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When Jerome Cardan asserted that the breach of Henry VIII with Rome was caused by the conjunction of Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury in the constellation of Aries in 1533,l he was doing his utmost to offer an interpretation of the historical event in terms of an astrological doctrine of conjunctions which by then had become commonplace. Imported into Christian Europe with the writings of decidedly unchristian astrologersnotably Abu Macshar (Albumasar)the doctrine offered simple procedures for deciding the fortunes of churches and religions on the strength of conjunctions of the superior planets, in particular of Saturn and Jupiter. This was an idea which many who were unschooled in the higher reaches of astrology felt they could grasp, and one which lent itself to the support of much religious prophecy, sometimes restrained, often wild, but usually comprehensible. I shall indicate its chief sources, and some of the ways in which it was developed to serve religious ends, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was still taken seriously in certain university circles, I should add, at the end of the seventeenth century. I do not know who was the last notable theologian to give the idea credence, but I shall end with an account of Pic0 della Mirandola's critique of it. When a religious event is correlated with a particular planetary conjunction only after the whole thing has happened, there is a sense of anticlimax, if not of plain deceit. The writings to which I shall refer can at best serve as sources of ecclesiastical history of a rather low grade.Centrale Interfaculteit, Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen, Westersingel 19, Holland. I should like to thank Mrs Kate Larsen for the preparation of the diagram and the typescript of the article: Mrs Else Lehrnann for typing the notes; and colleagues at the University of Arhus for discussion of several of the points raised in my contribution.

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Digital crimes are a part of modern life but evidence of these crimes can be captured in network traffic data logs.Analysing these logs is a difficult process, this is especially true as the format that different attacks can take can vary tremendously and may be unknown at the time of the analysis. The main objective of the field of network forensics consists of gathering ev idence of illegal acts from a networking infrastructure. Therefore, software tools, and techniques, that can help with these digital investigations are in great demand. In this paper, an approach to analysing and visualising network traffic data based upon the use of self-organising maps (SOM) is presented. The self-organising map has been widely used in clustering tasks in the literature;it can enable network clusters to be created and visualised in a manner that makes them immediately more intuitive and understandable and can be performed on high-dimensional input data, transforming this into a much lower dimensional space.In order to show the usefulness of this approach, the self organising map has been applied to traffic data, for use as a tool in network forensics. Moreover, the proposed SOM takes into account the qualitative features that are present in the traffic data, in addition to the quantitative features. The traffic data was was clustered and visualised and the results were then analysed.The results demonstrate that this technique can be used to aid in the comprehension of digital forensics and to facilitate the search for anomalous behaviour in the network environment.

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