Complete Works, Volume 1: The Book on Games of Chance

...hardly could have done so. Since there is no doubt that this happens for many reasons, it is my intention here to touch only upon the most important ones. Primarily, this is because no true prediction can be made from a false art unless it happens by some chance, by diligence, or by a certain peculiar temperament of character—three things that are outside the art itself. That astrology is not the least among the false and futile sciences, which so often infatuate the minds of men, has been demonstrated by so many arguments from men of every praise for their learning and character that he who feels otherwise does not seem to have made great progress in the attainment of wisdom and a sound mind. Since these things are so, Cardano is not to be accused for not having reached by prediction what he could not attain with the help of his art. This is especially true since he used that sagacity which, supported by chance and his own temperament, did not make him look vain or futile in most horoscopes.

But because that anomalous, excessive, and rare power of mind, which manifests itself in a person through great and admirable deeds, impelled Cardano only to penetrate the secrets of all sciences and to explain them with greater ease, sharper judgment, and a more excellent method than anyone else ever did, he could not, like others who receive predictions of future events solely from that impulse of the mind, make pronouncements about the death of his son, or of Aimar de Ranconet, or others, as perhaps Nostradamus would have done. I speak of Nostradamus because he is an example to us that astrologers, when they bring forth something certain, have not achieved it by the benefit of their art, but by the orgasm of that humor—which Nostradamus himself calls divine—and which favored him above all, as he testifies in this quatrain from his Centuries:

I prophesy with dread, filled with the divine spirit:
Wars, famine, turmoil, the contagions of sterile plague,
Floods, and heat, lands and seas stained with blood,
Peace, and lives, and the fates of great men.

For this is how Jean Amatus Chauigneus rendered it from the French language, although there is another more explicit quatrain on that matter. Since it cannot be conveniently rendered into Latin, it will be better to consult it in the same words in which it was presented by the author at the beginning of the first Century. Otherwise, if it were attributed to palmistry—because, as Cardano says, Bartholomæus Cocles left a table when he was dying of 45 men who were destined to perish by a violent death, as happened later in the outcome; if to nomancy divination by names—because Hannibal Raimundus indicated from two sick men, or from two individuals fighting in single combat, which one would be the first to die; if to geomancy divination by earth patterns—because Caranus determined the end of some business; if to the interpretation of Scripture bibliomancy—because Prosper Aldorisius elicited various motions of the soul and inclinations of nature from the diversity of the text; or finally to other divinations, because foolish and wine-drinking old women find stolen goods, designate future spouses, and announce illnesses; and if we do not instead return to the common cause of all those divinations, it would follow from an outcome that is not at all deceptive that the rules of such trifling disciplines are no less true than those of astrology. By that statement, I know not what could be said that is more foolish and absurd.

Finally, the last thing that brought the greatest envy upon Cardano, and was agitated with more burning zeal by all good men—the more each one was addicted to religion—is the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, explained by him from the rules of his art no differently than if it had been that of some ordinary man. For Thuanus Jacques-Auguste de Thou says this is a testimony of "extreme madness, or rather, impious audacity," and Scaliger Joseph Justus Scaliger calls it "vanity combined with impiety." But the words of the latter, from his preface to Manilius, are so expressive that I cannot refrain from laughter whenever I observe that this oracle of our time spoke so childishly, saying: "Listen to the subtlety of our century; forty-four years ago there existed a clanging cymbal of horoscope-makers who published the theme of our Lord Jesus Christ, and argued that everything that happened to him happened necessarily from the position of the stars. Shall I call this impious or laughable audacity, which subjected the Lord of the stars to the stars themselves, and thought he was born at a time that is still in dispute, so that vanity might contend with impiety."

But is this how you call the subtlety of our century, Scaliger, which for three hundred years and more before our century held sway among astronomers? You truly seem to have prevented yourself from reading good books so diligently that the knowledge of many escaped you, who, although they might be ignored by your peers as star-struck and empty of all good fruit, could nevertheless—if they had been known to you even by their titles—have warded off the significant stain of thoughtlessness and laziness from you. For who could bear for Cardano to be accused of that impious vanity for a horoscope of our Lord Jesus Christ that he devised himself, which Tiberius Russilianus Sextus Calaber had proposed in the previous century in three different diagrams in his Apologeticus? As he called it, it was "against the cowled monks, who had condemned twelve propositions as akin to heretical dogmas out of the four hundred he had undertaken to defend publicly at Bologna, Florence, and Padua." And he did not find it inconvenient to defend this one in particular, in which he said "that Christ, regarding the elementary composition of his body, was subject to the stars, and that his nativity, as well as being a great Prophet, and those things which happened around his body—especially the violent nature of his death—had been foretold." Tiberius published the book while Leo X was sitting on the throne under that title which we referred to above, and he explained in it the "three themes of Christ's nativity according to the three reasonable opinions of differing doctors" so clearly that it is a wonder Cardano found anything left to gather by way of gleanings and remnants after him.

But not even Tiberius Russilianus undertook such great sacrilege with no other author; for Pierre d'Ailly, Cardinal and Archbishop of Cambrai, who ceased to be among the living under Martin V, not only contended that the birth of Christ could have been foretold from horoscopic observations, but he also proposed the celestial chart of that same birth in his Elucidarium Astronomicae concordiae cum Theologica et historica veritate; and before Peter himself...