. All they could do was to divide up time
amongst the deities supposed to preside over the various planets. To
have simply given a planet to each day would have allowed the astrologer
a very small scope in which to work for his prophecies; the ingenious
idea of giving a planet to each hour as well, gave a wider range of
possible combinations. There seems to have been deliberate spitefulness
in the assignment of the most evil of the planetary divinities to the
sacred day of the Jews--their sabbath. It should be noticed at the same
time that, whilst the Jewish sabbath coincides with the astrological
"Saturn's Day," that particular day is the seventh day of the Jewish
week, but the first of the astrological. For the very nature of the
reckoning by which the astrologers allotted the planets to the days of
the week, implies, as shown in the extract quoted from Proctor, that
they began with Saturn and worked downwards from the "highest
planet"--as they called it--to the "lowest." This detail of itself
should have sufficed to have demonstrated to Proctor, or any other
astronomer, that the astrological week had been foisted upon the already
existing week of the Jews.

Before astrology took its present mathematical form, astrologers used
as their material for prediction the stars or constellations which
happened to be rising or setting at the time selected, or were upon the
same meridian, or had the same longitude, as such constellations. One of
the earliest of these astrological writers was Zeuchros of Babylon, who
lived about the time of the Christian era, some of whose writings have
been preserved to us. From these it is clear that the astrologers found
twelve signs of the zodiac did not give them enough play. They therefore
introduced the "decans," that is to say the idea of thirty-six
divinities--three to each month--borrowed from the Egyptian division of
the year into thirty-six weeks (of ten days), each under the rule of a
separate god. Of course this Egyptian year bore no fixed relation to the
actual lunar months or solar year, nor therefore to the Jewish year,
which was related to both. But even with this increase of material, the
astrologers found the astronomical data insufficient for their
fortune-telling purposes. Additional figures quite unrepresented in the
heavens, were devised, and were drawn upon, as needed, to supplement the
genuine constellations, and as it was impossible to recognize these
additions in the s