Ceremony of Innocence
What can we learn about the world into which Jesus was born by examining how our ancestors looked at, learned from, and interacted with the stars?
A few generations before Jesus’ birth, around the year 127 BCE, Greek astronomer Hipparchus was pointing his telescope at the sky, and thinking.
He had already made a name for himself — he’s credited as the inventor of trigonometry — but late in his career he made it his mission to observe the heavens, and began compiling star catalogues and constructing celestial globes.
These globes were more intricate and advanced than those that had come before, but he was far from the first to look up. Long before Hipparchus, constellations were fundamental to the early development of human religions. Practicing astrology was one of the things people did to try to make sense of what was happening in the real world. In the crescent of fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Mesopotamia means ‘between rivers’ in Greek) that gave birth to Europe’s ancestors, people began taking note of what unfolded above them nearly 4,000 years before present day (BP).
Mesopotamian divination involved the reading of astral omens. Astrologers would record changes in the positions of the stars over time and map them when important historical events took place. They made their notes in cuneiform, a writing system used by several civilisations in the Ancient Near East, notably the Sumerians (who probably invented it), the Akkadians (who penned the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, based on a handful of Sumerian poems, between 1800 and 1200 BCE), and the Assyrians (who made it look all weird and abstract, but arguably even cooler than its predecessors). See Fig. 1.
Sumerian cuneiform heavily influenced the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and existed in various forms until the Roman Empire rolled out its all-new and improved Latin alphabet.
There’s a Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, written around 1800 BCE, which offers the first known narration of the invention of writing. It includes the following passage:
Because the messenger’s mouth was heavy and he couldn’t repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
The very first episode of the Oldest Stories podcast goes ‘all the way back’ and explores this very story. It’s about a battle between the city of Uruk (led by Enmerkar) and its rival city Aratta.
So over time the astrologers of Babylon and other Mesopotamian city states, or proto-astrologers (because they might not have thought of themselves as astrologers at this point), produced huge physical archives of data in cuneiform, and these archives allowed the more scholarly among them to look for patterns. They believed — and you can hardly blame them — that the gods communicated to them via the stars and that astral phenomena had a direct connection to life on the ground.
And they weren’t the first to have beliefs like these. Whoever built Göbekli Tepe was certainly looking up. Göbekli Tepe dates from the 9th or 10th millennium BCE — 6,000 years before Stonehenge, earlier, even, than Yorkshire’s Star Carr settlement. Göbekli Tepe existed around the time Plato said Atlantis existed, although lots of people will tell you he made that up, and was built in what is now southern Türkiye in order to either observe and record astral phenomena, or celebrate them, or both.
It’s one of the oldest megalithic structures us modern humans have ever found, with giant stone pillars beautifully carved with depictions of lions, bulls, spiders, scorpions, snakes, gazelles and donkeys, some of which could well represent the constellations, and what looks to be a massive asteroid sweeping through the sky ready to obliterate the Earth. And it is in near-mint condition because it was deliberately buried under huge piles of rock and rubble. They built a hill to cover it up, basically, which begs the obvious question: why? But that’s a question for another day. The point is that people have been concentrating very hard on the movements of the stars for a long, long time, and they have been mapping them onto terrestrial events for almost as long.
But Hipparchus’ interest in the stars was scientific in a very different way. Using instruments he invented himself, clever boy, he logged the positions of some 850 stars, among them Spica (the brightest in the constellation we call Virgo, about 250 lightyears from the Sun) and Regulus (the brightest in Leo, ≈79 lightyears away). He was particularly interested in the stars the naked eye can’t see move and which, for a long time, people believed to be stationary, hence they were called ‘fixed’ stars.
Spica actually consists of two stars, orbiting round a shared centre of gravity in what’s called a ‘binary system’. It is, or they are, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. They glow bluish, and on a clear night they’re quite visible. If you follow the handle of the Big Dipper, maintaining its gentle curve, you’ll first find Arcturus, also known as the Bear Watcher, and then Spica. The name comes from the Latin word ‘spicum’, meaning ‘head of grain’, and refers to the ear of wheat Demeter (or her daughter Persephone) holds in her left hand in Greek mythology.
Hipparchus did a lot of measuring. One of the things he measured was the Sun’s path in the sky — this is called the ecliptic. Over the course of a year, as the Earth orbits the Sun, the route the Sun takes across the sky changes position. Each night, compared to the night before, the Sun sets in a slightly different place on the horizon, and in a slightly different place relative to the stars behind it. So, Hipparchus measured the length of time it took for the position of the setting Sun to return to the same place in relation to the horizon, which is part of the Earth and was therefore definitively fixed in relation to him. (We could talk about tectonic plates, but we’re not going to.) This is called a tropical year, and equals the length of time between equinoxes, when the Sun sets exactly over the equator and night and day are equal. He also measured the length of time it took for the position of the setting Sun to return to the same position in relation to the so-called fixed stars (such as Spica). This is called a sidereal year.
I spent a bit of time looking for an illustration to insert here, but honestly it would probably make it even more confusing.
Both ‘years’ are about 365 days, as you would think: the spring equinox always happens around the same time, once a year, and the Sun sets under Spica, or any given star, on the same date, every year. Right?
