Mazzaroth: Or, the Constellations

p. 1. MOST persons have been taught the names and figures of the signs of the zodiac. Many have been repelled by the explanations usually given of these and the other constellations; and it has been proposed to substitute a kind of survey of the heavens, where lines and angles should take the place of the traditional figures. Should this alteration be adopted, the message these figures were intended to transmit will not be less impressive when the types in which it was conveyed are not longer made subservient to the purposes of practical astronomy; especially as through being thus used the forms of the emblems are already disguised and modernized, and new figures, the most incongruous and absurd, have been intruded among them, while the names of the stars are becoming continually more corrupted.      The object of this work is to show, by the combined testimony of tradition and of ancient writers, and from the meaning of the yet extant ancient names of stars and emblems...

p. 9. THE antiquity and wide diffusion of these emblems, and the mystic veneration in which they were ever held, are traced in the accompanying pages: it is also shown that the notion of the signs having any reference to the seasons is of comparatively late origin, and could not at any time have been sustained consistently with the times and climates of their well-known previous existence. 1 .      It was not till the diffusion of the light of Christianity had cast into shade these dim foreshowings of its great events, that the vague awe with which these emblems were formerly regarded gave place to indifference and neglect, or was only preserved in the reveries of astrology. This reverence 2 , in some cases leading even to idolatry, indicated a tradition that their message was divine. They each represented an action, still to be traced in the fables connected with them 3 , a type, of which the true antitype is to be found in the great subject of the ancient prophecies ...