Loaves and Fishes

[neilgodfrey]

it fails to account for

• the many odd and unnatural details of the event,
• why these details are changed for its second telling, and
• what was its point in relation to the similar miracle by Elisha.

A reason that can account for all of these has to win over one that is as generalized as saying it's a lesson to inspire charity.

Good points. Cheers Neil.

I overlooked the most obvious point that it fails to account for:

• its demonstration of the theme of great growth coming from minuscule beginnings that Jesus had just been teaching in his parables

And also Jesus' subsequent point that the miracle represented some sort of mysterious knowledge that related to the disciples' fear:

• Mark 8:14-21

[DCHindley]

little ditty in the parables of Enoch

I don't think Enoch is usually referred to as writing ditties, except perhaps by people who have some dismissive agenda. My comments on Enoch are at viewtopic.php?p=3043#p3043

Yes, and my dismissive agenda was immediately demonstrated in the post immediately following yours.

The relevance here is that the loaves and fishes keys into a Gnostic tradition in which cosmic texts such as the one you have cited from Enoch are important.

Hmmmmm

FWIW, I have been following academic Enoch studies for about 30 years (R H Charles, J H Charlesworth, J T Milik, M Black). While no expert, I also follow modern academic study of ancient astronomy ( Otto E. Neugebauer, mainly). In fact, I even follow the wackier (although not entirely unuseful) astrological work by Cyril Fagan/Roy Firebrace on the Sidereal zodiac as depicted in Babylonian and Egyptian contexts.

I just fail to see astrotheological Sun mythicism behind every tree.

[neilgodfrey]

22 March 2014

Mark 6:39 He commanded them that everyone should sit down in groups on the green grass.

The green grass is an evocative image. Somehow I have always imagined this miracle story as occurring on a rocky dusty lake shore, but here we find this image of green fertility, pleasance, abundance, simplicity, peace, order and beauty.

The green grass evokes the line from Peter and Isaiah used by Brahms in his Requiem, behold all flesh is as the grass, with grass a symbol of temporal mortality, hinting toward the cosmic relation between time and eternity.

40 They sat down in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties.

With the men sitting in groups considered in this story as meaning stars, we can readily see the grouping as meaning constellations.

Again just another interim question if I may -- I am not clear whether the stars people here represent the stars or are meant to represent humanity. If the stars are made to sit on grass as a symbol of the impermanence of everything, are you suggesting something akin to the Stoic view of the universe in which everything was expected to come to a fiery end one day before starting the process all over again?

Don't you think that the specific grouping by hundreds and fifties and in ranks counts against the idea of constellations? Are constellations so uniform and orderly?

[Robert Tulip]

modern academic study of ancient astronomy ( Otto E. Neugebauer)

Thanks DCH. I recognise that Otto Neugebauer is the principle mainstream accepted authority on ancient views on precession. However, he has a method of enquiry and judgment that in my view fails to see the depth of ancient insight in astronomy.

A biography at http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/oneugebauer.pdf says “Neugebauer was always at pains to lay the ghost of profound Egyptian astronomical wisdom.” My view is that these pains indicate error, in that Neugebauer was wrong in his analysis of precession due to faulty method in analysis of ancient sources, due to treatment of extant data as representative. With what that biography calls “particular perversity”, Neugebauer began the section on Egypt in his History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy with the provocative sentence, “Egypt has no place in a work on the history of mathematical astronomy.”

Such a statement about the land of the pyramids, Karnak and Dendera looks absurd. If that is a bold claim on my part, I am happy to discuss it, and if possible, to be proved wrong. Neugebauer asserted that the Babylonians had the ability to predict eclipses but they somehow failed to see and measure that the equinoxes precess along the ecliptic path of the sun. This is an unbelievable disjunction, in that the science needed to measure the moon against the stars easily provides data to measure the shift of the equinoxes. His dismissal of the Pan-Babylonian scholarly hypothesis of Babylonian knowledge of precession appears to me to be grounded in selective and flawed method by Neugebauer, restricting to things that can be easily proved and ignoring things that require deeper analysis, creating a distorted and unbalanced view that excises the lost ideas of mystery religion from the heart of ancient astronomy.

