of the signs into decans and dispensers
of time, whom they style lords of the ascendant, whose
names, virtues in relieving distempers, rising, setting, and
presages of future events, are the subjects of almanacs (for
be it observed, that the Egyptian priests had almanacs the
exact counterpart of Matthew Lansberg's); for when the
priests affirmed that the sun was the architect of the
universe, Chaeremon presently concludes that all their
narratives respecting Isis and Osiris, together with their
other sacred fables, referred in part to the planets, the
phases of the moon, and the revolution of the sun, and in
part to the stars of the daily and nightly hemispheres and
the river Nile; in a word, in all cases to physical and
natural existences and never to such as might be immaterial
and incorporeal. . . .

All these philosophers believe that the acts of our will and
the motion of our bodies depend on those of the stars to
which they are subjected, and they refer every thing to the
laws of physical necessity, which they call destiny or
Fatum, supposing a chain of causes and effects which binds,
by I know not what connection, all beings together, from the
meanest atom to the supremest power and primary influence of
the Gods; so that, whether in their temples or in their
idols, the only subject of worship is the power of destiny.
Porphyr. Epist. ad Janebonem.

II. Second system: Worship of the Stars, or Sabeism.

"But those same monuments present us likewise a system more methodical
and more complicated--that of the worship of all the stars; adored
sometimes in their proper forms, sometimes under figurative emblems
and symbols; and this worship was the effect of the knowledge men had
acquired in physics, and was derived immediately from the first causes
of the social state; that is, from the necessities and arts of the first
degree, which are among the elements of society.

"Indeed, as soon as men began to unite in society, it became necessary
for them to multiply the means of subsistence, and consequently to
attend to agriculture: agriculture, to be carried on with success,
requires the observation and knowledge of the heavens. It was necessary
to know the periodical return of the same operations of nature, and the
same phenomena in the skies; indeed to go so far as to ascertain the
duration and su