But Hipparchus found a discrepancy between them. Tropical years are not the same as sidereal years. The time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun is not the same as the time it takes for the setting Sun to return to the same place in relation to the stars. Meaning: the fixed stars are not fixed! The difference is not very big, and you have to work pretty hard to notice it. Like, over a period of several years, ideally hundreds. When he compared his notes with those of his forebears Timocharis and Aristillus, Hipparchus calculated that Spica had moved about two degrees, relative to the autumn equinox, in 169 years.
In other words, the stars appeared to be moving, altogether, in the sky, anticlockwise, very slowly. Not only did they move as the Earth rotated, and not only did they move as the Earth orbited the Sun: there was a third thing affecting their positions in relation to the Earth. And the cause, Hipparchus concluded, was that the planet’s axis itself was moving like an unsteady spinning top, that it wobbled in a way no one thought possible.
As a result, the equinoxes — the points on the horizon where the Sun appears to rise and set directly above the equator (‘due east’/‘due west’) — were moving measurably through the constellations (Aquarius, Pisces, Aries). The process has a name: precession.
Ptolemy, another astronomer, developed Hipparchus’ model in the second century CE, and reckoned that all the stars moved about one degree per hundred years. Based on more recent calculations, we now understand that the ‘wobble’ of the Earth’s axis causes the stars to precess through the night sky at a rate of about one degree every 72 years.
Practically, day to day and year on year, this doesn’t mean much. But it ties in neatly with your average human’s life expectancy (at least until bearded gerontologist Aubrey de Grey’s wish comes true and we all live to be 1,000, heaven help us), so it’s quite nice to think, and maybe even get a bit geocentric, or even anthropocentric, about. At midnight on the day a baby is born, the stars will look a certain way. 72 years later, at midnight on the day of that person’s death, they will be a degree to the left.
Multiply that by 360 and you’re close enough to 26,000 (which is easier to remember than the actual value of 25,771.5), the time it takes for axial precession to complete one full cycle. Over the ages, civilisations have called this a ‘great year’ or ‘platonic year’. Plato himself called it a ‘perfect year’, Aristotle a bombastic ‘greatest year’. And yes, it may be completely meaningless. The reason it’s interesting (to non-astronomers) is because it’s been meaningful to members of our species since the end of the last Ice Age (about 12,500 years BP) = a super long time. And because the people who came before us almost certainly spent countless human lives building all kinds of absurd structures like the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx in Egypt, the Nazca Lines in Peru (see Fig. 2), and Göbekli Tepe in Türkiye with the mathematics of astronomy (and astrological imagery) in mind. Our obsession with precession is one of humanity’s most enduring characteristics. It’s so enduring that you could even flirt with the idea of saying it’s one of the things that makes us human.
Sidenote: there are at least two other long-term cycles that we know about. Together with axial precession, they are known collectively as Milankovitch cycles.
One is called ‘eccentricity’. Basically, the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun oscillates from being roughly circular to a bit elliptical over a period of about 100,000 years. Currently it’s on the way to being more circular. The combined gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn are thought to be responsible for these changes.
And besides ‘wobbling’ like a spinning top, the Earth’s axis is also ‘tilted’ with respect to the circle it draws while orbiting the Sun. This is called ‘obliquity’, and it’s the cause of the Earth’s seasons. The angle doesn’t change much: it’s stayed between 22.1 degrees and 24.5 degrees for the last million years. At the moment, it’s somewhere in the middle. The cycle lasts 41,000 years or so.
But for the purpose of this story we’ll just be talking about precession, not about obliquity or eccentricity, because precession appears to have had the greatest impact on the myths, stories and legends humans have invented to help understand their (our?) place in the world.
Fig. 2: The Nazca Lines of southern Peru have baffled researchers for decades. They were probably created between 500 BCE and 500 CE, and cover an area of 50 km2. Many are shapes and lines. Many are zoomorphic designs, aka animals. Some depict animals that probably didn’t exist in Peru at the time. Are they not awesome? (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
And so if between contractions Mary had glanced up at the sky — assuming Immaculate Births involve contractions and placentas and all the rest of it, and assuming Jesus was indeed born more or less 2,000 years ago as the Bible says… Matthew’s gospel apparently suggests he was born a few years BCE, while Luke’s suggests he might have been born in 2 CE, if you can get your head around that — if, just as little baby Jesus started crowning, Mary had taken a minute to observe the position of the stars in the sky, she would certainly have noticed the Sun rising between the constellations Pisces and Aries. That is, assuming that all this happened at daybreak.
And if, as a child, Jesus sat out on a hillock till morning on the spring equinox, he’d have seen the same, more or less. ‘Wow’, he would’ve said. ‘Look at all those chickens.’ ‘No, Jesus,’ Mary might have said, wondering what he was quoting now, the dolt. ‘They’re stars.’
