Subsection 4. The stars as a cause. Signs from physiognomy, metoposcopy and chiromancy.

Natural causes are either primary and universal, or secondary and more particular. Primary causes are the heavens, planets, stars, and so forth, which by their influence—as our astrologers maintain—produce this and similar effects. I will not pause here to discuss in passing whether stars are causes or signs, or to defend judicial astrology.

If Sextus Empiricus, Pico della Mirandola, Sixtus ab Hemminga, Pererius, Erastus, Chambers or the others have so persuaded anyone that he attributes no more power to the heavens, sun or moon than to their pictures on an innkeeper’s signpost or a tradesman’s shop, or indiscriminately condemns all such astrological rules confirmed by experience, I refer him to Bellantius, Pirovanus, Marascallerus, Goclenius, Sir Christopher Heydon, and the rest.

If you ask what I think, I must answer—for I too have been occupied with these learned errors—that they incline us but do not compel us: there is no necessity at all. “They act upon us; they do not force us.” Their influence is so gentle that a wise man can resist it: “The wise man will master the stars.” They rule us, but God rules them.

John of Indagine, I think, has briefly summed this all up: “You ask me how far the stars act upon us?” and so forth. Do you want to know how far the stars work upon us? I say that they merely incline us, and so gently that, if we let reason rule us, they have no power over us. But if we follow our own nature and let the senses lead us, they act upon us as much as upon brute beasts, and we are no better.

So I hope I may rightly conclude with Cajetan that “the heavens are the vehicle of divine power”: heaven is God’s instrument, through which he governs and orders these bodies composed of the elements. Or it is a great book whose letters are the stars, as one writer calls it, containing many wonders for those who can read; or a fine harp, made by a master craftsman, on which anyone who knows how to play will produce marvellous music. But to the point.

Paracelsus believes that a physician who does not know the stars can understand neither the cause nor the cure of any disease—this one, gout, or even toothache—unless he examines the particular birth configuration and astrological chart of the patient. For this specific illness, he insists that the chief and primary cause comes from heaven, giving the stars more weight than the humours: often the constellation alone produces melancholy, apart from every other cause. He cites people with lunacy, deprived of their reason by the moon’s motion;

and elsewhere he attributes everything to the ascendant and insists that its true and chief cause must be sought in the stars. Nor is this his opinion alone: many Galenists and philosophers share it, though they maintain it less rigidly and dogmatically. This variety of melancholic symptoms comes from the stars, says Melanchthon. The noblest melancholy, such as Augustus’s, comes from the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Libra; the bad kind, such as Catiline’s, from Saturn meeting the moon in Scorpio.

Giovanni Pontano discusses this at length in On Heavenly Things, book 10, chapter 13. “Various diseases arise from black bile,” and so forth: many diseases come from black bile according to whether it is hot or cold. Although naturally cold, it can readily be heated, just as water can be made to boil and burn as fiercely as fire, or be made as cold as ice. Hence the variety of symptoms: some people go mad, some seek solitude, some laugh, some rage, and so on.

He maintains that the cause of all this imbalance comes chiefly and primarily from the heavens: from the positions of Mars, Saturn and Mercury. His rules are these: if, in any birth chart, Mercury is found in Virgo or its opposite sign, Pisces, and at the ascendant, receiving the rays of Saturn or Mars in a square aspect, the child will be mad or melancholy.

Again: anyone born with Saturn and Mars, one at the midheaven and the other in the fourth house, will be melancholy, but will in time recover if Mercury is in aspect with them. If at birth the moon is in conjunction or opposition with the sun, Saturn or Mars, or in a square aspect with them—“from an unfavourable place in the heavens,” Leovitius adds—many diseases are indicated, especially harmful humours affecting the head and brain, producing melancholy, lunacy or madness.

Cardan adds those born on the fourth day of the moon, eclipses and earthquakes. Garcaeus and Leovitius hold that the chief judgement must be drawn from the ruler of the birth chart. Or, when the moon and Mercury are in aspect and neither is in aspect with the ascendant, or Saturn and Mars govern the current conjunction or opposition of the sun or moon in Sagittarius or Pisces, such people are commonly epileptic, deranged, demon-possessed or melancholy.

But see more of these rules in the Pontano already mentioned; Garcaeus, On Judging Nativities, chapter 23; Schöner, book 1, chapter 8, which he compiled from Ptolemy, Albubater and other Arab writers; Junctinus, Rantzau, Lindhout, Origanus, and so forth. Perhaps you will reject these men as astrologers and therefore biased judges. Then listen to the testimony of physicians, Galenists themselves.