Myth Lives in Night Sky

Myth describes the movement of stars. Many of the weird tales and incongruities can be explained, when we realize that they were used a mnemonic device, so that early peoples could identify and locate key stars.  One has to imagine what it was like to live long before clocks were invented, maps were available, and even when calendars were just being conceptualized. The sun appeared to rise every day and set every evening, but the length of the day varied by season, as did the its height and intensity. The sun doesn’t rise due east every day, but moves northward during summer and southward in winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The moon is even more erratic; it waxes, wanes and completely disappears for about three days each month. Only the stars appear to rise in the same location every night, rise to the same height in the sky and take the same amount of time to traverse their path every night.  In a world of constant change, the immutability of the stars became something divine. People not only revered them for the perfect order that they represented, but they served as the backdrop for measuring time and space.

One of the primary reasons for people to be able to identify the stars was to locate the North Celestial Pole. Today the North Star hovers around this point. Once people began to travel in places without significant landmarks such as deserts or at sea, they learned that they could still find their direction by orienting themselves to this immutable point. It became the most sacred part of the night sky and was long considered to be the hub or axis around which the stars, or firmament revolved. Today we know that it is the earth rotating that lends the appearance of stars, as well as the sun and moon, rising and setting.

This website is a nuts and bolts description of a theory develop over years, that religion and myth began as a way to describe astronomical movements so that they could be measured and translated into calendars, clocks, and compasses. Understanding the stars was considered sacred knowledge and the residents from that region were the gods. They magically flew through the air and many never die. Others would disappear for a time and then reappear. It was the reappearance of rise and set stars that marked the holy days of early calendars. Among the Egyptians, the earliest clocks measured the intervals between key stars rising. According to Giorgio de Santillano and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, myth was the ‘tech language’ of astronomy; according to ancient wisdom the purpose of many rites were to align the earthly life with the perfection of heaven, but according to Aristotle:

The heavens are full of gods, to whom we give the names of stars.