Jean-Baptiste Morin

Astrologia Gallica

(From) A HISTORY OF MAGIC
AND EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

By LYNN THORNDIKE

VOLUME VII

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Republished with the permission of
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

CHAPTER XVI

MORIN’S ASTROLOGIA GALLICA

Time of writing—Other works—Conversion to, and practice of astrology—Praefatio apologetica—Outline of the text—Natural basis of astrology—Its principles and technique—Astrological images rejected—Manuscripts on weather prediction—Astrological medicine and chemical remedies—Virtues of gems— Probably slight effect of Morin’s book

Futura praedicere proprie divinum est - Morin

     Well-nigh the last attempt upon a large scale to defend, rehabilitate and reconstruct judicial and genethliacal astrology was made by Jean Baptiste Morin (1583—1656), an M.D. (Avignon, 1613) and royal professor of mathematics at Paris, 1630—).  His Astrologia Gallica is a monumental work, in the edition of 1661 corn-pricing a Praefatio Apologetica of 36 folio pages and 784 more pages of text mostly double columned.[1]  In a preliminary preface to the reader by “G.T.D.G.V.” in this posthumous publication it is stated that the work was finished in 1648, but was delayed by the Fronde and other circumstances.  The book as published, however, refers to events after 1648 and up to 1656, such as a ten-page refutation of a book on the Pre-Adamites, of which “the report reached me in January of this year 1656”[2]

     The book on the Pre-Adamites was the work of Isaac de La Peyrère (1594—1676), librarian of Condé.  It was condemned by the Parlement of Paris,  and its author arrested and imprisoned.  Condé procured his release and he disavowed the book and abjured Protestantism.  Miron wrote of him. 

La Peyrère ici git, ce bon Israelite,   Huguenot, Catholique, enfin Préadamite.[3]

     An earlier instance of Morin’s tendency to let slip no opportunity to demonstrate his orthodoxy is seen in his publishing a refutation of the fourteen alchemical theses against Aristotle which aroused the ire of the Sorbonne and Parlement of Paris in 1624.[4]

     Earlier astrological compositions by Morin were on astrological houses[5] and restoring astrology,[6] and he had published works on longitudes[7] and the restoration of astronomy,[8] as well as a dissertation on atoms and vacuum against Gassendi.[9]  The dedication to Richelieu of Astronomia restituta is dated July 26, 1634, while its seventh part with a separate title page is dated 1638, and the eighth and ninth parts in 1639, both at the author’s expense and for sale at his house.[10]  The book evoked some criticism from Longomontanus (1562—1647) who had been Tycho Brahe’s assistant, since 1605 professor of mathematics at Copenhagen, and more recently author of Astronomica Danica.  Morin replied in 1641,[11] was answered by Fromm in 1642,[12] and replied again to Fromm.[13]  It should not be assumed that Morin was without scientific ability.  The method of determining longitudes at sea by the distance of the moon from a certain star was “brilliantly developed” by him and for some time enjoyed great vogue, concurrently with Galileo’s method of observing the satellites of Jupiter.[14]

     Morin tells us himself that he was forced to study astrology unwillingly some forty years ago by a bishop whose physician he was.  For ten years be pursued it empirically and could make no sense of it, but finally discovered principles which should satisfy every rational inquirer, and serve to distinguish what is true and what is false in the art, as previously taught and practiced.  He declares that these true principles of astrology had not been stated by Ptolemy or anyone else until himself.[15]  It seems fairly evident that he is attempting to follow in the footsteps of Descartes.  He was praised by the aforesaid “G.T.D.G.V” as having demonstrated astrology more surely and evidently than Aristotle demonstrated physics, or Galen demonstrated therapeutic.

     Just as Henri IV had summoned the physician and astrologer, Larivière, to the birth of Louis XIII, so, at the birth of Louis XIV, Morin was concealed in the royal apartment to draw up the horoscope of the future Grand Monarque.[16]  Later he selected the favorable astrological hour and minute for the trips of M. de Chauvigny, secretary of state during the early years of the reign, and also the times when he would be well received at foreign courts.  He is further said to have failed to predict Chauvigny’s imprisonment.[17]  Vautier, who was physician to Louis XIV, tried to have Morin made royal astrologer, but his proposal did not go through.[18]  There were French ordinances of 1493, 1560, and 1570 against astrology, but they seem to have become dead letters.  Morin himself tells us that be owed to astrology his appointment in 1630 by Marie de’ Medici to a royal professorship in mathematics.  The art had further enabled him to support two nieces in the best nunneries and to marry off a third.[19]  Mazarin gave him a pension of 2000 livres, and the queen of Poland contributed 2000 Thaler to the printing of Astrologica Gallica.[20]

     Morin interprets the Council of Trent’s Rule 9 of the Index of Prohibited Books and the Bull of Sixtus V of 1586 as condemning only the prediction of fortuitous events and those contingent upon human free will.[21]  He then devotes several pages to explaining away passages of the Bible which had been adduced against astrology.