During the course of his life, the point on the horizon where the Sun rose each morning (and set each night) shifted about half a degree to the left, so that if he had looked up at the stars on the spring equinox the year he died, he… probably wouldn’t have noticed a difference, because he had been busy doing other things besides recording the position of the ecliptic in relation to the fixed stars. But sure enough, during his lifetime, it budged ever so slowly away from Aries and more comfortably into the area demarcated by the boundaries of Pisces. It would have moved about half a degree, assuming he did die, on the cross, in his early 30s. If he travelled to the Indian subcontinent and died there age 120, to be interred at Roza Bal in Srinagar, it would have moved closer to two degrees. Yes, more on this later.
Astrologically speaking, Pisces is represented by two fish swimming in opposite directions — the word ‘pisces’ is the Latin plural for ‘fish’. This is because astronomically, the constellation Pisces looks (sort of, not really) like two fish caught on a line. And this, in turn, is why fish feature so prominently among the symbols of the New Testament.
Even if Jesus didn’t give a flying monkey about the gradual movement of the Sun’s ecliptic across the night sky, the people who wrote the Bible very probably did. They baked lots of important fish reference ‘Easter eggs’ into it to let everyone know that this was the age of Pisces and that Jesus had helped the world transition to this new era.
For example, in Matthew 4:19 Jesus says he will turn his followers into ‘fishers of men’. He also says this in Mark 1:17. In John 21 he helps Peter catch fish ‘of every kind’, a ‘multitude of fishes’ (153 fish precisely). There is Jonah. There is the Flood. And there is, of course, Jesus feeding the 5,000 with two fish and five loaves of bread.
Pisces is one of 12 constellations that make up the Zodiac Wheel, and the cycle of axial precession takes about 25,772 years from beginning to end. This means the Sun rises ‘within’ each constellation for an average of 2,148 years (25771.5 ÷ 12 = 2147.625). It’s worth stressing that this is an average figure because not all the constellations of the Zodiac are the same ‘width’, obviously, and the equinoctial sunrise spends different amounts of time in each one. There are overlaps. Nor is the Sun’s ‘entry’ into and ‘exit’ out of each constellation as clear-cut as pop-astrology would have you believe.
That’s because astronomy and astrology are very different systems. Astronomy sees constellations; astrology sees signs. Astronomy is the scientific study of extraterrestrial objects and phenomena (i.e., stuff not of this world); astrology is a method of forecasting local events based on the assumption that the planets and stars have some influence on human life.
In Chris Brennan’s podcast ‘Overview of the History of Western Astrology’ (opens in Spotify), he explains that for hundreds or even thousands of years, proto-astrologers (e.g. in Mesopotamia) had no qualms with the unevenness of the periods of time that ‘belonged’ to each astrological sign. It was only when the whole operation was mathematicised that the logic of the spoked wheel overwrote the reality of the night sky, and the 12 signs of the Zodiac magically became of equal size. Astrology became something like a game based on mathematics as opposed to earnest study of the movements of the stars and planets (and assumptions and predictions based on observable patterns thereof).
It was an ‘obscure’ group of individuals, according to Britannica, living in Egypt under a Greek dynasty called the Ptolemies, who mapped everything out like this. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt from 305 BCE to 30 BCE, or, roughly filling the period between Aristotle and Jesus. This was Egypt’s ‘Hellenistic’ period.
‘Hellenistic’ basically means ‘Greek’; the Greek word for ‘Greece’ is Ελλάς, which we transliterate as Hellas. The name ‘Greece’ comes from the Latin word Graecia, meaning ‘land of the Greeks’.
Plato and Aristotle had theorised that the Earth was at the centre of the solar system — wrong!!! — and the astrologers of Egypt ran with it. They mathematicised the concept, Britannica continues, of a ‘correspondence’ between the ‘larger order’/universe and the ‘smaller order’/man, macrocosm and microcosm.
They conceived of the ecliptic — the route the Sun appeared to draw as it orbited the Earth (again, wrong, but we’ll allow it) as being split into 12 equal parts. Each 30-degree wedge, they thought, was the domicile of a particular planet or god, so they assigned one to each wedge. And then they split each wedge, or domicile, into three ‘decans’, plus lots of other bits.
There is a lot of maths in Hellenistic astrology. In fact, astrologers of the Greco-Roman world called themselves mathematicians, because of the complexity of their star calculations. It wasn’t easy being a mathimatikós…
But again, as anyone who has gazed up at the sky at night has probably noticed, there are a lot more than 12 shapes out there. And, while the signs of the Zodiac Wheel represent equal 30-degree divisions, the actual ‘sizes’ of the 12 constellations that make it up vary in size. Ptolemy, the astronomer who developed Hipparchus’ precession calculations, documented 48 constellations. Now, 88 are formally recognised.
Whether or not you, as a modern human being, buy into astrology, its believers are part of a tradition more ancient than any of the Abrahamic religions. Understanding how past societies and civilisations have responded to the very real precessional cycle is interesting for what it tells us about them culturally. These are our ancestors. How they understood the world is relevant to us.
