Scorpio, the Scorpion (October 23–November 21), is perhaps the most powerful sign for students of the occult; it is the sign of secrecy, of mystery and dark passion. Scorpios have powerful, jealous, and determined natures; they can be good or evil, but either way they excel. Don’t cross a Scorpio if you know what’s good for you; a spurned Scorpio can turn violent. They’re always in control and aware of what’s going on—even when they pretend not to be. Their will is so strong that they can even exert a kind of hypnotic power over those around them. Professionally speaking, they make great detectives, first-rate scientists, and skillful physicians (unraveling complicated problems is their forte). As far as their own health is concerned, Scorpios are generally of a hardy constitution, though they can encounter problems in their genitals and nether regions.
Those born under Sagittarius, the Archer (November 22–December 20), are as open as Scorpios are closed. They’re cheerful, optimistic, and absolutely dependable; if you’re going out of town, you can leave your house key with a Sagittarian. The only danger is, he might throw a party there; Sagittarians are so friendly and outgoing, they can occasionally err on the side of boisterousness and even vulgarity. Best to keep them from getting too loaded. Sober, they evince a strong and compelling intellect and a fondness for the great outdoors. They’re always up for a touch football game. Good-looking and of above average height, with a wiry physique and expressive eyes, Sagittarians sometimes suffer from such ailments as sciatica, rheumatism, and anxiety attacks.
Anyone whose sign is Capricorn, the Goat (December 21–January 19), is probably not going to be playing touch football with the Sagittarian crowd. Capricorns are slow-moving and methodical, practical and pragmatic, orderly and trustworthy. If you’re looking for someone to do your taxes or make out your last will and testament, a Capricorn is a good choice. Successful Capricorns show up as judges, bankers, arbitrage experts; unsuccessful ones display a whining and disgruntled nature. A lot of them go through life with a scowl on their face. Constitutionally, they’re hard and lean and dry as a bone, though they do fall prey to depression and a general malaise of the spirit.
Aquarius, the Water Carrier (January 20–February 18), governs those of a refined and intellectual bent. Aquarians make fine philosophers and poets as well as astronomers and philanthropists. On most occasions serious and quiet, they can, among congenial company, break out of their shell, do lively impersonations, and become a spark plug for everyone around them. On the downside, they can be emotionally undemonstrative and expect a little too much from their friends; naïveté is among their failings. Physically, they’re a bit stocky, with good complexions, but they run into trouble with their ankles, their legs, and sometimes their vision.
Those born under Pisces, the Fishes (February 19–March 20), make good, if sometimes moody, friends. They’re good at listening to other people’s problems and show tact and sensitivity in their replies; as might be expected, they make nifty psychotherapists and also do well in things like art and archaeology. What they don’t do well is forging a path through life; they tend to be reactive rather than assertive, and they dream about things happening instead of going out and doing whatever’s necessary to make them come to pass. A little under the average height and pale-complected, they often suffer from foot problems and assorted skin difficulties.
Finally, the twelve signs of the zodiac are often divided into four categories based on the elements of which the universe was once thought to be composed—fire, earth, air, water. Each of these four ruled three of the signs.
Fire, which signified force and volatility, ruled over Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius.
Earth, representing dependability and pragmatism, governed Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn.
Air, which stood for liveliness and unpredictability, ruled Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius.
Water, signifying sensitivity and emotion, presided over Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.
For anyone seeking a mate, the common wisdom had it that fire and air signs (the “positive” signs) went well together, as did earth and water (the “negative” signs).
TYCHO BRAHE
Although he is justly celebrated for the genuine astronomical advancements he made, Tycho Brahe has also come down to us as perhaps the leading astrologer of his day—and without a doubt the only one who wore an artificial nose.
Born into a noble Danish family in 1546, he received a thorough education, in philosophy and rhetoric, at the University of Copenhagen. But what made an even greater impression on him was the solar eclipse of August 21, 1560, which he regarded as “something divine.” Brahe quickly bought and pored over the Ephemerides of Johann Stadius and the works of Ptolemy in Latin. And though he went on to the University of Leipzig to pursue a law degree, he secretly devoted every spare minute to the study of the celestial bodies, using a pair of compasses, a globe, and several primitive instruments of his own construction.
Over time, his interests in the stars supplanted all other pursuits, and by the time he’d moved on to the town of Rostock, he was openly posting his astrological predictions. When a lunar eclipse occurred on October 28, 1566, he proclaimed that this celestial event predicted the death of the great Turkish sultan, who was much in the news at that time. When, a short time later, news of the sultan’s death reached Rostock, Brahe’s reputation soared. But only for a while. When further news was received, establishing that the sultan had actually died before the eclipse had occurred, Brahe’s stock quickly fell.
And then Brahe ran into other trouble. After getting into an argument with a Danish nobleman, he was forced to fight a duel, in which his opponent managed to lop off a piece of Brahe’s nose. Ever resourceful, however, Brahe made a prosthetic replacement, out of a copper alloy, and wore it the rest of his life.
