The Emergence of the Week Began the Scientific Mind

The making of our week was another forward step in man's mastery of the world, in his reach toward science. The week was man's own cluster, not dictated by the visible forces of nature, for the planetary influences were invisible. By seeking astral regularities, by imagining that regularly recurring forces at a distance, forces that could be judged only by their effects, might govern the world, mankind was preparing a new arsenal of thought, an escape from the prison of Again-and-Again. The planets, unworldly forces, would lead mankind out into the world of history.

The planetary week was a path into astrology. And astrology was a step toward new kinds of prophecy. The earlier forms of prophecy can give us a hint of why astrology was a step forward into the world of science. Ancient rituals brought with them a complicated "science" for using parts of a sacrificed animal to foretell the future of the person who offered the sacrifice. Osteomancy, for example, prophesied by examining a bone of the sacrificed animal. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sir Richard Burton reported from Sindh, in the valley of the Indus, the elaborate technique still widely used for divining from the shoulder blade of a sacrificed sheep. The osteomancers divided the bone into twelve areas, or "houses," each answering a different question about the future. If in the first "house" the bone was clear and smooth, the omen was propitious and the consulter would prove to be a good man. If, in the second "house," which pertained to herds, the bone was clear and clean, the herds would thrive, but if there were layers of red and white streaks, robbers must be expected.

And so it went. Hepatoscopy, which predicted by examining the sacrificed animal's liver, was one of the earliest popular techniques of prophecy among the Assyro-Babylonians. It seems to have been used in China in the Bronze Age. Then the Romans and many others continued the practice. The liver impressed the diviners by its large size, its interesting shape, and its heavy burden of blood. An elaborate bronze model of a sheep's liver, which survives from Piacenza, Italy, is covered with inscriptions indicating what was to be foretold by the condition of each part. Every conceivable human activity or experience—from the knotting of strings to the interpretation of dreams—has become an oracle, witnessing man's desperate eagerness for clues to his future.

By contrast with these other kinds of prophecy, astrology was progressive. Astrology differed in asserting the continuous, regular force of a power at a distance. The influences of heavenly bodies on the events on earth it described as periodic, repetitious, invisible forces like those that would rule the scientific mind.

It was the first time human beings established an artificial order to things, setting up cycles.