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I feel sure that society ought to suppress with relentless energy all those parlours of the astrologists and palmists, of the scientific mediums and spiritualists, of the quacks and prophets. Their announcements by signs or in the public press ought to be stopped, and ought to be treated by the postal department of the government as the advertisements of other fraudulent enterprises are treated.
Speculators used to consult clairvoyants, crystal gazers, astrologists and card-readers for a forecast of business conditions. To-day, through accurate knowledge based upon statistics relative to fundamental factors in the business situation, they forecast the future with remarkable accuracy. The practice of medicine was once a combination of superstition, incantation, ignorance and chicanery.
The Society for the Propagation of Esoteric Buddhism asked him to tell them of his experiences in Hindoostan; "Purple Mother" and "Besant" Theosophists sent committees to wait on him, and various believers in Spiritist exploitations, astrologists, psychometrists and all sorts and conditions of dabblers in occultism pestered him with letters, circulars and requests of every conceivable nature.
"Mystical as the Druses, with whose mysterious secrets she alone, perhaps, in the world, was acquainted, resigned like the Mussulman, and as fatalistic; with the Jew, expectant of the Messiah's coming; with the Christian, a worshipper of Christ, whose beneficent morality she practised she invested the whole in the fantastic colours and supernatural dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East, and, it would seem, the revelations of the Arabian astrologists.
His graphic description of the diseases to which I was liable gave me a favorable impression of his astute wisdom. So I wrote to about a dozen other astrologists for horoscopes of my life in order to see whether all their findings were the same. Some of them tallied almost verbatim with the first one received, while others were diametrically opposite.
A comet made its appearance and was regarded with anxiety by the astrologists of Kyoto, who associated its advent with certain misfortune. Hidetada ridiculed these fears. "What can we tell," he said, "about the situation of a solitary star in the wide universe, and how can we know that it has anything to do with this little world?"
They were often given to the absurdity commonly known as the "black art," or witchcraft, and held to the preposterous notions of the astrologists. Even the immortal astronomer Kepler, who lived in the sixteenth century, was a professional astrologer, and still held to the notion that the stars determined the destiny of men.
At length, in the year 552, a party of doctors, astronomers, astrologists, and mathematicians came from Corea to the Japanese court, and with them a number of Buddhist missionaries, who brought a new religion into the land. Thus gradually the arts, sciences, letters, and religions of Asia made their way into the island kingdom, and the old life of Japan was transformed.
Two of his relatives his father and, I believe, his brother had been drowned, and this fact gave him a horror of the water. He seemed to feel somewhat like the clients of the astrologists, who, having been told from what agencies they were to die, took every precaution to avoid them.
Anyhow, the occult religions were fully represented there. Miracle-working was becoming more and more the basis even of paganism. Never had the soothsayers been more flourishing. Everybody, in secret, pried into the entrails of the sacrificial victims, or used magic spells. As to the wizards and astrologists, they did business openly. Augustin himself consulted them, like all the Carthaginians.
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