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Chapter 9 In the early third century AD, two zodiac systems coincided. One of these was the star-zodiac, then hoary with age, while the other was the tropical zodiac, with its starting-point at zero Aries anchored to the Vernal Point. This latter framework was by then hardly being used by astrologers. It gradually gained currency however, causing the older, sidereal system to sink into a deep oblivion - from which it only emerged in the twentieth century. Certain primary reference stars defined its position, although there were different views on this matter amongst the various cultures that adopted it. As these two wheels came to converge, the Vernal Point transited from the sidereal sign of Aries into Pisces - an event quite comparable to present-day expectations of its precessional movement into the sign of Aquarius. Did an Age of Pisces begin in AD 221, when 'the Tropical and Sidereal Zodiacs coincided' as claimed for example by Roy Gillett, Chair of the Astrological Association in The Observer (21 Jan 1996) as regards why Aquarius would arrive around AD 2,376. The two dates are separated by a period of some twenty-one centuries, in which time the Vernal Point traverses thirty degrees of the stellar background. It may help to take a historical perspective on these matters. Astronomical records of the Sumerian people in Mesapotamia, from the first and second millenia BC, indicate their perception of the constellations on and near to the ecliptic, primarily in relation to the Moon, discerning about seventeen of these. A list of them given in a text of the seventh century BC concluded: 'These are the gods standing on the path of the moon, (the gods) through whose sectors the moon passes every month and whom he touches'1,2. This experience of the night sky was without mathematics or geometrical form.
Six of these constellations had the same names as today (the Bull, Lion, etc), and their images have altered little through the millenia. The Cancer and Aries constellations were absent, but there was a Great Swallow (southwestern Pisces plus epsilon Pegasi) and the Lady of the Heavens (northeastern Pisces plus the central part of Andromeda)3. An early name for Libra meant 'horn of a scorpion', hinting at a much larger Scorpion4. Their constellation equivalent to the Virgin seems to have been of quite comparable ecliptic length to its modern counterpart, of 45°or so, and it lay next to the small constellation of Libra the Balance5. Sumerians of the second millenium B.C. had already developed a base-sixty (sexagesimal) number-system, with a year containing 360 days and a day divided into 360 parts, with twelve hours and thirty 'minutes' per hour6. They had a schematic year with twelve months each of thirty days. Our division of an hour into minutes and seconds echoes their method of base-sixty counting. For the Babylonians each month began by observing the lunar crescent7. A tablet from the end of the sixth century BC lists these twelve months, with a zodiac constellations adjacent to each one. Some of the names for these twelve constellations were similar to those of today's signs (the Crab, Lion, Balance, Scorpion and the Goat-fish), though some were different, eg The Hired Man instead of Aries, and The Giant instead of Aquarius8. For each calendar month, the constellation was that rising just before dawn ('heliacally').
The zodiac appeared in the fifth century BC, in Chaldea. The tale of its discovery was vividly described in 'The Omens of Babylon' by Michael Baigent, although without commenting on either the zodiac signs or how the position of the zodiac divisions were defined with respect to the stars. The dates cited above by Mr Gillett depend entirely upon this latter issue, yet scant attention has been given to it. At the beginning of the fifth century BC, twelve thirty-degree 'signs' appear as divisions of the ecliptic, reflecting the schematic twelve months of 30 days each, so that the Sun moved a degree per day. This involved some adjustment to the existing constellation images on the ecliptic to accomodate the twelve new, equal divisions. Thus the large Leo constellation, spread out over more than one sign, became decapitated by its sign boundary. Several different constellations perceived around what we now call Pisces became fused into one. Much later on, Greeks derived the idea of dividing the circle into 360° from this Chaldean scheme. The Metonic cycle for keeping the calendar also started to be used in fifth century BC, in both Chaldea and Greece9. Thereby the twelve lunar months were kept in step with the solar year through nineteen-year intervals. Before this, the process of intercalation had been a quite haphazard affair. The calendar acquired a structure linking months and years, at the same historical moment as twelve equal signs became fixed in the firmament. Hardly any images have survived of the signs of this primal zodiac, if indeed there were any, and the modern constellation-images seem to have derived more from Egypt. Almost the sole record of the constellation-images in antiquity comes from a constellation-map on the ceiling at Denderah in Egypt, dated to around 30 BC, composed of a mixture of Greek and Babylonian images10. Prominent fixed stars such as Spica, Antares and Aldebaran anchored the star-zodiac. Spica in the Babylonian division lay near the end of the sign Virgo11. In the 1940s, Cyril Fagan concluded that Aldebaran had originally been positioned at the centre of Taurus with 15° longitude as its reference-point12 (as would put Spica at 29° of Virgo) and some siderealists have endorsed this view13,14,15, though it is not unanimous16. A reconstruction of this primal zodiac is shown.
