dical practitioner who claimed to avert it
received the anxious patronage of people worried by this formidable issue.
Furthermore, just as marvelous cures were reported, striking predictions
were called to mind or, if need were, invented. The diviner had, as a rule,
only a restricted number of possibilities to deal with, and the calculus of
probabilities shows that he must have succeeded sometimes. Mathematics,
which he invoked, was in his favor after all, and chance frequently
corrected mischance. Moreover, did not the man who had a well-frequented
consulting-office, possess a thousand means, if he was clever, of placing
all the chances on his side, in the hazardous profession he followed, and
of reading in the stars anything he thought expedient? He observed the
earth rather than the sky, and took care not to fall into a well.

* * * * *

However, what helped most to make astrology invulnerable to the blows of
reason and of common sense, was the fact that in reality, the apparent
rigor of its calculus and its theorems notwithstanding, it was not a
science but a faith. We mean not only that {170} it implied belief in
postulates that could not be proved--the same thing might be said of almost
all of our poor human knowledge, and even our systems of physics and
cosmology in the last analysis are based upon hypotheses--but that
astrology was born and reared in the temples of Chaldea and Egypt.[19] Even
in the Occident it never forgot its sacerdotal origin and never more than
half freed itself from religion, whose offspring it was. Here lies the
connection between astrology and the Oriental religions, and I wish to draw
the reader's special attention to this point.

The Greek works and treatises on astrology that have come down to us reveal
this essential feature only very imperfectly. The Byzantines stripped this
pseudo-science, always regarded suspiciously by the church, of everything
that savored of paganism. Their process of purification can, in some
instances, be traced from manuscript to manuscript.[20] If they retained
the name of some god or hero of mythology, the only way they dared to write
it was by cryptography. They have especially preserved purely didactic
treatises, the most perfect type of which is Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos which
has been constantly quoted and commented upon; and they have reproduced
almost exclusively expurgated texts, in which the principles of various
doctrine