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THE ZODIAC IN THE BIBLE.
'/II
Plato—who shows Homer flourishing far earlier—could point to a number
of Zodiacal signs mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Orphic
poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock-and-bull hypothesis of some
modern critics that, so far from Orpheus, not even Homer or Hesiod
has ever existed, it would seem time lost to mention these archaic
authors at all. The Arabian Job will suffice; unless, indeed, his volume
of lamentations, along with the poems of the two Greeks, to which we
may add those of Linus, should now also be declared to be the patriotic
forgery of the Jew Aristobulus. But if the Zodiac was known in the
days of Job, how could the civilized and philosophical Hindus have
remained ignorant of it
Risking the arrows of modern criticism—rather blunted by misuse
the reader may make himself acquainted with Bailly's learned opinion
upon the subject.
Inferred speculations may be shown to be erroneous.
Mathematical calculations stand on more secure grounds. Taking as
a starting point several astronomical references in Job, Bailly devised
a very ingenious means of proving that the earliest founders of the
Science of the Zodiac belonged to an antediluvian, primitive people.
The fact that he seems willing to see some of the Biblical patriarchs
in Thoth, Seth, and in the Chinese Fohi, does not interfere with the
validity of his proof as to the antiquity of the Zodiac* Even accepting,
for argument's sake, his cautious 3700 years B.C. as
the correct age of
the Zodiacal Science, this date proves in the most irrefutable way that
it was not the Greeks who invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason
that they did not exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries B.C.—at an)'
rate not as a historical race admitted by the critics. Bailly then
calculated the period at which the constellations manifested the atmospheric
influence called by Job the "sweet influences of the Pleiades,"!
in Hebrew Kimah ; that of Orion, Kesil ; and that of the desert rains
with reference to Scorpio, the eighth constellation; and found that in
presence of the eternal conformity of these divisions of the Zodiac, and
of the names of the Planets applied in the same order everywhere and
always, and in presence of the impossibility of attributing it all to
chance and "coincidence"— "which never creates such similarities"—
very great antiquity indeed must be allowed for the Zodiac. J
• A sironomie Antique.
* The Pleiades, as all know, are the seven stars beyond the Bull, which appear at the beginning- of
spring. They have a very Occult meaning: in the liindu Esoteric Philosophy, and are connected u-ith
Sound and other mystic principles in Nature.
i See Astronomie Aniigue, pp. 63 to 74.