17. The Writing Of The Starsf

Hence they inferred that after a cycle of twelve periods Greece would be destroyed and desolated. A short time before the sack of Jerusalem and its temple by Nebuchadnezzar, the Kabalists remarked eleven stars disposed in the following manner vertically above the temple: All these entered into the word written from south to west, the term signifying reprobation and abandonment without mercy. The sum of the number of the letters is 423, exactly the period of the duration of the temple. Destruction threatened the empires of Persia and Assyria, in the shape of four vertical stars which entered into the three letters , Roev, and the fatal period indicated was 208 years. So also four stars announced to the kabalistic rabbins of another epoch the fall and division of the empire of Alexander; they entered into the word , PARAD = to divide = 284, the number of this word, indicating the entire duration of the said empire, both as to root and branches. According to Rabbi Chomer, the destinies of the Ottoman power at Constantinople would be fixed and foretold by four stars, entering into the word , CAAH, signifying to be feeble, weak and drawing to its end. The stars being more brilliant in the letter Aleph, indicated a capital, and gave it the numerical value of a thousand. The three letters combined make 1025, which must be computed from the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II, a calculation which still promises several centuries of existence to the enfeebled empire of the sultans, sustained at present by all Europe combined. The MANE THECEL PHARES which Belshazzar, in his intoxication, saw written on the wall of his palace by the glare of torches, was an onomantic intuition similar to that of the rabbins. Initiated, no doubt, by his Hebrew diviners in the reading of the stars, Belshazzar went to work mechanically and instinctively upon the lamps of his nocturnal east, as he would upon the stars of heaven. The three words which he had formed in his imagination soon became indelible to his eyes and paled all the lights of his banquet. It was easy to predict an end like that of Sar-danapalus to a king who abandoned himself to orgies in a besieged town. In conclusion, we have said and we repeat that magnetic intuitions alone give value and reality to these kabalistic and astrological calculations, puerile possibly and completely arbitrary when made without inspiration, by frigid curiosity and in the absence of a powerful will.