446 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. a decision, at least for France, by the case of Simon Pharees, in 149i. He had been condemned by the archiepiscopal court of Lyons for practising astrology, and was punished with the light penance of Friday fasting for a year, with the threat of perpetual imprisonment for relapse, and his books and astrolabe had been detained. He had the audacity to appeal to the Parlement, which referred his books to the University. The report of the latter was that his books ought to be burned, even as others had recently been to the value of fifty thousand deniers. All astrology pre- tending to be prophetic, or ascribing supernatural virtue to rings, charms, etc., fabricated under certain constellations, was denounced as false, vain, superstitious, and condemned by both civil and canon law, as well as the use of the astrolabe for finding things lost or divining the future, and the Parlement was urged to check the rapid spread of this art invented by Satan. The Parlement ac- cordingly pronounced a judgment handing over the unlucky Simon to the Bishop and Inquisitor of Paris, to be punished for his relapse. Astrology, which is described as practised openly everywhere, is condemned. All persons are prohibited from consulting astrolo- gers or diviners about the future, or about things lost or found ; all printers are forbidden to print books on the subject, and are ordered to deliver whatever copies they may have to their bishops, and all bishops are instructed to prosecute astrologers. This was a very em- phatic condemnation, but, in the existing condition of human intelli- gence, it could do little to check the insatiable thirst for impossible knowledge. Yet there were some superior minds which rejected the superstition. The elder Pico della Mirandola and Savonarola were of these, and Erasmus ridiculed it in the Encomium Moriae.* The question of oneiroscopy, or divination by dreams, was a puzzling one. On the one hand there was the formal prohibition of the Deuteronomist (xviii. 10), which in the Yulgate included
- D'Argentre* I. n. 325-31.— Erasmi Encom. Moriae, Ed. Lipsiens. 1829, III. 360.
The superstitions concerning comets scarce come within our present scope. They will be found ably discussed by Andrew D. White in the Papers of the American Historical Association, 1887. "We are told by a contemporary that Henry IV. lost his life in 1610 through neglect of the warning sent him by the learned Doctor Geronymo Oiler, priest and astrologer of Barcelona, based upon the portents of a comet which appeared in 1607. — (Guadalajara y Xavierr, Ex- pulsion de los Moriscos, Pampeluna, 1613, fol. 107).
