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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 1 [[Vol. 1, Page]] 647 ASTROLOGY A SCIENCE. [[This page continued from previous section] ] XVII. "THE ZODIAC AND ITS ANTIQUITY." " A LL men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understanding, and to be tenacious of the opinions they profess," said Jordan, justly adding to this -- "and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others , not by their own; and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget, their opinions." This becomes doubly true in the matter of scientific opinions upon hypotheses offered for consideration -- the prejudice and preconceptions of "authorities," so called, often deciding upon questions of the most vital importance for history. There are several such predetermined opinions among our learned Orientalists, yet few are more unjust or illogical than the general error with regard to the antiquity of the Zodiac. Thanks to the hobby of some German Orientalists, English and American Sanskritists have accepted Professor Weber's opinion that the peoples of India had no idea or knowledge of the Zodiac prior to the Macedonian invasion, and that it is from the Greeks that the ancient Hindus imported it into their country. We are further told, by several other "authorities," that no Eastern nation knew of the Zodiac before the Hellenes kindly acquainted their neighbours with their invention. This , in the face of the Book of Job , declared, even by themselves, to be the oldest in the Hebrew canon, certainly prior to Moses, and which speaks of the making "of Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades ( Ash , Kesil , and [[Vol. 1, Page]] 648 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. 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? 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 , [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Astronomie 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 Hindu esoteric philosophy, and are connected with sound and other mystic principles in Nature. [[Vol. 1, Page]] 649 THE ZODIAC IN THE BIBLE. "which never creates such similarities," there must be allowed for the zodiac a great antiquity indeed. (See Astronomie Antique , pp. 63 to 74.) Again, if the Bible is supposed to be an authority on any matter (and there are some who still believe so, whether from Christian or Kabalistical considerations), then the zodiac is clearly mentioned in II Kings, xxiii. 5. Before the "book of the law" was "found" by Hilkiah, the high priest (xxii.), the signs of the zodiac were known and worshipped. They were held in the same adoration as the sun and moon, since the "priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense . . . unto Baal, to the sun, moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven," or the twelve signs or constellations , as the marginal note in the English Bible explains (see II. Kings xxiii. 5), had followed the injunction for centuries. They were stopped in their idolatry only by King Josiah, 624 years B.C. The Old Testament is full of allusions to the twelve zodiacal signs, and the whole scheme is built upon it -- heroes, personages, and events. Thus in the dream of Joseph, who saw eleven "stars" bowing to the twelfth , which was his "star," the zodiac is meant. The Roman Catholics have discovered in it, moreover, a prophecy of Christ, who is that twelfth star, they say, and the eleven apostles; the absence of the twelfth being also regarded as a prophetic allusion to the treachery of Judas. The twelve sons of Jacob are again a reference to the same, as justly pointed out by Villapandus ( Temple de Jerusalem , Vol. II., p. 2nd part, chap. xxx). Sir James Malcolm, in his History of Persia (ch. vii.), shows the Dabistan echoing all such traditions about the Zodiac.