| FOGS News Volume IX number 3, May 1998 |
|
| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| Bu they do not. |
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| 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. |
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| The right of the author to the above material and research is asserted; any duplication of this material should |
| include the author's copyright ©1998-2000 Marian Youngblood |
