(30)
(30) Pantagrueline Prognostication, Rabelais, W. F. Smith's
translation, 1893, Vol. II, p. 460.
Even physicians of the most distinguished reputation practised judicial
astrology. Jerome Cardan was not above earning money by casting
horoscopes, and on this subject he wrote one of his most popular books
(De Supplemento Almanach, etc., 1543), in which astronomy and
astrology are mixed in the truly mediaeval fashion. He gives in it some
sixty-seven nativities, remarkable for the events they foretell, with an
exposition. One of the accusations brought against him was that he had
"attempted to subject to the stars the Lord of the stars and cast our
Saviour's horoscope."(31) Cardan professed to have abandoned a practice
looked upon with disfavor both by the Church and by the universities,
but he returned to it again and again. I show here his own horoscope.
That remarkable character, Michael Servetus, the discoverer of the
lesser circulation, when a fellow student with Vesalius at Paris, gave
lectures upon judicial astrology, which brought him into conflict with
the faculty; and the rarest of the Servetus works, rarer even than
the "Christianismi Restitutio," is the "Apologetica disceptatio pro
astrologia," one copy of which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale.
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