To observe the course of the stars throughout eternity may appear to us a desperately monotonous occupation, a rather unenviable beatitude. For the stars, shorn of their divinity, are for us no more than gaseous or solid bodies circulating in space, and we analyse with the spectroscope their chemical composition. But the ancients felt otherwise: they describe with singular eloquence the “cosmic emotion” which seized them as they contemplated their southern skies—their soul was ravished, borne on the wings of enthusiasm into the midst of the dazzling gods which from the earth had been descried throbbing in the radiance of the ether. These mystic transports were compared by them to Dionysiac intoxication; an “abstemious drunkenness”[532] raised man to the stars and kindled in him an impassioned ardour for divine knowledge. And as the exaltation produced by the vapours of wine gave to the mystics of Bacchus a foretaste of the joyous inebriation promised to them in the Elysian banquet, so the ecstasy which uplifted him who contemplated the celestial gods caused him to feel the happiness of another life while he was yet here below.[533] “I know,” says an epigram of Ptolemy himself,[534] “I know that I am mortal, born for a day, but when I follow the serried crowd of the stars in their circular course my feet touch the earth no longer: I go to Zeus himself and sate myself with ambrosia, the food of the gods.” In the same way the intoxication produced by music, the divine possession which purified man by detaching him from material cares, caused him to taste for an instant the felicity which would fill his whole being when he should harken to the sweet harmony produced by the rotation of the spheres, the celestial concert which the ears of mortals are incapable of hearing, as their eyes cannot bear the brilliance of the sun. Men’s instruments could cause the perception of only a weak echo of these delightful chords, but they awoke in the soul a passionate desire for heaven, where the unspeakable joy produced by the cosmic symphony would be felt.