CHAPTER XCV.

WHEREIN MENTION IS MADE OF LORD BYRON, RONSARD, RABBI KAPOL AND CO. IT IS SUGGESTED THAT A MODE OF READING THE STARS HAS BEEN APPLIED TO THE RECOVERY OF OBLITERATED ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS; AND IT IS SHOWN THAT A MATHEMATICIAN MAY REASON MATHEMATICALLY, AND YET LIKE A FOOL.

Thus may ye behold
This man is very bold,
And in his learning old
Intendeth for to sit.
I blame him not a whit;
For it would vex his wit,
And clean against his earning
To follow such learning
As now a-days is taught.
                 DOCTOUR DOUBLE-ALE.

Lord Byron calls the Stars the poetry of heaven, haying perhaps in mind, Ben Jonson's expression concerning bell-ringing. Ronsard calls them the characters of the sky:

        —Alors que Vesper vient embrunir nos yeux,
Attaché dans le ciel je contemple les cieux,
En qui Dieu nous escrit, en notes non obscures,
Les sorts et les destins de toutes creatures.
Car luy, en desdaignant (comme font les humains)
D'avoir encre et papier et plume entre les mains,
Par les astres du ciel, qui sont ses caracteres,
Les choses nous predit et bonnes et contraires.
Mais les hommes, chargez de terres et du trespas,
Meprisent tel escrit, et ne le lisent pas.

The great French poet of his age probably did not know that what he thus said was actually believed by the Cabalists. According to them the ancient Hebrews represented the stars, severally and collectively, by the letters of their alphabet; to read the stars, therefore, was more than a metaphorical expression with them. And an astral alphabet for genethliacal purposes was published near the close of the fifteenth century, at Cracow, by Rabbi Kapol Ben Samuel, in a work entitled “The Profundity of Profundities.”

But as this would rest upon an insecure foundation,—for who could be assured that the alphabet had been accurately made out?—it has been argued that the Heavens are repeatedly in the Scriptures called a Book, whence it is to be inferred that they contain legible characters: that the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis ought to be translated, “In the beginning God created the letter, or character of the Heavens;” and that in the nineteenth Psalm we should read “their line,” instead of “their sound has gone forth into all lands,” this referring to their arrangement in the firmament like letters upon a roll of parchment. Jews, Platonists and Fathers of the Church, are shewn to have believed in this celestial writing. And there can be no question but that both the language and the characters must be Hebrew, that being the original speech, and those the original characters, and both divinely communicated to man, not of human invention. But single stars are not to be read as letters, as in the Astral Alphabet. This may be a convenient mode of noting them in astronomical observations; the elements of this celestial science are more recondite in proportion as the science itself is more mysterious. An understanding eye may distinguish that the stars in their groups form Hebrew letters, instead of those imaginary shapes which are called the signs of the Zodiac.

But as the Stars appear to us only as dots of light, much skill and sagacity are required for discovering how they combine into the complex forms of the Hebrew alphabet. The astral scholar reads them as antiquaries have made out inscriptions upon Roman buildings by the marks of the nails, when the letters themselves had been torn away by rapacious hands for the sake of the metal. Indeed it is not unlikely that the Abbé Barthelemi took the hint from the curiously credulous work of his countryman, Gaffarel, who has given examples of this celestial writing from the Rabbis Kapol, Chomer and Abiudan. In these examples the stars are represented by white spots upon the black lines of the Hebrew letter. The Abbé, when he writes upon this subject to Count Caylus, seems not to have known that Peiresc had restored ancient inscriptions by the same means; if, however, he followed the example of Peiresc without chusing to mention his name, that omni-erudite man himself is likely to have seen the books from whence Gaffarel derived his knowledge.

There is yet another difficulty; even the book of Heaven is not stereotyped; its types are continually changing with the motion of the heavenly bodies, and changes of still greater importance are made by the appearance of new stars.

