configurations of the planets have also great influence on the weather. Conjunctions of Mars and Venus in certain parts of the sky cause rain and thunder, those of Jupiter and Mercury storms, those of the sun and Saturn turbid and disagreeable air. The most ancient writers on agriculture, as well as poets and astrologers, have observed that the rising and setting of the more conspicuous stars simultaneously with the sun produced rain, wind, and other atmospheric changes, particularly when the planets joined their effect to that of the stars.[1] The sun and stars move in the same manner from year to year, but this is not the case with the planets, and the weather of one year cannot, therefore, be like that of another. Among planetary conjunctions, he mentions that of Jupiter and Saturn in 1563, in the beginning of the sign of Leo near the hazy stars of Cancer (Præsepe), which Ptolemy already considered pestilential. This conjunction was in a few years followed by an outbreak of the plague. While many people admitted the influence of the stars on nature, they denied it where mankind were concerned. But man is made from the elements, and absorbs them just as much as food and drink, from which it follows that man must also, like the elements, be subject to the influence of the planets; and there is, besides, a great analogy between the parts of the human body and the seven planets. The heart, being the seat of the breath of life, corresponds to the sun, and the brain to the moon. As the heart and brain are the most important parts of the body, so the sun and moon are the most powerful celestial bodies; and as there is much reciprocal action between the former, so is there much mutual dependence between the latter. In the same way the liver corresponds
- ↑ "Habent se enim stellæ fixæ in coelo veluti matres, quæ nisi a septem errantibus stellis stimulentur et impregnentur, steriles sunt et nihil in hac inferiori natura progignunt" (Oratio, p. 20).
