Astrology (18-21)

So Endymion established the motions of the moon,[*]

so Phaeton inferred the course of the sun; yet not strictly, but left the theory incompleat at his death. Ignorant of this, men believe that Phaeton was Helius his son, and they relate a story of him that is not at all credible. Going, say they, unto Helius, his father, he asked to drive the car of light; whiche he suffered him to do, and also instructed him in the manner of its governance. But when Phaeton mounted the car, because of youth and inexpertness he drove now close to earth, now at a vast remove; and men were being destroyed both by cold and by heat that passed endurance. Thereupon, Jupiter in wrath smote Phaeton with a great bolt of lightning. After his fall his sisters surrounding him made great dole until they transmuted themselves, and now they are trees of black poplar and distil amber over him in place of tears. These things were not so, and it consisteth not with piety to believe in them; Helius begat no son, and no son of his perished.

But the Greeks relate many other fabulosities— which I do not credit at all. For how doth it consist with piety to believe that Aeneas was the’son of Venus, Minos of Jupiter, Ascalaphus of Mars, or Autolycus of Mercury? Nay, these were each and all divinely favoured, and at their birth one of them was under the regard of Venus, another of Jupiter, another of Mars. For what powers soever are in their proper houses at the moment of birth into this life, those powers like unto parents make men answerable to them in all respects, in complexion, in figure, in workes, and in humour. So Minos became a king because Jupiter was in his ascendancy, Aeneas fair by the will of Venus, and Autolycus a theef, whose theevery came to him from Mercury.

Moreover, it is not true, neither, that Jupiter put Saturn in chaines or threw him into Tartarus or otherwise mistreated him as men credit. Nay, Saturn moveth in the extream orbe, far away from us, and his motion is sluggish and not easy to be apprehended ocularly by human kind, whence they say that he holdeth still as if fettered; and the vast abyss of the ayr is called Tartarus.