One important rule is to be observed in perusing this great stelliscript. He who desires to learn what good they prefigure, must read them from West to East; but if he would be forewarned of evil, he must read from North to West; in either case beginning with the stars that are most vertical to him. For the first part of this rule, no better reason has been assigned than the conjectural one, that there is a propriety in it, the free and natural motion of the stars being from West to East; but for the latter part a sufficient cause is found in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah: septentrione pandetur malum. “Out of the North evil shall break forth.”

Dionyse Settle was persuaded that Martin Frobisher, being a Yorkshire-man, had, by his voyage in search of a north-west passage, repelled the rehearsal of those opprobrious words; not only he, but many worthy subjects more, as well as the said Dionyse, who was in the voyage himself, being “Yorkshire too.”

But why should evil come from the North? “I conceive,” says Gaffarel, “it would stand with sound philosophy to answer, by reason of the darkness and gloominess of the air of those parts, caused by the great distance of the Sun; and also by reason of the Evil Spirits which inhabit dark places.” This reason becomes stronger when it is considered that the word which in the Vulgate is rendered pandetur, may also be rendered depingetur, so that the verse might be translated, “all evils shall be described (or written), from the North;” and if written, then certainly to be read from that direction.

This theory of what Southey has called “the language of the lights of Heaven,” is Jewish. Abu Almasar (nominally well known as Albumazar, by which name the knaves called him who knew nothing of him or his history), derived all religions from the Planets. The Chaldean, he said, was produced by the conjunction of Jupiter with Mars; the Egyptian, by Jupiter with the Sun; Judaism, by Jupiter with Saturn; Christianity, by Jupiter with Mercury; Mahommedanism, by Jupiter with Venus. And in the year 1460, when, according to his calculation, the conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury would again occur, he predicted that the Christian religion would receive its death blow, and the religion of Antichrist begin. Pursuing these fancies, others have asserted that the reason why the Jewish nation always has been miserable, and always must be so, is because their religion was formed under the influences of Saturn:—

Spiteful and cold, an old man melancholy,
With bent and yellow forehead, he is Saturn.1

A malevolent planet he is, and also an unfortunate one, and it was he that

With lead-coloured shine lighting it into life,1

threw a tincture of severity and moroseness over the religion of the Jews; he it was that made them obstinate and covetous, and their Sabbath accordingly is his day. In like manner the character of the Turks and their day of rest have been determined by the planet Venus, which is the star of their religion. And as Christianity began under the influence of the Sun, Sunday is the Christian Sabbath; and the visible head of the Christian Church has his seat in Rome, which is a solar city, its foundations having been laid when the Sun was in Leo, his proper House. Farther proof of this influence is, that the Cardinals wear red, which is a solar colour.

1 WALLENSTEIN.

Dr. Jenkin, in his Discourses upon the Reasonableness and certainty of the Christian Religion, takes into his consideration the opinion of those persons who thought that the stars would shine to little purpose unless there were other habitable worlds besides this earth whereon we dwell. One of the uses for which they serve he supposes to be this, that in all ages the wits of many men whose curiosity might otherwise be very ill employed, have been busied in considering their end and nature, and calculating their distances and motions:—a whimsical argument, in advancing which he seems to have forgotten the mischievous purposes to which so much of the wit which had taken this direction had been applied.

Yet these fancies of the wildest astrologers are not more absurd than the grave proposition of John Craig, whose “Theologiæ Christianæ Principia Mathematica” were published in London at the close of the 17th century. He asserted, and pretended to show by mathematical calculations, that the probability of the truth of the Gospel history was as strong at that time, as it would have been in the days of our Saviour himself, to a person who should have heard it related by twenty-eight disciples; but that, upon the same mathematical grounds, the probability will entirely cease by the year 3150; there would then be no more faith on earth, and, consequently, according to St. Luke, the world would then be at an end, and the Son of Man would come to judge the quick and the dead.

Bayle always ridiculed that sort of evidence which is called mathematical demonstration.