The Babylonians could measure and record the position of every visible star and planet in the sky for around a thousand years of continuous civilization. It appears the Babylonians used ziggurats as observation platforms every night, enough to calculate the draconic, anomalistic and synodic motions of the moon. However, records of the priestly function of the ziggurats in connecting heaven and earth have not survived, although Herodotus mentioned their use as shrines. Babylonian astronomy was enough for Hipparchus to reconstruct precession from Babylonian star records of the position of Spica against the equinox using the total lunar eclipse on 21 March 134 BC, (2147 years ago today). This eclipse next to Spica will be closely repeated with the first blood moon of the 2014-15 tetrad on 15 April 2014.

Neugebauer unfortunately found nothing in Babylonian astronomy to prove to his satisfaction that they were aware of precession. Neugebauer argues the Babylonian astronomer priests failed to notice that the whole 'wheels within wheels' (to borrow a concept from the noted Babylonian resident Ezekiel) shebang moved the stars by one degree per lifetime against the seasonal cross of the solstices and equinoxes. Just to note now as a major theme deserving more discussion, Ezekiel’s description of the four living creatures refers to the stars Aldebaran in the Bull, Regulus in the Lion, Antares in the Eagle/Scorpion and Fomalhaut in the Man, the cardinal stars of the Ages of Taurus and Aquarius.

The errors of Neugebauer go to method and intent. The Christian church sought to destroy all traces of the Gnostic cosmic ladder it had climbed to construct its dream of Jesus Christ Supernatural. This destruction of Gnostic knowledge was so successful, striking fear into the heart of almost anyone who possessed heretical literature for more than a thousand years, that the evidence for the ancient knowledge is now sparse and must be sought in concealed and fragmentary sources such as the loaves and fishes miracle. Christians tend to take this sparse evidentiary framework regarding the extent of ancient astronomy as somehow complete, using it to bolster a traditional emotional supernatural myth regarding Christ, without reference to the real astronomical framework.

The beheading of John the Baptist described in Mark 6 just before the loaves and fishes miracle illustrates, by my reading, that knowledge of precession was the subject of extreme repression in the ancient world. My view is that this imperial repression was a response to precession as the originary scientific structure for the Christ myth. Mark tells us it was more important for Salome and her connections to get the Baptist's head, and thereby silence the watchers, than to get half of Herod's kingdom.

The evidentiary method used by Neugebauer, as also advocated by Gary D. Thompson, fails to engage the real evidence, which should rather be looked for in what Heidegger called the fugitive traces of the divine.

'To be a poet in a destitute time means to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

[DCHindley]

modern academic study of ancient astronomy ( Otto E. Neugebauermainly)

Thanks DCH. I recognise that Otto Neugebauer is the principle mainstream accepted authority on ancient views on precession. However, he has a method of enquiry and judgment that in my view fails to see the depth of ancient insight in astronomy.

A biography at http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/oneugebauer.pdf says “Neugebauer was always at pains to lay the ghost of profound Egyptian astronomical wisdom.” My view is that these pains indicate error, in that Neugebauer was wrong in his analysis of precession due to faulty method in analysis of ancient sources, due to treatment of extant data as representative. With what that biography calls “particular perversity”, Neugebauer began the section on Egypt in his History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy with the provocative sentence, “Egypt has no place in a work on the history of mathematical astronomy.”

Such a statement about the land of the pyramids, Karnak and Dendera looks absurd. ... Neugebauer unfortunately found nothing in Babylonian astronomy to prove to his satisfaction that they were aware of precession. Neugebauer argues the Babylonian astronomer priests failed to notice that the whole 'wheels within wheels' (to borrow a concept from the noted Babylonian resident Ezekiel) shebang moved the stars by one degree per lifetime against the seasonal cross of the solstices and equinoxes. ... The errors of Neugebauer go to method and intent. ...

I don't happen to have a copy of History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy but do have a collection of essays under the title Astronomy & History: Selected Essays, which outlines his position on these matters pretty clearly. I do not think you know very much about Neugebauer, other than that he has a low opinion of Egyptian astrological prowess. I'll post something separately to give an overview of what he REALLY thinks about the level of astronomical, and by extension astrological, sophistication of the Egyptians and Babylonians.

