by distributing the houses evenly round the equator and round the ecliptic. In the preface he talks about the possibility of averting the inclinations of the stars in the same strain as before, and throughout the whole dissertation he seems more doubtful about the results to be expected than he was in 1577. He has again corrected the places of the planets by his own observations. Mercury is here the strongest planet, free from the rays of the sun, though somewhat weakened by being retrograde and moving slowly, but particularly by being in the sixth house. The prince seems only to have "mediocre" luck in store, but Tycho remarks that everybody shapes his own fortune.[1]
That Tycho did not take much interest in nor attach any importance to these astrological prognostications will be evident to anybody who has read the foregoing pages. Whatever he had thought about these matters in his youth, the great work of his life now stood so clearly before him, that he did not care to waste his time on work of so very doubtful value as astrological forecasts.[2] We possess even stronger testimony to this effect than any we have yet quoted, in a letter which he wrote on the 7th December 1587 to Heinrich von Below, a nobleman from Mecklenburg, who in 1579, through the queen's influence, had received an estate in Jutland in fief, and who was married to a first cousin of Tycho's.[3] Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg-Güstrow,
- ↑ "Quisque suæ fortunæ faber: tamen non est dubium astra in his plurimum posse, ut non immerito dixerit Poeta ille:
'Esse igitur sapiens et felix nemo potest qui
Nascitur adverse cœlo stellisque sinistris.'" - ↑ All the same, he was naturally looked upon by the common people in Denmark as nothing but an astrologer, and thirty-two unlucky days are attributed to his authority (Hofman, Portraits historiques des hommes illustres de Denmark, vi. Partie, p. 23), though nothing could be more opposed to the principles of astrology than the fixing upon certain dates as lucky or unlucky.
- ↑ C. G. F. Lisch, Tycho Brahe und seine Verhältnisse zu Meklenburg, in the Jahrbücher des Vereins für Meklenburgische Geschichte, vol. xxxiv. (1869). I quote from a reprint, 20 pp. 8vo. See also Note C.
