Many of the stronger minds of the Renaissance broke away from the follies of the subject. Thus Cornelius Agrippa in reply to the request of a friar to consult the stars on his behalf says:(29) "Judicial astrology is nothing more than the fallacious guess of superstitious men, who have founded a science on uncertain things and are deceived by it: so think nearly all the wise; as such it is ridiculed by some most noble philosophers; Christian theologians reject it, and it is condemned by sacred councils of the Church. Yet you, whose office it is to dissuade others from these vanities, oppressed, or rather blinded by I know not what distress of mind, flee to this as to a sacred augur, and as if there were no God in Israel, that you send to inquire of the god of Ekron."
(29) H. Morley: The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, London,
1856, Vol. II, p. 138.
In spite of the opposition of the Church astrology held its own; many of the universities at the end of the fifteenth century published almanacs, usually known as "Prognosticons," and the practice was continued far into the sixteenth century. I show you here an illustration. Rabelais, you may remember, when physician to the Hotel Dieu in Lyons, published almanacs for the years 1533, 1535, 1541, 1546. In the title-page he called himself "Doctor of Medicine and Professor of Astrology," and they continued to be printed under his name until 1556. In the preparation of these he must have had his tongue in his cheek, as in his famous "Pantagrueline Prognostication," in which, to satisfy the curiosity of all good companions, he had turned over all the archives of the heavens, calculated the quadratures of the moon, hooked out all that has ever been thought by all the Astrophils, Hypernephilists, Anemophylakes, Uranopets and Ombrophori, and felt on every point with Empedocles.(30)
(30) Pantagrueline Prognostication, Rabelais, W. F. Smith's
translation, 1893, Vol. II, p. 460.
Even physicians of the most distinguished reputation practised judicial astrology. Jerome Cardan was not above earning money by casting horoscopes, and on this subject he wrote one of his most popular books (De Supplemento Almanach, etc., 1543), in which astronomy and astrology are mixed in the truly mediaeval fashion. He gives in it some sixty-seven nativities, remarkable for the events they foretell, with an exposition. One of the accusations brought against him was that he had "attempted to subject to the stars the Lord of the stars and cast our Saviour's horoscope."(31) Cardan professed to have abandoned a practice looked upon with disfavor both by the Church and by the universities, but he returned to it again and again. I show here his own horoscope. That remarkable character, Michael Servetus, the discoverer of the lesser circulation, when a fellow student with Vesalius at Paris, gave lectures upon judicial astrology, which brought him into conflict with the faculty; and the rarest of the Servetus works, rarer even than the "Christianismi Restitutio," is the "Apologetica disceptatio pro astrologia," one copy of which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Nor could the new astronomy and the acceptance of the heliocentric views dislocate the popular belief. The literature of the seventeenth century is rich in astrological treatises dealing with medicine.
(31) De Thou, Lib. LXII, quoted by Morley in Life of Jerome
Cardan, Vol. II, p. 294.
No one has ever poured such satire upon the mantic arts as did Rabelais in chapter twenty-five of the third book of "Pantagruel." Panurge goes to consult Her Trippa—the famous Cornelius Agrippa, whose opinion of astrology has already been quoted, but who nevertheless, as court astrologer to Louise of Savoy, had a great contemporary reputation. After looking Panurge in the face and making conclusions by metoposcopy and physiognomy, he casts his horoscope secundum artem, then, taking a branch of tamarisk, a favorite tree from which to get the divining rod, he names some twenty-nine or thirty mantic arts, from pyromancy to necromancy, by which he offers to predict his future. While full of rare humor, this chapter throws an interesting light on the extraordinary number of modes of divination that have been employed. Small wonder that Panurge repented of his visit! I show here the title-page of a popular book by one of the most famous of the English astrological physicians, Nicholas Culpeper.
Never was the opinion of sensible men on this subject better expressed than by Sir Thomas Browne:(32) "Nor do we hereby reject or condemn a sober and regulated Astrology; we hold there is more truth therein than in ASTROLOGERS; in some more than many allow, yet in none so much as some pretend. We deny not the influence of the Starres, but often suspect the due application thereof; for though we should affirm that all things were in all things; that Heaven were but Earth Celestified, and earth but Heaven terrestrified, or that each part above had an influence upon its divided affinity below; yet how to single out these relations, and duly to apply their actions, is a work ofttimes to be effected by some revelation, and Cabala from above, rather than any Philosophy, or speculation here below."
(32) Sir Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bk. IV, Chap.
XIII. (Wilkin's ed., Vol. III, p. 84.)
As late as 1699, a thesis was discussed at the Paris Faculty, "Whether comets were harbingers of disease," and in 1707 the Faculty negatived the question propounded in a thesis, "Whether the moon had any sway on the human body."