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Throughout 407, the news
received at Rome grew worse almost day by day. Slowly but inexorably,
Constantine III liberated all Gaul from both barbarians and the remnants of
Honorius' administration. Displaced and desperate bands of would-be settlers
from the north roamed northern Italy. Stilicho was forced to break off
operations he had commenced in Illycrium against the remnants of Radagais' horde
and so abandon his dreams of a west-Roman Danube. The pleas from Alaric (still
in Greece) took on a threatening note. By December the now adult Honorius,
surveying with Stilicho from the relative safety of Rome the chaos they had
helped create, realized that he must do something positive to demonstrate his
strength and effectiveness. The action he decided upon was apparently trifling
and futile, but in fact provocatively dangerous, inasmuch as it could only make
him still more enemies. To placate the Christians, he ordered that the Sybilline Books should be burned on Christmas Day. On the face of it, such an action would seem a small things beside all the insults already offered to the gods, but Rutilius Namantianus, a highly-educated and sensitive Roman traditionalist, saw it as a symbolic act of murder, a proclamation of the coming death of old Rome. Many probably shared his view. In a bitter attack of the memory of Stilicho, "The traitor who was secret emperor", Namantianus later compared burning the books with two similar symbolic murders from the mythological past: Althea's dooming to death her son Meleager by burning the firebrand upon which his life depended, and Scylla's destruction of her father Nisus' kingdom by cutting his sacred hair (after which, the gods made both of them sea-birds). So to this contemporary Pagan, the deliberate destruction of the Oracles was an evil act, an ill-wishing the meaning of which could scarcely be overlooked in a world where omens might be seen in events far less fateful:
Rome itself lying open to leather-clad auxiliaries, a slave before ever she grew withered - the traitor lying in wait with so many Gothic troops! Yet first he burned the treasure, the Sybilline Oracles -
Many shared Manantianus' opinion that all Rome's troubles lay at Stilicho's door. They would have been happier with the eastern Prefect Anthemius' anti-barbarian policies than they were with those of the western administration, although many of them would have scorned the Greek's devotion to the cause of Christianity. To Namantianus, Stilicho was "the traitor" who, with his leather-clad auxiliaries, lay concealed till the moment should come when he could destroy Rome - a moment he himself precipitated by burning the sacred books guaranteeing Rome's sovereignty. Yet was it in fact Stilicho who ordered the burning of the Books? Roman gossip told Namantianus that it was, but although he may actually have given the order, it is probable that the inspiration came from Honorius himself and his Christian advisers. Relations between the emperor and his prefect were probably already strained. Stilicho's son, Eucherius, was a Pagan, and was widely suspected of having been involved in plots against Honorius' Christian government. It may well be that by Christmas 407, Honorius felt that it was time to assert himself. Only shortly afterwards, he promulgated new laws underscoring his determination to rule through orthodox Christian administrators and to end the dangers of a Pagan revival: the first of them, issued simultaneously with the order to burn the oracles, barred Christian heretics from office, and made the bishops judges in these matters; another, dated 408, forbade "those antipathetic to the catholic sect" to serve as imperial guards; and a third, addressed to the Praetorian Prefect appointed after Stilicho's death, ordered the bishops to see that no Pagan rites were celebrated anywhere, even in cemeteries, and suggested, by what it proscribed, that during recent years Paganism had largely been reestablished, public money having been allocated for its support:
On that Christmas Day 407 - the day of the undying Sun - when the Sybilline books were burned, that last order lay a year in the future. But Namantianus and his friends saw it coming, when they watched the oracles destroyed and the priesthood of the Quindecimvirs thus emptied of meaning. The books had been destroyed before - but only by enemies in open warfare. The case now was different. The first signs that astrologers were working in Imperial Rome come from the highest level of all, the court of the Emperor. Augustus, says the historian Suetonius, had such confidence in his destiny that he published his horoscope and stamped coins with the sign of Capricorn under which he was born. At the death of his uncle, Julius Caesar, the passage of a comet provoked a legend that lasts to these days and gave strange support to the theory that man's destiny was unchangeable. Certainly at that time and place the message of the stars seemed more apt for the great than for the ordinary man. The "death of princes" was indeed earth-shaking. The Emperors took their cue from Augustus and employed not only one astrologer but many. Tiberius's man made public his own prediction that when the Emperor left Rome in A.D. 26, he would never return. Tiberius left Rome for Capri where he died in due course at the assassin's hand. Caligula, his successor, was warned of violence - apparently with no avail since he too died at the assassin's hand at the beginning of A.D. 41 Claudius, the Fourth Roman Emperor, was himself a scholar, versed in the