The Astronomy of the Bible Part 11

CHAPTER XII

SATURN AND ASTROLOGY

The planets, as such, are nowhere mentioned in the Bible. In the one instance in which the word appears in our versions, it is given as a translation of _Mazzaloth_, better rendered in the margin as the "twelve signs or constellations." The evidence is not fully conclusive that allusion is made to any planet, even in its capacity of a G.o.d worshipped by the surrounding nations.

Of planets, besides the earth, modern astronomy knows Mercury, Venus, Mars, many planetoids, Jupiter, Saturn, Ura.n.u.s, and Neptune. And of satellites revolving round planets there are at present known, the moon which owns our earth as primary, two satellites to Mars, seven satellites to Jupiter, ten to Saturn, four to Ura.n.u.s, and one to Neptune.

The ancients counted the planets as seven, numbering the moon and the sun amongst them. The rest were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They recognized no satellites to any planet. We have no evidence that the ancient Semitic nations considered that the moon was more intimately connected with the earth than any of the other six.

But though the planets were sometimes regarded as "seven" in number, the ancients perfectly recognized that the sun and moon stood in a different category altogether from the other five. And though the heathen recognized them as deities, confusion resulted as to the ident.i.ty of the deity of which each was a manifestation. Samas was the sun-G.o.d and Baal was the sun-G.o.d, but Samas and Baal, or Bel, were not identical, and both were something more than merely the sun personified.

Again, Merodach, or Marduk, is sometimes expressly identified with Bel as sun-G.o.d, sometimes with the divinity of the planet Jupiter. Similarly Ashtoreth, or Itar, is sometimes identified with the G.o.ddess of the moon, sometimes with the planet Venus. It would not be safe, therefore, to a.s.sume that reference is intended to any particular heavenly body, because a deity is mentioned that has been on occasions identified with that heavenly body. Still less safe would it be to a.s.sume astronomical allusions in the description of the qualities or characteristics of that deity. Though Ashtoreth, or Itar, may have been often identified with the planet Venus, it is ridiculous to argue, as some have done, from the expression "Ashteroth-Karnaim," Ashteroth of "the horns," that the ancients had sight or instruments sufficiently powerful to enable them to observe that Venus, like the moon, had her phases, her "horns."

Though Nebo has been identified with the planet Mercury, we must not see any astronomical allusion to its being the nearest planet to the sun in Isaiah's coupling the two together, where he says, "Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth."

Isaiah speaks of the King of Babylon--

"How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!"

The word here translated Lucifer, "light-bearer," is the word _helel_ from the root _halal_, and means _spreading brightness_. In the a.s.syrio-Babylonian, the planet Venus is sometimes termed _Mustelel_, from the root _elil_, and she is the most l.u.s.trous of all the "morning stars," of the stars that herald the dawn. But except that her greater brilliancy marks her as especially appropriate to the expression, Sirius or any other in its capacity of morning star would be suitable as an explanation of the term.

St. Peter uses the equivalent Greek expression _Phosphorus_ in his second epistle: "A light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day-star" (light-bringer) "arise in your hearts."

Isaiah again says--

"Ye are they that forsake the Lord, that forget My holy mountain, that prepare a table for that Troop, and that furnish the drink offering unto that Number."

"Gad" and "Meni," here literally translated as "Troop" and "Number," are in the Revised Version rendered as "Fortune" and "Destiny." A reference to this G.o.d "Meni" has been suggested in the mysterious inscription which the King of Babylon saw written by a hand upon the wall, which Daniel interpreted as "G.o.d hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end." By some commentators Meni is understood to be the planet Venus, and Gad to be Jupiter, for these are a.s.sociated in Arabian astrology with Fortune or Fate in the sense of good luck. Or, from the similarity of Meni with the Greek _mene_, moon, "that Number" might be identified with the moon, and "that Troop," by a.n.a.logy, with the sun.

It is more probable, if any astrological deities are intended, that the two little star cl.u.s.ters--the Pleiades and the Hyades--situated on the back and head of the Bull, may have been accounted the manifestations of the divinities which are by their names so intimately a.s.sociated with the idea of mult.i.tude. The number seven has been held a sacred number, and has been traditionally a.s.sociated with both the little star groups.

In one instance alone does there seem to be any strong evidence that reference is intended to one of the five planets known to the ancients, when worshipped as a G.o.d; and even that is not conclusive. The prophet Amos, charging the Israelites with idolatry even in the wilderness, asks--

"Have ye offered unto Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your G.o.d, which ye made to yourselves."

But the Septuagint Version makes the accusation run thus:--

"Ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of your G.o.d Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them."

