celestial matter and proposed three layers of earth, which corresponded in reverse order
to the three regions of the air. He criticized Ptolemy, rejected Cardan and Kepler, and
denied the existence of a vacuum and Toricelli’s proof thereof. He advocated the medi-
cine of Paracelsus and opposed the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus.
As a young child, when both his parents were sick, Morin was asked by his
older brother which parent he would prefer to survive. His preference was his father
(who eventually recovered), although he loved both parents. When his brother told
his mother what he had said, she hated him for the next two days before she died and
left him the minimum required by law.
It is not likely that his mother could have given him much even had she want-
ed to, as his parents had been reduced to poverty by the civil wars, plunder, pillage,
lawsuits, and calamities that marked the era of his birth. Because of trying times, his
education was interrupted for 10 years.
In Astrologia Gallica,Morin wrote: “Each planet in the XII house [he had five
if Venus was included, a mere 2° into the XIth] portends a prison cell.” Further, “Of
this, the course of my youth alone could hardly give more striking confirmation, due
to my love of vengeance and pleasures of the flesh.” Yet his “prison cells” were
metaphorical, he was not imprisoned, but he did suffer servitude. From age of 16 to 46,
he worked for 16 masters and had poor relations with them all. Morin characterized
his relations with his employers as, “thankless servitude and injurious masters.” Even
though he saved the life of one of them by performing an operation no other doctor
would have attempted, his employer showed him “monstrous ingratitude.” He com-
plained that his life was a litany of blasphemy against him by an army of detractors.
Just as his parents seem to have been poor, so was Morin. He wrote that he suf-
fered repeated bouts of chronic illness and faced violent death more than 16 times. In
spite of ill health, he lived to 73 years of age. Notwithstanding the enmity he faced,
several times in his life he had the love and support of eminent persons, including
kings, queens, princes, and cardinals. From 1635 to 1654, he had to fight to offset his
detractors’ assaults. During this period he developed a method of determining longi-
tudes as sea using the distance of the Moon from a fixed star.
Religiously, Morin was an avid Roman Catholic. He defended Catholicism
against the Hussites, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Yet Cardinal Richelieu treated him
shamefully, he complained. Morin did not like atheists. He attacked the humanist
Pico della Mirandola, who had attacked astrology in his Disputationes contra astrolo-
giam divinatricem(1496).
By his own admission, Morinus was fond of “the pleasures of the flesh.” His
adventures occasionally led to danger, as, for instance, in 1605. In a fight over a
woman, he was wounded just below the heart and in the thigh. In true French style,
he lost a great deal of blood and only avoided fainting by drinking six cups of wine.
Morin was the author of a number of books. His astrological doctrine is most
fully set forth in his monumental 850-page Astrologia Gallicawhich was not published
until five years after his death. It is in that book that a great deal of autobiographical
information about Morin appears.
THEASTROLOGYBOOK [465]
Morin, Jean-Baptiste (Morinus)