Just to note now as a major theme deserving more discussion, Ezekiel’s description of the four living creatures refers to the stars Aldebaran in the Bull, Regulus in the Lion, Antares in the Eagle/Scorpion and Fomalhaut in the Man, the cardinal stars of the Ages of Taurus and Aquarius.

My understanding is that these four are the "Royal Stars" of the Persians, representing the four points of the season (equinoxes and solstices) as they existed around 3,000 BCE. However, the following article shows how this whole idea is a modern one conjured up by romantics who read a lot into a description of an astral battle royal against Ahura Mazda's evil opposite, in an 18th century CE translation of the Zend Avesta of the Zoroastrians:

(Davis, George A Jr) The So-Called Royal Stars of Persia (Popular Astronomy Vol LIII-4, Apr 1945)
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi- ... etype=.pdf

The beheading of John the Baptist described in Mark 6 just before the loaves and fishes miracle illustrates, by my reading, that knowledge of precession was the subject of extreme repression in the ancient world. My view is that this imperial repression was a response to precession as the originary scientific structure for the Christ myth. Mark tells us it was more important for Salome and her connections to get the Baptist's head, and thereby silence the watchers, than to get half of Herod's kingdom.

The evidentiary method used by Neugebauer, as also advocated by Gary D. Thompson, fails to engage the real evidence, ...[i.e.,] "the trace of the fugitive gods."

Oh puhleeze ...

[DCHindley]

Well, I was happy to find that the entire contents of Neugebauer's major article The History of Ancient Astronomy: Problems And Methods, as revised in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 58, can be downloaded as digitized PDF files here:

Sect 1-11, No. 340, Feb 1946, 17-43
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi- ... etype=.pdf

Sect 12-23, No. 341, Apr 1946, 104-142
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi- ... etype=.pdf

OUTLINE

I. INTRODUCTION
1. Scope and Character of the Paper
2. Definition of “Astronomy”
3. Character of Ancient Astronomy

II. EGYPT
4. Egyptian Mathematics
5. Egyptian Astronomical Documents
6. Description of Egyptian Astronomy

III. MESOPOTAMIA
7. The Sources of Babylonian Astronomy
8. Mathematical Astronomy in the Seleucid Period
9. Babylonian Mathematics
10. Earlier Development of Babylonian Astronomy
11. Babylonian Astrology
11a. Jewish Astronomy

IV. THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD
12. Greek Spherical Astronomy
13. Mathematical Geography
14. Astrology
15. Greek Mathematics
16. From Hipparchus to Ptolemy
17. Relations to Mesopotamia

V. SPECIAL PROBLEMS
18. Social Background
19. Metrology
20. History of Constellations
21. Chronology
22. Hindu Astronomy
23. Methodology of the History of Astronomy

Bibliography and Abbreviations

DCH

[Robert Tulip]

Just chatting with a friend about Neugebauer and his derision about ancient knowledge of precession.

It is a bit like how Russia and Ukraine allegedly signed a treaty in 1654, but there is almost no surviving tangible evidence of this event. If you had a political agenda that meant it suited you to say there was no treaty, then you could advocate and defend that position.

Similarly, if the church had a political position that meant it suited it to say the ancients had only the sketchiest knowledge of precession, they could alter records and destroy evidence to bolster that view. And if Neugebauer fails to see the church influence, he will get a wrong interpretatio by treating objective proven hard evidence as the only legitimate source.

Similarly, if you wanted to say that the 5% of ancient astronomy that has survived the tender mercies of time and fire is representative, you would get a very distorted picture of what really happened, by ignoring the need to reconstruct the broader picture from the rubble and concealed fragments such as the loaves and fishes story.

Thank you DCH for sharing Neugebauer's texts. I think Thompson gives a good summary of his views, and I think I have fairly represented him, and explained why I disagree. Distorted views on ancient astronomy illustrate an important part of the puzzle as to why a cosmic interpretation of the Christ Myth is so difficult to explain and discuss.

I would be interested to find out how Neugebauer explains the amazing exactitude of the alignment of the pyramids of Egypt, the reason for their tubes pointed at spots including the North Celestial Pole, and why Sir Norman Lockyer was able to explain Egyptian temple alignments against the model of horizonal telescopes shifting with precession.