This was the version which St. Stephen quoted in his defence before the High Priest. It is quite clear that it was star worship to which he was referring, for he prefaces his quotation by saying, "G.o.d turned and gave them up to serve the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets."

The difference between the names "Chiun" and "Remphan" is explained by a probable misreading on the part of the Septuagint translators into the Greek, who seemed to have transcribed the initial of the word as "resh,"

where it should have been "caph"--"R" instead of "K,"--thus the real word should be transliterated "_Kaivan_," which was the name of the planet Saturn both amongst the ancient Arabs and Syrians, and also amongst the a.s.syrians, whilst "_Kevan_" is the name of that planet in the sacred books of the Pa.r.s.ees. On the other hand, there seems to be some difficulty in supposing that a deity is intended of which there is no other mention in Scripture, seeing that the reference, both by Amos and St. Stephen, would imply that the particular object of idolatry denounced was one exceedingly familiar to them. Gesenius, therefore, after having previously accepted the view that we have here a reference to the worship of Saturn, finally adopted the rendering of the Latin Vulgate, that the word "Chiun" should be translated "statue" or "image."

The pa.s.sage would then become--

"Ye have borne the booth of your Moloch and the image of your idols, the star of your G.o.d which ye made for yourselves."

If we accept the view that the worship of the planet Saturn is indeed referred to, it does not necessarily follow that the prophet Amos was stating that the Israelites in the wilderness actually observed and worshipped him as such. The prophet may mean no more than that the Israelites, whilst outwardly conforming to the worship of Jehovah, were in their secret desires hankering after Sabaeism--the worship of the heavenly host. And it may well be that he chooses Moloch and Saturn as representing the cruellest and most debased forms of heathenism.

The planet Saturn gives its name to the seventh day of our week, "Saturn's day," the sabbath of the week of the Jews, and the coincidence of the two has called forth not a few ingenious theories. Why do the days of our week bear their present names, and what is the explanation of their order?

The late well-known astronomer, R. A. Proctor, gives the explanation as follows:--

"The twenty-four hours of each day were devoted to those planets in the order of their supposed distance from the earth,--Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. The outermost planet, Saturn, which also travels in the longest period, was regarded in this arrangement as of chief dignity, as encompa.s.sing in his movement all the rest, Jupiter was of higher dignity than Mars, and so forth.

Moreover to the outermost planet, partly because of Saturn's gloomy aspect, partly because among half-savage races the powers of evil are always more respected than the powers that work for good, a maleficent influence was attributed. Now, if we a.s.sign to the successive hours of a day the planets as above-named, beginning with Saturn on the day a.s.signed to that powerful deity, it will be found that the last hour of that day will be a.s.signed to Mars--'the lesser infortune,' as Saturn was 'the greater infortune,' of the old system of astrology--and the first hour of the next day to the next planet, the Sun; the day following Sat.u.r.day would thus be Sunday. The last hour of Sunday would fall to Mercury, and the first of the next to the Moon; so Monday, the Moon's day, follows Sunday. The next day would be the day of Mars, who, in the Scandinavian theology, is represented by Tuisco; so Tuisco's day, or Tuesday (Mardi), follows Monday. Then, by following the same system, we come to Mercury's day (Mercredi), Woden's day, or Wednesday; next to Jupiter's day, Jove's day (Jeudi), Thor's day, or Thursday; to Venus's day, Vendredi (Veneris dies), Freya's day, or Friday, and so to Sat.u.r.day again. That the day devoted to the most evil and most powerful of all the deities of the Sabdans (_sic_) should be set apart--first as one on which it was unlucky to work, and afterwards as one on which it was held to be sinful to work--was but the natural outcome of the superst.i.tious belief that the planets were G.o.ds ruling the fates of men and nations."[136:1]

This theory appears at first sight so simple, so plausible, that many are tempted to say, "It must be true," and it has accordingly gained a wide acceptance. Yet a moment's thought shows that it makes many a.s.sumptions, some of which rest without any proof, and others are known to be false.