The great year, i.e. the full precessional cycle of more or less 26,000 years, comes up in all sorts of ancient literature and mythology. Randall Carson cites references to precession (although called by a different name), and analogies drawn between cosmic-level cycles, tropical years and sidereal years, in Persian, Indian and Babylonian mythological texts, evidence of what he calls a ‘sophisticated astronomy’ among these ancient civilisations. Scholar B L Vander Waerden has investigated the ‘application of th[e] doctrine’ of the great year in Persian and Hindu astronomy. It’s worth noting that many of the calculations that have survived until today, from those societies, are different from the actual figure (of 25,772 years) — sometimes by a long shot. But the point is that people have been ‘reading’ the sky with longterm focus and often impressive accuracy for many thousands of years, and writing, possibly even building, references to it for just as many.
We’ve already gone through a few instances of fish imagery in the New Testament, which, taken together, provide pretty robust evidence that the authors of the Bible were thinking Piscean thoughts. But it’s also worth mentioning the ichthys, or ‘Jesus fish’, that line drawing of a fish you sometimes see on the backs of people’s cars (See Fig. 3), because the symbol’s chronology begins around the time the Bible’s authors were licking the nibs of their fountain pens.
Ichthys is the Latin transliteration of the Ancient Greek word ΙΧΘΥΣ, meaning ‘fish’ — the original language of the New Testament was Koine Greek, although Jesus himself probably spoke Aramaic, which is closer to Hebrew. The letters of ΙΧΘΥΣ are capitalised because it’s an acronym. It stands for Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ, pronounced ‘Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter’, meaning ‘Jesus Christ God’s Son Saviour’. Early Christians started using the ichthys symbol around the end of the first century CE (while the New Testament was being written), probably as a way to identify each other without outing themselves as Christians, because Christianity was illegal in the Roman Empire until the Edict of Milan in 313 CE (more on this later). Before Christianity was formalised as a distinct set of beliefs and practices, people were just followers of Jesus, and were identified as such. Considering Jesus to be more than just a prophet was antithetical to the religious context of the period, and it was very dangerous.
In its discussion of the origins of the fish symbol, Christianity Today says the ichthys was the ‘perfect symbol for persecuted believers’ because it had already been in use among pre-Christian cultures. It gives the following example of its use during the Roman Empire’s anti-Christian phase:
When a Christian met a stranger in the road, the Christian sometimes drew one arc of the simple fish outline in the dirt. If the stranger drew the other arc, both believers knew they were in good company.
Meanwhile Tertullian, a Cartheginian theologian born in the second century CE, wrote that ‘we, little fishes, after the image of our Ichthys, Jesus Christ, are born in the water’. In other words, Jesus is the fish, the new dawn, the new era.
Because the equinoctial Sun has spent the last 2,000 years, more or less, rising in Pisces, it’s the constellation that presents itself most readily in the imagery and iconography of religious texts. This is also due in part to the Bible’s role as holy book for so many. But if you go back just a little further, it’s not too hard to find references to other specific constellations in other texts.
Note that because the ecliptic travels anti-clockwise in the sky, it’s as if the Sun progresses through the constellations backwards. On the Zodiac wheel, they are in the following order: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces.
Reversing this sequence gives us the astrological eras we’re supposedly progressing through very slowly. Which explains why The 5th Dimension celebrated the dawning of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ in 1969: in precessional terms, Aquarius comes after Pisces.
They might not have been bang on the money, however, since there’s no real academic consensus on when one age ends and the next begins. Per the Neil Mann interpretation, the Piscean Age began on 1 CE and will run until 2150 CE. The Heindel-Rosicrucian has it beginning in 498 CE and ending a long way off, in 2654 CE.
Meaning: the Age of Aquarius hasn’t started yet, at least by some measures. As Randall Carlson puts it, ‘it would be somewhat premature for New Age enthusiasts to get too excited about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius just yet’.
Austrian astronomer Hermann Haupt came up with the year 2595 for the start of the Aquarian Age, basing his calculations on boundaries accepted by the International Astronomical Union in Leiden in 1928. He quipped that he didn’t expect astrologers to ‘follow the official boundaries’ of the constellations, however, pointing to the ‘esoteric elements’ and ‘controversial’ methods of astrology.
But the relative positions of the constellations are (for practical purposes) fixed, and therefore the sequence of the ages is hard to dispute.
Before Pisces was Aries, which looks nothing like a ram.
The Age of Aries ran from (roughly, like, it could be a couple of hundred years either side) 2150 years BCE until (ditto; estimates are all over the place, see above) 1 CE, during which the Akkadians wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh in cuneiform on clay tablets; Indo-Aryans migrated through what is now Afghanistan to northwest India and started using iron tools; the Phoenicians founded Carthage in what is now Tunisia; and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all took their first (and last) steps. It was a fecund period for humanity.
All through this epoch, on the vernal (spring) equinox, when the Sun rose ‘due east’, it rose under the sign of Aries. The reason Aries is a ram is likely because the Ancient Egyptians associated that constellation with the god Amun-Ra, who was depicted as a man with a ram’s head. They might have made the association because the period during which the Sun rose under Aries (March-April) was when the weather began to get very hot, and rams are hotheaded. However the association first came about, this is why rams (and sheep and shepherds) feature so prominently in stories written during this period.