     The devil, in order to defame true astrology, has given the impression that the old arts of divination are mixed up with it, and servers of the devil pretend to be astrologers.[22]  As for the relation of religion to the stars, no sane person will ascribe to the stars religions which are of diabolical origin.  But man-made religions like Islam, Lutheranism and Calvinism may be referred to the stars insofar as these affected the characters of Mohammed, Luther and Calvin.  But we find Jews and Christians among the Turks; the Chinese and American Indians are being converted to Christianity; and so it seems a stupid and impious dogma which holds that religions and especially Christianity are caused or ruled by the heavenly bodies.  On the other hand, Morin defends Cardan’s horoscope of Christ, who could choose His own time of birth and who as a natural man was like other men subject in the body to the stars.  Morin further argues that it is not impious to believe that Christ employed election of hours, and that the date of His birth may be fixed from the horoscope which fits him and which shows Him teaching the doctors in the Temple at the age of twelve years and three months.  But the star of Bethlehem was not a new star or comet but an angel in a lucid cloud.[23]  Such are some of Morin’s contentions in the Praefatio Apologetica.  We shall have occasion to notice others in connection with the following résumé of his subsequent text.

     Much space is devoted to rebuttal of modern opponents of astrology such as Pico della Mirandola, Alexander de Angelis, Sixtus ab Hemminga and Gassendi.  Much space is also given to criticizing and rejecting the errors of ancient astrologers, including even Ptolemy, to purifying astrology from the excesses of the Arabs, Chaldeans, Egyptians and Hindus, and to rejection of the ideas of recent advocates and defenders of astrology such as Lucius Bellantius, Cardan, Giuntini and Kepler.[24]

     The first of Morin’s twenty-six books defends belief in God and Christ against idolaters, atheists, Calvinists and the like.  The second treats of creation, man, and the end of the world.  The third book divides the universe into three parts: elemental, ethereal and celestial, Morin still maintains that there are four elements and four qualities, although he recognizes that earth and water form one globe.  When he visited deep mines in Hungary in 1615, the idea occurred to him (which he proudly affirms had been maintained by no one before) that corresponding to the three regions of air there were three layers of earth but in reverse order: the first very thin, warm in winter when the lower air is cold, and cold in summer when the air is warm; the middle one hot, whereas mid-air is cold; and the lowest cold, whereas the highest region of air is warm.[25] The earth as a whole is immobile at the center of the universe,[26] for Morin rejects the Copernican hypothesis and elsewhere charges the “insane doctrine of the Copernicans” as denying that the heaven and stars and their motions are made for the sake of man dwelling on earth, and as asserting that the planets and fixed stars are inhabited,[27] Kepler is later twitted with having made the plants and animals on the moon fifteen times as large as ours in proportion to the size of the mountains on the moon,[28] compared to those of the earth.

     Beyond the elemental world comes the ethereal, in which the planets move through the ether, which Morin follows Kepler in regarding as a very rare, tenuous and fluid substance,[29] Beyond it is the celestial world, composed of the heaven of the fixed stars and the primum mobile.  The two additional heavens which were introduced at the time of the Alfonsine Tables to explain the motion of libration of the machine of the universe are pure fictions.[30]  The heaven of the fixed stars, with the Milky Way which forms a part of it, and the primum mobile, are on the other hand, duo coeli solidissimi.[31]  Morin denies that equator, ecliptic, horizon and meridian are imaginary circles and of no virtue, but grants that the tropics, polar circles and colures are imaginary and of no virtue per se.[32]

     Book four is on the extension of created beings and continuous quantity.  In the next book on space, place and vacuum, it is denied that the Torricellian experiment produced a vacuum and proved the existence of a vacuum.  After a book on motion and time, it is established in book seven on efficient cause and book eight on the alteration of physical bodies, that they may act at a distance by efflux of virtue.[33]  Incidentally there is a chapter on the intention and remission of qualities.[34]

