United States or Belgium ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The extravagance of his fancies does not appear until the fourth book, in which he reiterates the statement that he was forced to adopt his astrological opinions from direct and positive observation. He despises "The common herd of prophesiers who describe the operations of the stars as if they were a sort of deities, the lords of heaven and earth, and producing everything at their pleasure.
Continually they seized upon the thoughts of others, gathering them in from every quarter, translating the Greek mathematical works, borrowing the Indian arithmetic and system of notation, which we in turn call Arabic, filling the world with wild astrological fantasies.
Burnet mentions an astrological prediction of the Prince's fate, and adds: But that which was most particular was, that he was to have a son by a widow, and was to die of the small-pox in the twenty-fifth year of his age. Swift. Was, was, was, was. Burnet. They set it also up for a maxim. Swift. He can vary a phrase; set up for a maxim, and lay down for a maxim. Burnet.
It is easy to imagine that there was many a supper and dinner, when a thousand strange subjects were even more strangely discussed; when Pirkheimer now made them roar with a hazardous joke, or again dumbfounded them with Greek quotations pompously done into German, or made their flesh creep and the superstitions of their race stir in them by mysteriously enlarging on his astrological lore, for to his many weaknesses he added this, which was then scarcely recognised as one.
"I ask leave to question the fact: you know better than any man how often, through an error in our calculations, through haste, even through an over-attention, astrological predictions are exposed to falsification; and at present I foresee so little chance of my quitting Rome, that I prefer the earthly probabilities to the celestial."
And what Can this be then? Methought I was acquainted With all the dusky corners of this house. Ay, but the road thereto is watched by spirits, Two griffins still stand sentry at the door. The astrological tower! How happens it That this same sanctuary, whose access Is to all others so impracticable, Opens before you even at your approach?
This notion we may well believe was of popular origin, though elaborated in the schools to conform to a developed astrological science. The stars and moon never passed beyond certain limits, and, accordingly, the view was developed which gave to the canopy of heaven fixed boundaries. At each end of the canopy was a great gate, properly guarded.
To make profit for the house of Borgia by fraud, sacrilege, and the dismemberment of nations, was the Papal policy. Their father, Galeotto Manfredi, had been murdered in 1488 by their mother, Francesca Bentivogli. How far, we may ask, were these dark crimes of violence actuated by astrological superstition?
His taste for astronomy soon lost itself in those astrological reveries to which timid and melancholy temperaments like his are but too disposed. This, together with a youth passed in Spain, opened his ears to the evil counsels of the Jesuits, and the influence of the Spanish court, by which at last he was wholly governed.
But in recognizing the time of the inundations and the vernal equinox, the Assyrians did not dethrone the moon from its accustomed precedence, for the year was reckoned as commencing not precisely at the vernal equinox, but at the new moon next before the equinox. Beyond marking the seasons, the chief interests that actuated the Babylonian astronomer in his observations were astrological.
Word Of The Day