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{"id":16371,"date":"2014-08-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1286"},"modified":"2014-08-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T00:00:00","slug":"fault-in-the-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/08\/fault-in-the-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"Fault in the Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Giorgio de Santillana\u2019s\u00a0Hamlet\u2019s Mill<\/a> is an exercise in un-forgetting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ancients believed the world moved through various ages: \u201cEach age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world.\u201d And each at was marked by an astronomical shift, as \u201cthe secular shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac which determines world-ages\u201d (2).<\/p>\n

Each new world was organized by \u201cSeven sages,\u201d which \u201cturn out to be the Seven Stars of Ursa, which are normative in all cosmological alignments on the starry sphere. These dominant stars of the Far North are peculiarly but systematically linked with those which are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the planets as they move in different placements and configurations along the zodiac\u201d (3).<\/p>\n

The basic astronomical view of things was widely diffused: \u201cThese notions appear to have been common doctrine in the age before history-all over the belt of high civilizations around our globe. They also seem to have been born of the great intellectual and technological revolution of the late Neolithic period. The intensity and richness, the coincidence of details, in this cumulative thought have led to the conclusion that it all had its origin in the Near East. It is evident that this indicates a diffusion of ideas to an extent hardly countenanced by current anthropology.\u201d<\/p>\n

But we miss it because ancient \u201cscience, although it has dug up a marvelous wealth of details, has been led by its modern evolutionary and psychological bent to forget about the main source of myth, which was astronomy \u2013 the Royal Science.\u201d \u00a0Our \u201cobliviousness is itself a recent turn of events \u2013 barely a century old.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recent it may be, but our ignorance cuts us off from the ancients: \u201cAristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally stars, even if popular fantasy had later 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: \u2018This is historically untrue.\u2019\u201d\u00a0De Santillana points out the obvious: \u201cwe 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\u201d (4).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"