Take the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), written between 1200 and 100 BCE. Its main character, Moses, is a shepherd. God is also frequently analogised as a shepherd whose believers are sheep. In Genesis 22, in order to prove his unquestioning obedience to God, Abraham goes to sacrifice his own son Isaac at Moriah (you couldn’t make this stuff up… could you?). He binds Isaac to an altar, and is just about to do it when an angel intervenes at the last moment and… he sacrifices a ram instead.
Astronomer Michael Molnar has catalogued evidence for Aries the ram being the ‘astrological sign of Judea’. Bethlehem is in Judea. Molnar is sure that the constellation Aries was where the three Magi saw the star that led them to witness Jesus’ birth.
One of the most potent symbols in ancient Greek mythology (and the Indiana Jones comics) is the Golden Fleece, which belongs (pre-shearing) to Chrysomallos, the golden-woolled, winged ram. In the story, Chrysomallos rescues a Boeotian prince called Phrixus, and whisks him away to a city on the Black Sea coast (in modern Georgia). Phrixus sacrifices the ram (yeah, thanks Phrixus) and takes its fleece, which the Argonauts later set out on a quest to find. Elsewhere in the canon, Zeus transforms himself into a ram in order to rescue a Phoenician princess. Ivory ram figurines have been unearthed in sancturies devoted to Hera (aka Juno, goddess of marriage) at Argos and Perachora (in Greece), and at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, modern day Türkiye. They’ve popped up in southern Italy and in the sanctuary of Ortheia at Sparta, too.
Finally to ancient Egypt, where the deity Amun, who rose to prominence in the 16th century BCE, is often linked symbolically to a criosphinx, or ram-headed sphinx (Fig. 4). Pharoahs constructed huge temples dedicated to him; he was the Protector of the Road who upheld the principles of Ma’at (truth, harmony, morality, justice). Upon conquering the Kingdom of Kush, the Egyptians identified the Kushites’ main deity as Amun. He was a woolly ram with curved horns. Egypt continued to revere Amun as a symbol of virility and fertility for hundreds of years, and eventually merged Amun with the sun god Ra, creating Amun-Ra, a transcendental, self-created creator deity (awesome) and one of the two most widely recorded gods in the Egyptian pantheon.
Before Aries was Taurus, the bull, in whose corner the equinoctial Sun rose in between 4500–4000 BCE and 2200–1800 BCE (the Bronze Age started around 3300 BCE). Yes, if they were precise 2,000-year periods, it would be simpler. During the Age of Taurus, cults that worshipped bulls emerged in Egypt, Assyria and Crete. The Minoan civilisation became the dominant power on the island of Crete around 3100 BCE. Penn Museum’s Expedition Magazine notes that in Cretan culture, ‘the bull is everywhere’:
In every medium imaginable, from gold rings to terracotta figurines, from stone seals to frescoes in relief, the image of the bull permeates the Minoan world.
We don’t know what they called themselves. British archaeologist derived the name ‘Minoan’ from the mythical King Minos, whom the Classical Greeks reckoned to have ruled the Cretan city of Knossos. The Ancient Egyptians called them ‘Keftiu’.
History Today adds that the civilisations that bloomed in Anatolia (Türkiye) and Mesopotamia (Iraq and parts of Syria, Kuwait and Türkiye) between 6000 BCE and 2000 BCE produced ‘many striking examples of the bull-image’, including ‘vivid murals’ and the Bull Headed Lyre of Ur, a string instrument with a bull’s head made of solid gold, made in the image of Mesopotamian Sun god Utu/Shamash, who took the form of a bull. Meanwhile, worship of Apis, an Egyptian deity who served as an intermediary between humans and other deities, commenced during the First Dynasty in Memphis. That’s between 3100 BCE and 2900 BCE. Some have argued that the ankh, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for ‘life’, takes its form from a thoracic vertebra of a bull — one of the chunks that make up the middle part of its spine. Bulls, like rams during the period that followed, were symbols of fertility, virility and strength.
It might not be a coincidence that at the end of the first half of the Epic of Gilgamesh, mentioned above, the titular Gilgamesh and his wartime comrade Enkidu literally kill the Bull of Heaven. The source material for the Akkadian epic is five Sumerian poems, written around 2100 BCE — in other words, during the transitional period between the Age of Taurus and the Age of Aries. Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the bull right around the time the Sun on the vernal equinox ceases to rise under the constellation Taurus.
Of course it’s important to register the exceptions to the rule — points on the graph that skew the line of best fit. Little is known about the Mithraic Mysteries, a mystery cult popular among the Imperial Roman Army from the 1st to the 4th centuries CE, but one of its enduring images was that of its chief deity, Mithras, half-straddling a bull that he’s forced to the ground and is preparing to slaughter.
Similarly, when Arthur Evans excavated the Palace of Minos, which dominates Knossos, he unearthed the now-iconic Bull-Leaping Fresco. It was probably created around 1450 BCE, several hundred years after our ancestors entered the Age of Aries.
As you go further and further back, not only are there fewer remaining artefacts/buildings/texts, it also gets harder to know what to look for. Stargazers and mathematicians of the ancient world called the constellations by different names — identified different beings/animals/shapes in them. The thing is, none of them actually look like the things we associate with them, so there could be all sorts of references to the constellation we call Taurus in the relics that survive from 5,000 years ago, but they could be invisible to us because they don’t depict that particular constellation as a bull.