[neilgodfrey]

On the ancient knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes:

Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire, 2006:

This hypothesis about the design and composition implies that the designers knew the then very recherche ́ fact that the equinoxes do indeed slowly shift position, the so-called precession of the equinoxes. Very few serious scholars either of the Mithraic mysteries or of the history of astronomy have accepted Ulansey’s theory. My own view (Beck 2004 c :243–4) is that, wrong though the theory is, this much can be said for it: had you explained precession to a Mithraic Father and pointed out that the torch bearers, the scorpion, and the bull could be related to the equinoxes of an earlier era, he would have gratefully added it to his portfolio of explications. Simply as a matter of star-talk syntax, the archaic equinoxes were and are potentially present as meanings in the composition of the tauroctony. What makes it extremely improbable that precession was ever elicited as a meaning, let alone deliberately encoded in the tauroctony as a ‘plumbed-in’ meaning, is the need to postulate Mithraists or Ur-Mithraists with the requisite knowledge. Nothing in the reception-history of the astronomical theory of precession suggests that such people ever existed. Since one can account for Mithraism’s esoteric quartering without invoking them, they serve no useful function and are best dismissed. (p. 217)

Beck refers to Swerdlow's criticism of Ulansey's theory with this caveat (p. 33):

Swerdlow is a distinguished historian of astronomy, and his particular target, David Ulansey (1989), had the temerity to propose that the tauroctony encoded one of ancient astronomy’s most important and highly technical discoveries, the ‘precession of the equinoxes’. On the limited question of precession I agree with Swerdlow against Ulansey.

From N.M. Swerdlow's review of Ulansey in Classical Philology, 86, 1, 1991

The other point concerns Hipparchus' discovery of the precession and whatever might have been made of it in Tarsus or any place else. The earliest surviving writer so much as to mention the precession is Ptolemy in the mid-second century, about three hundred years after Hipparchus. Ulansey may say the centuries intervene because the discovery was kept a deep dark secret reserved for adepts of the cult of Mithras or Perseus, but that is simply ridiculous. Aside from the vagaries of the survival of writings on astronomy before Ptolemy, whose work made that of his predecessors on the whole obsolete, it is most likely that the precession was not mentioned for three hundred years because Hipparchus' description was so tentative, and so uncertain of what his observations showed, that no one paid any attention to it until Ptolemy demonstrated that it really existed. Even then, Proclus, who lived fully three centuries after Ptolemy and is the only philosopher to my knowledge to take note of the precession, denied it because he thought it undetectable and contradicted by the appearances it would, he said, make the Bears partially set below the horizon and because all wise men agreed that the fixed stars have only a single motion about the pole of the world, the diurnal rotation, and none about the pole of the ecliptic. In short, what was good enough for Plato was good enough for Proclus. And Ptolemy, who (like Proclus) was personally a devoted believer in the divinity of the heavenly bodies and the efficacy of astrological divination, treats the precession purely astronomically, for nowhere does he so much as hint at any religious or astrological implications. Did he know he was giving away a great mystery? Was he perhaps doing it on purpose? Had everyone forgotten the true significance of the precession? Was Proclus trying to put the cat back into the bag? The questions are too absurd to deserve an answer.

Now Hipparchus' treatment of the precession was not at all straightforward and was hardly such as would have suggested the need for a new cosmic deity. If anything, until a few hundred years had passed, in which the evidence for a motion of the stars with respect to the equinoxes became stronger, it would have suggested above all the possibility of observational error, which Hipparchus himself feared. All that is known of Hipparchus' study of what we now call the precession is contained in Almagest 3. 1 and 7. 1-3, and it is evident from Ptolemy's account that it was highly technical, highly tentative, and offered more than one explanation for rather discrepant observations that did not necessarily indicate anything like a motion of the entire sphere of the fixed stars with respect to the equinoxes. (p. 59)

[DCHindley]

II. EGYPT

4. A few words must be said about Egyptian mathematics before discussing the astronomical material. ... Egyptian arithmetic can be characterized as being predominantly of an “additive” character, that is, its main tendency is to reduce all operations to repeated additions. And, because the process of division is very poorly adaptable to such procedures, we can say that Egyptian mathematics does not provide the most essential tools for astronomical computation. It is therefore not surprising that none of our Egyptian astronomical documents requires anything more than simple operations with integers. Where the complexity of the phenomena exceeded the capacity of Egyptian mathematics, the strongest simplifications were adopted, consequently leading to little more than qualitative results.

