The Nativities of Zosimus

by Julius Firmicus Maternus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I. Of the copyist, and of the house in which the work was done

I set down first the place, then the man, then the question, then what I did, and last what came of it. That is the order, and I keep it.

The house stands on the slope above Catina, where the black soil of the mountain grows vines that need no manure. In the month of which I write the south wind came across from Africa for nine days together, and the papyrus curled on the table unless it was weighted with stones at each corner. I used four pieces of lava from the courtyard, grey and full of holes, because they were heavy and they were to hand. Oil cost what it had cost in my father's time and twice as much again. My steward Thallus kept the account of it on a tablet hung by the kitchen door, and each evening when the lamps were lit in the library he came to look at them as a farmer looks at a sky that will not rain.

I was then at the eighth book of the Mathesis, the last, in which every degree of every sign is set down with what it gives to the man born when that degree rises. Thirty degrees in Aries, thirty in Taurus, and so through the twelve: three hundred and sixty in all. My lord Mavortius had written to me from Rome three times that year. The last letter was short and courteous and asked whether the books were finished. They were not. A man may write the first seven books of a science in the heat of love for it; the eighth he writes as one carries stones up a hill, one at a time, counting.

My copyist was Zosimus. He had been bought for me at Syracuse eleven years before, a boy of perhaps fourteen with a good hand in both Latin and Greek, and he had grown into a narrow, silent man with ink worked so deep into the second finger of his right hand that it would not wash out. He wrote at a low table at my left. I dictated walking. When I lost a sentence he did not prompt me; he waited with the reed lifted until I found it again. I have known senators with less tact.

II. Of the dictation of the degrees of Leo, and of the question that was put

On the seventh night of the wind I was dictating Leo.

"In the eleventh degree of Leo," I said, "whoever is born will be a commander of men, of great body, harsh in speech, who will perish by the sword in a foreign place. In the twelfth degree of Leo, whoever is born will be a keeper of temples and treasuries, faithful, without children. In the thirteenth—"

The reed had stopped.

I turned. Zosimus was looking at the papyrus, not at me, and he had laid the reed down across the ink-pot, which he never did before the lamp was trimmed.

"Master," he said, "does every man have one of these?"

"Every man born has a rising degree. The heaven turns, and at the moment the child comes forth some degree of some sign stands upon the eastern horizon. That degree, with the places of the seven stars and the lots, gives the decree of his life."

"Every man."

"Every man, every woman, every slave, every king." I stopped there, because it was not true, and a teacher who has said a false thing should unsay it in the same breath. "Every one but the emperor. The emperor alone is not subject to the courses of the stars, for he is lord of the whole world and his fate is ruled by the highest God. That is why it is forbidden to cast for him. I have written so in the second book. You copied it."

"I remember it." He took up the reed again and did not dip it. "Then I would ask you to cast mine."

Here I must set down what I asked him, because the order of the art requires it and because I would not have it said that I made an exception for a man of my own house. I asked him to what end he wanted it. I asked whether he wished to know the day of my death, or of the emperor's, or of any man's; whether he wished to know when he might run, or whom he might harm, or which woman he might have against her husband's will. I asked whether he had been paid by anyone to ask. These are not insults. The heaven does not show itself to a corrupt question, and the astrologer who answers one does not merely sin; he reads wrongly, as a man reads wrongly through a cloudy glass.

He heard me out. Then he said, "I want to know whether I am in it."

"In what?"

He moved his hand over the sheet of degrees, over Leo and over the stack of finished signs beneath it.

"In the book," he said.

I told him the end was pure. I tell you so now.

III. Of the hour, and why it could not be had

I asked for his day and hour of birth.

He told me he did not know them. I asked for the day and the year, at least, and he told me what he knew, which was this: that he had been taken up from the heap outside the eastern gate of Catina, where the town throws its sweepings and where women who cannot feed a child, or will not, set it down at night. A slave woman of a dyer's household had found him at first light, wrapped in a piece of blue wool, on the day before the Nones of a month that she remembered as March, in the year when the mountain smoked for forty days. She had milk because her own child had died. She called him Zosimus, which in Greek is a name given to infants of whom one hopes they will live, and she sold him to a dealer when he was weaned, because the dyer told her to. That was all. The woman was dead. The blue wool was not kept.

I am obliged by my own rule to set down what such a beginning means for the art, and I will not soften it.