After Fagan had reached this view, a detailed study resolved the position of the Chaldean zodiac against the stars, by comparing given longitudes, in tablets dateable to the first and second centuries BC17. This agreed within arcminutes with the position advocated by Fagan. It is mainly from this estimate of position that a date is derivable, as around 221 AD, plus or minus about fifty years, for when the two zodiacs, Sidereal and Tropical, coincided - a century after Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos was written. Greek Reception of the Zodiac The Greek word Kosmos (κóσμος) originally just meant 'order' or 'adornment', from which the English word 'cosmetic' derives. In the fifth century BC it came to acquire a wider meaning, as applying to the world as a whole18. Thus the meaning of this special Greek word, of beauty as discerned in the order and structure of things, developed while the zodiac was coming into being. The Tropical zodiac started life as a calendar, associated with the Greek astronomer Euktemon in the fifth century BC. He located the date of the summer solstice, from which he constructed twelve 'signs' as calendar months:'The first day of the month 'Cancer' was the day of the summer solstice, the first day of 'Libra' was the autumnal equinox, and so on19.' Other Greek mathematicians did not agree, and instead placed the Vernal Point 8° away from zero Aries20 - an early 'ayanamsa' value, ie the angle separating the two zodiacs. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus in the second century BC was the first to prepare a catalogue of star-longitudes, and he did so taking the Vernal Point as zero Aries, ie using the tropical zodiac. Much later on, in the first century AD, Pliny's History of Nature placed the Vernal Point at 8° of Aries, as likewise did Vitruvius a century later21. It would appear that, in the first century AD, these Romans were far from appreciating the phenomenon of precession, and were picturing an immovable Vernal Point, at a position that had been valid for a much earlier epoch: eight degrees was fine for the fifth century BC, but by Pliny's time it was way out. One could say that Pliny was using a tropical zodiac, in the sense that his Vernal Point had a fixed celestial longitude. Hipparchus had taken zero Aries as the Vernal point, but this had not made much headway. He had also described precession, ie how the stars were moving against the vernal point, but this notion was far from being generally accepted. The compilation 'Greek horoscopes' by Otto Neugebauer gives planetary longitudes of the earliest remaining birthcharts written in Greek, from the Hellenistic world spread around the Mediterranean, spanning the first to the fifth centuries AD. As Neugebauer remarked, the charts in this volume are sidereal, ie they use essentially the same reference as did the Babylonian zodiac22. The charts from the first century have their planets 3-4° from the positions expected using a tropical system, ie that was their ayanamsa. There are a dozen or so of such charts coming from the latter half of the fifth century, by which time the two wheels had moved some two degrees apart. These charts suggest that, in the centuries after Ptolemy, the astrologers writing in Greek continued to use a sidereal reference23. The charts are mainly from Alexandria, indicating that even in Ptolemy's city the sidereal tradition endured. It would thus appear that ancient astrology was primarily sidereal. Greeks who used the Tropical reference, such as Euctemon and Hipparchus, are remembered as astronomers24, concerned with calendars and star-positions. There were different zodiac frameworks in antiquity, tropical and sidereal, but the evidence suggests that the latter type was mainly used by astrologers25, a fact underempasised in histories of astrology26. In Ptolemy's time, one could hardly tell the difference, as the two systems came into convergence. Fagan argued that it was not until several centuries after Ptolemy, around the 5th-6th centuries, that astrologers started using a tropical zodiac. The sidereal trend of the Greek horoscopes collection fits quite well with having the star Spica at 30° of Virgo27, as may be a degree away from the Chaldean setup, in which Antares was located at 15° of Taurus. In the zodiac picture on the ceiling of Denderah, a harvest-goddess standing upright (not lying down, as was Ptolemy's Virgo) holds a sheaf of corn, representing the star Spica. By the end of the third century, the Autumn Equinox was conjunct the star Spica, and the Egyptian year began at the Autumn equinox, making the Libra/Virgo boundary opposite the First Point of Aries the start of their zodiac28. Ptolemy Ptolemy advocated use of the tropical zodiac in astrology, and was the first to do so29. In his lifetime, the two wheels were only a degree apart. As his astronomy opus, the Almagest, used the star-positions of Hipparchus, it was logical for him to advocate the same reference-point as Hipparchus for zero Aries. Thereby he unlinked the zodiac from its starry framework and reconnected it to the Four Seasons. As the Janus-figure of astrology, he had the privilege of being able to face both ways, living around the time when the two wheels coincided. 