ideas of astrology, of philosophy, and of other methods of divination. During his reign astrological divination definitely became "the thing" - the ante-rooms of the great were thronged with the Chaldeans, as they were known, giving advice as to love affairs, the fulfilment of ambition, the acquisition of wealth. And, considering the uncertain conditions of the day, a little hint as to dangerous moments in which to venture forth into the dark streets and some sagacious warning as to reliability of slaves, were probably also in vogue. The naissant science of medicine was by this time inextricably wedded to astrological ideas that certain parts of the body responded to certain stellar influences. The idea that the hour of death, like the hour of birth, is written in the stars was widespread. "At the moment we are born we die, and our end is fixed from our beginning." "A man dies on his day and not before." Current scientific thought accepted the subject without criticism and, in incorporating it into the study of natural phenomena, paved the way to the mediaeval and Renaissance belief in celestial correspondences that affected the course of nature and the crops, the human body and disease. Nor were the writers of the day indifferent to the appeal of astrological symbology. The idea of fatalism, of man's destiny being written in the stars, is a poetic one that has struck an echo in every generation, and certainly did so in Imperial Rome. Horace - that pleasant cynic - was unlikely a devotee of any cult, but he plays with astrological terms happily enough. Seneca treats the whole subject more seriously, and, as befits a writer of tragedies, brings his unhappy characters to the end ordained in their birth stars. Even the gay Ovid brings into his Metamorphoses the ideas of Pythagoras which were so closely linked with astrological teaching. Yet once again it was on the religious level that astrological ideas impressed the more thoughtful Romans. The brisk, pleasure-loving Pagan attitude began to leave an aftermath of bitterness as existence under the Emperors became more uncertain and human lives of ever-decreasing value. New religious ideas colored by Eastern mysticism began to creep into the thought of the time: the Olympic deities with their rough and ready enjoyment of life and disconcerting ideas about punishment were poor comfort to the children of a highly sophisticated civilization. The idea that the highest in the land, those self-styled deities the Emperors, passed from human life to eternity in the Sun had begun to pall. So speculation about a future life, about a passage of the soul, gained ground. The most religious of the Roman poets, Virgil, in his Georgics, appeals to the Muses to point out to him the path of the stars in the sky, the reason for eclipses, tides and earthquakes, and to bestow on him a knowledge of nature that will help him to a philosophical approach to this life and to eternity. The most fascinating in this religious currency was the animating principle of the cult of Mithras - a religion that was only narrowly defeated by Christianity in the 4th century of our era. The Roman soldiers were followers of Mithras, the Legions had their own Mithraic chapels. The mysteries were ceremoniously observed from the 1st century onward, and appeared to have come into the western world from Chaldean-Persian sources, bringing astrological beliefs with them. Briefly, the human soul was said to descend from heaven to this world beneath the Moon, passing through the Planetary spheres and acquiring dispositions and qualities peculiar to each of them. After the death of the body it made the return journey, sloughing off the passions and sins that it had acquired on Earth as undesired garments. To the Moon went the failings of human personality, to Mercury greed, to Venus lust, to the Sun intellect, to Mars war-like ardor, to Jupiter ambition and to Saturn sloth. When the soul reached the Eighth Heaven it entered a sublime essence where lived the gods. In the mythology of Mithras, seven different metals composed a ladder which was the symbol of this passage of souls from the spheres, and the astrological correspondences of metals with the Planets determined the constitution of the ladder. Lead signified Saturn, gold the Sun, silver the Moon and copper Venus, and so on. In various disguises this idea of the passage of the soul was to survive throughout the dark and middle ages and is still with us in the mystical cults among the Christians and the Eastern faiths. And who shall say that it is not an inspiring one? Says Claudius Ptolemy:
Roman life was sordid enough in many of its aspects. Blood and cruelty darkened the splendors of the Imperial court and the glorious triumphs of Roman arms. These astrological ideas, percolating westward in the days of Imperial Rome, brought some hope, inspiration and light into dark places. Christianity was an early rival pitted against astrology, and more often than not its number one enemy. Perhaps they are both competing for the Soul and Destiny. At the start of Christianity, Christian writers regarded this astrology-religion as a kind of rival which used methods which were basically and fundamentally wrong, for it posited a number of gods and forces of nature whose rigid and blind fatalism allowed no freedom of will to man, instead of a single and all-powerful god. The first church fathers therefore saw astrology as a demonic monster which had to be fought. Its harmful nature, amorality, and determinism threatened to turn believers from the way of righteousness. Its determinism was particularly dangerous: since God was sole master of the future, it was impossible that the stars should be a cause of men's destinies. Yet the early church fathers were all hypocrites anyway, so it is no surprise that they followed the counsel of the stars all the while denouncing it. Here is a comment by William Edelen, a former minister at the First Congregational Church in Tacoma, Washington, and lecturer for the Department of Religion at the University of Puget Sound:
