-:- the house of the sky -:-
-:- the movements of the stars -:-
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Let us therefore begin our survey of the history and future of floods with a quick run down of some important astronomical points. We have to remember that ancient people who formulated their mythologies did not believe that we were living on a globe which moved through space. Rather, they considered that it was the sky that moved around the earth, carrying the heavenly bodies with it. And to precisely coordinate their lives with the sky so as to make sure they planted crops at the correct time, or to prepare for the annual migrations of birds or prey animals many ancient people used what is known as heliacal risings of stars.
A heliacal rising of a star or planet occurs when it rises at dawn just before being drowned out by the light of the Sun.
The star rises just before dawn, but the gathering light begins to drown it out. By the time the sun rises a few minutes later, the stars light has disappeared. This heliacal rising was often used by ancient peoples to regulate the time of year and organise their calendars. Significant stars rose heliacally at certain times of the year and this helped people to coordinate their lives.
Before 400AD, the Milky Way used to rise in this way at midsummer dawn and at midwinter dawn.
The ancients considered that when the Milky Way rose heliacally at these times, what in fact was happening was that the Sun was burning a hole through the Milky Way and that its light was thus streaking across the sky to land on Earth. At this sacred time a flaming bridge of light was thrown down to the Earth that led to directly to a sacred world.
The midwinter bridge led directly northwards towards the World of the Gods. Uniquely, on midwinters dawn, the power of the Gods was directly accessible to all on Earth, and their sacred power filled the whole Earth with rejuvenating life (*3). Similarly on midsummers dawn, the Flaming Bridge led to the World of the Ancestors. On this day, all of humanity could convene with the spirits of their ancestors as they returned to Earth for one day.
Already some of the technical language is becoming clear to us. The flaming sky bringing an end to the world might well refer to the blazing bridges of light shown here. But there is more. We are often told that the ancients believed that the sky was a permanent fixture, that it never changed or at least that our ancestors did not pay enough regard to the sky to understand that it changed. A close analysis of Flood Myths and Worlds End myths shows us, however, that like us, the ancients knew that the intransience of the sky was little more than a polite fiction. They knew of the movements of the planets, and they gave them names which belied similar natures across all cultures. They knew of meteor showers and were intimate with the phases of the moon.
More than that, their constant watch on the heliacal risings of the stars and the Milky Way ensured that they knew of one other, very subtle, feature of the changing sky precession. Now it is common knowledge that the Earth rotates on its axis once every twenty four hours (*4), and that it rotates around the Sun once every 365-and-a-quarter days.
What is less known is that the daily rotation of the Earth precesses, or tracks across the sky like a spinning top. Just as the tops apex whirls around in a slow circle, so the North and South poles of the Earth trace out a wide circle as the rotation changes, bit by bit, each year, in a cycle that takes 26,000 years to complete the full 360 degrees.
This cycle has a number of very long term effects in the sky. Firstly, the North and South Pole stars start to change. The current North Pole Star, Polaris, will not rest at due north for long. Five thousand years ago, the North Celestial Pole was in the constellation of Draco, and in some twelve thousand years time it is likely to be close to the very bright summer star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra.
Thus, the Pole Star has, over a very long period of time, been constantly changing from one constellation to another. Five thousand years ago, when the great pyramids were being built, Beta Draconis in the constellation of Draco was the nearest star to the North Celestial Pole, and as such, many of the precise alignments found within the pyramids themselves are centred on Beta Draconis. But the change in the Pole Star was not the only change in the sky. The whole sky moved and still moves with this precessional movement. The Zodiac also changes.
Traditionally, the Zodiac begins with the constellation that contains the Sun at spring equinox. Two and a half thousand years ago, when the Zodiac was being formulated, that was Aries. Now it is Pisces, and shortly, the equinox was move into Aquarius. This movement exactly matches up with the movement of the Poles, and the spring equinox moves backwards through the Zodiac every 26,000 years.
So the whole sky moves with precession. Notice also that precession moves in the opposite direction to the daily and annual cycles of rotation. In the image above, the daily rotation direction is to the left, and the sun moves through the Zodiac from right to left. But precession causes the sun to have its spring equinox earlier and earlier in the Zodiac, such that it effectively moves very slowly from left to right. These are the phenomena that the ancients had to contend with. The daily and yearly cycles were making stars move in a 'sunwise' or clockwise direction, from east to west. But there was a subtle undercurrent, moving everything backwards, anticlockwise, west to east, from future to past.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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