In 1572, he made his first great discovery—a new star in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Using a large quadrant he had designed himself, he was able to prove that the star was motionless and so far away that the distance couldn’t even be measured. He recorded his findings in a tract entitled De Nova Stella, which was printed in Copenhagen in 1573. At about the same time, he also began to explore the mysteries of medicine and alchemy and the possible influence that the planets exerted over various metals.
Word of his achievements reached the ears of King Frederick II of Denmark, who summoned him for a private audience. Brahe, never bashful, told the king all about the work he still wanted to do, the discoveries he planned to make, the treatises he hoped to write. But what he needed, he explained, was a place where he could work unmolested and an income he could depend upon. The king, moved by his candor and his enthusiasm, solved both problems for him.
By royal decree, Brahe was given the island of Hveen in the sound near Elsinore, a pension of five hundred thalers, and additional funds to build a house and a state-of-the-art observatory, equipped with the very best instruments money could buy, at Uraniborg. The observatory itself was of a radical design, being built underground, so that only its roofline showed, and it had soon attracted students from all over Europe. Brahe also had hidden buttons installed, which he could use to ring other rooms in the house, where some of the students lived. Guests who toured the observatory were always amazed when Brahe was able to summon these students as if by telepathy.
The house was also inhabited by Brahe’s wife, his nine children, and an adopted family member, a dwarf named Jeppe, who followed Brahe everywhere he went and sat at his feet during meals; Brahe would feed him morsels of food with his own hand. Jeppe, who nattered on constantly, was thought to have psychic powers, so he was listened to quite carefully; if someone fell ill, Jeppe was consulted about the course the disease would take and whether or not it would prove fatal. His diagnostic abilities were purportedly first-rate.
Brahe himself kept up his medical sideline, manufacturing elixirs which he claimed could ward off all forms of contagious diseases. For Rudolf II, Habsburg ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, he made up a special prescription,
composed of treacle of Andromachus, spirit of wine, sulfur, aloes, myrrh, and saffron. If the emperor wished to enhance its efficacy, Brahe advised him to add “a single scruple of either tincture of coral or of sapphire, of garnet, of dissolved pearls or of liquid gold.”
Nor had Brahe abandoned his astrological beliefs. In a lecture delivered at the University of Copenhagen on September 23, 1574, he had taken issue with those who were willing to admit that the stars had an influence on nature, but not on man. Man, he argued, “is made from the elements and absorbs them 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 being and the seven planets. The heart being the seat of life corresponds to the Sun and the brain to the Moon. In the same way the liver corresponds to Jupiter, the kidneys to Venus, the milt [spleen] to Saturn, the gall to Mars and the lungs to Mercury.”
He also took up the cudgels against those who denigrated astrology as a science: “Many philosophers have considered, that astrology was not to be counted among the sciences because the moment of birth was difficult to fix. Many are born at the same moment whose fates differ vastly, because twins often meet with different fortunes, while many die simultaneously in war or pestilence whose horoscopes by no means foretold such a fate. To these contentions I say, even if there was an error of an hour in the assumed time of birth, it would be possible from subsequent events to calculate it accurately.
“With regard to war and pestilence,” he added, “prudent astrologers always make a reservation as to public calamities which proceed from universal causes.” He even went so far as to argue that a person’s astrological forecast could be altered, either by the hand of God or by a spirit that the Creator had instilled in everyone, by which it was possible to change the course of a preordained fate.
But after twenty-one years under the bliss of royal patronage, Brahe found himself out of favor again when Frederick II died and his son, Christian IV, succeeded him. His pension and fief were rescinded, and Brahe decided to leave the private island he had inhabited so happily and for so long. Eventually, he made his way to Prague, where he landed another pension, and a castle in Benatsky, from Emperor Rudolf II. But less than two years later he fell gravely ill, and on October 24, 1601, Brahe died; his body was buried in the Teynkirche, Prague.
THE DEVIL’S PICTURE BOOK
“An imprisoned person,” wrote Eliphas Lévi, “with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequalled learning and inexhaustible eloquence.” While most people today are vaguely familiar with the tarot—a deck of cards decorated with colorful, antique figures—and treat it as an amusing parlor game, for centuries it was looked upon with awe, and some fear, as a reliable means of divining the future. Part of its mystery hinged on the fact that no one could say with certainty where the tarot had come from.
Even the origin of the word “tarot” is unknown. Was it derived from the river in northern Italy, the Taro, where early decks of the cards began to emerge in the fourteenth century? Or did it come from the French word tarotée, the term for the Crosshatch design that decorated the back of some card sets? Or was the correct theory the one advanced by the eighteenth-century occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin, who believed that the cards had been passed down from the ancient Egyptians? De Gébelin believed that the word was a combination of the Egyptian words for road, tar, and royal, ro, so that the cards might be thought to present a “royal road” to wisdom.
In fact, according to one legend, the earliest pictures of the symbols that appeared on the cards adorned the walls of an inner chamber in an Egyptian pyramid and were used as part of the magical initiation rites; in symbolic form, they convey the wisdom of the Book of Thoth (Thoth being the early Egyptian moon god who was presumed to know the secret formulas needed for a soul to make a safe passage through the underworld). An Egyptian origin would also account for the fact that the cards were commonly used, and introduced to much of Europe, by the Gypsies; these wandering people, known for their fortune-telling skills, were sometimes said to be the descendants of the priests of ancient Alexandria. When the temple of Serapis was destroyed by fire, some of these priests, or so the story went, had quickly gathered together the sacred texts and become nomads upon the face of the earth, traveling about with their occult wisdom jealously guarded. To those who could read them properly, however, the tarot cards could reveal the secrets of the universe.
