Fingerprints of the Gods
night and day are of equal length all over the planet. Once again,
however, as with the solstices, the date that marks the onset of spring in
the northern hemisphere (20 March) marks that of autumn in the
southern hemisphere, and the date for the onset of autumn in the
northern hemisphere (22 September) marks the onset of spring in the
southern hemisphere.
Like the subtler variations of the seasons, all this is brought about by
the benevolent obliquity of the planet. The northern hemisphere’s
summer solstice falls at that point in the orbit when the North Pole is
aimed most directly towards the sun; six months later the winter solstice
marks that point when the North Pole is aimed most directly away from
the sun. And, logically enough, the reason that day and night are of
exactly equal length all over the planet on the spring and autumn
equinoxes is that these mark the two points when the earth’s axis of
rotation lies broadside-on to the sun.
Let us now take a look at a strange and beautiful phenomenon of
celestial mechanics.
This phenomenon is known as ‘the precession of the equinoxes’. It has
rigid and repetitive mathematical qualities that can be analysed and
predicted precisely. It is, however, extremely difficult to observe, and
even harder to measure accurately, without sophisticated
instrumentation.
In this, there may lie a clue to one of the great mysteries of the past.
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Chapter 29
The First Crack in an Ancient Code
The plane of the earth’s orbit, projected outwards to form a great circle
in the celestial sphere, is known as the ecliptic. Ringed around the
ecliptic, in a starry belt that extends approximately 7° north and south,
are the twelve constellations of the zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer,
Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces.
These constellations are irregular in size, shape and distribution.
Nevertheless (and one assumes by chance!) their spacing around the rim
of the ecliptic is sufficiently even to bestow a sense of cosmic order upon
the diurnal risings and settings of the sun.
To picture what is involved here, do the following: (1) mark a dot in the
centre of a blank sheet of paper; (2) draw a circle around the dot, about
half an inch away from it; (3) enclose that circle in a second, larger, circle.
The dot represents the sun. The smaller of the two concentric circles
represents the earth’s orbit. The larger circle represents the rim of the
ecliptic. Around the perimeter of this larger circle, therefore, you should
now draw twelve boxes, spacing them evenly, to represent the
constellations of the zodiac. Since there are 360° in a circle, each
constellation can be considered to occupy a space of 30° along the
ecliptic. The dot is the sun. The inner of the two concentric circles is the
earth’s orbit. We know that the earth travels on this orbit in an anticlockwise direction, from the west towards the east, and that every
twenty-four hours it also makes one complete rotation around its own
axis (again from the west towards the east).
From these two movements two illusions result:
1 Each day as the planet turns from west to east, the sun (which is of
course a fixed point) appears to ‘move’ across the sky from east to
west.
2 Roughly every thirty days, as the spinning earth journeys along its
orbital path around the sun, the sun itself slowly appears to ‘pass’
through one after another of the twelve zodiacal constellations (which
are also fixed points), and again it appears to be ‘moving’ in an eastwest direction.
On any particular day of the year, in other words, (corresponding on our
diagram to any point we care to choose around the inner concentric circle
marking the earth’s orbit), it is obvious that the sun will lie between an
observer on the earth and one of the twelve zodiacal constellations. On
that day what the observer will see, so long as he or she is up and about
well before dawn, is the sun rising in the east in the portion of the sky
occupied by that particular constellation.
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Beneath the clear and unpolluted heavens of the ancient world, it is
easy to understand how human beings might have felt reassured by
regular celestial motions such as these. It is equally easy to understand
why the four cardinal points of the year—the spring and autumn
equinoxes, the winter and summer solstices—should everywhere have
been accorded immense significance. Even greater significance was
accorded to the conjunction of these cardinal points with the zodiacal
constellations. But most significant of all was the constellation in which
the sun was observed to rise on the morning of the spring (or vernal)
equinox. Because of the earth’s axial precession, the ancients discovered
that this constellation was not fixed or permanent for all time but that the
honour of ‘housing’ or ‘carrying’ the sun on the day of the vernal equinox
circulated— very, very slowly— among all the constellations of the zodiac.