Incidentally, Taurus is the oldest named constellation, ‘recognised across the world’s early cultures as a bull’, per The Guardian’s Starwatch team. At its centre is a distinctive V-shaped collection of stars we now call the Hyades, and its eye is a red giant star called Aldebaran, the 14th brightest in the nightsky. All of which make it one of the easier constellations to track back through time.
Gemini is Latin for ‘twins’. The constellation’s two brightest stars are Pollux and Castor, although it includes 83 others that are visible to the naked eye. Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek-speaking Roman citizen from Alexandria, Egypt who has come up in this story before, described the constellation Gemini in the second century CE. In Babylonian mythology, the stars Pollux and Castor were known as the Great Twins. So the Babylonians and the Greeks had names for the stars in the constellation — even the constellation itself — but only much later than the period when the equinoctial Sun actually rose under it.
And finding anything Gemini-related, built or written during that period is complicated by the fact that at that time (something like 6500 BCE to 4000 BCE, plus or minus a few hundred years) writing itself was in its infancy. Cuneiform basically hadn’t been invented yet. The Egyptians hadn’t come up with hieroglyphics. People in what later became China were producing glyphs and ideographics as early as 6000 BCE — has anything survived that suggests they were tracking the progress of the ecliptic through the constellation Gemini? I honestly don’t know. Finding it would fill a gap.
Similarly, we don’t have much manmade stuff at all from (what we would now call) the Age of Cancer, let alone textual, glyphic or lithic references to crabs that would suggest that ancient peoples living during that time were were mathematicians of the stars. Besides, Cancer is the dimmest of all the zodiacal constellations, not to mention it looks nothing like a crab. So, what do you even look for?
Leo, on the other hand…!
(Sleeves up.)
No one knows for sure when the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved out of the bedrock of the Gizan plateau in Egypt, or, therefore, who ordered its creation. The standard answer is that it was Khafre, the pharaoh who is believed to have overseen the construction of the second-largest pyramid at Giza. As underwater archaeologist Robert S Neyland wrote for the journal Archaeological Discovery in 2020:
The current mainstream model of history proposes that 4th Dynasty King Khafre had the Great Sphinx carved from the bedrock of the Giza Plateau in approximately 2500 BCE, and that the entire statue including its head, neck, and body was sculpted […] at the same time.
However, says Neyland, there is ‘no unequivocally conclusive evidence when or by whom’ the Great Sphinx was carved. The attribution of the Sphinx to Khafre seems to hinge on such evidence as: its proximity to Khafre’s pyramid, and the unearthing of a statue of Khafre from the Valley Temple (which is next to the Sphinx) by a group of archaeologists in the 19th century. The Sphinx’s head also supposedly looks like him, although you have to go some to see his likeness in it, and (seriously) a New York City forensic detective flew to Egypt in 1991 to measure and examine what was/is left of the Sphinx’s noseless, weather-beaten visage and compare it to statues of Khafre (no photos of him have ever been found… coincidence?). He returned home with the view that statues of Khafre and the head of the Sphinx don’t depict the same person. And he was an officer of the law.
On the other hand, Neyland writes, a ‘growing body of evidence’ suggests that the Sphinx is in fact older than 2500 BCE, and that the ‘head and neck’ were ‘remodeled from a prior sculpture’ sometime during the Old Kingdom (circa 2649–2130 BCE). In this version of events, Khafre could easily have overseen work on the Sphinx, but he didn’t order its creation.
Anyone who has seen the Sphinx (Fig. 5) up close, or even in pictures, has likely remarked on one glaringly anomalous feature. Maybe you take it for granted, but if you look at it critically, it’s strange and demands an explanation. The Sphinx has a disproportionately small head. There are sphinxes all over Egypt (and Greece, and other parts of the Mediterranean, North Africa and Mesopotamia) and as a rule their heads are proportionate to their bodies, making the Sphinx’s tiny pharaoh head rather conspicuous. It’s also interesting that no sphinxes predate it — the concept was without precedent during Khafre’s time.
Summarising work by scholars Manu Seyfzadeh and Robert Schoch, Neyland notes, ‘it did not exist as a cultural image prior to [Khafre’s reign]’. No Old Kingdom texts mention its construction and, when mentioned at all, ‘it is referenced as though it had always existed’, writes J J Mark for the Ancient History Encyclopaedia.
Fig. 5: The Great Sphinx of Giza, ft. teeny head, photographed from the southeast. It points directly due east, towards Egypt’s bustling capital and the Nile River. Its nose appears to have been deliberately hacked off some time before the 15th century CE — not blown to smithereens by Napoleon’s army (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
So, what if the head we see isn’t the head that was originally carved?
