The Anatomy of Melancholy

Another obstacle or hindrance is strict and severe discipline, laws and rigorous customs that forbid people to marry at certain times and in certain places: apprentices, servants, members of colleges, holders of copyhold estates for lives, or those in some low and subordinate offices. In such cases, as the poet said, “You may desire, but you may not possess.”

They can only gaze, like prisoners through a grating; they long and reach, but “Tantalus, from his lips,” and so on. Their love is wasted, and in such a position it is useless to try. “It is most painful to love without possession”: it is a grievous thing to love and not enjoy.

Some of them may indeed marry if they wish and have a free choice—I do not deny it. But all the while their case is desperate: “They hold a wolf by the ears”; they must either burn or starve. It is “a horned dilemma,” hard to resolve. If they marry, they forfeit their livelihoods, ruin themselves, and starve through poverty and want. If they do not marry, this passion of love makes them rage furiously; they are tormented and torn apart by their ruling affections.

Not every man has the gift of sexual self-restraint. Then let him pray for it, as Beza advises in his treatise On Divorce, because God, by taking away the means of marriage, has thus called him to a single life.

Paul wished to go from Mysia to Bithynia, but the Spirit would not allow him; and perhaps you would wholeheartedly wish to be a married man, but that protecting angel does not judge it fitting. The devil too may sometimes turn people aside with his evil suggestions and spoil many good marriages, just as the same Paul wished to visit the Romans but could not, because Satan hindered him.

There are those who think they are constrained by fate, that their stars have so decreed; and therefore they grumble at their hard fortune. They are quite willing to marry, but one obstacle or another is always in the way.

I know what astrologers say on this subject: Ptolemy in the Four-Part Treatise, book 4, chapter 4; Schöner, book 1, chapter 12; Leovitius in his first example of a nativity, which Sextus ab Heminga takes to be the horoscope of Hieronymus Wolf; Pezelius, Origanus, and Leovitius’s commentator Garceus, chapter 12; Junctinus, Protanus, Campanella and the rest.

Leaving aside those Arabian conjectures drawn “from the Part of Marriage, from the Part of Lust, the triplicities of Venus,” and so on, and those answers to questions such as “whether he will possess his beloved,” they determine “whether the native will have a spouse; whether he will obtain a bride easily or with difficulty; how many wives are allotted to him, at what time, and of what kind; and the mutual love of spouses,” in the birth charts of both men and women.