In the words of Giorgio de Santillana: ‘The sun’s position amongst the
constellations at the vernal equinox was the pointer that indicated the
“hours” of the precessional cycle—very long hours indeed, the equinoctial
sun occupying each zodiacal constellation for almost 2200 years.1
The direction of the earth’s slow axial precession is clockwise (i.e., east
to west) and thus in opposition to the direction of the planet’s annual
path around the sun. In relation to the constellations of the zodiac, lying
fixed in space, this causes the point at which the spring equinox occurs
‘to move stubbornly along the ecliptic in the opposite direction to the
yearly course Direction in which the vernal point shifts as a result of
precession of the sun, that is, against the “right” sequence of the zodiacal
signs (Taurus Aries Pisces Aquarius, instead of Aquarius Pisces
Aries Taurus).’2
1 Hamlet ‘s Mill, p. 59.
2 Ibid., p. 58.
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During the course of each year the earth’s movement along its orbit
causes the stellar background against which the sun is seen to rise
to change from month to month: Aquarius Pisces Aries
Taurus Gemini Cancer Leo, etc, etc. At present, on the vernal
equinox, the sun rises due east between Pisces and Aquarius. The
effect of precession is to cause the ‘vernal point’ to be reached
fractionally earlier in the orbit each year with the result that it very
gradually shifts through all 12 houses of the zodiac, spending 2160
years ‘in’ each sign and making a complete circuit in 25,920 years.
The direction of this ‘processional drift’, in opposition to the annual
‘path of the sun’, is: Leo Cancer Gemini Taurus Aries
Pisces Aquarius. To give one example, the ‘Age of Leo’, i.e. the 2160
years during which the sun on the ve
rnal equinox rose against the
stellar background of the constellation of Leo, lasted from 10,970
until 8810 BC. We live today in the astrological no man’s land at the
end of the ‘Age of Pisces’, on the threshold of the ‘New Age’ of
Aquarius. Traditionally these times of transition between one age
and the next have been regarded as ill-omened.
That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of ‘precession of the equinoxes’. And
that is exactly what is involved in the notion of the ‘dawning of the Age of
Aquarius’. The famous line from the musical Hair refers to the fact that
every year, for the last 2000 years or so, the sun has risen in Pisces on
the vernal equinox. The age of Pisces, however, is now approaching its
end and the vernal sun will soon pass out of the sector of the Fish and
begin to rise against the new background of Aquarius.
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The 25,776-year cycle of precession is the engine that drives this
majestic celestial juggernaut along its never-ending tour of the heavens.
But the details of exactly how precession moves the equinoctial points
from Pisces into Aquarius—and thence onwards around the zodiac—are
also worth knowing.
Remember that the equinoxes occur on the only two occasions in the
year when the earth’s tilted axis lies broadside-on to the sun. These are
when the sun rises due east all over the world and day and night are of
equal length. Because the earth’s axis is slowly but surely precessing in a
direction opposite to that of its own orbit, the points at which it lies
broadside-on to the sun must occur fractionally earlier in the orbit each
year. These annual changes are so small as to be almost imperceptible (a
one degree shift along the ecliptic—equivalent to the width of your little
finger held up to the horizon—requires approximately seventy-two years
to complete). However, as de Santillana points out, such minute changes
add up in just under 2200 years to a 30° passage through a complete
house of the zodiac, and in just under 26,000 years to a 360° passage
through a complete cycle of precession.
When did the ancients first work out precession?
In the answer to this question lies a great secret, and mystery, of the
past. Before we try to penetrate the mystery and to learn the secret, we
should acquaint ourselves with the ‘official’ line. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica is as good a repository as any of conventional historical
wisdom, and this is what it tells us about a scholar named Hipparchus,
the supposed discoverer of precession:
Hipparchus, also spelled HIPPARCHOS (b. Nicaea, Bithynia; d. after 127 BC,
Rhodes), Greek astronomer and mathematician who discovered the precession of
the equinoxes ... This notable discovery was the result of painstaking
observations, worked upon by an acute mind. Hipparchus observed the positions
of the stars, and then compared his results with those of Timocharis of Alexandria
about 150 years earlier and with even earlier observations made in Babylonia. He
discovered that the celestial longitudes were different and that this difference was
of a magnitude exceeding that attributable to errors of observation. He therefore
proposed precession to account for the size of the difference and he gave a value
of 45’ or 46’ (seconds of arc) for annual changes. This is very close to the figure of
50.274 seconds of arc accepted today ...’3
First, a point of terminology. Seconds of arc are the smallest subdivisions
of a degree of arc. There are 60 of these arc seconds in one arc minute,
60 minutes in one degree, and 360 degrees in the full circle of earth’s
path around the sun. An annual change of 50.274 seconds of arc
represents a distance somewhat under one-sixtieth of one degree so that
3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 5:937-8. See also The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt,
p. 205, where the precise figure of 50.274 is given.