For those who tried to read and interpret the cards without knowing how, the tarot would create nothing but confusion or mischief. Officials of both the Catholic and Protestant churches condemned the cards, too—if the tarot could be used to predict a predestined future, then what would be the good of trying to earn God’s grace by doing good works and leading a virtuous life? You might just as well consult the cards and see what particular fate had already been laid out for you.
Not to mention the fact that time spent mulling over colorful cards could be better spent in religious meditation. In the view of these clerics, the tarot—and other playing cards, too—were nothing but “the devil’s picture book,” designed to turn the players’ thoughts away from more heavenly and worthwhile pursuits.
None of which did anything to alter the growing popularity of the tarot. From the fourteenth century onward, the cards were used for everything from gambling and amusement to, ultimately, divination. Special decks were drawn up for important patrons and used to commemorate great occasions, such as royal weddings and accession to the throne. And over time, the deck and its symbolic representations became standardized into the seventy-eight cards that are still in use today.
The cards are divided into two “arcana” (hidden things). The Lesser Arcana consists of fifty-six cards, which in turn are divided into four suits. But these aren’t the four suits—spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds—we’re accustomed to seeing on regular playing cards. These suits are cups, swords, pentagrams, and wands (or scepters). Many different meanings have been attached to these suits—as indeed, many meanings are attached to every element of the tarot—but by and large, the suits are believed to represent the four main segments of society in the Middle Ages.
The cups (or chalices) are thought to represent the church, the swords the military, the pentagrams (or coins or diamonds, as they are sometimes shown) the tradesmen, and the wands (also seen as staves or cudgels) the peasantry.
The four court cards showed the four indispensable members in the household of a feudal lord—King, Queen, Knight (or Courtier), and Page (or Knave). This deck most probably preceded the Greater Arcana, and while it was used chiefly for gambling, it was sometimes employed all by itself for purposes of divination. (In one famous instance, Napoleon’s cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, asked the renowned tarotist Mile Lenormand for a reading. The first time Murat cut the cards for her, he pulled the King of Diamonds—a card of notoriously bad luck. Demanding another try, he pulled it again. He cut once more—and the King of Diamonds turned up again. When he insisted on yet another attempt, Mlle Lenormand threw the deck in his face and said, “You will wind up on the gallows or standing in front of a firing squad!” Her second guess was right: in 1815, he was executed by a firing squad.)
It was, however, the Greater Arcana, made up of twenty-two cards numbered 1 through 0, that emerged as the dominant force in the art of tarot. Each of these cards, also called trumps, bore an elaborate and highly symbolic picture, larded with obscure meanings; the manner in which the cards were laid out, and the messages that each one carried, were determined and interpreted by the reader. Sometimes the cards of the two arcana were mixed, sometimes they were used separately; they were laid out on the table in any number of complex arrangements, which went by such names as the Royal Spread, the Gypsy Spread, the Celtic Cross, the Horseshoe, and the Tree of Life Spread. The order in which they appe
ared, and even the way they were pulled from the deck (if the card was upside down, it was sometimes thought to reverse its normal meaning), would provide the petitioner—that is, the customer who’d asked for the reading—with an answer to whatever question he had posed.
In preparation for the reading, it was generally advised that the reader keep his decks of cards in a safe, out-of-the-way place, possibly wrapped in silk; it was also important that no one else handle them. For some time before sitting down at the table, both reader and petitioner were to abstain from any stimulating food or drink and clear their minds of all other considerations. The table itself was to be covered with a neutral cloth (nothing fussy or distracting), the chairs were to face east and west, and the cards were to be shuffled, stacked, and turned over quite thoroughly—first by the reader, then by the petitioner. By having the petitioner do it, the cards were assumed to have absorbed some of his vibrations and thoughts. Finally, the reader asked the petitioner to voice aloud his question.
Once that was done, the reader, or tarotist, began to lay the cards down according to whichever of the patterns he had chosen. Although subject to the order and influence of all the cards that had been dealt before it, the last card dealt was in almost every instance the card that best indicated the answer to the petitioner’s question or the possible outcome of what he had planned. Every card carried its own message, but the interpretation of the twenty-two major trumps, and their place in the tarot arrangement, were of paramount importance. (In many cases, these cards of the Greater Arcana were all that were used.) In ascending order, these cards, and the images they bore, were:
0. The Fool. A young man in a jester’s cap, with a pole over his shoulder (and all his belongings hanging from it in a pouch) and a dog nipping at his heels. The card referred to the thoughtlessness and extravagance with which many people led their lives. Its message? Turn away from temptation and overindulgence, and if you choose to go forward with your plans, do so with the utmost caution. (The fool is often depicted walking along the edge of a cliff, without looking where he’s going.)
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