When were the planets discovered? Not certainly at the dawn of astronomy. The fixed stars must have become familiar, and have been recognized in their various groupings before it could have been known that there were others that were not fixed,--were "planets," _i. e._ wanderers. Thus, amongst the Greeks, no planet is alluded to by Hesiod, and Homer mentions no planet other than Venus, and apparently regarded her as two distinct objects, according as she was seen as a morning and as an evening star. Pythagoras is reputed to have been the first of the Greek philosophers to realize the ident.i.ty of Phosphorus and Hesperus, that is Venus at her two elongations, so that the Greeks did not know this until the sixth century before our era. We are yet without certain knowledge as to when the Babylonians began to notice the different planets, but the order of discovery can hardly have been different from what it seems to have been amongst the Greeks--that is to say, first Venus as two separate objects, then Jupiter and Mars, and, probably much later, Saturn and Mercury. This last, again, would originally be considered a pair of planets, just as Venus had been. Later these planets as morning stars would be identified with their appearances as evening stars. After this obscurity had been cleared up, there was a still further advance to be made before the astrologers could have adopted their strange grouping of the sun and moon as planets equally with the other five. This certainly is no primitive conception; for the sun and moon have such appreciable dimensions and are of such great brightness that they seem to be marked off (as in the first chapter of Genesis) as of an entirely different order from all the other heavenly bodies. The point in common with the other five planets, namely their apparent periodical movements, could only have been brought out by very careful and prolonged observation. The recognition, therefore, of the planets as being "seven," two of the seven being the sun and moon, must have been quite late in the history of the world. The connection of the "seven planets" with the seven days of the week was something much later still. It implies, as we have seen, the adoption of a particular order for the planets, and this order further implies that a knowledge had been obtained of their relative distances, and involves a particular theory of the solar system, that which we now know as the Ptolemaic. It is not the order of the Babylonians, for they arranged them, Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.

There are further considerations which show that the Babylonians could not have given these planetary names to the days of the week. The order of the names implies that a twenty-four hour day was used, but the Babylonian hours were twice the length of those which we use; hence there were only twelve of them. Further, the Babylonian week was not a true week running on continuously; it was tied to the month, and hence did not lend itself to such a notation.

But the order adopted for the planets is that current amongst the Greek astronomers of Alexandria, who did use a twenty-four hour day. Hence it was certainly later than 300 B.C. But the Greeks and Egyptians alike used a week of ten days, not of seven. How then did the planetary names come to be a.s.signed to the seven-day week?

It was a consequence of the power which the Jews possessed of impressing their religious ideas, and particularly their observance of the sabbath day, upon their conquerors. They did so with the Romans. We find such writers as Cicero, Horace, Juvenal and others remarking upon the sabbath, and, indeed, in the early days of the Empire there was a considerable observance of it. Much more, then, must the Alexandrian Greeks have been aware of the Jewish sabbath,--which involved the Jewish week,--at a time when the Jews of that city were both numerous and powerful, having equal rights with the Greek inhabitants, and when the Ptolemies were sanctioning the erection of a Jewish temple in their dominions, and the translation of the Jewish Scriptures into Greek. It was after the Alexandrian Greeks had thus learned of the Jewish week that they a.s.signed the planets to the seven days of that week, since it suited their astrological purposes better than the Egyptian week of ten days. That allotment could not possibly have brought either week or sabbath into existence. Both had been recognized many centuries earlier.

It was foisted upon that which had already a venerable antiquity. As Professor Schiaparelli well remarks, "we are indebted for these names to mathematical astrology, the false science which came to be formed after the time of Alexander the Great from the strange intermarriage between Chaldean and Egyptian superst.i.tions and the mathematical astronomy of the Greeks."[139:1]

There is a widespread notion that early astronomy, whether amongst the Hebrews or elsewhere, took the form of astrology; that the fortune-telling came first, and the legitimate science grew out of it.

Indeed, a claim is not infrequently made that no small honour is due to the early astrologers, since from their efforts, the most majestic of all the sciences is said to have arisen.

These ideas are the exact contrary of the truth. Mathematical, or perhaps as we might better call it, planetary astrology, as we have it to-day, concerns itself with the apparent movements of the planets in the sense that it uses them as its material; just as a child playing in a library might use the books as building blocks, piling, it may be, a book of sermons on a history, and a novel on a mathematical treatise.

Astrology does not contribute, has not contributed a single observation, a single demonstration to astronomy. It owes to astronomy all that it knows of mathematical processes and planetary positions. In astronomical language, the calculation of a horoscope is simply the calculation of the "azimuths" of the different planets, and of certain imaginary points on the ecliptic for a given time. This is an astronomical process, carried out according to certain simple formulae. The calculation of a horoscope is therefore a straightforward business, but, as astrologers all admit, its interpretation is where the skill is required, and no real rules can be given for that.

Here is the explanation why the sun and moon are cla.s.sed together with such relatively insignificant bodies as the other five planets, and are not even ranked as their chief. The ancient astrologer, like the modern, cared nothing for the actual luminary in the heavens; all he cared for was its written symbol on his tablets, and there Sun and Saturn could be looked upon as equal, or Saturn as the greater. It is a rare thing for a modern astrologer to introduce the place of an actual star into a horoscope; the calculations all refer to the positions of the _Signs_ of the Zodiac, which are purely imaginary divisions of the heavens; not to the _Constellations_ of the Zodiac, which are the actual star-groups.

