Astrology, like astronomy, has passed through successive stages. It began at zero. An unexpected event in the heavens was accounted portentous, because it was unexpected, and it was interpreted in a good or bad sense according to the state of mind of the beholder. There can have been at first no system, no order, no linking up of one specific kind of prediction with one kind of astronomical event. It can have been originally nothing but a crude jumble of omens, just on a level with the superstitions of some of our peasantry as to seeing hares, or cats, or magpies; and the earliest astrological tablets from Mesopotamia are precisely of this character. But the official fortune-tellers at the courts of the kings of Nineveh or Babylon must speedily have learned the necessity of arranging some systems of prediction for their own protection--systems definite enough to give the astrologer a groundwork for a prediction which he could claim was dependent simply upon the heavenly bodies, and hence for which the astrologer could not be held personally responsible, and at the same time elastic enough to enable him to shape his prediction to fit in with his patron's wishes. The astrology of to-day shows the same essential features. This necessity explains the early Babylonian tablets with catalogues of eclipses on all days of the month, and in all quarters of the sky. The great majority of the eclipses could never happen, but they could be, none-the-less, made use of by a court magician. If an eclipse of the sun took place on the 29th day and in the south, he could always point out how exceedingly unpleasant things might have been for the king and the country if he, the magician, had not by his diligence, prevented its happening, say, on the 20th, and in the north. A Zulu witch-doctor is quite equal to analogous subterfuges to-day, and no doubt his Babylonian congeners were not less ingenious 3,000 years ago. Such subterfuges were not always successful when a Chaka or a Nebuchadnezzar had to be dealt with, but with kings of a more ordinary type either in Zululand or Mesopotamia they would answer well enough.