"Generation goeth and generation cometh," says Ecclesiastes,
"while for ever the earth abideth. The sun riseth also and the
sun goeth down and cometh panting back to his place where he
riseth." . . . The early dawn, the time of scarlet eyes, was also
when the caravan would be attacked. However, to this day the
rising sun is worshipped by the Bedawi, despite the prohibition
of Mahomet and despite the Moslem dictum that the sun rises
between the devil's horns. Now the divinity of the stars
(_quatrain_ 4) had been affirmed by Plato and Aristotle; it was
said that in the heavenly bodies dwelt a ruling intelligence
superior to man's, and more lasting.[2] And in Islam, whose holy
house, the Kaaba, had traditionally been a temple of Saturn, we
notice that the rationalists invariably connect their faith with
the worship of Venus and other heavenly bodies. We are told by
ash-Shahrastani, in his _Book of Religious and Philosophical
Sects_, that the Indians hold Saturn for the greatest luck, on
account of his height and the size of his body. But such was not
Abu'l-Ala's opinion. "As numb as Saturn," he writes in one of his
letters,[3] "and as dumb as a crab has every one been struck by
you." Elsewhere he says in verse:

If dark the night, old Saturn is a flash
Of eyes which threaten from a face of ash.

And the worship of Saturn, with other deities, is about a hundred
years later resented by Clotilda, says Gregory of Tours, when she
is moving Chlodovich her husband to have their son baptized. When
the little boy dies soon after baptism, the husband does not fail
to draw a moral. But misfortunes, in the language of an Arab