     In the ninth book on mixed bodies Morin refutes the opinions of Gassendi and Descartes, approves that of Aristotle, but adds the views of Paracelsus, Severinus, and other chemists, Nicholas of Cusa held erroneously[35] that the earth was neither at the center of the universe nor immobile, that the universe was without center or circumference, and that all the planets and even the fixed stars were inhabited, Morin admits, however, that the planets are not simple bodies but each a different compound, as is shown by observations through the telescope.  They combine celestial, ethereal and elemental matter.  Morin also abandons the Aristotelian explanation of comets as terrestrial exhalations and holds that they are produced in the ethereal region.  He is brief as to their significance.[36]  He believes that the fixed stars shine by their own light.[37]  In a previous book he had accepted elliptical orbits for all the planets, “as Kepler first of all detected.”[38]

     Book tenth book contends that astrology has a basis in experience.  In the eleventh book Morin begins to take up the action of the heavenly bodies, first treating of light, while in the twelfth book he deals with their elemental qualities of heat, cold, dryness and humidity_, and with their influence, which is a virtue flowing from their substantial forms.[39]  He further holds in support of the doctrine of nativities that the native temperament of a man persists all through his life, [40] and that the native propensities of men cannot be determined in any other way more certainly than by thawing up the horoscope at the moment of birth.[41]  He rejects employment of a figure of the time of conception.

     Having thus built up astrology, to his own satisfaction, on a supposedly firm natural basis in the first twelve books, Morin devotes the last fourteen—which, however, fill nearly twice as many pages, to an exposition of the principles and details of the art.  Book XIII on the properties of the planets and fixed stars distinguishes between masculine and feminine, diurnal and nocturnal, beneficent and maleficent planets, and fills eleven pages with elaborate Tables of the universal lordship of the planets.” Book XIV is on the signs of the zodiac, which derive their different virtues from the first heaven.  God made the division into twelve signs corresponding to the natures of the planets and the twelve houses, and revealed this to Adam, from whom it came down to posterity by way of the Cabala.[42]  Other books deal with the dignities of the planets in the signs, the rays and aspects of the stars, the division into astrological houses, which is illustrated by particular nativities, and the fortitudes and weaknesses of the planets.  With regard to aspects, Morin has occasion to refute Ptolemy and Cardan, Bianchini and Regiornontanus, and Leowitz

     After a brief book of definitions, axioms and theorems, Morin considers the universal action of the heavenly bodies upon each other and upon our sublunar world.  He contends that his doctrine is purely physical, yet unknown to Aristotle and all previous schools of philosophy.  For Ptolemy’s division of the terrestrial globe among the signs of the zodiac he substitutes one of his own.[43]  He refuses to accept the statement of Aquinas that, if the motion of the heavens ceased, they would no longer heat, and, although illumination from the sun would continue in these inferiors, generation would stop.  Morin retorts that, if the sun stood still over one spot, it would burn it the more, and that it is to prevent such destructive combustion that the sun is kept moving.  “And so the movement of the heavens works nothing per se but merely distributes the active virtue.”[44]

     Aside from such particular departures from past astrological theory, the chief distinctive features of Morin’s system may be summarized as follows, repeating some points that have been noted already.  In place of the old distinction between superiors and inferiors, heaven and earth, celestial and sublunar, fifth essence and four elements, he adopts a threefold division of elementary, etheral and celestial.[45]  The planets are no longer simple bodies of a fifth essence, but compound bodies with the elemental qualities of hot, cold, dry and moist, as well as ethereal and celestial matter.  Morin distinguishes between their elemental action in heating, moistening and the like, and their influential action by virtue of their celestial nature.[46]  The first heaven or primum mobile is a simple body and acts as such, pouring its universal force like a world-soul through the whole world.  But it also has a second action, as it is divided into Dodecatemoria or signs of the immobile zodiac.[47]  The other “most solid” celestial heaven of the fixed stars has per se and as a whole no sublunar influence so far as we know, but the particular constellations and stars in it exert virtue of their own.[48]  Similarly the ether of the ethereal heaven has per se no sublunar virtue, but the planets in it exert a great influence, although their formal virtue is ineffable and incomprehensible to us.[49]  Great as it is, the signs signify more fully and efficaciously than the planets.[50]  In particular, the degree of the sign on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth signifies more efficaciously than the lord of the horoscope or the planet in the first house.  Morin held that it was enough to know the degree for the horoscope and that the exact minute of the degree was not essential.[51]

     While Morin affirms the influence of the heavens over elements, minerals, plants, brutes and man, he will not admit it in the case of works of art such as astrological images and characters.[52]  All artifacts lack seed, and “only the spirit of seed from which things are physically generated...  is the proper subject of the inhesion of the influx of the celestial bodies.”[53]