Let us note that during the last centuries of paganism belief in the divinity of the heavenly bodies grew even stronger. The stars are alive: they have a recognized appearance, a sex, a character, which their names alone suffice to evoke. They are powerful and redoubtable beings, anxiously prayed to and interrogated, since it is they who inspire all human action. They reign over human life and hold in their keeping the secrets of man’s fortune and of his end. Benevolent or deadly, they determine the fate of peoples and individuals by the mere accident of their movements, their conjunctions and oppositions. To conciliate these dangerous masters everyone, from the Emperor down to the circus groom, had recourse to the arts of the Chaldean soothsayers, a fraternity as indispensible as it was ill-famed. These charlatans boasted that they could bring the spirit of a star down from heaven and render it propitious both for this life and the next. Amulets and talismans were everywhere in circulation. Increasingly - as, for example, among the Neoplatonists of the third century - obsession with the divine and the demoniacal began to mingle with concepts of natural law and mechanics. Science lost ground to superstition and magic, or at the very least became inextricably involved with them. Let us note, furthermore, that this process of “absorption” of the gods by the stars which we have sketched finally resulted in assuring the gods of survival. One might indeed call it a piece of unhoped-for good luck on their side, for the old mythology had long been bankrupt and the Olympians had become mere phantoms. Now, however, a providential shelter is offered them: “the great gods find honorable refuge in the planets,” while the demigods and heroes ascend to people the sky with “catasterisms.” Thus, though dethroned or about to be dethroned on Earth, they are still masters of the celestial spheres, and men will not cease to invoke them and fear them. Perhaps there is an analogy here with the process by which the totem animals of the primitive religions “took refuge” long ago in the zodiac. Such was the situation with which Christianity found itself confronted. In its intolerance of all pagan cults, it is only natural that special hostility should have been shown to their most recent and lively embodiment - belief in powerful stellar divinities, with Helios as their king. This hostility is in fact apparent from the very beginnings of Christianity: St. Paul reproaches the Galatians for continuing to observe “days and months, times and years” in the name of the “weak and beggarly elements” to which they desire again to be in bondage (Galatians 4:9-10). Later, the apologists (here, incidentally, echoing the views of Philo of Alexandria) explain that it is a crime to deify the physical world - to worship the thing created instead of the creator. What seems to them particularly impious in the worship of the heavenly bodies, as well as a danger to mortals, is that such worship implies a denial of all human liberty and can end only in a discouraging fatalism. At first sight it would therefore seem that Christianity had nothing but cause to abhor pagan astrology and to oppose it. In actual fact, something quite different took place. To begin with, Christianity itself contained astrological elements; too many traces of the Hellenistic and Oriental religions, too much philosophy and science, were intertwined at its very roots for it to be able to rid itself of them completely. Accordingly, not only did the mythological names of the days of the week survive in spite of a certain amount of protest and some timid attempts to substitute a Christian terminology, but we even see the Church of Rome herself, in the middle of the fourth century, officially fixing the twenty-fifth of December as the date of Christ’s nativity - the same day which had marked the birth of the Sun in the pagan religions, since the yearly course of each new sun has its beginning then. Aurelian, in his day, had made the sun a god of the Empire. Later, the first Christian Emperor was to have himself represented in the likeness of the Sun God on a porphyry column in Constantinople. Thus we see that astrology still had its partisans and believers among the Christians, while even its adversaries made important concessions. Tertullian, not without embarrassment, admits that astrology was valid up to the birth of Christ; now, however, one can no longer look to Saturn, Mars, and the other “dead” gods for knowledge of the future: Neither Lactantius nor St. Augustine, again, casts doubt upon the fact of stellar influence, but both believe it can be overcome by man’s free will and by the grace of God. In short, “since according to the doctrine of predestination, man’s eternal salvation or doom depends solely on the will of God, many see it the compulsion execised by the stars - an inevitable compulsion, which determines the moral life as well - merely another expression of this doctrine; at all events, God’s omnipotence makes manifest its immutable decrees to man through the stars as intermediary.” (L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 