Tycho Brahe was from his fifteenth year devoted to astrology, and adjoining his observatory at Uranienburg the astronomer-royal of Denmark had a laboratory built in order to study alchemy, and it was only a few years before his death that he finally abandoned astrology. We may here notice one very remarkable prediction of the master of Kepler. That he had carefully studied the comet of 1577 as an astronomer, we may gather from his adducing the very small parallax of this comet as disproving the assertion of the Aristotelians that a solid sphere enveloped the heavens. But besides this, we find him in his character of astrologer drawing a singular prediction from the appearance of this comet. It announced, he tells us, that in the north, in Finland, there should be born a prince who should lay waste Germany and vanish in 1632. Gustavus Adolphus, it is well known, was born in Finland, overran Germany, and died in 1632. The fulfilment of the details of this prophecy suggests that Tycho Brahe had some basis of reason for his prediction. Born in Denmark of a noble Swedish family, a politician, as were all his contemporaries of distinction, Tycho, though no conjuror, could foresee the advent of some great northern hero. Moreover, he was doubtless well acquainted with a very ancient tradition, that heroes generally came from the northern frontiers of their native land, where they are hardened and tempered by the threefold struggle they wage with soil, climate and barbarian neighbours.
Kepler explained the double movement of the earth by the rotation of the sun. At one time the sun presented its friendly side, which attracted one planet, sometimes its adverse side, which repelled it. He also peopled the planets with souls and genii. He was led to his three great laws by musical analogies, just as William Herschel afterwards passed from music to astronomy. Kepler, who in his youth made almanacs, and once prophesied a hard winter, which came to pass, could not help putting an astrological interpretation on the disappearance of the brilliant star of 1572, which Tycho had observed. Theodore Beza thought that this star, which in December 1573 equalled Jupiter in brilliancy, predicted the second coming of Christ. Astronomers were only then beginning to study variable and periodic stars, and disturbances in that part of the heavens, which had till then, on the authority of Aristotle, been regarded as incorruptible, combined with the troubles of the times, must have given a new stimulus to belief in the signs in heaven. Montaigne (Essais, lib. i. chap, x.) relates a singular episode in the history of astrology. Charles V. and Francis I., who both bid for the friendship of the infamous Aretino, surnamed the divine, both likewise engaged astrologers to fight their battles. In Italy those who prophesied the ruin of France were sure to be listened to. These prophecies affected the public funds much as telegrams do nowadays. “At Rome,” Montaigne tells us, “a large sum of money was lost on the Change by this prognostication of our ruin.” The marquis of Saluces, notwithstanding his gratitude to Francis I. for the many favours he had received, including his marquisate, of which the brother was despoiled for his benefit, was led in 1536 to betray his country, being scared by the glorious prophecies of the ultimate success of Charles V. which were then rife. The influence of the Medici made astrologers popular in France. Richelieu, on whose council was Jacques Gaffarel (1601-1681), the last of the Kabbalists, did not despise astrology as an engine of government. At the birth of Louis XIV. a certain Morin de Villefranche was placed behind a curtain to cast the nativity of the future autocrat. A generation back the astrologer would not have been hidden behind a curtain, but have taken precedence of the doctor. La Bruyère dares not pronounce against such beliefs, “for there are perplexing facts affirmed by grave men who were eye-witnesses.” In England William Lilly and Robert Fludd were both dressed in a little brief authority. The latter gives us elaborate rules for the detection of a thief, and tells us that he has had personal experience of their efficacy. “If the lord of the sixth house is found in the second house, or in company with the lord of the second house, the thief is one of the family. If Mercury is in the sign of the Scorpion he will be bald, &c.” Francis Bacon abuses the astrologers of his day no less than the alchemists, but he does so because he has visions of a reformed astrology and a reformed alchemy. Sir Thomas Browne, too, while he denies the capacity of the astrologers of his day, does not venture to dispute the reality of the science. The idea of the souls of men passing at death to the stars, the blessedness of their particular sphere being assigned them according to their deserts (the metempsychosis of J. Reynaud), may be regarded as a survival of religious astrology, which, even as late as Descartes’s day, assigned to the angels the task of moving the planets and the stars. Joseph de Maistre believed in comets as messengers of divine justice, and in animated planets, and declared that divination by astrology is not an absolutely chimerical science. Lastly, we may mention a few distinguished men who ran counter to their age in denying stellar influences. Aristarchus of Samos, Martianus Capella (the precursor of Copernicus), Cicero, Favorinus, Sextus Empiricus, Juvenal, and in a later age Savonarola and Pico della Mirandola, and La Fontaine, a contemporary of the neutral La Bruyère, were all pronounced opponents of astrology.
In England Swift may fairly claim the credit of having given the death-blow to astrology by his famous squib, entitled Prediction for the Year 1708, by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. He begins, by professing profound belief in the art, and next points out the vagueness and the absurdities of the philomaths. He then, in the happiest vein of parody, proceeds to show them a more excellent way:—“My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I mention it to show how ignorant these sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns: it refers to Partridge the almanac-maker. I have consulted the star of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next about eleven at night of a raging fever. Therefore I advise him to consider of it and settle his affairs in time.” Then followed a letter to a person of quality giving a full and particular account of the death of Partridge on the very day and nearly at the hour mentioned. In vain the wretched astrologer protested that he was alive, got a literary friend to write a pamphlet to prove it, and published his almanac for 1709. Swift, in his reply, abused him for his want of manners in giving a gentleman the lie, answered his arguments seriatim, and declared that the evidence of the publication of another almanac was wholly irrelevant, “for Gadbury, Poor Robin, Dove and Way do yearly publish their almanacs, though several of them have been dead since before the Revolution.” Nevertheless a field is found even to this day for almanacs of a similar type, and for popular belief in them.
