Note 218 — Chapter VI · Magic Rites as affecting the Life of Man (continued 3)

But by far the largest class of divinatory rites consists of astrological calculations based on the supposed values of times and seasons, or the properties of numbers. For the purposes of the native astrologer, exhaustive tables of lucky and unlucky times and seasons have been compiled, which are too long to be all examined here in detail, but of which specimens will be found in the Appendix. Few of them are likely to be original productions, most, if not all, being undoubtedly translated from similar books in vogue either in India or Arabia. Besides these tables, however, use is frequently made of geometrical (and even of natural) diagrams, to the more important parts of which certain numerical values are assigned.218