'His zodiac was firmly constellational, and also firmly Sun-based. Did Ptolemy realise that he had established a system whereby a phantom Zodiac would detach itself from the stars as the centuries rolled by, move ever further away from the constellations which gave them birth, and cause the original Zodiac of mankind to be forgotten? Did he realise that the two systems were only together at one point in historical time - his life time?'30 I doubt it. Ptolemy's Zodiac was firmly linked to the seasons of the year, so that he explained their passage with reference to the Sun's motion through the signs (Fortunately, there were no southern hemisphere astrologers then to dispute this!). Yet, as Fagan observed, Ptolemy's Zodiac was also sidereal: his section in Tetrabiblos on the Zodiac is entitled "The influence of the Fixed Stars", and refers throughout to the individual stars which comprise the Zodiac images31. In like manner he refers to the influence of various extra-Zodiacal constellations on man. Before Ptolemy, there were two traditions, of which that from Chaldea was astrological, while the Greek tradition was astronomical. These traditions fused in the melting-pot of Alexandria, where astrology as we know it was born, after which the Sidereal tradition fades away and a new tropical tradition appears; as if the astral images of the constellations had become precipitated onto the ecliptic plane, giving a Sun-defined zodiac. The tropical zodiac used today has a remembered image of the star-zodiac, as Ptolemy saw it eighteen centuries ago. The Vernal Point moved into Pisces, at which moment of synchrony, when the two systems coincided, the image of a fish came to be widely accepted as a symbol for the Christian religion. This Pisces-symbol first appeared in this context in Alexandria, at the start of the second century AD, and had become 'current by the end of the second century' amongst Christians32.
The triplicities had been associated together in early Chaldean texts, such as Leo, Sagittarius and Aries, or Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces33. Quite separately, the Greek four elements developed in a medical, physiological context using the four humours, and were used by philosophers. In the latter half of the second century AD these elements acquired a heavenly context as colouring the triplicities of the zodiac. The four elements first went into the zodiac in the works of the Syrian Vettius Valens34,35, being (rather surprisingly) absent from Ptolemy. It was around the 5th century A.D. (in the view of Fagan) that the sidereal tradition ended and Ptolemy's two books were taken by Arabs as their only or chief link with this past tradition36,37. Ptolemy's fixing the start of the zodiac at a position in space defined by a point in time of the year's cycle, the equinoctial point at March 22nd, became henceforth the only zodiac they knew about. Thus the Sidereal zodiac vanished from the West. In the East, "In its original form the zodiac in India was probably the Zodiac used by Greek astrologers, which, owing to the spread of astrology, became transmitted to India in the 2nd century A.D."38 Indian astrologers do not admit that their zodiac was so derived, believing in the immemorial antiquity of Hindu culture etc. However, they now have a star-based zodiac (the 'Lahiri' ayanamsa) with Spica at 30° of Virgo, as seems to have been used by the Hellenistic world of antiquity. The decoding of cuneiform tablets around the turn of the century, unearthed from the banks of the Tigris, disclosed the forgotten roots of astrology. In the mid-twentieth century a school of sidereal astrologers arose, who endeavoured to claim that modern zodiac signs were illusory, and that astrologers should switch back to the old sidereal signs (presently shifted some 25° from the Tropical). Their siderealist journal was called, appropriately enough, 'Spica'. By the 1970s, this endeavour had faded away and the sidereal zodiac was reforgotten. Let us hope that some other approach can be found, to discern its proper place and significance39,40. Recent books debating when an Age of Aquarius will 'dawn' have used the unequal constellations. The Pisces constellation is faint but large, so that such an approach postpones its 'dawn' for eight centuries hence. Worse, the Aquarius and Pisces constellations overlap, giving an interim period of several centuries when no-one would know which Age it would be! This further indicates the reforgetting of the star-zodiac of antiquity. The diagram shows the present position of the vernal point, as it moves backwards through the constellations, having now reached 5° sidereal Pisces, together with its position at 8° of Aries as Meton and Euctemon originally located it in the fifth century BC. Little has been written about the sidereal zodiac of antiquity, owing not least to the strong academic prejudice against astrology. It has here been argued that, for a millenium, in the countries around the Mediterranean, a star-zodiac was in use. Respect for the Chaldeans, who invented horoscopic astrology, was such that the tradition could not be abandoned, as long as that origin was remembered. References
1) F.Rochberg-Halton, 'New Evidence for the History of Astrology', Journal of Near-Eastern Studies, 43,1984, pp.115-127,122.
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