Jacques Gaffarel

Who was Jacques Gaffarel?

Jacques Gaffarel was a French scholar and astrologer. He followed the family tradition of studying medicine, and then became a priest, but mainly developed his interests in the fields of natural history and Oriental occultism, gaining fluency in the Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic languages.

His most famous work is Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, horoscope des Patriarches et lecture des estoiles, which was published in French in 1629. Jewish astrology developed independently from the mythology and star-gazing of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations. Gaffarel included in his work two large folding plates of "the Celestial Constellations expressed by Hebrew characters", and asserted that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet could be interpreted from the constellations and that the heavens could be read as if a book.

The book enjoyed phenomenal success. René Descartes read this work with interest and the French physician and mathematician Pierre Gassendi defended it. Unheard-of Curiosities was one of 1,500 books in the Library of Sir Thomas Browne and one of the varied sources of his encyclopaedia entitled Pseudodoxia Epidemica.