historical beings that had been
transferred upon them. For instance, the serpent, which shines near the
northern pole, was the author of medical cures, because it was the animal
sacred to AEsculapius.[29]

The religious foundation of the rules of astrology, however, can not always
be recognized. Sometimes it is entirely forgotten, and in such cases the
rules assume the appearance of axioms, or of laws based upon long
observation of celestial phenomena. Here we have a simple aspect of
science. The process of {174} assimilation with the gods and catasterism
were known in the Orient long before they were practiced in Greece.

The traditional outlines that we reproduce on our celestial maps are the
fossil remains of a luxuriant mythological vegetation, and besides our
classic sphere the ancients knew another, the "barbarian" sphere, peopled
with a world of fantastic persons and animals. These sidereal monsters, to
whom powerful qualities were ascribed, were likewise the remnants of a
multitude of forgotten beliefs. Zoolatry was abandoned in the temples, but
people continued to regard as divine the lion, the bull, the bear, and the
fishes, which the Oriental imagination had seen in the starry vault. Old
totems of the Semitic tribes or of the Egyptian divisions lived again,
transformed into constellations. Heterogeneous elements, taken from all the
religions of the Orient, were combined in the uranography of the ancients,
and in the power ascribed to the phantoms that it evoked, vibrates in the
indistinct echo of ancient devotions that are often completely unknown to
us.[30]

Astrology, then, was religious in its origin and in its principles. It was
religious also in its close relation to the Oriental religions, especially
those of the Syrian Baals and of Mithra; finally, it was religious in the
effects that it produced. I do not mean the effects expected from a
constellation in any particular instance: as for example the power to evoke
the gods that were subject to their domination.[31] But I have in mind the
general influence those doctrines exercised upon Roman paganism.

When the Olympian gods were incorporated among the stars, when Saturn and
Jupiter became planets and {175} the celestial virgin a sign of the zodiac,
they assumed a character very different from the one they had originally
possessed. It has been shown[32] how, in Syria, the idea of an infinite
repetition of cycles of years according to which the celesti