The element nearest to the stars, about which there is certainty, is air; for it is highly probable that there is no proper sphere of fire, an opinion very ancient and strongly defended by some recent writers. This seems to be Ausonius’ meaning in the Riddle of Three:
Three Graces, three Fates, triple voice, three elements.
[margin: On the sphere of fire and the elements: Jerome Cardan, De varietate, book 1, chapters 1-2; Scipione Capece, On Principles, book 2; Francesco Patrizi, Peripatetic Discussions, book 7, tome 4; Francisco Valles, Sacred Philosophy, chapter 50; Villalpando and others; Ausonius, Riddle of Three]
In the middle region of the air many very varied meteorological impressions occur. An abundance of exhalations produces great and small fires, configured in very diverse ways according to the different form of those exhalations, so that they sometimes seem to be flames, sometimes columns, sometimes spears, sometimes stars leaping or running about, descending or ascending, and sometimes even manifold comets. This is not now the place to treat comets at length. All these have in common that they denote great dryness of the weather. They are also signs of lasting or violent winds, which especially agrees with comets. If comets are frequent, they also signify sterility, famine, and plague, because the force of a comet consumes all the moisture of vapors and exhalations; consequently they threaten death to bilious persons and to those of a more ardent nature, such as many princes and great men. By the same cause of dryness they also incline toward wars and seditions. The other things astrologers and Squarcialupi add to these are vain and deceptive. The things I have said seem consonant with nature.
[margin: Natural signs from meteors and comets: Aristotle, Meteorology, book 1, chapter 4; Pliny, Natural History, book 2, with Milichius’s commentary there; Seneca, Natural Questions, book 1; Contarini, On the Elements, book 2; Cardan, De subtilitate, book 4, and De varietate, books 1 and 14; Scaliger against Cardan, exercise 79; Fracastoro, Homocentrica; Andreas Dudith, treatise On Comets and letter to Johann Crato; Squarcialupi’s additions rejected as vain]
Yet it happens not rarely that the cause of comets is merely a supernatural disposition of God, as when they portend some happy event, which Chaeremon once taught by examples from histories, according to Origen. If his book On Comets survived, perhaps it would be found that this opinion arose from the fact that things happy for one region or kingdom were joined with calamity for others. Or surely the cause is God’s disposition, wishing in this way to warn men of an imminent public calamity or death of kings and princes, so that we may turn back to repentance and amendment of morals. Then comets belong to the signs and portents already discussed, and they splendidly commend God’s charity toward us, since he does not strike us unless he has first warned us.
[margin: Origen, Against Celsus, book 1, reporting Chaeremon’s lost On Comets; John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith, book 2, chapter 7, and Bonaventure on book 2 of the Sentences, distinction 14, final question, on divine warning signs]
We therefore see that hairy stars spread their hair toward the part they threaten. Gobelinus Persona narrates a marvelous sign of this kind of warning. In the monastery of Boddeken, which Blessed Meinulphus the Confessor built, he says, a certain great bronze bell, of good sound, is reverently preserved. Whenever any sister of that monastery is shortly to depart this life, without any human ministry the bell gives forth of itself a strong sound. Let the heretic laugh as he pleases; let him also receive, even if unwilling, two similar accounts. Leonard Vair writes that in Celtiberia, in the town of Vililla, there is a bell which the inhabitants call the Bell of Miracles. For some months before Christendom suffers some adversity, it is accustomed to sound of itself, with no one striking it. Of this matter, he says, he himself read public notarial testimony as an eyewitness, in addition to the faith which the viceroys of that kingdom made concerning the same thing in their letters. Let another example from Gaul be added, since our opponents exclude Spain from testimony. By the same Vair’s witness, on the Rhone, near the borders of the Sequani, there is a noble monastery of St. Maurice. A fishpond is seen there in which fish are placed according to the number of the monks. If any one of the monks falls sick, a little fish is also seen floating half-dead on top; if the monk is about to depart this life, a few days before, the fish dies. Vair writes that he received this both from Antonio, cardinal of Granvelle, an eyewitness and singular patron of good arts, and from other trustworthy people, as a thing known in those places and attested by every kind of faith.
[margin: Gobelinus Persona, in the life of St. Meinulphus in the October material, on Boddeken and Meinulphus; Leonard Vair, in his book on fascination, on the Bell of Vililla and the monastery of St. Maurice]
Moreover, since exhalation is also the matter of wind, and since heat and dryness are especially qualities of winds, it is easily understood why probable signs of bodily health and of the fertility of the year can be taken from them. Let anyone who wants more about winds seek elsewhere.
[margin: Winds and atmospheric signs: Seneca, Natural Questions, book 5; Pliny, Natural History, book 2, chapter 40, with Milichius; Cardan, De varietate, book 1, chapters 1 and 8; Valles, Sacred Philosophy; Conrad Wimpina, On Signs, chapter 5]
Second, no fewer signs arise from vapors, which also bring their probable foreknowledge. How many things can be predicted from clouds, after a certain Gerard, Conrad Wimpina teaches; and there are also rustic prognostics from common rains, and from prodigious rains, whether natural signs of the year’s weather or supernatural threats of divine wrath. In the previous year, 1600, on February 18, near Arequipa, from among those many fire-vomiting mountains in Peru which they call volcanoes, one called Guaynaputina was seen by shepherds from a distance to belch out a white cloud. This was followed by a storm of huge fragments, as if torn from rocks but burning. After these had advanced a little space, they were broken into smaller stones and, almost a hundred paces from the crater, gradually into ash. Wherever the rocks fell, everything was torn up, ruined, shattered, and killed; where the stones fell, few mortals or beasts escaped.
