The
foundation of this opinion is accounted for by Mark Ficimis as
follows:--There is a year, he tells us, assigned for each planet to rule
over the body of a man, each of his turn; now Saturn being the most
_maleficient_ (malignant) planet of all, every seventh year, which
falls to its lot, becomes very dangerous; especially those of
sixty-three and eighty-four, when the person is already advanced in
years. According to this doctrine, some hold every seventh year an
established climacteric; but others only allow the title to those
produced by multiplication of the climacterical space by an odd number,
3, 5, 7, 9, &c. Others observe every ninth year as a climacteric.
Climacteric years are pretended, by some, to be fatal to political
bodies, which, perhaps, may be granted, when they are proved to be so
more than to natural ones; for it must be obvious that the reason of
such danger can by no means be discovered, nor the relation it can have
with any other of the numbers above mentioned.
Though this opinion has a great deal of antiquity on its side; Aulus
Gellius says--it was borrowed from the Chaldeans, who possibly might
receive it from Pythagoras, whose philosophy teemed much in numbers, and
who imagined a very extraordinary virtue in the number 7.
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