A nativity requires the moment. The rising degree changes in the time it takes a man to walk from my library to the cistern and back. The Moon, which governs the body and the fortune of the child, moves through some thirteen degrees in a single day. If Zosimus was born in the night before he was found, I could have the Moon within a sign; if he was born two nights before, and lay crying in the cold all one day while people walked past to the market, then I could not have the Moon at all. The woman had said first light. A child laid on the heap in the dark and found at first light might have come into the world at any hour of that night, or the night before it.

"So there is nothing to be done," Zosimus said.

He said it without bitterness, the way he would tell me that the papyrus from Alexandria was late again.

"Go to bed," I said.

IV. Of what I did in the night

I did not go to bed.

I took the ephemerides for the year when the mountain smoked; I knew the year, because I had sat in this house as a young man and watched the ash fall on the vines. I fixed the day of the finding as the day of birth, which was the one supposition the evidence would bear. I took the places of the Sun and of the five wandering stars for that day, which change slowly enough that a night more or less will not move them out of their signs. The Moon I took for the night before the Nones, and wrote beside her, in my own hand, if the night was this night.

Then I began at the first degree of Aries.

I do not know how to tell this so that it does not sound like the act of a madman, and I will therefore tell it plainly. I did not cast one nativity for Zosimus. I cast every nativity he could have had, rising degree by rising degree, three hundred and sixty of them. For each I set the Sun, the Moon, the five stars in their houses as that degree would place them; I set the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of the Daemon; and I gave the delineation the ancients assign, as Nechepso and Petosiris teach and as I had been writing down for my lord Mavortius all that year. When the stars fell into a configuration I had already described in the earlier books, I did not refer to the book. I wrote it out again. A man who looks for himself must not be sent elsewhere to find himself.

Thallus came at the second hour of the night to see the lamp, and went away. He came at the sixth, and stood in the door, and went away. At some hour after that I trimmed the wick myself, which I had not done since I was a student.

In the first degree of Aries, if the night was this night, whoever is born will be quick, a runner, a carrier of messages, and will die young of a fever caught on the road. In the second degree he will be a worker in bronze. In the ninth, with the Moon in the house of the Evil Daemon as that degree would put her, he will be a slave all his life and will be buried by strangers. In the seventeenth degree of Taurus, with the Moon and Venus together in the house of Good Fortune, he will be loved by a woman of higher station and will be freed for her sake. In the fourth degree of Gemini he will write for other men. In the fifth degree of Gemini he will write for other men, and will be honoured for it, and his name will be on nothing.

I wrote until the wind dropped, which it did a little before dawn, all at once, so that I heard the silence before I understood what it was. I had reached the twentieth degree of Virgo. I slept two hours on the couch in the library with my sandals on, and woke with the sun on my face, and went on.

V. Of the thing that would not come straight

On the second night, at the twenty-eighth degree of Libra, I stopped.

It was not weariness. I have dictated through fever. It was that I had come to a degree in which, as the stars stood that day, every malefic was cast down and every benefic was raised, Jupiter in his exaltation on the Midheaven, and the Lot of Fortune with him. I wrote the delineation the art assigns, and the delineation said: he will be subject to no man.

I sat a long time with that sentence.

You will see the difficulty, and if you do not, I will set it out, because I promised I would omit nothing. There is one man who is subject to no man and to no star, and his nativity it is forbidden to cast. I was not casting it. I was casting a foundling's, three hundred and sixty times over, out of a supposition about a dyer's slave's memory of the light. And yet among the three hundred and sixty there stood one case that the art itself described as the emperor's case.

I did not think Zosimus would be emperor. I am not a fool. But I thought: the art says every man has his degree. The art says one man has none. And here is a man whose degree I cannot find, and among all the degrees he might have had there is one that says he is subject to no one. Then either the art had come to a place where it was incomplete, which I had spent seven books denying, or there was a second sort of man the heaven did not decree, and I had never written him down.

I wrote the sentence out in full, as the art required. Then I wrote beneath it, small, in Greek, so that Thallus would not read it if he came: The ignorance is ours. The heaven knows his hour, though no woman living does. I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it now. I record also that I needed to write it down in order to go on, and that a man who needs a sentence in order to go on should ask himself what the sentence is for.

I went on. Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn. In the thirtieth degree of Pisces, whoever is born will be found.

I mean that the delineation said so. Lost in infancy, found, raised by another's hand. It is a common case. Tradition gives it to several degrees of the watery signs, and I had written it for my lord Mavortius in Book Eight without a thought. I wrote it out for Zosimus, and dried the sheet, and laid it on the others, and the stack was the height of my hand from wrist to the end of the longest finger.

