The Anatomy of Melancholy

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;