Plants, stars, and botonical enmity

O Crollius in his 1624 treatise on “signatures” compared stars and plants: “The stars are the matrix of all the plants and every star in the sky is only the spiritual prefiguration of a plant, such that it represents that plant, and just as each herb or plant is a terrestrial star looking up at the sky, so also each star is a celestial plant in spiritual form, which differs from the terrestrial plants in matter alone . . . , the celestial plants and herbs are turned towards the earth and look directly down the plants they have procreated, imbuing them with some particular virtue.”

And in 1656, J Cardan said that “It is fairly widely known that the plants have hatreds between themselves . . . it is said that the olive and the vine hate the cabbage; the cucumber flies from the olive . . . Since they grow by means of the sun’s warmth and the earth’s humour, it is inevitable that any thick and opaque tree should be pernicious to the others, and also the tree that has several roots.”

Cardan saw similar antipathy among animals: “The rat of India is pernicious to the crocodile, since Nature has created them enemies; in such wise that when that violent reptile takes his pleasure in the sun, the rat lays an ambush for it of mortal subtlety; perceiving that the crocodile, lying unaware for delight, is sleeping with its jaws agape, it makes its way through them and slips down the wide throat into the crocodile’s belly, gnawing through the entrails of which, it emerges at last from the slain beast’s belly.”