Seeing Things—In the Sky Part One | thunderbolts.info
13 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
Via Scoop.it – Secular Curated News & Views
Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The early 20th century saw the ascendancy of a short-lived movement in scholarship called ‘Pan-Babylonianism’, soon bemoaned for its folly. Supporters of this group held that the Babylonians had been remarkably bright astronomers from a very early time onward, spreading their science and the associated mythology to all the world’s major civilisations. Part of this knowledge gift were the notion of constellations, even the zodiac itself, and an understanding of the precession of the equinoxes. The figurehead of the movement, Alfred Jeremias (1864-1935), pontificated that attestations of the zodiac traced back to the Age of Taurus, i. e., the late 5th millennium BCE. Dotty ideas such as these continued to produce ripples in other areas, such as anthropology and the history of religions, until the present day. Did countless myths worldwide originally encode the precession of the equinoxes, the protagonists representing asterisms? An affirmative ‘yes’ was publicised in such influential bestsellers as Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill (1969), Thomas Worthen’s The Myth of Replacement (1991) and Elizabeth and Paul Barber’s When They Severed Earth from Sky (2006).
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