Ancient knowledge of Precession

[seasmith]

Moderator Note-this thread is split from "11,000 B.C. Extinction"
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... 94&start=0
------------------------------------------------------

from GrayCloud:

Mather Walker on Earth Tilt and Precession
http://www.sirbacon.org/mham.htm

So is it Mather’s astronomical view that:

“Draconis has a special place because it is actually at the pole of the polar ecliptic. In order words when Draconis was the Pole Star, the ecliptic would have coincided with the equator. Days and nights would have been equal year round, and there would have been spring year round, a golden age.” ??

The picture of precession that I’ve had etched in my brain from childhood was that of the path of a circle or ellipse~ Around the polar axis. Somehow I didn’t realize that at certain stages of a complete precession {if precession is really real}, that there were no seasons; ie: day-duration equals night-duration.

How does that affect the various theories for causes of precession:

Earth normal wobble.
Earth tilted by external force within the memory of man.
Spiral paths of stellar/solar and orbiting bodies through the cosmos.
A “companion” sun / Nibirubies.

?
c

[nick c]

A comment on the precession of the Earth's axis of rotation.
It is often presented as indisputable fact that the ancient Egyptians observed Alpha Draconis (aka Thuban) as the pole star. Statements to this effect appear in numerous learned journals, texts, and assorted writings too numerous to list. Apparently, this is one of those statements that has been repeated so many times it has become "fact." Here is an example:

The ancient Egyptians regarded as pole star the star Thuban or "Alpha Draconis," the brightest star (=alpha) in the constellation Draco, the serpent.
http://www.iki.rssi.ru/mirrors/stern/st ... recess.htm

Actually the ancient Egyptians, or Sumerians, or Chinese, or whomever left no record of Alpha Draconis being the pole star. This conclusion was reached solely through the process of astronomical retrocalculation. If the present rate of precession is reversed, the pole star would have been Alpha Draconis, however, there is no ancient map, or literary reference to Alpha Draconis being the north (pole) star. When modern scholars encounter some Egyptian structure and state that it was aligned to Alpha Draconis which was then the north star, they are interjecting their own modern assumption that the rate of precession has been constant and uninterrupted over time. An alignment to the celestial pole requires that an axis (of whatever you wish to align) is parallel to the Earth's axis of rotation, it will point at whatever constellation or star happens to be lined up with said axis.

nick c

[StevenJay]

If the present rate of precession is reversed, the pole star would have been Alpha Draconis, however, there is no ancient map, or literary reference to Alpha Draconis being the north (pole) star. When modern scholars encounter some Egyptian structure and state that it was aligned to Alpha Draconis which was then the north star, they are interjecting their own modern assumption that the rate of precession has been constant and uninterrupted over time.

Or, that the current configuration of the solar system has remained essentially unchanged for billions of years - a comforting, though misleading, notion that a lot of folks seem to prefer. As I stated once before somewhere on this forum, if the Saturn Theory is even partly correct, then we haven't even experienced more than one quarter to one half of a complete precessional cycle - nor is there any indication that we will necessarily remain in this current configuration long enough to do so. And so, in my mind, that pretty much renders the "Great Year" to be an irrelevant assumption.

[Grey Cloud]

We are getting off-topic here. Could I suggest that these last two posts be moved to Mo's Precession thread in NAIMI (or a new thread). I think Nick and Steven are wrong on a couple of points here and would like to reply.

The following link is mostly concerned with George and the Dragon but includes a mention of Perseus and Andromeda.
http://www.decodingmythology.com/george/george02.html

[Grey Cloud]

Hi Seasmith,
The bit you quoted from the SirBacon site is follwed immediately by:

Then, due to some great misfortune, the plane of the ecliptic was disservered from the plane of the equator. The axis of the earth was tilted. The serpent was cast down. That ancient pair, Orion and Virgo, passed down from their place on the plane of the ecliptic below the equator to winter and death.

The way I read it is that prior to the tilt you had the 'Golden Age' . Post tilt you get (Earthly) seasons. I don't think the GA thing occur within the cycle of the precession. Like you, I don't see how it could.

Plato mentions the two planes in Timaeus but I can't remember what he says.

[Grey Cloud]

Hi Nick,
Re precession and Pole Stars, you wrote:

Apparently, this is one of those statements that has been repeated so many times it has become "fact."

I'm intrigued, can I ask where you got that from?

And:

When modern scholars encounter some Egyptian structure and state that it was aligned to Alpha Draconis which was then the north star, they are interjecting their own modern assumption that the rate of precession has been constant and uninterrupted over time.

I'm confused here. A) Are you suggesting that the Egyptians didn't align their monuments with anything or that the Earth's orientation has altered so dramatically that it is impossible to say what they originally aligned with? b) Modern astronomers know that the rate of precession varies. c) What evidence do you have that it has been interrupted? Presumably you are referring to either V or one of the Saturn theories? If so which one?