1923, I, chap. xxii: “Augustine on Magic and Astrology.”, p. 32.) Furthermore, even when the apologists and Fathers interpret Astrology in this way - and even when they condemn it - they leave untouched the underlying belief in demons in which it is rooted. The existence of evil angels is an article of faith with them all, as it is for the Church; but the gods of pagan fable are now combined wit hthe demons mentioned in the Bible in one confused rabble of malevolent spirits (Psalms 96:5). "The things which they sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God," says Paul, speaking to the Gentiles (I Corinthians 10:20). For centuries to come, preachers will still go about the countryside expelling "the demons Jupiter, Mercury," etc., from haunts where they have lingered, as was done, for example, by St. Martin. One resource of the hunted gods is to transform themselves into popular saints. It is through the stars and through astrology that these demons often act. In former times, for man's temptation and perdition, they taught him to read the stars. Now, scattered through the air (aeria animalia, as St. Augustine called it), they make use of the heavenly bodies to aid them in their evil dominion. After this, Augustine's anathema against seems somewhat vain, especially since he elsewhere affirms the corporeal reality of the evil powers of heaven. On this point, the great Bishop is in agreement with the "magician" Apuleius, whose teaching he expounds at length (De civ. Dei, I, 9) - with the difference that Aupelius admits the existence of friendly demons. And his arguments, aimed at destroying Astrology as a religion, sometimes have the effect of reinstating it and confirming it. Last of all, there is one fundamentally important reason why Astrology was by no means easily to be extirpated: it stood as an integral and essential element of culture. As we have seen, it had intimately invaded the science of the late pagan world - to such a degree, in fact, that it dominated all the natural sciences. Not only had astronomy fallen under its sway, but mineralogy, botany, zoology, physiology, and medicine as well. A glance at the tabulation reproduced below, in illustration of the system advanced by an astrologer of the second century of our era, Antiochus of Athens, will show that all physical beings were thought of as related to the zodiac. It was therefore a simple matter to connect them with the planets as well, by making use of the "fundamental qualities" of the planets as intermediaries. Mars, in fact, was "hot-dry," Jupiter and Venus were "hot-moist," etc. Similarly, correspondence was established between the planets and the elements - between Mars and Fire, between Jupiter and Air, between Mercury and the Moon on the one hand and Water on the other.  Insofar as the Christian community was receptive to Pagan culture, therefore, it could not neglect Astrology. Now the Church Fathers were urged by two considerations to admit all these studies into the Christian curriculum - their concern that the Christian be in no way inferior to the non-Christian, and their sense of the need for a proper understanding of their own religion. For, as St. Augustine recognizes, knowledge of natural history and astronomy is essential to a right reading of Scripture and a true understanding of divine things. (De doctrina Christiana, II, 29). This theory might prove disturbing to overscrupulous believers. In order to reassure them and justify profane studies the Fathers invoked a most appropriate Biblical episode: when the Hebrew people emerged from Egypt, they carried away with them vessels of gold and silver belonging to their enemies. Why should Christianity not do the same? (Ibid., II, 40). It was on the strength of this argument, many times repeated, that ancient science was to pass over into the Middle Ages. But along with it, all sorts of religious elements, classical or barbaric, passed over as well, and were in many cases to outlive the vicissitudes, the periods of eclipse and shipwreck, experienced by science itself. Thus the Christian polemics of the first centuries concerning Astrology did not, as might have been expected, result in simply relegating it. Instead, the Church to a certain extent came to terms with it, and even turned to it for support. The situation remained the same during the Middle Ages for reasons which are not hard to explain. In the first place, the active principle basic to Astrology, the fear of demons, survived. The Church, it should be recalled, had not completely expelled the antique divinities; they had been degraded to the rank of evil spirits. In this form, they still inspired superstitious fears. To be sure, such fears were now to some extent dispelled and held in check by the belief in the omnipotence of a supreme God capable of subduing adverse forces in obedience to His will: God could save man from demons - but they were none the les there, still living and fearsome. We are told in the Golden Legend that when St. Benedict was preaching against idolatry to the people of Monte Cassino, he converted a temple of Apollo into an oratory of St. John. But the enraged god returned to torment him in the form of a black monster with flaming eyes. While the fear of demons continues to haunt the popular imagination, the astrological theory of causation remains in force as an intellectual concept; even the greatest minds do not repudiate it entirely. They do of course see that omnipotence of the stars could constitute a threat to human liberty, but like the apologists and the Fathers, they