     Incidentally in the same chapter Morin testifies to the popularity of these images by saying that many lords and ladies had tried to seduce him into making them by offering pay.  He had especial difficulty in resisting certain nobles who brought to Paris the sword which Gustavus Adolphus wore at Lützen and desired him to explain the images and characters and golden letters carved upon it.  He finally did inspect them sufficiently to prove that they bore no relation to Adolphus’s nativity or revolution thereof or the hour of his death.  Morin believed, however, that Gustavus had engaged in the battle of Lützen on a most unlucky and lethal day, as could be seen from his horoscope and Ephemerides.  It was only on images made by art that he denied action of the heavenly bodies.

     Morin’s last six books are chiefly concerned with details of astrological technique.  Book XXI, rejecting such divisions of the signs of the zodiac as termini, decani and facies, deals with planetary houses and aspects.  It closes with a chapter which asserts that God’s method of acting externally is imitated by no physical cause more perfectly than by the celestial bodies. 

     Book XXII treats of directions, significatores and promissores.  Briefly a direction may be defined as an arc extending across the sky from .significator to promissor.  Morin calls this book the chief and most divine of all astrology.  From it one learns the times of events which will happen to one after birth.  It is “the supreme apex of natural prophecy, and the science which, more than all the physical sciences, is participant of divinity.” But great confusion and difference of opinion exist regarding it among astrologers.[54]  For instance, Ptolemy and Cardan accepted only five significatores for all the future events of life: namely, the horoscope for health and journeys; pars fortunae, for faculties; the moon, for character and conversation; the sun, for dignity and glory; and the zenith for other acts and the procreation of children.  Haly and Schöner, on the contrary, accepted all seven planets and twelve other points as significatores.[55]  For Morin both promissores and significatores are parts of the primum mobile, and when they are quiescent or fixed in the heaven, their effects are produced on earth by their concourse in directions.  “This certainly seems to be in the nature of a miracle,” the mode of which surpasses the human understanding, although no one who is not ignorant of astrology may doubt its truth.[56]

     Book XXIII considers revolutions of nativities, or prediction from the return of birthdays, and illustrates them by many figures of horoscopes.  John Stadius rejected them, and no wonder, for he used erroneous tables of the sun’s movements.  Others today who have good Tables still reject it.  Others who accept it are ignorant of its fundamental principles, and have written about it in different ways with many errors and lack of completeness.  But it is half of genethliacal astrology, and so Morin tries to purify and unify it on its true foundations, and to leave a correct and complete exposition of it to posterity.

     Book XXIV deals with progressions and transits, by which the day and hour of a coming event may be forecast.

     Book XXV treats of revolutions of years and planetary conjunctions, eclipses and comets.  Past astrologers have written so diversely, confusedly and imperfectly on these subjects that Morin has had a very difficult time in reconstructing a science of them.[57]  The great solar eclipse of 1652 was followed not only by political changes but by a great mortality throughout France, so that at Paris alone 100,000 persons perished from malignant fevers, although there was no outbreak of the pest.”[58]

     In Book XXVI and last of his huge magnum opus, Morin comes to interrogations and elections.  He asserts that no one hitherto has freed interrogations from figments and errors and established it upon its true foundations.  He rejects the Arabic doctrine of interrogations, and notes the errors of Cardan.  Morin would limit such questions to certain subjects, but be includes such inquiries of the stars as how long the king will live, and which of two kings will triumph in a battle between them.[59]  Elections of favorable times for action he regards as a useful part of astrology, and he gives examples from his own practice illustrated with astrological figures.

     And herewith we close the Theory of our astrology, to the honor and glory of the Eternal Wisdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, who made heaven and earth, and endowed celestial bodies with wondrous virtues.  To Whom be everlasting praise, virtue and glory, Amen.

