The Astronomy of the Bible, E. Walter Maunder [the reading strategies book TXT] 📗

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 assigned 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 assigned 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 superstitions 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 formulæ. 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 classed 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 assignment 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 god. 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 Assyria 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 Assyrian 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 naïve comment of a distinguished Assyriologist, 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 gods, or the vehicles and engines of gods. 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 God, and to His revealed will alone for all such light.