[Grey Cloud]

Hi Steven,
You wrote:

As I stated once before somewhere on this forum, if the Saturn Theory is even partly correct, then we haven't even experienced more than one quarter to one half of a complete precessional cycle - nor is there any indication that we will necessarily remain in this current configuration long enough to do so.

That's a BIG if.

And:

And so, in my mind, that pretty much renders the "Great Year" to be an irrelevant assumption.

No offence but it wasn't an irrelevant assumption to the minds of Plato and Homer or the writers of the Vedas, as a few examples.

[StevenJay]

That's a BIG if.

Depends on who you talk/listen to.

No offence but it wasn't an irrelevant assumption to the minds of Plato and Homer or the writers of the Vedas, as a few examples.

By the same token, the big bang, black holes, dark matter, etc., aren't considered irrelevant assumptions to modern demi-gods like Stephen Hawking, either.

[Grey Cloud]

That's a BIG if.

Depends on who you talk/listen to.

No offence but it wasn't an irrelevant assumption to the minds of Plato and Homer or the writers of the Vedas, as a few examples.

By the same token, the big bang, black holes, dark matter, etc., aren't considered irrelevant assumptions to modern demi-gods like Stephen Hawking, either.

So who do you talk/listen to? By your own admission, in another thread, you don't read the ancient material so you are only getting one side of the argument.

Plato and Homer weren't demi-gods though the authors of the Vedas may have been. BB, black holes etc have no bearing on prescession and no modern is a demi-god. My point, in any case, was that the intellectual calibre of Plato et al, is of orders of magnitude greater than any modern expert.

Precession was relevant to cultures on every inhabited continent. If, as you manitian, we have only lived through part of a precessioanal cycle, why would cultures all around the globe put so much time and effort into studying and tracking the phenomena?
Precession is not just stand-alone idea to the ancients, it is part and parcel of their philosophy of the cyclical nature of the Universe. It fits in with eveything they believed in.

[Total Science]

"Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally [wandering] stars, even if popular fantasy had obscured this truth. Little as he believed in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future. He could not guess that W.D. Ross, his modern editor, would condescendingly annotate, 'This is historically untrue.' Yet we know that Saturday and Sabbath had to do with Saturn, just as Wednesday and Mercredi had to do with Mercury. Such names are as old as time; as old, certainly, as the planetary heptagram of the Harranians. They go back far before Professor Ross' Greek philology. The inquiries of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, Boll and, to go further back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavius, had they only been read carefully, and noted, would have taught several relevant lessons to the historians of culture, but interest shifted to other goals, as can be seen from current anthropology, which has built up it's own idea of the 'primitive' and what came after." -- Giorgio de Santillana, polymath, 1969

"Today expert philologists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague deities, subterranean or atmospheric, superimposed on the planets at a 'late' period; they neatly sort out folk origins and 'late' derivations, all unaware that planetary periods, sidereal and synodic, were known and rehearsed in numerous ways by celebrations already traditional in archaic times." -- Giorgio de Santillana, polymath, 1969

[nick c]

Grey Cloud,

Hi Nick,
Re precession and Pole Stars, you wrote:

Apparently, this is one of those statements that has been repeated so many times it has become "fact."

I'm intrigued, can I ask where you got that from?

History books and other writings on Egypt state that Alpha Draconis (Thuban) was the North Star during the Old Kingdom. Googling "Thuban +ancient Egypt" will bring up a wealth of examples, such as this one:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/kl1014041w6j0kv4/
I was pointing out that this "fact" is the result of modern retrocalculations of today's rate of precession, not the result of an analysis of any ancient document or observation, such as a star map that shows Thuban as the North Star.

I'm confused here. A) Are you suggesting that the Egyptians didn't align their monuments with anything or that the Earth's orientation has altered so dramatically that it is impossible to say what they originally aligned with?

Ancient buildings were built to coordinate to one or another of various astronomical alignments, such as cardinal points, equinoxes, etc. I am only pointing out that if you built a structure and aligned it with the pole star, and subsequently the Earth changed its' orientation in space and pointed its' axis in a new direction, your structure would still be aligned with the new pole star (assuming the axis pointed at a visible star). In reality, the coordination of your structure would be with the Earth's axis, not with the star to which that axis points. There is no evidence that Thuban was ever actually observed by anyone in ancient times to be the north star. [If the axis changed within the Earth, ie. the location of the N (and S) pole shifted its' geographical position on the globe, then your structure would no longer be aligned with the pole star. However such a change, might only be temporary as the equatorial bulge would influence the axis to return to at or near its' original position.]

b) Modern astronomers know that the rate of precession varies.

Modern astronomers calculate the rate of precession presently observed, and ASSUME that it has always been so.

c) What evidence do you have that it has been interrupted?