     In a manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale are two tracts on weather prediction by Morin which do not seem to have been printed either separately or in the Astrologia Gallica”.[60] In the course of Astrologia Gallica he sometimes refers to a work of his own which appears to be no longer extant, as in the case of a book on the concourse of the First Cause with second causes, against the Jansenists.[61]

     Morin was a doctor of medicine and had been physician to a bishop, an abbot, and the duke of Luxemburg.[62]  He complained that the physicians of Paris were ignorant of astrology and could not draw up a horoscope.[63]  Conversely, Gui Patin called Morin a fool, “fantasque, présomptueux, brûlé,” and declared that he would not buy his book.[64]  Morin regarded the moon as the cause of critical days,[65] and held that the innate temperament was principally from celestial rather than sublunar causes.[66]  He approved the drawing up of a figura coeli at the beginning of a disease, because diseases were generated naturally from their seeds and had their own symptoms, movements and periods.  He further asserted that the Roman Church, “which has never rejected astrological medicine,” approved of such horoscopes of diseases.[67]

     Morin rails at length against the excessive use and abuse of venesection and phlebotomy in his day.  Some physicians, rather than adopt the chemical remedies of Paracelsus, devised a new method of treatment alien from that of Hippocratus or even Galen.  They abstained from the strong purgative drugs of Hippocrates, especially hellebore, and contented themselves with infusions of senna, cassia, rhubarb and with clysters, but carried bleeding to excess and were responsible thereby for the deaths of many patients.  This, continues Morin, is the chief reason why I gave up the practice of medicine twenty-eight years ago.[68]

     The chemical remedies of Paracelsus, however, had gradually won acceptance.  The Galenists at first opposed Paracelsus, but then some of them began to use chemical remedies—Ruland, Quercetanus (Duchesne), Croll, Hartmann, and especially the Dane, Peter Severinus, in his Idea medicinae philosophicae.  Now there are chemical remedies in the pharmacies through all Europe but especially in Germany.  Paracelsus aimed to overthrow the Galenic methodus medendi and to emphasize rather the vital principle, seed or balsam of vegetables, minerals and animals, and the vital powers of salt, sulphur and mercury.[69]

     Despite his earlier refutation of the theses of Villon and de Clave, Morin was now favorable not only to Paracelsan remedies but to alchemy itself.  “Among physical sciences there are two which surpass the rest in excellence..., Chymia and Astrologia.[70]  He believed that he had seen the purest gold, far superior to any natural gold, made from lead by projection.  He also agreed with the Chymici in their books on the philosophers’ stone that any mixed body could be reduced naturally, but with the supernatural concurrence of human art, to the highest degree of perfection concordant with its nature, and that, when it reached this supreme stage, it had attained a fixed state and could not in any way be altered to another nature.[71]

     Morin furthermore accepted extreme virtues of gems, such as that the sapphire counteracts melancholy and the pest, and represses vain fears; that the emerald checks anger and lust, refreshes sight and heart, and cures epilepsy, leprosy, dysentery and cases of poisoning; and that the diamond makes its wearer intrepid.  He attributed such virtues not to any hidden virtue of the stars or planets, but to the formal and specific property of the gems themselves, since such powers worked, whatever the position or movement of the heavenly bodies might be.[72]

     Such is the book of Morin, a curious collection of old and new, of progressive and backward views.  He welcomes the new medicine of Paracelsus, but opposes the new astronomy of Copernicus.  Yet he accepts elliptical orbits for the planets, and to straight and circular motion adds elliptical and spiral.  But he won’t accept a vacuum.  He drops the fifth essence, but holds to the four elements.  He is against excessive bleeding, but he is for extreme virtues of gems.  He abandons the Aristotelian explanation of comets, but holds that the star of Bethlehem was an angel.  He approaches the germ theory of disease, but believes in astrological medicine.  He spurns the magnificent chimeras of Fludd as to light,[73] but believes in revelation of knowledge to Adam and its transmission through the Cabala.  It is surprising that one who still accepted so much unreformed science of the past, should reject so much of past astrology and attempt to reform that art.  But in this jumble of diverse opinions, this juxtaposition of views which seem today inconsistent if not contradictory, this strange mixture of credulity and skepticism, this simultaneous acceptance and rejection of different phases of past tradition, and of recent observation and experiment, he reflects the many conflicting scientific and superstitious interests, the strength and the weaknesses, of the seventeenth century.

     As for astrology alone, he found so much fault with that of everyone else, that it is doubtful weather he himself would find many followers.  It is equally dubious whether his own destructive criticism.

     Yet in the same year, 1661, that the printing of Morin’s Astrologia Gallica, with its criticisms of both previous opponents and previous defenders of astrology, failed to reform that art, there was published another book, entitled, The Sceptical Chymist, whose criticism of the obscure and mystic mode of writing and of the three principles of past and contemporary alchemists exercised a salutary influence and facilitated, if not the reform of alchemy, the emergence there from of the science of chemistry.  But the experimental and scientific foundation of its author, Robert Boyle, was superior to that of Morin.  Moreover, astronomy had already emerged and largely separated itself from astrology before Morin’s book appeared.

ABBREVIATIONS

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