The zany story of the courthouse zodiac

By Robert J. Brink

I recently read a quirky 1939 story from the old Boston Daily Globe regarding a controversy involving the fortune-telling signs of the zodiac, which, oddly, had been engraved as symbols of justice on the façade of the “new” Suffolk County Courthouse, completed only a year earlier in Pemberton Square.

On viewing friezes of Libra, Taurus, Scorpio, Gemini and other soothsaying symbols orbiting the second-floor walls of the courthouse, a Medford High School math teacher was piqued by the placement of the horoscope on the new home of the Supreme Judicial Court, the Social Law Library and various trial courts — guardians of our government of laws, but not guarantors of cosmic justice.

The math teacher’s concerns about the zodiac looking down from the sides and back of the building caught the architects by surprise.

Unfortunately, they confessed, there was not much they could do about reworking the granite-embedded symbols that could be taken to suggest that lawyers and litigants should check their daily horoscopes before entering the halls of justice.

Libra’s iconic scales

Even so, the central element of one astrological sign — Libra’s iconic scales — has evolved into an ubiquitous symbol of justice since the zodiac apparently first appeared in Mesopotamian times.

In former ages, scales were exceptional instruments of advanced technology that not only provided accurate measurements to set fees for common items of everyday trade, but served as trusted devices used to settle disputes impartially.

Scales were so special and so scarce that they were secured in the custody of official keepers.

Co-opted scales

As scales connoted accuracy and authority, they were co-opted by all manner of religious and secular authorities as symbols that their decisions and dictates were fair and impartial.

Indeed, the Babylonian sun god Shamash was sometimes shown holding scales.  As the tale is told, he anointed the famed code-giver, Hammurabi, as the “king of justice, to whom the god Shamash has granted [insight into] the truth.”

Doubtless, the zodiac is an unusual and incongruous motif for a courthouse. The Magistrates Chamber in the Amsterdam Town Hall, circa 1655, stands out as the sole example mentioned in “Representing Justice,” an encyclopedia of courthouse iconography from ancient times to the present.

Notwithstanding such overreaching symbolism, however, scales actually measured only small amounts of physical matter and obviously provided humankind with no factual insight into the way the world really worked.

Hence, astrology and its superstitious kin were ascendant for millennia as prime sources of common, but misbegotten, knowledge and beliefs.

Science and law vs. superstition

As Will Durant told in his classic multi-volume work, “The Story of Civilization,” it was not until the Age of Reason in the 16th and 17th centuries that science started to challenge mankind’s deceiving “jungle” of “magic powers and mystic hopes.”

Astrology topped Durant’s list of superstitions, followed by numerology, palmistry, portents, the evil eye, witches, goblins, ghosts and other quackery, too.

For ages, torture-induced witchcraft confessions in both old and New England trumped reason in the law as trusted ways to discover truth.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1621) is universally recognized as the man who, it was memorably said, did “ring the bell” of reason that would reverberate for successive generations ever after.

His great work, “Novum Organum” (translated as “new instrument of science”), directly challenged superstition with a new path of inductive knowledge gleaned from hypotheses tested by systematic experimentation.

Bacon’s contemporary, the great jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), also rang the bell of reason when he refuted the implications of King James I’s imaginary claim of Divine Right, a commonly believed and obeyed article of faith.

In 1603, the king asserted that he had the right to decide any case before the courts by his divine self. As he infamously said, a king, like God, “hath power to create or destroy, make or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all and to be judged nor accountable to none.”

Sitting as chief justice, Coke defied such heavenly claims with this face-to-face rejoinder: “that the King in his own person cannot adjudge any case … but that this ought to be determined and adjudged in some Court of Justice, according to the law and custom of England.”

For Coke, the king was neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Neither was Parliament, a body of men Coke deemed “of none or very little judgment in law.”

In oft-quoted dicta that contributed to the doctrine of judicial review, Coke declared in Dr. Bohham’s Case (1610) that “when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it, and adjudge the Act to be void.”

It has been said that Coke’s contributions to the modern development of constitutionalism — most notably the foregoing notions of judicial independence and judicial review — were on a par with his fellow Shakespeare’s contemporaneous contributions to literature.

For our story on the courthouse zodiac, even Shakespeare’s plays recognized the power struggle between astrology and reason to win hearts and minds.

Poor Romeo and Juliet, after all, were “two star crossed lovers” helpless to alter their tragic fate.

But, in timeless words that test every generation, Cassius in “Julius Caesar” didn’t blame his horoscope: “The fault, Dear Brutus, in not in our stars, but in ourselves … .”

Two ironies

There are two ironies regarding this zany little story of the zodiac on the courthouse walls.

The first flows from the fact that John Adams was a great admirer of Lord Coke.  He took Coke’s convictions to heart, incorporating them into his draft of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.

Indeed, Coke’s interlocking principles of an independent judiciary and the supremacy of law are at the core of Adams’ inspiring words, found in Article XXX of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, that ours is “a government of laws and not of men,” a phrase favorably quoted by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison as the purpose of judicial review.

Sometimes individuals and institutions that strive to be the best they can be do so by remembering that they have not always been so.

Toward that end, the public exhibit of Sacco and Vanzetti in the John Adams Courthouse examines a low point in Massachusetts judicial history, one that prompts those who pass it by to rise above prejudice.

Likewise, the zodiac might ironically be seen as a similar reminder that justice is not found in the stars (or in the spectral evidence of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials) but in Adams’ government of laws.

The second irony is that the Medford High teacher who created the 1939 ruckus over the zodiac was not vexed by the implications of its inapposite symbolism.

Rather, his concern was that the architect had placed the heavenly constellations around the courthouse in the opposite direction from their astrological counterparts, thought since ancient times to circle the heavens in a set counter-clockwise pattern.

Could the misdirected zodiac jinx the true course of justice?

It may still be wise to wish on your lucky stars whenever entering court.

Robert J. Brink is executive director of the Social Law Library.