... The modern philosopher and historian alike deride and marvel at
astrology as the most persistent disease with which the minds of men
have ever been afflicted but from which they are now happily freed by
the advance of science. I must confess my inability to share this view
as to the patent folly of the art. The careful student of astrology
cannot fail to be impressed with the logical coherence of its
doctrines and their necessary relation to the fundamental postulates
from which they spring. While these postulates can no longer be
maintained they seem in no way inappropriate as stages in the
development of human knowledge and their wide spread acceptance is
sufficient evidence of their seeming reasonableness to nascent
society. Indeed it is only the upper strata of European civilization
that has now outgrown the beliefs above considered. Asia still teems
with them, from Seoul to Bagdad, and even in the heart of Europe
astrological calendars are current and find enormous circulation among
the lower classes. The practicing astrologer who seeks business
through advertising in the daily press is with us in America, and to
judge by the persistence of his advertisements they bring response. I
find upon the shelves of the principal scientific library of Chicago a
manual of applied astrology whose dirty and dog's eared leaves,
together with recent date upon its title page, are additional
testimony that American cultivation of the occult is not limited to
Boston. Even nearer home we all know people who will plant or sow, or
cut their hair only at the right phase of the moon or who have an
abiding faith that the planetary weather predictions of Mr. Hicks are
sound, in theory at least. I venture to assert that within range of
the reader's acquaintance there is a considerable number of persons
who firmly believe that in case of premature birth a seven months baby
has a better chance of life than one of eight months--an ancient
doctrine, for which excellent reasons were adduced by the Greek
astrologers but which seems to find little support in current medical
theory.
But assuredly our best memorial of the part astrology has played in
human affairs lies not in such paltry superstitions but in its
incorporation into the great literatures of Europe. Casual
illustrations of this fossilized relationship have been given in this
essay, but far more impressive than these instances are those cases in
which astrologic doctrine permeates and dominates the whole structure
of a great work. Chaucer's treatise on the Astrolabe was avowedly
written as an exposition of the astrologic art, and in Dante's Divine
Comedy the whole moral structure of the Paradiso, with its successive
heavens allotted to beatitudes of varying degrees, finds its key in
the astrology that Dante knew and followed. The sequence of these
heavens accords with that of the spheres allotted by astrologic
doctrine to the several planets, arranged in the order of their
increasing distance from the earth, the order of their altitude as
Dante would have said. The lowest heaven, that of the moon, is
allotted by the poet to virgins because forsooth they best typify
those qualities of cold and moist with which astrologic doctrine
endows the moon. They who have fought with fire and sword in defence
of the Church militant are placed in a higher heaven than are those
saints and theologians whose service has been intellectual in its
nature; an impropriety in our eyes and doubtless little congenial to
Dante's mode of thought. But astrologically it must be so, for Mars,
who typified the warrior, is higher, i. e., more distant from the
earth, than is the sun whose light and warmth are alike the symbol and
the source of intellect and spirituality. But ancient and modern ideas
are equally satisfied when the poet placed God and the Redeemer in the
empyrean, the region of the fixed stars, alike the most exalted and by
reason of its distance, the purest part of the universe.
Although far from extinct, the old faith in the influence of the
heavens is waning and it is hard to believe that any mutations of
human thought can ever restore it to a status comparable with that it
enjoyed in classical and mediaeval times. As a factor in the conduct
of life among enlightened people its power is gone, but the marks of
its old time influence are dyed in the social fabric, imprinted alike
upon language and literature and so long as that literature abides,
astrology cannot sink below the horizon of man's intellectual
interests.