VII. A Cosmological Tract by Pseudo-Dionysius in the Syriac Language

Extract

The small cosmological tract I here publish, and which is attributed to Dionysius, Bishop of Athens, I have taken from the MS. marked 7192 Rich., now Add. 7192, of the British Museum. This is a MS. in quarto on vellum, containing not more than seventy-six folios, and belongs probably, so far as we can judge from the good esṭrangĕlô character in which it is written, to the eighth century. The treatise begins on f. 57c—there are two columns of thirty-one lines on every page—and ends on f. 63b at the bottom. It is followed by another tract from the hand of the same author—the contents and the style, and especially the concluding lines which are nearly identical to the last ones of the tract we publish, at least point to the same author—that bears the following inscription:

It is an anti-astrological and anti-magical tract, as it undertakes to demonstrate that divination by means of the “stars, the zodiacal signs, the horoscopes, the fortunes, the chances, the hours, the convulsions, the auguries, the divinations, and all the deception of the Chaldæans, sons of deception” is not to be relied upon, and is contradictory to the facts that daily observation affords us.