are satisfied with defining the limits of this power; they do not deny its existence. St. Thomas Aquinas admits that the stars determine individual character, at least in a physical sense, and since most men follow their passions - that is to say, their physical appetites - it is really by the stars that they are led into sin: In the heyday of the clergy, the heavy hand of ecclesiastical displeasure fell not on the physician, but on the astronomer. Men like Bruno, Galileo, and Copernicus could upset the Christian order of the world, for they stepped directly on the toes of the Fathers who had been taught that the earth was God's footstool, and that the whole mystery of creation had been worked out on this planet. When Copernicus stopped the Sun and made the Earth move, he outdid Joshua, who only stopped the Sun. The Church acted against these men with all sincerity - but with a woeful lack of knowledge - to put these innovationists back in their places before they tore the universe apart. With a rival as insidious as a popular religion of the stars, it was no wonder that Christianity should absorb it and turn some of its chief elements to its own account. This is what the Christian church consistently did in order to accommodate rival Pagan beliefs. The two fundamental dates around which the year of Christian celebrations is built are those of the birth and rebirth, or resurrection, of their Messiah: Christmas and Easter. After a long period of indecision, the Christians chose dates which had marked the beginning of the year for the gods of the Sun, that is, they put the birth of their Messiah at the time of the Winter solstice, when the days begin to lengthen, and his resurrection at the Spring equinox, when the days begin to be longer than the nights. As for the instrument used in the torment of Jesus ( a T-shaped device used for the punishment of slaves), the Christian church, after some indecision, decided to represent it as two lines intersecting each other at right angles, which was the traditional symbol of the four points of the compass and of the Sun's course in the Pagan cults of Sun and life. And, as in these cults, Christians of the first centuries established the custom of turning toward the East in prayer, that is the Rising Sun. Many other details reveal how astrological ideas infiltrated early Christianity: the darkening of the sky which indicated the death of Christ; his resurrection on a Sunday, the day of the Sun; and, especially, the fact that his birth was announced by the star of the Magus Kings. At the beginning these Magi were not kings. They were Chaldean astrologers! Jerome acknowledges without difficulty that they were genuine astrologers, but the legend turned these Arab magicians into kings. In the ensuing quarrel between the church fathers and astrology, the star of the Magus Kings was a considerable embarrassment to the Christians, for its presence in scripture was true astrology, holding the high jurisdiction for which it had been designed. For at the birth of Christ this star proclaimed royalty. Even a royal horoscope for Jesus Christ meant a destiny for the man-god and also appeared to be a guarantee of authenticity for astrology provided by God himself. Christians got around the contradiction by claiming that the star did not belong to the repertory of the astrologers but was merely a witness, a sign of the coming God, and in no sense a cause. But this problem of the star of the Magus Kings shows a subject of astrological concern had penetrated the heart of Christianity. Laws began to reflect a new Christian attitude towards Paganism, the attitude of the middle ages, when Paganism was not seen as a religion, but as Christian heresy, punishable by ecclesiastical courts:
So the new world had come. Now the Christians had to learn to live in it and direct it. Many, of course, played their part in the evolution of the Christian dialectic of history. Yet three men filled roles of special significance in it. They were Augustine, who elaborated the theory of the City of God as an idea and ideal to be set up in place of the failed City of Rome; Paul Orosius, who accepted a challenge from Augustine to compose a Christian History Against the Pagans (Historiae adversum paganos) to replace earlier histories and correct earlier historical theories; and the friend of them both, Jerome, whose main memorial has been the Latin version of the Bible bearing his name, but whose chief task he himself saw as one of education, involving him, together with the production of a Latin Bible, in the development of a system of Christian instruction (such as the Emperor Julian had proposed) to replace the methods and materials used in earlier times. In his letters, he frequently warned Christian friends against the dangers of Pagan literature: "what children are obliged to do", he once wrote of reading Pagan books, "it is a crime for you to do of your own free will." In other words, an ancient prohibition equivalent today to "don't try this at home." This sentence highlights the dilemma in which the Christians found themselves, as far as educators were concerned. There were still no Christian schools within imperial frontiers, nor in fact would there be for some time to come. But as future Christian administrators had to be educated, Christian children still attended Pagan schools, where they learned to read and write as imperial citizens had done for centuries; the alphabet first, then syllables, then wordlists made up principally of the names of the gods and heroes, and afterwards grammar and syntax from the myths