* * * * *
Astrological Clarification
> **Date:** Mon, 7 Jul 2003 09:55:23 -0400 (EDT)
> **From:** Jason <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
> **To:**
[email protected]
> **Subject:** elaborate please
>
>
> Sean,
>
> Could you make a post elaborating on this one
>
http://boston.conman.org/2003/07/03.1 [1]
>
> You have me throuroughly confused. (see I cant even spell now … BAH!)
>
Email from “Jason [2]”
This is certainly harder than I thought.
If (and this is a big hypothetical situation here), if you could see the
stars when the sun is up in the sky, you would notice that slowly over the
course of a year the stars would slowly shift relative to the sun (you can,
however, notice this at night when certain groupings of stars, called
contellations, rise a few minutes earlier each night). The path the sun makes
through the backdrop of stars is called the ecliptic [3]; the planets also
appear along this path as well. Along this path are constellations—there are
thirteen along the ecliptic, that the sun passes through during the year.
Why astrologers only consider twelve I do not know (I can speculate and say
that twelve had religious significance as the Sumerians [4], Akkadians [5],
Greeks and Romans had 12 major gods in their respective pantheons, and twelve
is also easily divisible in half, thirds and fourths, and is a factor in 60,
which the Sumerians used as their counting base, but like I said, this is
speculation on my part) but only twelve signs are counted in the Zodiac
house. The dates that the sun is travelling through a particular Zodiac
constellation become the dates for that “sign,” so the sun is in Aries
between March 21^st (or the 20^th or 22^nd) through April 20^th (or the 19^th
or 21^st—depending upon which astrologer you listen to).
Only that's not true. It was, about 2,100 years ago. But the earth “wobbles”
as it spins and this “wobble” (called precession [6]) causes the sun to shift
its path along the ecliptic for another cycle of about 26,000 years (the
North Star is also affected by this—13,000 years from now Polaris will be
some 23° away from the North Pole, but 26,000 years from now it will again be
the Pole Star). This shifting means that the dates the sun is travelling
across Aries (and the rest of the signs) has changed over the years, until
today, when the sun is in Aries between April 19^th through May 13^th.
Also, the constellations are not the same size; Virgo is easily twice the
size as Libra. This messes things up even more as the “longest” sign (Virgo)
is 45 days, the shortest sign (Scorpius) is only 7 days with the average
being 28 days (actually, it gets even worse—I added up the days given for
each sign and came up 5 days short so you can't even trust the astrology
debunking sites [7] to get this right!).
So, even assumign that astrology is “legit,” every astrologer (and horoscope)
is working under wrong assumptions and are a sign behind the times (more or
less).
Does this clear things up?
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/07/03.1
[2]
http://www.squeak.net/
[3]
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Secliptc.htm
[4]
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/SUMER.HTM
[5]
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/AKKAD.HTM
[6]
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sprecess.htm
[7]
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/astrolft.htm
Email author at
[email protected]
