James Gaffarel (1601-1681) was a French scholar of Hebrew and astrology who was appointed as librarian to Cardinal Richlieu. He proposed in his Unheard-of Curiosities (English translation 1650) that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet could be read in the night-sky. Using the stars as a form of geomatria and an alternative to the Babylonian-Greek circle of animals or Zodiac.
Gaffarel's Kabbalistic astrology was of sufficient interest to Sir Thomas Browne to introduce the word 'cryptography' into the English language in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. He also alludes to Gaffarel in the opening paragraph of chapter three of The Garden of Cyrus
Could we satisfie ourselves in the position of the lights above, or discover the wisdom of that order so invariably maintained in the fixed Stars of heaven; Could we have any light, why the stellary part of the first mass, separated into this order, that the Girdle of Orion should ever maintain its line, and the two Starres in Charles's Wain never leave pointing at the Pole-Star, we might abate the Pythagoricall Musick of the Spheres, the sevenfold Pipe of Pan; and the strange Cryptography of Gaffarell in his Starrie Booke of Heaven.
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