5. The astronomical documents of purely Egyptian origin ... It is, finally, worth mentioning that not a single report of observations is preserved, in strong contrast to the abundance of observational records from Mesopotamia. It is hard to say whether this reflects a significant historical fact or merely that we are at the mercy of the accidents of excavation.

Speaking of negative evidence, three instances must be mentioned which play a more or less prominent role in literature on the subject and have contributed much to a rather distorted picture of Egyptian astronomy.

The first point consists in the idea that the earliest Egyptian calendar, based on the heliacal rising of Sothis, reveals the existence of astronomical activity in the fourth millennium B.C. It can be shown, however, that this theory is based on tacit assumptions which are very implausible in themselves and that the whole Egyptian calendar does not presuppose any systematic astronomy whatsoever.(Neugebauer, O. "Die Bedeutungslosigkeit der 'Sothisperiode' für die älteste ägyptische Chronologie," Acta orientalia, 17 (1938), 169-95; Neugebauer, O. "The Origin of the Egyptian Calendar," INES, 1 (1942), 396-403; Winlock, H. E. "The Origin of the Egyptian Calendar," Proc. of the Amer. Philos. Soc., 83 (1940), 447-64.)

The second remark concerns the hypothesis of early Babylonian influence on Egyptian astronomical concepts. This theory is based on a comparative method which assumes direct influence behind every parallelism or vague mythological analogy. Every concrete detail of Babylonian and Egyptian astronomy which I know contradicts this hypothesis. Nothing in the texts of the Middle and New Kingdom equals in level, general type, or detail the contemporaneous Mesopotamian texts. The main source of trouble is, as usual, the retrojection into earlier periods of a situation which undoubtedly prevailed during the latest phase of Egyptian history.

This brings us to the third point to be mentioned here: the assumption of an original Egyptian astrology. First of all, there is no proof in general for the widely accepted assertion that astrology preceded astronomy. But especially in Egypt is there no trace of astrological ideas in the enormous mythological literature which we possess for all periods. The earliest horoscope from Egyptian soil, written in Demotic, refers to A.D. 13; the earliest Greek horoscope from Egypt concerns the [25] year 4 B.C. We shall presently see that the assumption of a very late introduction of astrological ideas into Egypt corresponds to various other facts. ...

The criterion for scientific mathematics must be the existence of the concept of proof; in astronomy, the elimination of all arguments which are not exclusively based on observations or on mathematical consequences [28] of an initial hypothesis as to the fundamental character of the movements involved. Egyptian mathematics nowhere reaches the level of argument which is worthy of the name of proof, and even the much more highly developed Babylonian mathematics hardly ever displays a general technique for proving its procedures.(26) Egyptian astronomy was satisfied with a very, rough qualitative description of the phenomena — here, too, we miss any trace of scientific method. ...

9. It will be clear from this discussion that the level reached by Babylonian mathematics was decisive for the development of such [astronomical] methods. The determination of characteristic constants (e.g., period, amplitude, and phase in periodic motions) not only requires highly developed methods of computation but inevitably leads to the problem of solving systems of equations corresponding to the outside conditions imposed upon the problem by the observational data. In other words, without a good stock of mathematical tools, devices of the type which we find everywhere in the Babylonian lunar and planetary theory could not be designed. Egyptian mathematics would have rendered hopeless any attempt to solve problems of the type needed constantly in Babylonian astronomy. It is therefore essential for our topic to give a brief sketch of Babylonian mathematics. ...

