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{{Page|648|the secret doctrine.}} | {{Page|648|the secret doctrine.}} | ||
{{Style P-No indent|''Cimah'') and the chambers of the South ” (ix. 9) ; of Scorpio and the ''Mazzaroths'' — the twelve signs (xxxviii., 31,32), which words, if they mean anything, imply knowledge of the Zodiac even among the nomadic Arabic tribes. The ''Book of Job'', they say, precedes Homer and Hesiod by at least one thousand years — the two Greek poets having themselves flourished some eight centuries before the Christian era ( !! ). One who prefers, by the bye, to believe Plato, who shows Homer flourishing far earlier, could point to a number of Zodiacal signs mentioned in the ''Iliad ''and the ''Odyssey'', in the Orphic poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock-and-bull hypothesis of some modern critics to the effect that neither Orpheus, nor yet Homer and Hesiod, 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, adding to them those of Linus, should now be also 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 ?}} | {{Style P-No indent|''Cimah'') and the chambers of the South ” (ix. 9) ; of Scorpio and the ''Mazzaroths'' — the {{Style S-Small capitals|twelve signs}} (xxxviii., 31,32), which words, if they mean anything, imply knowledge of the Zodiac even among the nomadic Arabic tribes. The ''Book of Job'', they say, precedes Homer and Hesiod by at least one thousand years — the two Greek poets having themselves flourished some eight centuries before the Christian era ( !! ). One who prefers, by the bye, to believe Plato, who shows Homer flourishing far earlier, could point to a number of Zodiacal signs mentioned in the ''Iliad ''and the ''Odyssey'', in the Orphic poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock-and-bull hypothesis of some modern critics to the effect that neither Orpheus, nor yet Homer and Hesiod, 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, adding to them those of Linus, should now be also 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 be made 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 in Thoth, Seth, and in ''Fohi ''(of China), some of the Biblical patriarchs, 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 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 yet exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries B.C. — not as an ''historical ''race admitted by the critics, at any rate. Bailly then calculated the period at which the constellations manifested the atmospheric influence called by Job “ sweet influences of the Pleiades ” † (in Hebrew, ''Chimah'', see ''Job xxxviii. ''31) ; of the ''Cesil ''(Orion) ; and that of the ''desert ''rains with reference to ''Scorpio'', the eighth constellation ; and found that in presence the eternal conformity of those divisions of the zodiac and 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'', | Risking the arrows of modern criticism — rather blunted by misuse — the reader may be made 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 in Thoth, Seth, and in ''Fohi ''(of China), some of the Biblical patriarchs, 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 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 yet exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries B.C. — not as an ''historical ''race admitted by the critics, at any rate. Bailly then calculated the period at which the constellations manifested the atmospheric influence called by Job “ sweet influences of the Pleiades ” † (in Hebrew, ''Chimah'', see ''Job xxxviii. ''31) ; of the ''Cesil ''(Orion) ; and that of the ''desert ''rains with reference to ''Scorpio'', the eighth constellation ; and found that in presence the eternal conformity of those divisions of the zodiac and 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'', | ||