Astrology has exerted a powerful influence upon language and literature. Many words most frequently used are derived from astrology or kindred subjects—augur, augury, auspices, the common word talisman; and especially influence. In literature appeals to the heavens are common, as well as references to stars as sources of prosperity.
Trench says we seem to affirm that we believe that
the planet under which a man may happen to be born will affect his temperament, will make him for life of a disposition grave or gay, lively or severe. … For we speak of a person as "jovial," or "saturnine," or "mercurial"—jovial as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and of the happiest augury of all; a gloomy, severe person is said to be "saturnine" as born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those that owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself; another we call "mercurial," that is, light-hearted, as those born under the planet Mercury were accounted to be. The same faith in the influence of the stars survives, so far at least as words go, in "disaster," "disastrous," "ill-starred," "ascendant," "ascendancy," and, indeed, in the word "influence" itself.[1]
Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the word "influence" occurs in our English poetry, down to a comparatively modern date, there is always more or less remote allusion to the skyey, planetary influences supposed to be exercised by the heavenly luminaries upon men? How many a passage starts into new life and beauty and fullness of allusion, when this is present with us! Even Milton's
Store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence,
as spectators of the tournament, gain something when we regard them—and using this language, he intended we should—as the luminaries of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and valor into the hearts of their knights."[2]