The calendaric interest of these problems is obvious. The same is true of the oldest preserved astronomical documents from Mesopotamia, the so-called “astrolabes.”(57) These astrolabes are clay tablets inscribed with a figure of three concentric circles, divided into twelve sections by twelve radii. In each of the thirty-six fields thus obtained we find the name of a constellation and simple numbers whose significance is not yet clear. But it seems evident that the whole text constitutes some kind of schematic celestial map which represents three regions on the sky, each divided into twelve parts, and attributing characteristic numbers to each constellation. These numbers increase and decrease in arithmetic progression and are undoubtedly connected with the corresponding month of the schematic twelve-month calendar. It is clear that we have here some kind of simple astronomical calendar parallel (not in detail, but in purpose) to the “diagonal calendars” in Egypt. In both cases these calendars are of great interest to us as a source for determining the relative positions and the earliest names of various constellations. But here, too, the strongest simplifications are adopted in order to obtain symmetric arrangements, and much remains to be done before we can answer such questions as the origin of the “zodiac.” ...

DCH

[Robert Tulip]

I am not clear whether the stars people here represent the stars or are meant to represent humanity.

Hi Neil. I am using this thread to continue our conversation started in the Acharya S Conspiracy Theory thread, looking at how the Christian texts most probably emerged, analysing this remarkable central story of the loaves and fishes miracle to shed light on the broader questions.

Your question here (assuming that by ‘stars people’ you meant ‘people’) asks about the allegorical intent. My reading is that the 5000 or 4000 men represent the visible stars of the sky, but also how the stable presence of the stars is reflected in the changing situation of life on earth. It is all about the connection between earth and heaven.

One of the features of parables is multivalency - having various meanings or values. So the prodigal son, the good Samaritan and the parable of the sower are used by preachers to derive a range of lessons. We see in the loaves and fishes that the conventional meaning regarding charity is a popular starting point, as already noted in this thread, but there are also meaning regarding cosmology and the social connection between Christianity and Judaism.

I would like now to cite a major historical example of this method of using depiction of earth (the microcosm) to explain a stable universal structure of the cosmos (the macrocosm).

Leonardo da Vinci, as explained in a good essay at the Penn State College of Engineering website, http://www.coe.psu.edu/water/images/d/da/Essay_1.pdf was convinced that the study of the human body would lead to a better understanding of the powers of the universe. Leonardo wrote a famous line in his Notebooks that was central to his scientific and artistic work: "Man is the model of the world". What he meant was, for example, that the circulation of the blood is like the circulation of the oceans.

This is the old Hermetic notion that microcosms may be understood as reflections of macrocosms. Applied to the miracle of the loaves and fishes, this heuristic identity of man and world means that the story of the 5000 men fed in Galilee has universal significance. Specifically, it refers to the movement of the equinoxes into the signs of the loaves and fishes, but generically, it also means that attunement to the cosmos is a source of creative genius.

If the stars are made to sit on grass as a symbol of the impermanence of everything, are you suggesting something akin to the Stoic view of the universe in which everything was expected to come to a fiery end one day before starting the process all over again?

The stars participate both in eternity and time, as reflected in Plato’s Chi Rho in the Timaeus with its hypostatic idea of the unity of the same and the different, as marked by the intersection between the unchanging galaxy and the changing zodiac. The stars provide the slow clock of history. For the stars to sit on the grass is an incarnational motif, reflecting the Christological idea that the eternal Christ is in hypostatic unity with the temporal Jesus of Nazareth.

You may know the Negro Spiritual ‘O Mary Don’t You Weep’, with the line ‘won’t be water but fire next time.’ This is the idea that the cataclysm of the flood of Noah will be repeated with a destructive fiery end to human civilization. The concept from Nietzsche of the eternal return of the same picks up on this image of fiery destruction of the world. In my view the imagined fiery end of the world is a corruption of the ancient cyclic idea of the Great Year, as seen in Vedic myth of the cycle between golden and iron ages every 24,000 years. This cyclic period actually aligns to the real cycle of precession driving glaciation.

The old eschatological idea from Rev 14 is that humanity will suffer a cataclysm by fire leaving only 144,000 with Christ on Zion to restart history. I prefer to think that if we can understand the structure of cosmic ages now, we can minimise the apocalyptic damage in this century and evolve to a higher consciousness in a global civilization, averting a fiery apocalypse and global collapse.

Don't you think that the specific grouping by hundreds and fifties and in ranks counts against the idea of constellations? Are constellations so uniform and orderly?

When you add in the really faint stars, down to sixth magnitude, there are a number of prominent constellations with that many stars. Ptolemy listed 48 constellations, so if that is comprehensive, it means 100 stars per group.