Reappropriation of sphinxes was not uncommon in Ancient Egypt. The Sphinx of Tanis/ Amenemhat II, probably crafted sometime between 2620 and 1866 BCE and currently ensconced at the Louvre museum in Paris, was repurposed by pharaohs Apophis, Merenptah and Chéchonq I after its initial construction. And as Neyland points out, ‘the existing head is the least eroded and deteriorated component of the monument’; its headdress still exhibits ‘crisply cut lines’ and it is ‘devoid of the vertical and horizontal erosion striations’ that characterise the body. And, this is despite the body having been buried in sand for millennia while the head has been ‘exposed to the elements since its creation’.
OK, so it doesn’t have a nose, but that’s because a fanatical dervish deliberately destroyed it in 1378 CE. His name was Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, and he was angry because Egyptian peasants were making offerings to the Great Sphinx ‘in the hope of controlling the flood cycle’ and ensuring a successful harvest, according to the Smithsonian Institute. ‘Outraged by this blatant show of devotion, Sa’im al-Dahr destroyed the nose.’ He was later executed for vandalism, so, let that be a lesson to anyone playing I’ve Got Your Nose in the 21st century.
The Great Sphinx could originally have had a human head — that’s the definition of a sphinx, in Egyptian mythology: man’s head, lion’s body. (In Greek mythology, on the other hand, sphinxes have wings.) If it did, as mentioned above, it would have been the first: there are no (known) coifed sphinxes earlier than the Great Sphinx. Alternatively, it could originally have had a ram’s head, like the criosphinxes found at the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, Egypt (Fig. 4), which signify/ied the god Amun, mentioned earlier, and are actually pretty common in southern Egypt.
There’s also a third possibility, which I hope you’ll agree isn’t so absurd. It could’ve had a lion’s head.
Neyland cites textual evidence that suggests the Great Sphinx was ‘originally a lioness’, and his research paper quoted here documents his success in creating a clay model of a lioness whose head, proportionate to its body, fits entirely around the Sphinx’s head. ‘Like a Godiva chocolatier’, he says, he moulded the head, sliced it in half, hollowed out its interior, and installed it ‘like a clamshell’ over the ‘existing, undersized Sphinx head’. In other words, the Sphinx’s current head (including its pharaonic coif) is so small you can build a regular-sized lioness’s head on top of it.
Historically, Neyland explains, the disproportionate sizing of the Sphinx’s head has been attributed to ‘miscalculation, structural constraints, material limitations, [and] fissures’. But none of these explanations holds much water. King Khafre was the statue builder par excellence in the Old Kingdom, and the ancient Egyptians were masterful stoneworkers evidently capable of constructing geometrically near-perfect pyramids of eye-watering size — pyramids so ridiculously impressive people in the 21st century think aliens helped build them. If the (human) sculptors carved the head first, they could have made the body fit, and vice versa. Neyland concludes that the Sphinx’s head and body were not carved at the same time.
Meanwhile, geologist Robert Schoch, in ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza’, published in 1992 and readable on his website, suggests that when it was first sculpted, the Sphinx was carved so as to look like it was emerging from the rockface behind it — that the front portion of the Sphinx is in fact the oldest part, and the rear was carved out later.
Having analysed and compared the weathering patterns on the different parts of the Sphinx, the limestone floor of its enclosure, and the nearby ‘Sphinx temple’ (built using blocks cut from around the sculpture itself), he hypothesises that ‘when Khafre repaired and refurbished’ the Sphinx circa 2500 BCE, he ‘had the back of the colossal sculpture carved out and freed from the cliff’. Based on his analysis, the lion’s ‘rump’ must have been carved out either during or before Khafre’s time. Meaning: even if the head is Khafre’s, the Sphinx as a whole is probably older. The question then becomes, how much older?
During his geological analysis of the Sphinx, Schoch found ‘prominent vertical crevices’ on its leonine body, which he categorises as ‘precipitation-induced’. In other words, at some point, rain made deep cracks in its back. Yes, rain in Egypt, in the desert. He adds that on the nearby Sakkara Plateau, ten miles south of Giza, there are structures ‘indisputably’ dated to the First and Second Dynasties — hundreds of years earlier than 2500 BCE and long before Khafre was even a glint in the courier’s eye — that ‘exhibit no evidence’ of the same weathering, i.e., rain crevices. And Schoch points out that the deeper the weathering is, the slower it progresses. The ‘overlying material’ protects it from further weathering, making precipitation less likely to reach the bottom of a deeper crevice.
The conclusion he draws is that the Sphinx appears to have been subjected to heavy and sustained rainfall that other ancient structures in the area have not. And: since weathering rates proceed ‘non-linearly’, the deep, rainfall-induced crevices in the Sphinx’s back suggest its initial carving preceded Khafre’s rule by quite a long time. Of course, saying how long involves guesswork. Schoch says maybe it was carved for the first time between 7000 and 5000 BCE, i.e., 7,000–9,000 years ago. Certainly, he says, it predates Old Kingdom times, and ‘may well predate dynastic times altogether’. These days, the Nile Valley doesn’t get much rain, besides occasional storms like the one that battered Upper Egypt in 2016. The region’s ‘last wet period’, according to research published in Nature in 2015, was between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago during the Nabtian Pluvial Period. Daily History writes that Egypt’s ‘summer monsoons’ shifted southward in around 5000 BCE, and that the 3,000 years before that had been wet-wet-wet for North Africa.
