A Manual of Astrology

In February 1820 the London papers carried a small death notice. Samuel Hemmings, an ironmonger who had done well in trade, was dead. What made it news was the date.

Hemmings was born on 4 June 1738, at nearly the same moment as King George III and in the same parish, St Martin’s in the Fields. He set up in business in October 1760, when the king came to the throne. He married on 8 September 1761, the king’s own wedding day. And he died on 29 January 1820, the same day as the king, at nearly the same hour.

Raphael puts this story on the very first page of his text, before any argument. Two lives from one moment is the whole claim of astrology, told as a newspaper item.

Raphael does not say the Hemmings case settles anything by itself. He asks a question and leaves it hanging: can a rational mind put such an agreement down to mere chance?

He knows which answer his own age preferred. When an old prediction comes true, he complains, the modern world files it away as a “curious coincidence, as the fashion of the day is pleased to term it.”

His definition of the art is plain. Astrology is foreknowing future events from the motions, positions and configurations of the planets, built up from observations made across the ages. Not a revelation, then, but a pattern watched long enough to be written down as rules. And that body of rules, he insists, has been buried many times and has risen again every time, like the phoenix from its own ashes.

What does Raphael want the story of Samuel Hemmings to suggest?

• That a king’s fate is written in the stars, but a tradesman’s is not
• That two people born at one moment and place can share a life’s pattern✓Correct answer
• That the king’s court astrologer had foretold the ironmonger’s death
• That the parish you are born in shapes your fortune more than the sky

Hemmings matters because his birth matched the king’s in time and place, and the big events of both lives followed suit. The story makes no distinction between king and tradesman, and no astrologer appears in it at all.

Raphael’s first piece of evidence is one no sceptic of 1828 could deny: the tides. Everyone agreed that the Sun and Moon move the sea. He simply refuses to stop there.

The ocean, he says, is by nature inert and would lie still, yet the luminaries make it toss and roll against its own nature. If they can move a mass that gross, their influence must reach every sort of matter tied to the earth, the human body included.

Then he chains the body to the mind. The weight of the air pressing on a person shifts by more than three thousand pounds within hours, the body strains to restore its balance, and the mind cannot help sharing what the body suffers. Tide, pressure, mood, action: for Raphael it is one unbroken line from the sky to what a person does.

His boldest step he borrows from Ptolemy, whom he calls the Prince of Philosophers. A man who knows the stars well can foretell whether a season will run hotter or wetter. If so, Ptolemy asks, “what hinders but he may likewise predict concerning every man?”

The logic runs from weather to temperament. The state of the sky at a birth sets the quality of the person, body and mind, and with it the leanings of the life ahead.

What Raphael will not do is pretend to know the mechanism. Whether some fine ethereal substance passes from one body to another, he says, cannot be declared. The fox and the hare sense a change in the weather before it arrives, and nobody can say how. He claims only that the effects are seen and can be tied to the planets, which is all the astrologer contends for.

Raphael admits he cannot say how planetary influence travels from the sky to a person, and he does not think this weakens his case.

True✓Correct answer

True. He leaves the question of an ethereal medium open and rests on observed effects, the same way no one needed to explain an animal’s weather sense before noticing it.