VI. Of the giving, and of what he asked

I gave it to him on the third morning, in the library, before we began the day's dictation. I had bound the sheets in a cover of plain leather that had held a commentary on Aratus nobody in the house had read.

He untied it and turned the leaves. He read the first degree of Aries, and the second. He turned further. He read slowly; he was not used to reading what he had not written himself. Thallus, who had come in with the oil, set down the jar and stayed.

"These are all me," Zosimus said.

"One of them is you. Which, the heaven knows. I have set them all down so that the one is among them."

"How will I know it?"

I told him the truth, which was that I did not know. I said that a man might read the cases against his own life so far: the runner who dies of a fever on the road is not he, for he has never run anywhere; the bronze-worker is not he. A man who reads honestly might strike out many and be left with few. I said this was not the art, but it was not against the art.

He found the fifth degree of Gemini, and read it, and his face did not move. Then he turned to the end and found the thirtieth of Pisces, and read it, and closed the book on his finger.

"And the one in Libra," he said. "Subject to no man."

I had not thought he would find that one so soon. I told him what I had written beneath it in Greek. He listened, and nodded, and said nothing for long enough that Thallus picked up the oil jar and put it down again.

"Then there are two men you may not cast," Zosimus said. "The emperor, because he is above the stars. And me, because I am under the heap."

"That is not what the art says."

"No, master."

"The decree is firm," I said. "It is firm for you as for any man. The heaven saw the hour you were born. A woman did not, and I do not. The failing is in us."

"Yes, master," he said, and put the book on the shelf beside my own seven, and sat down at his table, and wetted the reed. "The thirteenth degree of Leo."

I dictated the thirteenth degree of Leo.

VII. Of what came after, ten years on

I set this down because the order requires that the end be told, and because a man who has written against his own former gods owes it to the reader to say what he kept.

My lord Mavortius received the eight books, and praised them, and was made Prefect of the City, as I had once written that a man of his nativity might be. The emperor whose life I had prayed for in the first book died, and his sons divided the world. I came to the faith of Christ in my middle years, in a manner I will not set down here because it is no part of this account. In the reign of the brothers Constantius and Constans I wrote a book addressed to them, On the Error of the Profane Religions, in which I asked them to pull down the temples and melt the gods for coin, and I meant every line of it.

Zosimus wrote it out for me. He was a freed man by then. I had given him the cap before the magistrate at Catina in the year after the Mathesis was finished, and he stayed on as my secretary for a wage, and married a widow with a stall near the theatre, and had two daughters whose hours he wrote down himself to the quarter-hour with a water-clock he bought for the purpose. I was not present at those births. I record only that the clock was expensive and that he paid for it.

On the last evening of that work I was dictating against the worship of the Sun.

"They give the name of god," I said, "to the lamp that God lit, and fall down before the light of the world as though it were its own maker, and pour blood on the earth to a fire that does not drink."

Zosimus wrote it. The lamp in the library was a new one, bronze, with two spouts; the old clay one had cracked in the earthquake of the spring. He finished the line, and sanded it, and did not take up the next sheet.

"Master," he said, "will you burn the Mathesis?"

"No."

"The bishop at Syracuse says that the stars must go with the gods."

"The bishop at Syracuse has not read it. The planet called Saturn is not Saturn. It is a body in the order God made. I renounced the cult. I did not renounce the heaven."

He nodded. He did not argue; he never did. He rose and went to the shelf, where the eight books stood in their capsa, and beside them, in its cover of plain leather, the three hundred and sixty nativities. He took the book of nativities down and held it a moment without opening it.

"Did you keep them," he said, "because they are true, or because you wrote them?"

I have set down everything in order and I will set down this. I opened my mouth to give him the distinction again, the cult and the cosmos, the god and the instrument. It is a true distinction. I believe it as I believe the Creed. I also know how convenient it is to a man who gave his youth and his Latin to one science and his age to a faith that might have asked him to give the science up. A sentence can be true and needed both, and a man who has lived on such a sentence cannot always tell which of the two he is holding.

"Write it down as a question," I said. "I have nothing to dictate after it."

He sat, and wrote it, in Latin, at the foot of the last sheet of the book against the gods, where it does not belong and where I have let it stand. Then he put the book of nativities back on the shelf beside the eight, not between them and not apart from them, and squared its edge with theirs, and trimmed both wicks of the lamp, and went home to his daughters.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Iūliō Firmicō Māternō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Julius Firmicus Maternus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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