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Know all the canons of astronomy, but leave judicial astrology and the Art of Lullius alone as abuses and vanities.
there were gathered together four of the most learned and obese members
Where the controversy was patently easy to determine you have obscured it with the daft and unreasonable reasons and irrelevant opinions of Accursius, Baldus, Bartolus, Castro, Imola, Hippolytus, Panormitanus, Bertachinus, Alexander, Curtius and other old curs who have never understood the least law of the Pandects.
since the laws are rooted in the contexts of moral and natural philosophy, how on earth can those fools understand them, having gone less into philosophy, by God, than my mule!
‘You’re ill, Panurge, as I can tell from your physiognomy. And I understand your malady: you have diarrhoea of the purse. But don’t worry: I still have sixpence farthing which have never known father or mother and which will no more let you down in your need than the pox.’
those pardoners gave it to me when they said, as they offered me their relics to kiss, “Thou shalt receive an hundredfold” – that is, for one coin I may take a hundred. – For “Thou shalt receive” was spoken after the manner of the Hebrews who use the future for the imperative, as in the Law Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve, and Thou shalt love thy neighbour;78 in other cases too. Therefore, whenever a pardoner said to me, “Thou shalt receive an hundredfold,” he meant “Receive an hundredfold”.
want to dispute by signs alone with no talking, for the matters are so arduous that no words of Man would be adequate to settle them to my satisfaction.
‘But,’ he said, ‘can you make an equivocation out of Buckingham Fair?’ ‘I’ve no idea!’ she said. ‘It’s Fucking ‘em bare,’ he said.
‘Well now,’ said Panurge, ‘is your flatulence so fruitful! Here by God are some fine old male down-at-heels and some fine female farts. We must marry them together and they’ll beget gadflies.’
That din did awaken the enemy, but can you guess how? They were as heavy as that first bell of mattins which the men of Luçon call Scratch-your-balls!
you are the Almighty who, in your own proper concern where your own proper cause is drawn into action, can defend yourself far more than we can estimate, you who have a thousand thousands of hundreds of millions of legions of angels, the least of whom could kill all human beings and spin Heaven and Earth at his pleasure, as was made most manifest in the army of Sennacherib.
vow to you that, throughout all the lands in Utopia or elsewhere where I shall have power or authority, I will cause your holy Gospel to be preached purely, simply and entirely, so that the abuses of a load of bacon-pappers and false prophets who have poisoned the whole world with their human doctrines and their depraved novelties shall be banished from about me.’
What one single angel of God can do unaided by men was shown by the slaughter of the entire host of Sennacherib (II Kings 19:35, Isaiah 37:36, II Maccabees 15:22, and I Maccabees 7:41).
Medieval tales recount several resurrections. Descents into Hell are common in popular religious stories.
Where the damned were concerned, he said he bitterly regretted that Panurge had summoned him back to life so soon, ‘For,’ he said, ‘looking at them afforded me a singularly pleasurable pastime.’ ‘How was that?’ asked Pantagruel. ‘They’re not treated as badly as you might expect,’ said Epistemon: it’s their situations which are altered in an outlandish fashion: for I saw: Alexander the Great eking out a wretched living by patching up old breeches. Xerxes was a mustard vendor; [Romulus, a salt-merchant; Numa made nails; Tarquin was a tar quean; Piso, a peasant;
Sylla, a river-man; Cyrus, a cow-man; Themistocles, a glass-peddler; Epaminondas, a maker of looking-glasses; Brutus and Cassius, land-surveyors; Demosthenes, a vigneron; Cicero, a fire-raiser; Fabius, a stringer of rosary-beads; Artaxerxes, a rope-maker; Aeneas, a miller; Achilles, a dyer; Agamemnon, a licker-out of casseroles; Ulysses, a scyther; Nestor, a rag-and-bone man;] Darius, a cleaner of latrines; [Ancus Martius, a bit of a caulker; Camillus, a maker of galoshes; Marcellus, a shucker of beans: Drusus, an almond-crusher;] Scipio Africanus, a peddler of wine-lees in a wooden clog.
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[Trajan was a catcher of frogs; Antoninus, a lackey; Commodus, an ornamentalist in jet; Pertinax, a sheller of walnuts; Lucullus, a meat-griller; Justinian, a seller of knick-knacks, Hector, a stir-sauce; Paris, a tattered beggar; Achilles, a baler-up of hay; Cambyses, a mule-driver; Artaxerxes, a skimmer of scum from off cooking-pots;]
Pope Sixtus, a greaser of syphilitic sores.’ ‘What!’ said Pantagruel. ‘Are there syphilitics in that other world?’ ‘Indeed there are,’ said Epistemon. ‘I never saw so many. Over a hundred million. For you should believe that those who don’t catch the pox in this world will do so in the next.’
‘In such ways, those who had been great lords in this world earned a poor, wretched, nasty living there below. Philosophers, on the contrary, and those who had been indigent in this world had their turn at being fat lords in that world beyond. ‘I saw Diogenes, in a large purple robe, a sceptre [in his right hand], parading magnificently about like a prelate and driving Alexander the Great to distraction for having failed properly to patch his breeches; he paid him for it with great thwacks from his stick.
