NOTES ON THE CALENDAR.

IN all old Almanacs, and in some new ones, there are
to be found evidence of a connection that was supposed
by the wise men of a past time, and that is taught by the
foolish of the present time (the wisdom of the past often
surviving as the folly of the present), to exist between the
parts of a man's body and the position of the moon among
the signs of the Zodiac. As it used to by rhymed after
the manner in which we now rhyme "Thirty day hath
September," & c.

          "In head and face is Aries place
              And Taurus in the neck.
           But arms and hand in Geminies bands
               Do suffer joy and wreck.
           Cancer doth possess the breast,
                The ribs and stomach stout.
           And Leo back and heart he hath,
                Thereof ye need not doubt," & c.

Thus, it was considered most essential that information
like this should be given in his almanac in the
year sixteen hundred and four, by Antony Ascham,
physician and priest: "To take preparatives or disgestion,
Gemini, Libra, Capricornus. To cut hairs, Libra,
Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces." A little space may not
be spent amiss in showing what thoughts used to lie at
the bottom of this kind of information.

Foolish as ASTROLOGY now is, it had its origin in high
human conceptions of the Divine power. What we now
call the laws of Nature were unknown. Of gravitation,
chemical affinity, and other principles, the philosophers
of old saw only the wonderful effects, and they attributed
the effects, not as we do to a Divine working by means
of Laws, but ot a Divine working by means of Influences.
Thus Plato taught that God having created superior
things, as the first ideas, gave to them influences by
which they worked in producing less spiritual copies, or,
as it were, shadows of themselves in the inferior world.
He pictured man as sitting in a cavern with his face
turned from the cavern's mouth, through which the
light streams from the upper world. It passes over his
head and shines on the dark wall that faces him, broken
by shadows of things passing before it in the upper day.
We see the shadows, we hear echoes of voices, and
knowing nothing else take these to be independent sights
and sounds. Happy is he who, turning his face from
the wall, can by hard climbing escape into the upper
day. The entire world was animated with a soul, and
the philosophers of the sixteenth century, who still had
found nothing that was a worthy substitute for the
conception of Influences which occupied the place now
taken by the doctrine of physical Laws, taught also that
everything below has a celestial pattern, and receives
from it superior operative powers through the help of
the soul of the world. "Stones and metals," one of these
men taught, expressing the belief of his time, "have a
correspondency with herbs, herbs with animals, animals
with the heavens, the heavens with intelligences, and
those with divine properties and attributes, and with
God himself, after whose image and likeness all things
are created . . . . For this is the band and continuity of
nature, that all superior virtue doth flow through every
inferior with a long and continued series, dispersing its
rays even to the very last things:" thus was expressed
the reason of a belief in the influences of the stars and
things of the unknown world upon man; "and," it was
added "inferiors, through their superiors, come to the
very supreme of all;" showing how it was thought that
man might draw down influences from the stars or
unknown world,—explaining in fact, the old faith in
magic.

Before a truth is learned, a theory must stand for it;
and this was no ignoble theory which stood for the
truths discovered in much later times. The doctrine of
superior influences pointed, of course, to an especial
faith in influences that descend from the celestial bodies.
"But the moon," we quote again the student who wrote
in the sixteenth century, "the moon, as the receptacle
of heavenly influences, and, as it were, the wife of all
the stars, is nearest to the earth, on which she pours
the superior influences which she hath received; and by
this planet, on account of her familiarity and propinquity,
a stronger influence is exercised on the inferiors"
—that is to say, on us—"that here receive her power
in a stream."

The moon, it was argued, in her monthly journey
through the several signs of the Zodiac, receives her
influences from a set of stars every day changed; the
nature of the moon's influence will depend, therefore,
upon her position. So we come to the original meaning
of such directions in old Almanacs as "Note, that it
is not convenient to let blood while the moon passes by
Taurus, Capricorn, Gemini, Leo, and Scorpio, or the
moon near the change, full, or quarter; or being afflicted,
by Saturn and Mars,"—a direction having the one
merit that it must have put wholesome restriction on
that practice of blood-letting which, except at certain
times and in a few cases of serious disorder, is always
most injurious to health.

The NEW YEAR used to be introduced in England by the
travelling about our towns and villagers of wassailers,
who carried from door to door, singing as they went, a
brown bowl—the wassail-bowl—of ale flavoured with
nutmeg, sugar, toast, and roasted crab-apples. From
this they drank, with the pledge said to date from
Rowena's pledge to Vortigern (Wæs hæl, Your good
health), to every householder, who, in return, was
expected to give drink or money to

              "These poor jolly wassail boys
               Come travelling through the mire."

The very natural result was, that the wassailers degenerated
as the hours slipped by, and, towards one or
two o'clock on New Year's morning, were in a state to
justify Milton's selection of their troop as the best image
of the rout attendant upon Comus, about which the
Lady says—

                                            "I should be loth
        To meet the rudeness and swill'd insolence
         Of such late wassailers."

In Edinburgh it used to be the custom for nearly
every man to run about on hogmany night, or the night
preceding the new year, with a het-kettle—a brew of
ale, spirit, and spice, in the tea-kettle wherein it had
been boiled. There was a great running about with
kettles, torches, and lanterns, an exchange of brews and
a kissing of dames. The first foot in a house after the
old year had passed away, brought good or bad luck
with it; and lovers would stand in the cold, kettle in
hand, for a whole hour on a December night, to have the
right of entering first after the chime of midnight, and
offer the het-kettle (or cauld kettle) to their mistresses.

The New Year, as we need hardly tell our readers,
has, even in modern times, begun at other dates than the
first day in January. Before the Old was altered into
New Style, the legal year began in England on the
twenty-fifth of March. In France, before the year fifteen
hundred and sixty-four, the French year began, as
ordained by an edict of Charles the Ninth, at Easter. The
consequence of this was that there might sometimes be
two months of March in the same year, distinguished
from each other as Mars Avant and Mars Après. In
Russia, until Peter the Great ordered reckoning to be
made from the first day of January, New Year's day was
the first of September.