Teaching Christianity (continued)
certain signs which they call "characters," or of any objects to be hung or tied round the neck, or even to be danced[73] somehow or other, not for exercising the patients' bodies, but in order to signify certain hidden or even obvious meanings.
They call all these things by the milder name of "physic," to make it seem as if they proceed from nature, and do not involve any superstition, things like earrings in the tips of each ear, or rings made from ostrich bones on the fingers, or your being told, when you hiccup, to hold your left thumb in your right hand.
31. To these can be added a thousand and one observances of the stupidest kind, if a limb twitches or jerks, if when two friends are walking along arm in arm a stone or a dog or a child comes in between them, and their kicking the stone as though it were breaching their friendship is less offensive than when they slap an innocent child hard, if he runs in between them as they walk together. But what is nice is that the children are sometimes avenged by the dogs, because such people are often so superstitious that they are even bold enough to kick a dog running in between them, and this they do not do with impunity, because occasionally the dog will very speedily send the man who kicks him straight from this futile remedy to the real medical man.
Here too we can fit in such practices as these: treading on your threshold when you go past your house; going back to bed if you sneeze when you are putting on your shoes; going back home if you stumble as you go out; when your clothes have been gnawed by shrew-mice, trembling at the prospect of some future evil more than lamenting your present loss. On this point there is Cato's witty retort, when he was consulted by someone who said his boots had been gnawed by shrews, replying that there was nothing of ill omen in that, but that it would indeed have been an ill omen if the shrews had been gnawed by the boots.
21, 32. Nor are those exempt from this kind of pernicious superstition who are called genethliacs because of their examination of birthdays,[74] but are now more commonly called astrologers. While they do indeed note and follow the true position of the stars when someone is born, and sometimes even prognosticate it,[75] still by claiming to predict from their observations either our actions or the consequences of our actions they wander very far from the truth, and sell uneducated people short with a wretched slavery. Because whenever a free man goes in to one of these astrologers, he pays him money in order to come out the slave of either Mars or Venus, or rather of all the constellations. These were given the names of animals because of a certain resemblance, or of human beings to do them honor, by those who were the first to fall into this error, and who then passed it on to posterity.[76]
This is hardly surprising, surely, when we consider that even in more recent times closer to our own the Romans attempted to dedicate what we call the morning star in honor of the name of Caesar. And perhaps this might have happened and become an ancient and accepted custom, had not Venus his forebear given her name to this property; and there was no legal way in which she could pass it on to her heirs, because she never actually possessed it during her life or asked to possess it.[77] But where a place was vacant, and not occupied in honor of someone who had died before, that happened which usually happens in such cases. Thus instead of Quintile and Sextile[78] we call those months July and August, named in honor of the human beings Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. So anyone who wishes to can readily understand that those stars as well previously wandered round the sky without any of those names; but that when important persons died whose memory people wished to honor, whether out of human vanity or forced to do so by royal authority, their names were attached to the stars, and people thought they were elevating the dead themselves to the heavens.
But whatever they may be called by human beings, they are still just stars, which God set in place and regulated as he wished; and they have their definite movements by which the seasons are distinguished and alternate. Noting these movements and their mutual relationships when anyone is born is easy enough to do by following the rules that have been worked out and written down by the people whom holy scripture condemns when it says, For if they have been able to know so much that they could calculate the age of the universe, how is it that they did not all the more readily find its Lord? (Wis 13:9).
22, 33. But wishing as a result of such observations to predict the morals, the actions and the future of those who are born is a great mistake and great nonsense. And those who have learned how to unlearn such things can refute this superstition without the slightest hesitation. For what these people call a person's stars[79] are the relationships observed between the stars when the person was born, about whom these unfortunates are consulted by people more unfortunate still. Now it can happen that some twins emerge from the womb so quickly one after the other that no interval of time can be perceived between them and marked against the numbers of their stars. So it must follow that many twins have the same stars, while they do not have the same history of things they do and things they undergo, but often ones so different from each other that one is very fortunate in life while the other is very unfortunate.
Thus we are informed that Esau and Jacob were born as twins, and that Jacob, who was born second, was found to be grasping in his hand the foot of his brother (Gn 25:25), who preceded him. Undoubtedly the day and time of birth of these two could only be noted down as giving them one and the same set of stars; but how different they were in their morals, their deeds, their trials and their fortunes, is evident