themselves. Although the dangers to adults of any contact with Paganism was fully realized (and exaggeratedly stressed), children were permitted to use texts which adults viewed as criminal propaganda. It was this situation which Jerome set himself. There can be no doubt that when Augustine, Jerome and Orosius put themselves to the task of reforming the Christian's way of seeing the world, they were fully conscious of what they were doing. All had received extensive Pagan educations and were determined that theirs should be the last generation to be so burdened. As the old testament led to the new, the argument ran, so the Roman Empire was intended by God to prepare the way for the universal kingdom of Christ. Anyone standing in the way of this inevitable development can only expect to suffer. It is noteworthy that they were as strongly anti-Jewish as they were anti-Pagan. Augustine was the heavyweight Christian critic. His knockout punches come from being well versed in astrology, since he studied it before his conversion to Christianity. He employs both rational-scientific and spiritual arguments. He also accuses astrologers of slippery logic by attempting to justify astrology sometimes as causes and other times as signs. He then clobbers them on either count. How? By saying that natal astrology could be disproved because twins and "time twins" (people born at the same moment from different mothers) have different destinies. If astrologers say that the stars cause our actions, this is determinism, taking away the free will of the soul at the heart of Christianity. Yet, when astrologers make successful predictions, they are aided by demons. The aim of demons is to seduce the soul into giving up its free will by accepting determinism. In this way demons subjugate the soul to the Pagan deities of the stars. "Astrology is congress with demons" or "the work of the Devil", which is the line taken by modern-day fundamentalists and the Vatican alike. The theme of inevitable suffering for all opponents recurs time and again in Christian literature. There is an especially explicit statement of it in Orosius' summing up of history from Constantine I to his own day:
Later, in the text, Jerome sneers against Julian:
Living as they did after the sack of Rome and consequent dismay of the Pagans, Augustine and Orosius believed that total victory was possible in their own generation. Augustine directly related the genesis of his own most powerful attack on the credibility of the Pagans' world with the blow his god had struck at Rome through Alaric and his armies:
What Augustine had to say in his twenty-two books about the City of God destined to replace divine Rome coloured all mediaeval thinking in the West and deeply influenced the protestant and puritan reformers. Although he would have denied that he was a fatalist, with no true concept of human freedom, his philosophy of history was in fact wholly mechanistic: he saw his god as inexorably redeeming the world in spite of itself, and acceptance of this fundamental Augustinian tenet was what fastened the fetters upon mediaeval Europe. Monks and bishops like John Chrysostom and Martin of Tours forced the destruction of the material treasures of the old world. Thinking men like Augustine squeezed men's minds into a new and constricting mould. It goes without saying that mythological terminology survived as a concomitant of astrological doctrine. Timid attempts were nevertheless made to abolish at least the pagan names of the zodiacal signs; we have already mentioned the effort to Christianize the names of the days of the week. Similarly, during the early Christian centuries, the "astrotheosophers" had wished to transform Cepheus into Adam, Cassiopeia into Eve, and Perseus into Logos, while the Priscillians had replaced the signs of the zodiac by the twelve patriarchs. In the Carolingian period, a certain "Hirenicus" tries, in turn, in a poem on the zodiac, to adjust the signs to Christian symbolism, turning Aries into the Lamb, etc. In the ninth century, in a manuscript now in the ecclesiastical archives of St. Gallen, Cancer has become Abraham; Aries, Job; and Leo, Daniel. But these attempts were of no avail; on the contrary, the astronomer William of Conches proclaims the legitimacy of the stellar mythology, and the necessity of knowing it well. He tells us that certain authors have spoken of the astral bodies in terms of myth (mythice), mentioning Nimrod, Hyginus, and Aratus, and their accounts of the origin of the zodiacal signs - one example being Taurus, the bull (Jupiter) which abducted Europa. "This way of treating of celestial things is legitimate; without it we would not know in what part of the sky a given sign is located, how many stars it contains, nor how they are arranged." (As the De philosophia mundi of William of Conches has been falsely attributed to Bede, Honorius of Autun, and William of Hirschau, the Latin text must be sought in the Patrologia Latina, either in XC, 1127-1178 (Bedae opera, I bk. ii) or in the CLXXII, 39-102 (Hon. Aug. opera, II, V, quot modis auctoritas loquatur de superioribus). In the Roman world, there was an instant reaction even among the Christians against the narrowness of Augustinian concepts of sin and salvation. In Britain, the dangers of imposing a rigid doctrine of time and salvation on the world were quickly appreciated by a monk named Pelagius who realized that such expressions of Christian feeling as Augustine's prayer "Give me what you will" were altogether destructive of human freedom, and that the tendency of Christian teaching was