Until astronomers had determined the apparent orbits of the planets, and drawn up tables by which their apparent places could be predicted for some time in advance, it was impossible for astrologers to cast horoscopes of the present kind. All they could do was to divide up time amongst the deities supposed to preside over the various planets. To have simply given a planet to each day would have allowed the astrologer a very small scope in which to work for his prophecies; the ingenious idea of giving a planet to each hour as well, gave a wider range of possible combinations. There seems to have been deliberate spitefulness in the a.s.signment of the most evil of the planetary divinities to the sacred day of the Jews--their sabbath. It should be noticed at the same time that, whilst the Jewish sabbath coincides with the astrological "Saturn's Day," that particular day is the seventh day of the Jewish week, but the first of the astrological. For the very nature of the reckoning by which the astrologers allotted the planets to the days of the week, implies, as shown in the extract quoted from Proctor, that they began with Saturn and worked downwards from the "highest planet"--as they called it--to the "lowest." This detail of itself should have sufficed to have demonstrated to Proctor, or any other astronomer, that the astrological week had been foisted upon the already existing week of the Jews.

Before astrology took its present mathematical form, astrologers used as their material for prediction the stars or constellations which happened to be rising or setting at the time selected, or were upon the same meridian, or had the same longitude, as such constellations. One of the earliest of these astrological writers was Zeuchros of Babylon, who lived about the time of the Christian era, some of whose writings have been preserved to us. From these it is clear that the astrologers found twelve signs of the zodiac did not give them enough play. They therefore introduced the "decans," that is to say the idea of thirty-six divinities--three to each month--borrowed from the Egyptian division of the year into thirty-six weeks (of ten days), each under the rule of a separate G.o.d. Of course this Egyptian year bore no fixed relation to the actual lunar months or solar year, nor therefore to the Jewish year, which was related to both. But even with this increase of material, the astrologers found the astronomical data insufficient for their fortune-telling purposes. Additional figures quite unrepresented in the heavens, were devised, and were drawn upon, as needed, to supplement the genuine constellations, and as it was impossible to recognize these additions in the sky, the predictions were made, not from observation of the heavens, but from observations on globes, often very inaccurate.

Earlier still we have astrological tablets from a.s.syria and Babylon, many of which show that they had nothing to do with any actual observation, and were simply invented to give completeness to the tables of omens. Thus an a.s.syrian tablet has been found upon which are given the significations of eclipses falling upon each day of the month Tammuz, right up to the middle of the month. It is amusing to read the nave comment of a distinguished a.s.syriologist, that tablets such as these prove how careful, and how long continued had been the observations upon which they were based. It was not recognized that no eclipses either of sun or moon could possibly occur on most of the dates given, and that they could never occur "in the north," which is one of the quarters indicated. They were no more founded on actual observation than the portent mentioned on another tablet, of a woman giving birth to a lion, which, after all, is not more impossible than that an eclipse should occur in the north on the second day of Tammuz. In all ages it has been the same; the astrologer has had nothing to do with science as such, even in its most primitive form; he has cared nothing for the actual appearance of the heavens upon which he pretended to base his predictions; an imaginary planet, an imaginary eclipse, an imaginary constellation were just as good for his fortune-telling as real ones.

Such fortune-telling was forbidden to the Hebrews; necessarily forbidden, for astrology had no excuse unless the stars and planets were G.o.ds, or the vehicles and engines of G.o.ds. Further, all attempts to extort from spirits or from inanimate things a glimpse into the future was likewise forbidden them. They were to look to G.o.d, and to His revealed will alone for all such light.

"When they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their G.o.d?"

The Hebrews were few in number, their kingdoms very small compared with the great empires of Egypt, a.s.syria, or Babylon, but here, in this question of divination or fortune-telling, they stand on a plane far above any of the surrounding nations. There is just contempt in the picture drawn by Ezekiel of the king of Babylon, great though his military power might be--

"The king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver."

And Isaiah calls upon the city of Babylon--

"Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the mult.i.tude of thy sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth; if so thou shalt be able to profit, if so be thou mayest prevail.

Thou art wearied in the mult.i.tude of thy counsels: let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee."

Isaiah knew the Lord to be He that "frustrateth the tokens of the liars and maketh diviners mad." And the word of the Lord to Israel through Jeremiah was--

"Thus saith the Lord. Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them."