“Know, then, that in fact, everything that happens down here among humans in the order of external things is figured on the surface of all the spheres that circulate in the heavens, and that everything that humans operate with so much care, so much importance and so much pride has been represented since the beginning of time on the envelope of those same spheres, which are veritably covered in all those signs, as your skin is covered with little wrinkles and little stars whose arrangement and symmetry is infinitely variable. All the marvels of which humans boast on earth, therefore, ought no longer to flatter their self-esteem, since they are not their inventors, and they are only repeating in a servile and mechanical manner what the surfaces of the heavenly bodies imprint on them as they pass over them.”

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798