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Friends of Grampian Stones
Newsletters
FOGS Vernal Equinox News
Volume IX number 3, All Hallows, May 1998 |
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Gab o' May
Aye keep in some straw and hay
To meet the caal' Kalends o' May
WHILE the equinoxes may still be precessing, the seasons heading toward change with the
move into the next celestial sphere, this old farming addage still applies - particularly
this year - to a biting cold spell expected around Beltane. Farmers unwary (or wooed by
Euro-grants) enough to leave beasts out in the fields, have in the past found it necessary
to bring them back inside or suffer calving casualties.
On equinoctial precession, many of us are aware of our headlong course towards the age of
Aquarius, but might like to know what it meant in archaic terms. Ancients discovered and
handed down the scientific fact that the earth spins, like a top, with its equator
inclined at 23.5° to the celestial equator, in ideal terms splitting the zodiac which
runs on the ecliptic into a northern band reaching from vernal to autumnal equinox, and a
southern zodiacal arc reaching from autumnal equinox through winter solstice to vernal
equinox.
The earth's equinoctial times would in that ideal scenario be seen to occur forever in the
same spot in relation to the fixed stars and zodiac constellations.
But they do not.
Instead they move quite deliberately 'backwards', in a course opposite to the annual path
of the sun, against the zodiac sequence, i.e. Taurus-> Aries->Pisces. This
Precession was seen by the ancients as the cause of cataclysm, the rise and fall of
civilization, the loss or gain of knowledge. Around 5000BC the sun was in Gemini, moving
every 2,200 years into a new 'Age' - to Taurus, age of the 'Golden Calf', through Aries,
until it reached the Christian era, marked by Pisces, the fish (symbol of early
Christendom, and Celtic knowledge). But each new age was to herald a loss of the best of
the last.
If the Piscean Age were seen as a Classical era giving way to a Christian one, with
classical learning merely surviving to express both the new and the old, our next move
into Aquarius, however enlightening, may sadly mark utter loss of that learning (no longer
taught in schools, jocularly 'dead' languages). If a laissez faire approach to
our national archives and traditions is now the fashion, what we may lose this time could
be irrevocable.
The right of the author to the above material and research is asserted; any duplication of
this material should include the author's copyright ©1998-2000MCNagahiro
send us email to stones@globalnet.co.uk
Editor Marian Youngblood |
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