Having considered the infinite deceptions perpetrated by means of a mass of Prognostications from Louvain – made in the shadow of a glass of vin – I have here calculated one for you which is the truest and surest that has ever been seen, as experience will prove to you.
Louvain, same as Leuven, city in Belgium.
say no more than what I think, and think no more than what is:
Anything said over and above that will be sifted this way and that through my coarse riddle and perhaps may happen or perhaps may not.4 I do warn you of one thing, however: if you fail to believe it all, you are doing me a bad turn for which you will be punished here or hereafter!5 So now, my little lads, wipe your noses, adjust your glasses, and weigh well these words.
No matter what you are told by those idiotic astrologers of Louvain, Nuremberg, Tübingen and Lyons, you must never believe that there will ever be any other Governor of the entire world this year but God the Creator,
Lyon is Nostradamus?
This year there will be an eclipse of the Moon on the fourth day of August.9 Saturn will be retrograde; Venus, direct; Mercury, variable. And a mass of other planets will not proceed as they used to.10 As a result, crabs this year will walk sideways, rope-makers work backwards, stools end up on benches, and pillows be found at the foot of the bed;11 many men’s bollocks will hang down for lack of a game-bag;12 the belly will go in front and the bum be the first to sit down; nobody will find the bean in their Twelfth Night cake; not one ace will turn up in a flush; the dice will never do what
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Old age will prove incurable this year because of the years gone by.
there will all but universally reign an illness most horrible, redoubtable, malignant, perverse, frightening and nasty which will so confuse everybody that they will never know what wood to use for their arrows, and will often madly write treatises in which they argue about the philosopher’s stone;19 Averroës (in Book Seven of the Colliget) calls it Shortage of cash.
The greatest madness in the world is to think that there are stars and comets for kings, popes and great noblemen rather than for the poor and the needy, as though fresh ones had been created since the times of the Flood or of Romulus or Pharamond, when kings were newly invented.
Holding therefore for certain that the heavenly bodies care as little about kings as beggars or about the rich as vagabonds, I will leave it to those other foolish prognosticators to talk of the kings and the rich whilst I shall talk of the condition of folk of low estate.
Nuns will find it very difficult to conceive without the ministrations of a male, and hardly any virgins will lactate.
Apropos: you will find in this season half as many flowers again as in the other three.
And that man will be reputed no fool who, throughout this year, provides himself with money rather than spiders.
Trust this reporter.39
I moisten. I humidify. I drink lest I die.
If I drink not, I dry out. And there I am, dead. My soul will scamper off to some frog-pond or other. In the arid can no soul abide.
Contra Heraclitus
Our great God rules the welkin, and we rule the firkin; – I have God’s word in my mouth: I thirst.
And He hath poured it out from this into that.
Drink up, Breton-fashion! – Polish off this nippitate. – Swallow it down: it’s an herbal cure.’
I doubt whether you assuredly believe that strange nativity. If you do not believe it, I really don’t care, but a proper man, a man of good sense, always believes what he is told and what he finds written down. Does not Solomon say (Proverbs I), ‘The simple believeth every word,’ and Saint Paul (I Corinthians 13), ‘Charity believeth all things.’
certain Scotist doctors alleged that his mother breast-fed him and that she could draw from her bosom on each occasion fourteen hundred tuns of milk [plus six quarts]. Which is unlikely, and condemned by the Sorbonne as [mammalarily] scandalous, offensive to pious ears and redolent from afar of heresy).
In Plato’s Symposium (or Banquet) Aristophanes playfully suggests that the first human beings were created double then split into two. A man and a woman truly love when they find their ‘better half’. The androgyne was found by some in Genesis 1:27.
The Fuggers of Augsburg were a family of great bankers.]
For his gown were cut two-thirds of an ell short of nine thousand six hundred ells of blue velvet (as above) all embroidered in unravelled gold-thread forming diagonals which, when you looked at them from a particular angle, radiated a colour which has no name, such as you can see on the necks of doves, which marvellously rejoiced the eyes of those who contemplated it.
as the proverb puts it, A besquittered bum in shit abounds:
save the moon from baying wolves,
As Rabelais retells the tale, the bells are delivered back in the presence of real people: the Provost of Paris was probably Jean de la Barre (who died in 1534), who was also bailiff of the University with wide disciplinary powers.]
The name of the ‘learned physician… Seraphin Calobarsy’ is an anagram of Phrançois Rabelais,
That Rabelais can claim friendship with Janus Lascaris is revealing. Lascaris, a refugee from Constantinople, taught Budé Greek and helped Erasmus with his Adages. He had contacts at the highest level in France and Italy. He died in 1534.
Alpharbal, King of Cararre, not satisfied with his good fortune, madly invaded the lands of Aunis, acting the pirate amongst all the islands of Armorica and the neighbouring regions.
Joyce’s Amorica
Marguerite was a platonizing, mystical, evangelical Christian, attracted by the mystical philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus (taken by many to be a contemporary of Moses):
Jesus of Nazareth,
Jeep-Chevy of Naz
