*(Note: This issue appeared January 14 and is re-posted here for your amusement while I take a week off to get caught up on some personal business. Meanwhile, get set for next week’s edition featuring one of America’s founders who was also America’s most evil traitor. It’s an incredible story!)
There’s probably no way for most of us to make sense of the Universe. Not that we haven’t tried. However, after long centuries of being amazed by it, we can finally understand our solar system.
Sort of.
Over the past hundred thousand years or more, we humans have looked at the sky and tried to figure out why sun rises in a different place every day or why the moon disappears each month or why stars go one way and planets sometimes go the other or why a constellation that came up just ahead of the sun for two thousand years slowly got replaced by the constellation just behind it. Great minds like Kepler and Copernicus and Newton came along much later to nail all that it down for us. Not that we gave it much thought.
But for many millennia, those observations were not the stuff of trivia. They were important messages from Heaven itself that had to be understood and remembered. And passed along to succeeding generations.
Ancient peoples saw all these wonders and made up stories about them which we call myths. They made up stories because they didn’t have writing and weren’t able to transmit their observations to future generations otherwise. Furthermore, these stories had to be not only colorful but demonstrably insane fabrications. That made them easy to remember from one generation to the next, not as mere mechanical descriptions of objects moving above the earth. Nobody, without having it written down, would otherwise be able to remember such things. So the stories were pretty much off-the-wall nuts.
That’s why mythology is so weird and the various “gods” so nasty and unpredictably crazy and why they do such murderously outlandish things.
An easy example of this would be the constellation of Orion, The Hunter, which looks somewhat like a giant figure in the night sky. To the ancient Greeks, he was Hephaestus and to the Romans, Vulcan. Both were considered to be the god of the forge and of volcanoes.
So when they saw the planet Mars approach the planet Venus not far from Orion they made up a little story by which to remember it. According to the tale, Venus was the wife of Vulcan and was having an affair with Mars and Vulcan forged a fine metal net which he cast over the two adulterers, trapping them. The net was the small constellation of the Pleiades.
Moreover, this same Orion was seen all around the entire Earth so that different peoples interpreted the same figure in very much the same way but with aspects of their own cultures attached. To the American plains Indians, for example, he was “Long Sash,” the hunter with his bow pulled back. To the Polynesians, he was the great fisherman, casting his net.
You get the idea.
Keep in mind the fact that these ancient, pre-literate people had no telescopes or astrolabes or even sextants but relied solely on observing the horizon and noting the appearances and disappearances of the sun, moon and planetary “gods” above and below that horizon. The horizon was the only astronomical tool they needed.
Ancient people had no way of knowing that Earth was not the center of the Universe. In the early childhood of humanity it was plainly obvious to everybody that the sun and planets revolved around us and that the stars were fixed points of light on a rotating dome. This “dome” rotated 360 (+ -) degrees every year so that it wound up where it started and then began the cycle all over again with everything reassuringly in place, just like always.
The sky was divided into 12 sections, each stretching 30 degrees, each section being named for one of the constellations. The particular constellation that rose with the sun on the Spring Equinox every year gave its name to the “world age”.
To the ancients, this was permanent. It was unchangeable. It was fixed forever and was forever immutable.
Only it wasn’t!
After many hundreds of years of observing the horizon, ancient priests and astronomers began to notice something terrible was happening. The Zodiacal constellation which had risen with the sun for 2,000 years had moved on and was being replaced by the one just behind it on the Zodiacal circle.
Good Lord! How could that be?
It could only mean one thing: that the whole dome of Heaven was not locked in place but was moving! To them it was as if the sky itself was falling, that if Heaven were not fixed and permanent then all bets were off regarding the future of mankind. This didn’t happen overnight, obviously, but over a long stretch of time, dutifully recorded in myths around the world. This knowledge had to be closely guarded by the priests and astronomers to keep the masses from turning them out and wrecking the “world order” in fits of mass hysteria.
Every 2,160 years there would be a new constellation rising at the Spring Equinox. This is called the “precession of the equinoxes”. And if you multiply 2,160 years by the 12 Zodiacal sections you get the figure of 25,920 years. The Greek philosopher, Plato, recognized this and wrote about it so we refer to this great circle as a “Platonic Year.”
This kind of observation requires a steadfast diligence almost unknown today. It consisted of people verbally passing down the record of the sky in storied myth from generation to generation for 60 or more generations!
Keeping this knowledge “under wraps” was serious business long ago because the priest/astronomers feared that if the masses got wind of it they would revolt in revenge against them for dislodging Heaven. In some cases, the penalty for revealing this awareness was death.
Nowadays, people no longer believe in the end of the world. Such hysteria is just a thing of the pre-literate, unsophisticated past.
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