In his 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock (he had to come up eventually) throws his weight behind the argument that the Great Sphinx was constructed during the Age of Leo. The points he raises include some of those detailed here: the weathering on its back suggests that it is much older than other structures in the area that definitely date from the reign of Khafre; its head seems newer, and is disproportionately small; there are no written materials that refer to its construction, and when it does come up it is referred to as if it has always existed; and it points due east, directly towards the Sun as it rises on the vernal equinox. Hancock also talks at length about the physical features of the Great Pyramids that suggest they, too, were built with the stars in mind.
The Age of Leo — when the equinoctial Sun rose and set roughly underneath the constellation Leo — lasted from 10000 BCE to 8000 BCE, ish, or 12,000 years BP to 10,000 years BP.
So, a really long time ago. Long enough ago for conventional wisdom to have us believe that human societies were not sufficiently advanced to undertake such a massive (and awesome) project. And it would be naïve to let the wave of a beautiful idea carry us away. But Anatolia’s Göbekli Tepe, which contains some the world’s oldest known megaliths, was inhabited from as early as 9500 BCE (i.e., during the Age of Leo) and is arguably more complex than the Great Sphinx, and required at least a comparable level of technical skill to create. What if there are more archaeological sites from this period that we haven’t rediscovered, either because they are buried under ice or sand, or because their creators chose to bury them in order to seal them in time, as is the case with Göbekli Tepe?
What’s the point of all this?
The idea is to illustrate how out of touch we become from the things that make us human when we think of the stars as just being stars. We are living through a unique period in human history. The Age of Enlightenment launched us into a new era of secularism and empiricism, which brought many positive changes to the way we humans relate to each other. But it also discouraged us from looking up, and broke — or at least weakened — the chain that links us to our ancestors.
Graham Hancock calls us a ‘species with amnesia’, because of how little we know about the lives, histories, wisdom, technologies and rituals of our forebears. As a species, our creativity knows few bounds, but nor does our capacity for destruction. Everything we know about our history comes to us through the bottleneck of desolation we ourselves have wrought, whether by actively razing centres of learning and knowledge (as with the libraries of Ashurbnipal, Pantainos, Hadrian, Antioch, Al-Hakam II, etc., and the Xianyang State Archives), or failing to preserve the texts contained within them (as with the decline, accidental burning and eventual destruction of the Library of Alexandria). We have gone to great lengths to erase knowledge of the past, or otherwise failed to treasure it.
Meanwhile, the way we understand the most popular religion on the planet (enter stage left: Jesus) is doubly warped, because we (almost) only ever see it through the lens of doctrine and dogma held in place by centralised religious authorities such as the Vatican.
We’ll get into this in the next chapter, as we familiarise ourselves with the work of Brian Muraresku, whose investigation into the nascent field of archaeochemistry presents a wildly different view of early Christianity to the one we read about in the canonical Bible.
One thing we’ve learned about the world 2,000 years ago is that thinkers in many parts of the world were studiously interpreting terrestrial phenomena through the lens of these astronomical epochs, transforming the shapes made by the stars into characters and inventing stories involving those characters. And they had been doing this, or something like this, for millennia before Jesus ever arrived, with his ideas about poor people being made in God’s image. Or else people had been telling stories involving the signs and symbols they saw in the stars, and using those stories to somehow explain what was going on on the ground. What else did they have? Who can blame them?
The stars represented the heavens, mystery and magic. It also helps to think of this astrologic-astronomic dualism as one of humanity’s most enduring practices, or disciplines. We have been reading patterns in the stars for longer than we have believed in monotheistic gods. Along with visual art, ceremonial burial practices and, as we’ll see later on, the ritualised ingestion of painstakingly crafted psychedelic brews and fermentations, ascribing importance to the movements of the stars is one of the things we’ve been doing for the longest, as humans. It may even be one of the things that makes us human.
Endnote: Were they onto something, the whole time?
20th century British astrologer said ‘there is no branch of Astrology upon which more nonsense has been poured forth than the doctrine of the precession of the equinoxes’.
While it’s undoubtedly true that most conversations about astrology are unscientific, there are hints of evidence that axial precession does have an impact on life on Earth.
According to NASA’s explainer on the effect Milankovitch orbital cycles have on Earth’s climate, axial precession ‘makes seasonal contrasts more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other’. Currently, perihelion (when the Earth is closest to the Sun) occurs during winter in the northern hemisphere and in summer in the southern hemisphere. As a result, southern hemisphere summers get a heat boost, and northern hemisphere winters are more moderate.
But in 13,000 years, axial precession will invert these conditions. The northern hemisphere will receive extra solar radiation, while seasonal variations in the southern hemisphere will be comparatively mild. Meanwhile, about 0.8 million years ago, the cycle of Ice Ages lengthened from once every 41,000 years to match Earth’s eccentricity cycle.
Could people have known or predicted these phenomena, all those years ago, with their simple tools and stelae, without ChatGPT and Wikipedia?
I originally published this essay on Substack. It reappears here along with its sequel, titled ‘Loosed Upon the World with a Sun-Filled Voice’.