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it takes roughly 72 years (an entire human lifetime) for the equinoctial
sun to migrate just one degree along the ecliptic. It is because of the
observational difficulties entailed in detecting this snails’ pace rate of
change that the value worked out by Hipparchus in the second century BC
is hailed in the Britannica as a ‘notable discovery’.
Would this discovery seem so notable if it turned out to be a
rediscovery? Would the mathematical and astronomical achievements of
the Greeks shine so brightly if we could prove that the difficult challenge
of measuring precession had been taken up thousands of years before
Hipparchus? What if this heavenly cycle, almost 26,000 years long, had
been made the object of precise scientific investigations long epochs
before the supposed dawn of scientific thought?
In seeking answers to such questions there is much that may be
relevant which would never be accepted by any court of law as concrete
proof. Let us not accept it either. We have seen that Hipparchus proposed
a value of 45 or 46 seconds of arc for one year of precessional motion.
Let us therefore not attempt to dislodge the Greek astronomer from his
pedestal as the discoverer of precession unless we can find a significantly
more accurate value recorded in a significantly more ancient source.
Of course, there are many potential sources. At this point, however, in
the interests of succinctness, we shall limit our inquiry to universal
myths. We have already examined one group of myths in detail (the
traditions of flood and cataclysm set out in Part IV) and we have seen that
they possess a range of intriguing characteristics:
1 There is no doubt that they are immensely old. Take the
Mesopotamian flood story, versions of which have been found
inscribed on tablets from the earliest strata of Sumerian history,
around 3000 BC. These tablets, handed down from the dawn of the
recorded past, leave no room for doubt that the tradition of a worlddestroying flood was ancient even then, and therefore originated long
before the dawn. We cannot say how long. The fact remains that no
scholar has ever been able to establish a date for the creation of any
myth, let alone for these venerable and widespread traditions. In a
very real sense they seem always to have been around—part of the
permanent baggage of human culture.
2 The possibility cannot be ruled out that this aura of vast antiquity is
not an illusion. On the contrary, we have seen that many of the great
myths of cataclysm seem to contain accurate eye-witness accounts of
real conditions experienced by humanity during the last Ice Age. In
theory, therefore, these stories could have been constructed at almost
the same time as the emergence of our subspecies Homo sapiens
sapiens, perhaps as long as 50,000 years ago. The geological
evidence, however, suggests a more recent provenance, and we have
identified the epoch 15,000-8000 BC as the most likely. Only then, in
the whole of human experience, were there rapid climatic changes on
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ock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
the convulsive scale the myths so eloquently describe.
3 The Ice Age and its tumultuous demise were global phenomena. It is
therefore perhaps not surprising that the cataclysm traditions of many
different cultures, widely scattered around the globe, should be
characterized by a high degree of uniformity and convergence.
4 What is surprising, however, is that the myths not only describe
shared experiences but that they do so in what appears to be a shared
symbolic language. The same ‘literary motifs’ keep cropping up again
and again, the same stylistic ‘props’, the same recognizable
characters, and the same plots.
According to Professor de Santillana, this type of uniformity suggests
a guiding hand at work. In Hamlet’s Mill, a seminal and original thesis
on ancient myth written in collaboration with Hertha von Dechend
(professor of the History of Science at Frankfurt University) he argues
that:
universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something
found, say, in China, turns up also in Babylonian astrological texts, then it must be
assumed to be relevant if it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody
could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin
of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more
than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre
but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their
identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of
something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the
Pied Piper turns up both in the German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long
before Columbus, and is linked in both places to certain attributes like the colour
red, it can hardly be a coincidence ... Likewise, when one finds numbers like 108,
or 9 x 13 reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of
Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus’ dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla,
it is not accident ...4
Connecting the great universal myths of cataclysm, is it possible that
such coincidences that cannot be coincidences, and accidents that cannot
be accidents, could denote the global influence of an ancient, though as
yet unidentified, guiding hand? If so, could it be that same hand, during