could not be held personally responsible, and at the same
time elastic enough to enable him to shape his prediction to fit in with
his patron's wishes. The astrology of to-day shows the same essential
features.

This necessity explains the early Babylonian tablets with catalogues of
eclipses on all days of the month, and in all quarters of the sky. The
great majority of the eclipses could never happen, but they could be,
none-the-less, made use of by a court magician. If an eclipse of the sun
took place on the 29th day and in the south, he could always point out
how exceedingly unpleasant things might have been for the king and the
country if he, the magician, had not by his diligence, prevented its
happening, say, on the 20th, and in the north. A Zulu witch-doctor is
quite equal to analogous subterfuges to-day, and no doubt his Babylonian
congeners were not less ingenious 3,000 years ago. Such subterfuges were
not always successful when a Chaka or a Nebuchadnezzar had to be dealt
with, but with kings of a more ordinary type either in Zululand or
Mesopotamia they would answer well enough.

Coming down to times when astronomy had so far advanced that a catalogue
of the stars had been drawn up, with their positions determined by
actual measurement, it became possible for astrologers to draw up
something like a definite system of prediction, based upon the
constellations or parts of a constellation that happened to be rising at
any given moment, and this was the system employed when Zeuchros of
Babylon wrote in the first century of our era. His system must have been
started later than 700 B.C., for in it Aries is considered as the leader
of the zodiac; the constellations are already disestablished in favour
of the Signs; and the Signs are each divided into three. A practical
drawback to this particular astrological system was that the aspect
presented by the heavens on one evening was precisely the same as that
presented on the next evening four minutes earlier. The field for
prediction therefore was very limited and repeated itself too much for
the purpose of fortune-tellers.

The introduction of the planets into astrology gave a greater diversity
to the material used by the fortune-tellers. An early phase of planetary
astrology consisted in the allotment of a planet to each hour of the day
and also to each day of the week. It has been already shown in the
chapter on "Saturn and Astrology," that this system arose from t