[margin: Gerard and Conrad Wimpina on clouds and rains; Father Juan Ruiz de Alarcon on the 1600 Guaynaputina eruption near Arequipa]
By chance a Spaniard was making his way on horseback. When he could not bear the force of the stony hail, he dismounted and placed himself under the horse. But the horse could not stand because of the force of the blows. Seeing that under the animal there was no safe or quiet refuge for him, the master took off the saddle, left the horse, and put the saddle on his head. Thus he barely escaped having his skull broken. Torrents, rivers, and some springs dried up completely; the flow of others was blocked by the mass of ash, and that for more than three hundred leagues. At Arequipa, after this began, darkness during broad daylight lasted for almost a whole month. Meanwhile at the beginning the sky seemed to gape open with lightning, and thunders were heard, and fiery globes like artillery, with battle lines arranged here and there, seemed to fire mutually at one another and run this way and that. Once a huge globe fell, burst from a church into the adjoining enclosure, then through an open gate into the public way, and suddenly disappeared, leaving the smell of sulfur. The earthquake was continuous, so that many houses collapsed and the others seemed to dance as they swayed.
Meanwhile white earth, like ashes or ground lime, did not cease to rain, so that no one could walk through the streets without being covered at once to the thickness of a finger. Houses that were least covered were covered to a depth of half a foot; many, groaning under the weight, sank down. The calamity lasted, with light showing itself at intervals rather than providing day. After almost a month there was a cessation and some pause, as our men who live there wrote; yet fear of worse things still remained. Fear produced a great change of morals for the better. All threw themselves at the feet of the priests, so that no rest was given, and penitents broke into their bedrooms by force. Thus God gained profit in many souls. But Satan too did not neglect the occasion. When the neighboring pagan Indians, by their usual superstition, approached magicians nearer the flames and hurried together to that mountain, and tried to appease it with evil songs and sacrifices, the flame consumed the magicians and all those nearer it; all the rest, badly maimed, despaired and killed themselves, some by hanging, others otherwise. These things were narrated in the letter of Father Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, written at Arequipa on March 15 of the previous year. In March of this year I read a Spanish copy of it, from which I excerpted this summary. I have scarcely read or heard anything similar.
[margin: Father Juan Ruiz de Alarcon’s Arequipa letter on darkness, ash, fire, earthquake, repentance, and Indian sacrifices at Guaynaputina]
The same must be said of hail and ice, which do not differ in species, though Pisides speaks poetically, not philosophically, against Aristotle in the Cosmergia. Abundance of snow foretells the fertility of the year; multitude of dew and frost, rather, sterility. A descending mist indicates fair weather; an ascending one, rains. Thunder and ecnephias are signs of following rain; other unusual sounds customarily heard in the air belong rather to prodigies. Wimpina will teach you what lightning and the fiery whirlwind announce.
[margin: Pisides against Aristotle on hail and ice; Wimpina on lightning and fiery whirlwind]
Third, swelling of the sea, winds, unusual overflows of rivers, are announcements of plague; earthquakes also signify the same, as Ammianus, Procopius, and others testify.
[margin: Ammianus, Procopius, Seneca, Convarra, and Pernumia on sea-swell, winds, river floods, and earthquakes as signs]
Fourth, with respect to impressions which arise by reflection of light around vapors and exhalations, such as rainbow, halo, crowns, parhelia, and rods, they can be counted among the prognostics of natural fore-sensings, as can also gaps and what are called caves and windows. So too can those tracks of flames called will-o’-the-wisps, for they are varied effects of a superabundant exhalation or vapor overcoming an obstacle, or sometimes of light conquered and routed.
Fifth, to come to earthly things, prognostics are also gathered from the produce of trees, as Cicero says:
The lentisk, accustomed to swell with threefold fruit, by bringing forth three harvests, shows the three seasons of plowing.
[margin: Cicero and the panegyric on the Nativity of the Virgin on weather and tree signs]
Abundance of almonds indicates abundance of harvest. Trefoil bristles and lifts its leaves against a storm. Tree leaves moving without breezes, poplar down flying through the air or floating on waters, announce a storm. If roses or violets bloom again under autumn, plague is imminent. At Bordeaux, the winter which preceded that great plague produced some roses in our garden; I saw them. This one thing does not seem empty of superstition, which some have handed down: that under autumn two or three acorns should be gathered and then split with a knife, and that among them one of three things is usually found: a fly, a worm, or a spider. The fly is said to denote future discord in that year, the worm fertility, and the spider mortality.
Sixth, certain animals too give us forewarnings, as:
The white gull, fleeing from the deep abyss of the sea, crying, announces that horrible storms are at hand.
And:
If the dusky crow presses on with morning cries, or, running along the shores, has plunged its head and received the wave upon its neck.
So too frogs, inhabitants of sweet water, and oxen looking toward the lights of heaven, and other such things from Aratus as translated by Cicero, and from Hesiod by Virgil. What is more contemptible than a little mouse or sparrow? Yet the former anticipate houses about to fall, and the latter anticipate by flight the contagion of the air. Francesco Pico investigates the causes of all these things.
[margin: Aratus, Cicero, Hesiod, Virgil, and Francesco Pico on animal signs]
From observing phenomena of this kind arose the canons of foreknowledge used by sailors, shepherds, and farmers. On these there is a not-contemptible work by Antoine Mizauld of Montlucon, Rural Ephemerides. These animals themselves are ignorant of their own presage; they merely feel a certain natural impulse, when the imagination has been stirred by the humors, toward seeking the things that will be useful and fleeing those that will be harmful. Since Pico shows this separately for storks, swifts, diving birds, dolphins, and others, it would be too long and slow for me to dwell on each. Let us come to the nobler animal, man, and to certain presages drawn from him.
[margin: Antoine Mizauld’s Rural Ephemerides; Francesco Pico on storks, swifts, diving birds, dolphins, and other animal presages]