y a natural
and beautiful illustration of this Sympathy that the movements of the
Stars should be bound up with the sufferings of man. They also appealed
to the general belief in prophecy and divination.[145:3] If a prophet
can foretell that such and such an event will happen, then it is
obviously fated to happen. Foreknowledge implies Predestination. This
belief in prophecy was, in reality, a sort of appeal to fact and to
common sense. People could produce then, as they can now, a large number
of striking cases of second sight, presentiment, clairvoyance, actual
prophecy and the like;[145:4] and it was more difficult then to test
them.

The argument involved Stoicism with some questionable allies.
Epicureans and sceptics of the Academy might well mock at the sight of a
great man like Chrysippus or Posidonius resting an important part of his
religion on the undetected frauds of a shady Levantine 'medium'. Still
the Stoics could not but welcome the arrival of a system of prophecy and
predestination which, however the incredulous might rail at it,
possessed at least great antiquity and great stores of learning, which
was respectable, recondite, and in a way sublime.

In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if I mistake not, the
Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras
Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,[146:1]
repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of
'the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores', or Lords of the Universe, and
seems, under their influence, to go off into its 'Seven Maidens with
heads of serpents, in white raiment', and its divers other Sevens. The
various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naassenes described by
Hippolytus,[146:2] and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and
even Cicero in his _Somnium Scipionis_, are full of the influence of the
seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some
simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably pronounced our
fate, and decreed, or at least registered the decree, that in spite of
all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path; still more
perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that
laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good,
beings malignant as well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And
Saturn, the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To some of the
Gnostics he becomes J