credulity

by R. A. Davenport

Astrology has been divided into natural and judiciary, or judicial; but it is only the latter division which will come under present consideration, and its definition has been said to be the art of foretelling future events, from the aspects, positions, and influences of the heavenly bodies.

The idea that they should have any influence, direct or indirect, on our actions in this nether world, or that they obliged us to the performance of any act, however extraordinary, may have been originally supposed, by those who were familiar with the figurative language of the Prophets, to receive confirmation from the facts, and the style of the predictions, recorded in sacred history. They would find, for instance, that the Star in the East was foretold, which at its coming was to announce peace and goodwill towards men; and the later and more solemn revelations, concerning the final consummation of all things, typified that awful event by signal appearances in the heavens.

Traditionary knowledge of these events and predictions, coupled with ignorance of the causes of meteorological phenomena, now better understood, might easily lead the timid and superstitious to forebode evil, from the disastrous twilight of the eclipse, or to impute a favouring influence to the rising of certain stars at particular seasons. The universal custom of traversing the deserts, or navigating ships across the pathless ocean, by the observation of the stars, previously to the discovery of the compass, led the imaginative to conceive, that the moral path of life was equally to be regulated by astral indications. It must be owned, too, that it was not unnatural for simple unreasoning minds thus to connect the glorious sun, the moon, when walking in brightness, queen of heaven, and the host of stars, with the destinies of man.

Fear, it is said, first deified the ancient heroes. It was a storm and an eclipse that first consecrated Romulus; nor had Jupiter himself been master of heaven, or worshipped on earth, if the terrors of his thunders had not advanced the conceit of his divinity. It is quite certain that, by degrees, a system was formed, which took hold of the imaginations of all classes of persons; and the truth of such a doctrine, and its decisions, it was heretical to doubt. J. Butler, one of the devout believers in astrology, far from thinking it a remnant of Pagan superstition, calls it a divine science. He pretended, with many others, “that Adam, after his fall, communicated it out of his memories of the state of innocency, to Seth. He in his turn made impressions of the same in certain permanent pillars, able to withstand fire and water, by which means the science passed to Enoch and Noah. Shem was instructed by his father, and communicated his knowledge to Abraham, who carried it into Chaldea and Egypt. Moses, ‘skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians,’ was also thought to have been an able astrologer.”

Thus was the vanity of the more modern professors of the art encouraged, and they maintained that the heavens were one great volume, wherein God had written the history; and, of course, it was to be understood, that the astrologers were the high-priests, who alone could expound its mysterious pages.

The author of the “Contemplations on the Starry Heavens” has, with great propriety, made the following remarks on this science:—“The pretenders to judicial astrology talk of I know not what mysterious efficacy, in the different aspects of the stars, or the various conjunction and opposition of the planets. Let those who are unacquainted with the sure word of revelation give ear to these sons of delusion and dealers in deceit. For my own part, it is a question of indifference to me, whether the constellations shone with smiles, or lowered in frowns, on the hour of my nativity. Can these bodies advertise me of future events, which are unconscious of their own existence?”

In the time of Petrarch, though astrologers had great credit, that learned man only laughed at their pretensions. Of one of them, in particular, he says, “The astrologer was older and wiser than I was; I loved him, and should have been still more attached to him if he had not been an astrologer. I sometimes joked, and sometimes reproached him, about his profession. One day, when I had been sharper than usual with him, he replied, with a sigh, ‘Friend, you are in the right; I think as you do, but I have a wife and children.’ This answer touched me so much, that I never spoke to him again on that subject.”

Queen Catherine of Medicis, though a woman of strong mind, was deluded with the more ignorant, by the vanity of astrological judgments; the professors of the science were so much consulted in her court, that the most inconsiderable act was not to be done without an appeal to the stars.

In England, William Lilly, John Gadbury, and others, set up for prophets; and nativities were cast for all who could afford to pay for the privilege of searching into futurity. It was but natural that the inquirers should have to reward such intelligence in proportion to the distance it was brought, or its flattering nature; events, however, soon proved it to be far-fetched and nothing worth.

The volumes of tiresome absurdity, written on this subject, about the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century, would exceed present belief; and nothing but a thorough though unaccountable conviction, in their readers, that they spoke the language of truth, could have ever made the perusal of them tolerable.