-What few ancient observations and starmaps exist are not reconcilable to today's sky. Numerous Babylonian tablets, including the "Venus Tablets," don't make uniformitarian sense, see:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... a&start=30
Among these astronomical tablets is a computation of the longest day of the year (summer solstice), at Babylon, being equal to 14 hours 24 minutes. The modern calculation based on the present order is 14 hours, 10 minutes, 54 seconds. This led modern scholars to determine that the observations were not made in Babylon, even though the observatories were in Babylon, and that's where the tablets were found.
-One of the two star maps on the ceiling of the temple of Senmut (an 18th dyn official) depicts a sky with constellations in a reversed order, as if the entire globe was turned upside down. Much has (and still is) been written about Senmut's star maps, but rarely is it mentioned that one of the maps shows the constellations are in reversed order. Here Clagett quotes Pogo who compared the reversed order Senmut map, with one from the Ramesseum (which depicts the same order as Senmut) and one from Seti I which depicts the correct (present) order:

On the ceiling of Set I, on the other hand, the orientation of the southern panel is astronomically correct
[...]
With the reversed orientation of the southern panel [in the Senmut tradition], Orion, the most conspicuous constellation of the southern sky, appeared to be moving eastward; i.e', in the wrong direction
[...]
http://books.google.com/books?id=xKKPUp ... 22&f=false

Velikovsky theorized that this star map commemorated a tradition remembering the time when the Sun changed direction and E and W were reversed, [see Worlds In Collision, chap 5 "East and West"] he goes on to cite numerous references to the Earth "turning over" or the Sun reversing it's course after a great catastrophe. Though he specifies that these accounts probably refer to more than one specific catastrophe and serve to, at the very least, show that the supposed regular movement of the celestial sphere (including precession) has been disturbed.
Some of these:
1.Plato, The Statesman,"I mean the change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set..."
2. "Tevel is the Hebrew name for the world in which the sun rose
in the west. Arabot is the name of the sky where
the rising point was in the west."
3. Herodotus relates how Egyptian Priests told him that the Sun on more than one occaision reversed it's movements, rising in the west and setting in the east.
4. from Bellamy, Moons, Myrhs and Man, p69 "The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west."
5. Seler an early researcher of Mesoamerican culture, was perplexed by accounts of reversals of the Sun's motion, "However, one cannot imagine the sun as wandering eastward: the sun and the entire firmament of the fixed stars travel westward."

The discovery of precession is conventionally attributed to [url2=http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biog ... rchus.html]Hipparchus[/url2] circa 150 bce, he is also credited with calculating the distance to the moon. What evidence is there that anyone before, knew of precession?

nick c

[seasmith]

~
NickC wrote:

..might only be temporary as the equatorial bulge would influence the axis to return to at or near its' original position.]

EMG

Or the Electro-Magnetic Gyro effect ?

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... &sk=t&sd=a
~

[StevenJay]

The discovery of precession is conventionally attributed to Hipparchus circa 150 bce, he is also credited with calculating the distance to the moon. What evidence is there that anyone before, knew of precession?

Thanks for that, Nick. I was about to pose the question: Exactly how "ancient" are these ancient texts? Because, if they're only two or three thousand years old, then it would seem that they were compiled thousands of years after the fact, so to speak. That's a long time by human standards; perhaps even long enough for certain events to morph or fade into obscurity and out of contemporary favor/thinking.

And, just for the record, GC, I was using the term 'demi-god' sarcastically. I thought that was pretty obvious.

[Grey Cloud]

Hi Steven,
you wrote:

Exactly how "ancient" are these ancient texts? Because, if they're only two or three thousand years old, then it would seem that they were compiled thousands of years after the fact, so to speak. That's a long time by human standards; perhaps even long enough for certain events to morph or fade into obscurity and out of contemporary favor/thinking.

Fair points.
In academe, 'ancient', as in a. history or a. world, is anything prior to the final Fall of Rome in 476 CE. Sumer was c. 5000 BCE, so from that one can see we are talking about a period which is much longer than from the Fall of Rome to today.
It is true that some of these texts were written thousands of years after the event.
It is also certainly true that within a given culture, e.g. Greek or Egytpian, things did morph or fade etc.
On the other hand, it is worth bearing in mind that, e.g., a Greek writing in the classical period had at his disposal a large library of texts that are now lost. Also, this is where the esoteric element proves its worth. These ancient writers knew that things change, get lost, word meaning alter etc. This is one of the reasons they used symbolism, allegory, correspondence etc to record the important information. These don't change. What has changed is our, modern, ability to understand the symbolism etc. This is a constant refrain of mine and a criticism I frequently level against the Saturn theory authors is that they read everything literally. Reading myth or even Plato literally is about as smart as reading the Bible literally. I will go out on a limb and say that, e.g. Greek mythology represents a coherent body of knowledge. Its apparent incoherence is due to our inablity to understand it.

[Grey Cloud]

Hi Steven,
[Too late to edit prev post]
You wrote:

I was using the term 'demi-god' sarcastically. I thought that was pretty obvious.

Yes, I realised you were being sarcastic but to me a demi-god is a specific and actual phenomenon.