To astrological politics we owe the theory of heaven-sent rulers, instruments in the hands of Providence, and saviours of society. Napoleon, as well as Wallenstein, believed in his star. Many passages in the older English poets are unintelligible without some knowledge of astrology. Chaucer wrote a treatise on the astrolabe; Milton constantly refers to planetary influences; in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Gloucester and Edmund represent respectively the old and the new faith. We still contemplate and consider; we still speak of men as jovial, saturnine or mercurial; we still talk of the ascendancy of genius, or a disastrous defeat. In French heur, malheur, heureux, malheureux, are all derived from the Latin augurium; the expression né sous une mauvaise étoile, born under an evil star, corresponds (with the change of étoile into astre) to the word malôtru, in Provençal malastrue; and son étoile pâlit, his star grows pale, belongs to the same class of illusions. The Latia ex augurio appears in the Italian sciagura, sciagurato, softened into sciaura, sciaurato, wretchedness, wretched. The influence of a particular planet has also left traces in various languages; but the French and English jovial and the English saturnine correspond rather to the gods who served as types in chiromancy than to the planets which bear the same names. In the case of the expressions bien or mal luné, well or ill mooned, avoir un quartier de lune dans la tetê, to have the quarter of the moon in one’s head, the German mondsüchtig and the English moonstruck or lunatic, the fundamental idea lies in the strange opinions formerly held about the moon.
Bibliography.—For the history of astrology with its affinities to astronomy on the one hand, and to other forms of popular belief on the other, the following works out of a large number that might be mentioned are specially recommended:—A. Bouché-Leclercq, L’Astrologie grecque (Paris, 1899), with a full bibliography; Franz Boll, Sphaera (Leipzig, 1903); Franz Cumont, Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (Brussels, 1898; 7 parts published up to 1909); Franz Boll, “Die Erforschung der antiken Astrologie” (in Neue Jahrbucher fur das klassische Altertum, Band xxi. Heft 2, pp. 103-126); Franz Cumont, Les Religions orientates dans le paganisme romain (Paris, 1907) (ch. vii. “L’Astrologie et la magie”); Alfred Maury, La Magie et l’astrologie à l’antiquité et au moyen âge (4th ed., Paris, 1877); R.C. Thompson, Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon (2 vols., London, 1900); F.X. Kugler, Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel (Freiburg, 1907;—to be completed in 4 vols.); Ch. Virolleaud, L’Astrologie chaldéenne (Paris, 1905—to be completed in 8 parts—transliteration and translations of cuneiform texts); Jastrow, Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens (Parts 13 and 14); also certain sections in Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité (Paris, 1879), vol. i. pp. 205-257; in Marcellin Berthelot, Les Origines de l’alchimie (Paris, 1885), pp. 1-56; Ferd. Höfer, Histoire de l’astronomie (Paris, 1846), pp. 1-90; in Rudolf Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie (Munich, 1877), ch. i. See also the article by Ernst Riess on Astrology in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. ii. (Stuttgart, 1896). For modern and practical astrology the following works may be found useful in different ways: E.M. Bennett, Astrology (New York, 1894); J.M. Pfaff, Astrologie (Bamberg, 1816); G. Wilde, Chaldaean Astrology up to date (1901); R. Garnett (“A.G. Trent”), “The Soul and the Stars,” in the University Magazine, 1880 (reprinted in Dobson and Wilde, Natal Astrology, 1893); Abel Haatan, Traité d’astrologie judiciaire (Paris, 1825); Fomalhaut, Manuel d’astrologie sphérique el judiciaire (Paris, 1897).
(M. Ja.)
ASTRONOMY (from Gr. ἄστρον, a star, and νέμειν, to classify or arrange). The subject matter of astronomical science, considered in its widest range, comprehends all the matter of the universe which lies outside the limit of the earth’s atmosphere. The seeming anomaly of classifying as a single branch of science all that we know in a field so wide, while subdividing our knowledge of things on our own planet into an indefinite number of separate sciences, finds its explanation in the impossibility of subjecting the matter of the heavens to that experimental scrutiny which yields such rich results when applied to matter which we can handle at will. Astronomy is of necessity a science of observation in the pursuit of which experiment can directly play no part. It is the most ancient of the sciences because, before the era of experiment, it was the branch of knowledge which could be most easily systematized, while the relations of its phenomena to day and night, times and seasons, made some knowledge of the subject a necessity of social life. In recent times it is among the more progressive of the sciences, because the new and improved methods of research now at command have found in its cultivation a field of practically unlimited extent, in which the lines of research may ultimately lead to a comprehension of the universe impossible of attainment before our time.
The field we have defined is divisible into at least two parts, that of Astronomy proper, or “Astrometry,” which treats of the motions, mutual relations and dimensions of the heavenly bodies; and that of Astrophysics (q.v.), which treats of their physical constitution. While it is true that the instruments and methods of research in these two branches are quite different in their details, there is so much in common in the fundamental principles which underlie their application, that it is unprofitable to consider them as completely distinct sciences.
Speaking in the most comprehensive way, and making an exception of the ethereal medium (see [Aether]), which, being capable of experimental study, is not included in the subject of astronomy, we may say that the great masses of matter which make up the universe are of two kinds:—(1) incandescent bodies, made visible to us by their own light; (2) dark bodies, revolving round them or round each other. These dark bodies are known to us in two ways: (a) by becoming visible through reflecting the light from incandescent bodies in their neighbourhood, (b) by their attraction upon such bodies.