Goethe's autobiography commences with these words:
On the 29th of August, 1749, at midday, as the clock struck 12, I came into the world at Frankfort-on-the-Main. My horoscope was propitious: the Sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked on him with a friendly eye and Mercury not adversely, while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the Moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more as she had then reached her planetary hour. She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this hour was passed. These good aspects, which the astrologers managed subsequently to reckon very auspicious for me, may have been the causes of my preservation; for, through the unskillfulness of the midwife, I came into the world as dead, and only after various efforts was I enabled to see the light.
This mighty intellect, representing, according to Madame de Staël, in himself alone the whole of German literature, whose knowledge, insight, sensibility, and imagination were so extraordinary as to elevate him for all time to the highest rank, appears to have been somewhat under the influence of that belief in astrology which, from earliest ages, had dominated the human mind, and from which, at the date of his birth, even the most enlightened, with comparatively few exceptions, had not been emancipated. For there was scarcely an extraordinary character in antiquity who did not believe in astrology. Hippocrates and Galen,—the first names in medicine,—Pythagoras, Democritus, and Thales gave it credit. Hippocrates said in substance that a physician who was ignorant of astrology deserved to be called a fool rather than a physician; and Galen, that no man should "trust himself to that physician, or rather pretender, who is not skilled in astrology." In China, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome it was universally accepted, while Chaldea was the center of its power.
