evocations, purifications, fastings, prayers, hymns, intercourse with apparitions, and with the gods, and in the celebration of the festivals of Paganism, especially those which were held in honour of the Mother of the Gods. His religious admiration extended to all forms of mythology. The philosopher, said he, is not the priest of a single religion, but of all the religions in the world. Accordingly, he composed hymns in honour of all the divinities of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Arabia;-Christianity alone was excluded from his favour. 2. Mystical Arithmetic.-It is unnecessary further to exemplify, from Proclus, the general mystical character of the school and time to which he belonged; but we may notice more specially one of the forms of this mysticism, which very frequently offers itself to our notice, especially in him; and which we may call mystical arithmetic. Like all the kinds of mysticism, this consists in the attempt to connect our conceptions of external objects by general and inappropriate notions of goodness, perfection, and relation to the divine essence and government; instead of referring such conceptions to those appropriate ideas, which, by due attention, become perfectly distinct, and capable of being positively applied and verified. The subject which is thus dealt with, in the doctrines of which we now speak, is number; a notion which tempts men into these visionary speculations more naturally than any other. For number is really applicable to moral VOL. I. U notions, to emotions and feelings, and to their objects, as well as to the things of the material world. Moreover, by the discovery of the principle of musical concords, it had been found, probably most unexpectedly, that numerical relations were closely connected with sounds which could hardly be distinguished from the expression of thought and feeling; and a suspicion might easily arise, that the universe, both of matter and of thought, might contain many general and abstract truths of some analogous kind. The relations of number have so wide a bearing, that the ramifications of such a suspicion could not easily be exhausted, when men were willing to follow them into darkness and vagueness; which it is precisely the mystical tendency to do. Accordingly, this kind of speculation appeared very early, and showed itself first among the Pythagoreans, as we might have expected, from the attention which they gave to the theory of harmony: and this, as well as some other of the doctrines of the Pythagorean philosophy, was adopted by the later Platonists, and, indeed, by Plato himself, whose speculations concerning number have decidedly a mystical character. The mere mathematical proportions of numbers,-as odd and even, perfect and imperfect, abundant and defective,-were, by a willing submission to an enthusiastic bias, connected with the notions of good and beauty, which the terms suggested; and principles resulting from such a connexion were woven into a wide and complex system. It is not necessary to dwell long on this subject; the mere titles of the works which treated of it show its nature. Archytas" is said to have written a treatise on the number ten: Telauge, the daughter of Pythagoras, wrote on the number four. This number, indeed, which was known by the name of the Tetractys, was very celebrated in the school of Pythagoras. It is mentioned in the "Golden Verses," which are ascribed to him: the pupil is conjured to be virtuous, Νὰι μὰ τὸν ἡμετέρᾳ ψυχῇ παραδόντα τετραχτὺν By him who stampt The Four upon the mind, In Plato's works, we have evidences of a similar belief in religious relations of number; and in the New Platonists, this doctrine was established as a system. Proclus, of whom we have been speaking, founds his philosophy, in a great measure, on the relation of unity and multiple; from this, he is led to represent the causality of the Divine Mind by three triads of abstractions; and in the developement of one part of this system, the number seven is introduced". "The intelligible and intellectual gods produce all things triadically; for the monads in these are divided according to number; and what the monad was in the former, the number is in the latter. And the intellectual gods produce all things 10 Mont. ii. 123. - Procl. v. 3., Taylor's Translation. hebdomically; for they evolve the intelligible, and at the same time intellectual triads, into intellectual hebdomads, and expand their contracted powers into intellectual variety." Seven is what is called by arithmeticians a prime number, that is, it cannot be produced by the multiplication of other numbers. In the language of the New Platonists, the number seven is said to be a virgin, and without a mother, and it is therefore sacred to Minerva. The number six is a perfect number, and is consecrated to Venus. The relations of space were dealt with in like manner, the geometrical properties being associated with such physical and metaphysical notions as vague thought and lively feeling could anyhow connect with them. We may consider, as an example of this, Plato's opinion concerning the particles of the four elements. He gave to each kind of particle one of the five regular solids, about which the geometrical speculations of himself and his pupils had been employed. The particles of fire were pyramids, because they are sharp, and tend upwards; those of earth are cubes, because they are stable, and fill space; the particles of air are octahedral, as most nearly resembling those of fire; those of water are icositetrahedron, as most nearly spherical. The dodecahedron is the figure of the element of the heavens, and shows its influence in other things, as in the twelve signs of the zodiac; we see how loosely space and number are combined or confounded by these mystical visionaries. These numerical dreams of ancient philosophers have been imitated by modern writers; for instance, by Peter Bungo and Kircher, who have written De Mysteriis Numerorum. Bungo treats of the mystical properties of each of the numbers in order, at great length. And such speculations have influenced astronomical theories. In the first edition of the Alphonsine tables, the precession was represented by making the first point of Aries move, in a period of 7000 years, through a circle of which the radius was 18 degrees, while the circle moved round the ecliptic in 49,000 years; and these numbers, 7000 and 49,000, were chosen probably by Jewish calculators, or with reference to Judaical Sabbatarian notions. 3. Astrology. Of all the forms which mysticism assumed, none was cultivated more assiduously than astrology. Although this art prevailed most universally and powerfully during the stationary period, its existence, even as a detailed technical system, goes back to a very early period. It probably had its origin in the East; it is universally ascribed to the Babylonians and Chaldeans; the name Chaldean was, at Rome, synonymous with mathematicus, or astrologer; and we read repeatedly that this class of persons were expelled from Italy 13 Montucla, i. 511. |