neilgodfrey wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:The position of the sun at the equinoxes moved into Pisces and Virgo, the star groups conventionally associated with loaves and fishes, in 21 AD.
Why such precision? Did the ancients have the very same imaginary borders between constellations as we have today?
Dating of the shift of the March equinox from Aries to Pisces is somewhat controversial. The facts are as follows.
The constellation of Pisces consists of two fairly straight lines of faint stars, conventionally known as the first fish and the second fish. These two lines join together at the star Alpha Piscis, known as the knot or Al Rescha. The two lines of stars are depicted as ropes or cords holding the two fish. The first line is near perpendicular to the path of the sun, while the second line is roughly parallel to the path of the sun.
You can see this diagram I made of the moment when the spring point entered Pisces at htt p: / /fr eethou ghtnati on.co m/jesus-christ-avatar-of-the-age-of-pisces/
It shows what the ancients could also see.
The equinox points whirl around the whole zodiac about once every 25765 years, at a speed of one degree of arc every 71.6 years. The speed of this motion was calculated roughly by Hipparchus in 134 BC, and could have been known in Babylon and Egypt far earlier.
Modern astronomy calculates the precise date at which the equinox point crossed the perpendicular line of stars of the first fish of Pisces as 21 AD. The ancients could have used naked eye estimates to calculate this date to within a decade. While perhaps unlikely, it is not impossible that this calculation could be the basis of the seventy weeks prediction in the Book of Daniel, which fundamentalists assert calculated the baptism of Christ at 26-7 AD. Babylonian knowledge of precession could have understood for hundreds of years before Christ that the equinox would precess into Pisces in that decade, presenting a mythicist basis for subsequently placing Christ at that time.
Pisces is a constellation with a simple shape, and its perpendicular line of stars forms a clear boundary. To the east of that line is in Aries and to the west is in Pisces, as the diagram above shows clearly. Where this gets slightly complicated is that some theorists use arbitrary imagined boundaries rather than the stars themselves. For example, modern astronomy considers a constellation as an area of sky rather than a group of visible stars, and sets the boundary of Pisces well to the east of the first fish, at a point crossed by the equinox in the second century BC.
Another calculation method seems to use the traditional drawing of the rope shown in the picture, holding the fish well to the west of the actual line of stars, and so claims the equinox entered Pisces around the time of the Council of Nicaea.
My reasons for asserting that the ancient Gnostics understood that the equinox precessed into Pisces in the third decade of our era are its visual simplicity and its match to evidence. The visual simplicity is the theory that the ancients considered the constellations to be made of the visible stars, and Pisces has a clear line of stars which was crossed by the equinox at an exact date, which the ancients could calculate to within a decade, and which we can now calculate to a highly exact level of accuracy due to the clockwork power of mechanistic astronomy. The match to evidence is the placement of the passion of Jesus Christ during the rule of Pontius Pilate, and the symbolism of Christ as alpha and omega. Astrology, and the ancient lunisolar calendar, considers Pisces to be the last sign of the year and Aries to be the first sign of the year. At the moment that the equinox point crossed into Pisces, at the beginning of the year in the Jewish calendar on 1 Nisan,, the last physically became first, so to speak, the seasons matched the stars, and the earth entered a time of imagined celestial harmony, incarnating the beyond in the midst of the world.