towards rigid conformism and worse, a fatalism influenced by gnosticism and Manichee dualism. The Augustinian Christian might speak of a god "whose service is perfect freedom" but he was in danger of thinking for himself as free only to perform ritualistic acts of choice in servile obedience: the concept was no longer what it had been when the devotees of Venus had used the same phrase of the service they had offered to their goddess. In Rome before 410, then afterwards in Africa and in Palestine, Pelagius fought untiringly to preserve the concept of human free will in the face of virulent attacks by Augustine and Jerome. A church council was called in the east not so much to try as to condemn him. Significantly, the man chosen to prosecute him before it was Paul Orosius, whose dialectic of history excluded true freedom. The details of "The Pelagian Controversy" belong to Christian history: what must interest us here is that Pelagius' attack on Augustine was in essence a restatement of Plotinus' argument against Christian thinking as stated over a century earlier: Plotinus was Augustine's chosen mentor, but he had failed to understand Plotinus here, as in so many other contexts. To Porphyry, Plotinus' disciple and companion, interpreter of his ideas, contemporary Christians were atheists because they knew nothing about the divine nature: in the years since Plotinus, they still had learned nothing about it. The fascinating thing is that Augustine and Pelagius reached their diametrically opposite views of the relation between man and his world from a very similar philosophical beginnings: both found the roots of their teachings not so much in the Christian Bible as in the ideas of Plotinus and Porphyry. The first book which Augustine wrote after becoming a Christian contains only one direct quotation from the Christian scriptures - and that the most Hellenist of all Jesus' reported sayings, one worthy of the sophists of Julian's reign, It is much to be regretted that his intellectual grasp was so limited in some directions that once he had fixed on a fanatically narrow interpretation of the destiny of man and the universe, he resolutely closed his mind around it, shutting out any view whatsoever. Yet they were all pretty creepy men. At the age of nineteen, Augustine read Cicero, which converted him to philosphy - of which he often later wrote as though it were a religion in its own right. A little later, he became a Manichee, dedicated to beliefs he never afterwards wholly lost about the absolute power of evil and total corruption of the physical universe. From Carthage, he moved first to Rome where, flattered by the patronage of the elder Symmachus and the friendliness of the younger, he dropped his Manichee friends, dismissed his mistress, and planned to make an advantagoeus marriage. It pained him afterwards to remember that he never quite succeeded in making himself acceptable as a Roman philosopher and sophisticate. He applied unsuccessfully for the professorship of rhetoric and was never fully admitted to that circle of friends which later writers distunguished ad the Aristocracy of Letters. One may wonder what part envy played in his subsequent development. Jerome was his slightly older contemporary, born about 348 at Stridon in Damaltia, but educated in Rome, where he was privileged to study under the great Pagan, Aelius Donatus, whose textbooks on grammar survived long into the middle ages. It was at Rome that he was baptized, although he studied Christian theology at Trier, the Greek language and its literature at Antioch, and Hebrew at a monastery in the desert near Calchis. Later, he returned to Rome, where he began his new Latin version of the bible, but in 386, after the death of pope Damascus, he was driven from the city by the enmity of Christians who believed that he had overstepped the bounds of acceptable underhandedness in his intrigues to have himself elected pope. Scornfully summing up his enemies' reasonably accurate estimate of his character in a letter to a friend, he wrote, Based on these words, from his own letters, it becomes clear that Jerome may have been better suited to becoming a satanic rapper. So Jerome withdrew to Bethlehem and founded a monastery, from where he issued the complete "vulgate" Bible, a chronicle continuing Eusebius' history of the church down to the year 381, a study of one hundred and thirty five Christian writers entitled de viris illustribus, numerous biblical studies, and a volume of correspondence unsurpassed in its antifeminism, antisemitism, and general vutuperation against every aspect of life and manners offensive to his own excessively narrow view of the world. Now this unpleasant man - okay, this total loser - also carried treasures from Rome into a new era. The purity of expression he had learned from his earliest teachers influenced generations of mediaeval scholars. He was a bundle of contradictions. Although very learned and proud of it, he claimed that his love of literature was a pain to him. In one letter, he wrote that he had had a dream in which he was accused at the gates of heaven of having lived as a Ciceronianus rather than a Christianus, and had since sworn never again to read "secular books". Yet later, when Rufinus accused him of having done precisely that, he defended the practice - although in another place he rejoiced that the old authors were being forgotten:
This was basically wishful thinking on his part, yet it was a cause for boasting among Jerome's younger monastic contemporaries that they were ignorant of everything except Christian literature. Soon they were to force the world into ignorance also. Here, I offer a brief examination of the historical evidence for the wide acceptance of reincarnation in the original Gospels. I know of no source more logical and lucid as a starting point than Leslie D. Weatherhead, M.A., Ph.D., Hon.D.D.; Minister of the City of Temple, London, and Honorary Chaplain to Her Majesty’s Forces. In his Psychology, Religion and Healing, (Abingdon Press) he states:
If we now turn to the genius of Voltaire, one of history’s greatest scholars, as well as founding father of democracy, we find that he anticipated Dr. Weatherhead’s argument with admirable acerbity. Voltaire’s style, like Shaw’s, is an abiding joy in itself, so I doubt if the following excerpts from his Philosophical Dictionary will seem excessive or obscure:
The first gospels must have contained teachings which the early Christians were prepared to preserve with their lives. Unfortunately they appear to have died in vain. Our orthodox versions of the Old and New Testaments date no further back than the 6th Century, when the Emperor Justinian summoned the Fifth Ecumenical Congress of Constantinople in 533 A.D. to expunge the Platonically inspired writings of Origen, an early Church Father, who had upheld reincarnation until his death three hundred years before. Origen was born in 185 A.D. under an obdurate star; but he was as intractably dedicated, in his way, as Theodora was ursinely dedicated in hers. He too was an extremist. To insure his abiding consecration to his chosen calling, he had had himself castrated. No act could have constituted a more studied affront to a woman like Theodora, even across centuries, and it was equally calculated to offend the ambivalent celibate in Justinian. In their imperial eyes, Origen was no better than a self-mutilated pariah; so his teachings would no doubt have been doomed in any case, regardless of their subject matter. Alas, his teachings were vital to the preservation of the original gospels. Origen’s pen had been as prolific as Voltaire’s; but according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the ten books of Stromata, his most provocative work, have disappeared leaving almost no trace. This is of paramount significance, in that Origen occupied himself here in ”correlating the established Christian teachings with the ‘Christian’ dogmas of Plato, Aristotle, Numenius and Corrutus. The link that connects him with Churchly realism, as well as with the Neo-Platonic mysticism, is the conviction that certain knowledge rests wholly on divine revelation, i.e. on oracles. Origen states in his own Contra Celsum:
The views of Pythagoras (582-507 B.C.) exist only in his biographies by Diogenes Laertius and Iamlichus respectively; but the former quotes him as asserting that "he had received the memory of all his soul's transmigrations as a gift from Mercury, along with the gift of recollecting what his own soul, and the souls of others, had experienced between death and rebirth." (It is important to respect the distinction that these worthies made between metempsychosis - the dilatory migration of souls through sub-human shapes - and a series of progressive re-births in human form.)  From Plato (427-347 B.C.), we can obtain direct context:
It should also be established here that St. Jerome once impulsively hailed Origen as "the greatest teacher of the Church since the Apostles." This is hardly plausible if the New Testament was then as ambiguous in its references to reincarnation as it is now. Surely for Origen to have held pride of place among the Early Church Fathers for nearly four centuries his tenets must have been based solidly on what at that time were accepted as true gospels. St. Jerome also asserted the following:
St. Clement of Alexandria (150-220), in his Exhortation to the Pagans is also clearly influenced by Plato:
To St. Jerome's and St. Augustine's views on Plato must be added those of St. Gregory (257-332), who affirmed that "it is absolutely necessary that the soul should be healed and purified, and if this does not take place during its life on earth, it must be accomplished in future lives." St. Augustine (354-430) held Plato in such veneration that he writes in his Contra Academicos:
To come full circle, Plotinus (205-270) was a fellow-disciple with Origen under Ammonius, who founded the famous Alexandrian School of Neoplatonism in Egypt in 193. Plotinus, in The Descent of the Soul, is perhaps the most articulate and expressive:
Here we have the testimony of four Saints - not laymen, but Saints - of the early Church. They cannot all have had bees in their bonnets; nor would they have embraced beliefs that were hostile to the contemporary tenets of their own church. They repeatedly refer to the "Christian" dogmas of the thoroughly Pagan philosopher Plato; so they obviously subscribed to the belief that Christ had included them in His own philosophy. Sources: Cornelius, Geoffrey; Hyde, Maggie; Webster, Chris, Introducing Astrology, Totem Books, New York, NY 1995 Gauquelin, Michel, The Scientific Basis of Astrology, Stein and Day, New York, NY 1969 Holland-Smith, John, The Death of Classical Paganism, Scribners, New York, NY 1976 P.I.H. Naylor, Astrology - A Fascinating History, Wilshire Book Co., Hollywood, CA, 1967 The Dawn of Goddess-centered Astrology, C. Ravin, Lammas 2001. Toward A Religious Construct of Environmentalism, C. Ravin, Spring 1994. also see The Decline of Astrology, Paula Wagner, BA student Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences Fall/Winter 2000 - IS102 Nick Campion, advisor.   |