Precession and the
Golden Age: How Much Did the Ancients Know?
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Dateline: Wednesday, September 14, 2005
By: WALTER CRUTTENDEN
By: Archaeoastronomer and Author
In 1901, divers working off the Greek island of Antikythera
found the remains of a 2,000-year-old clocklike mechanism. Now
in the Greek National Archaeological Museum, the extraordinary
find is a complex assembly of twenty or more precision gears
designed to compute the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets.
Nothing comparable is known from ancient scientific texts, and
from a traditional historic point of view, such a mechanism
should not have existed for at least another thousand years.
The discovery of the Antikythera Device is equivalent to finding
a supercomputer on a farm in the 18th century.
Archaeological finds that upset our current understanding of
history are growing increasingly common. The incredible discovery
of six pyramids in Caral, Peru, is a case in point. These structures
that surround a huge plaza and circular kivas (no one knows
what they were used for) have been reliably dated to 4,700 B.C.
That is 400 years before the accepted date of the Great pyramid
at Giza. Like the Greek computing device, they are out of place
and out of time sequence with our current understanding of history.
It was not expected that ancient people in South America built
pyramids before the Egyptians.
The Antikythera device, ancient pyramids, astronomically aligned
megaliths and similar structures found around the world were
apparently built to monitor the movement of the heavens – at
least that could be one of their uses. The vast majority of
Neolithic tombs built prior to about 1000 B.C. in Europe and
North Africa; ziggurats of the Middle East; henges and great
stone markers in Britain and around the world, appear to be
oriented toward the equinox, solstices or four cardinal points.
With this preponderance of evidence it now seems likely these
ancient builders not only understood the motions of the heavens
but most likely tracked the precession of the equinox as well.
Precession of the Equinox
The “precession of the equinox” is the slow movement of the
equinox (that point in time each Spring and Fall when night
and day are of equal length – and the Earth’s axis sits at an
exact ninety degree angle to the Sun) against the background
constellations.
Today, on the first day of spring––the Vernal Equinox– if you
look due east at sunrise, you can see the constellation Pisces
is fading from view and Aquarius is rising to take its place.
This is what is meant by the “dawning of the age of Aquarius”.
It is not just an astrological colloquialism but a convenient
way for layman or astronomer alike to note the rough position
of the equinox relative to the twelve constellations of the
zodiac.
The equinox moves slowly taking about 24,000 years, more or
less, to precess through all twelve signs and return to its
starting position. Plato called this cyclical time period the
“Great Year”. The motion of the equinox is how one tells the
time within this great cycle.
Although most historians and scientists still teach that the
precession of the equinox was not discovered until about 150
B.C. by Hipparcus, that is now being questioned. Giorgio de
Santillana, the late professor of the history of science at
MIT, documented in his book, Hamlet’s Mill, that this cycle
was well known to dozens of ancient cultures around the world.
In fact he tells us the Great Year is one of the most prevalent
myths of all time, as popular as the great flood myth.
Dark and Golden Ages
Ancestral people acknowledged the precession of the equinox
and believed the Great Year had its seasons. Similar to yet
different than the seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter
in the solar year - the Great Year was thought to be punctuated
with a Golden Age of incredible beauty at one end, and a Dark
Age of misery at the other. The Vedic Indians and early Mediterranean
cultures had different names for these periods of the Great
Year, and the Greeks simply called them the Iron, Bronze, Silver
and Golden Ages. Thus, there was a valid reason why we find
ancient cultures so intent on tracking the precession of the
equinox.
Just as we want to know our place in the solar year with its
changing conditions, ancient people wanted to know their place
in the Great Year. Many of the ancient myths, before the last
Dark Age, spoke of a long lost Golden Age and lamented the coming
of the Dark Age and its pending loss of culture and knowledge.
And this is what an examination of the archaeological record
shows. Around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago Mohenjodaro and the Indus
Valley were in full bloom; the megaliths of Britain and the
great pyramids in Caral, Peru, and Giza were newly constructed;
the ziggurats, gardens, dams and great water systems of Mesopotamia
were fully functioning. A vast agricultural civilization also
existed within the Amazon and much of the Americas, and the
amazing fifty-ton, carved architectural columns of Gobekli,
Turkey , were already 5,000 years old!
Mankind was at a high state of civilization and had been for
centuries. Evidence shows that countries traded far and wide
and had the technological capability to master much of their
environment just as we do today. Yet, this was not to last.
All of the great ancient civilizations, every one, slowly fell
silent over the next few thousand years as the Earth approached
a worldwide Dark Age, an age that was not overcome until the
Renaissance period of the 14th through the 17th centuries.
Truth or Fiction
Today we are taught that there was no Golden Age, man was a
simple hunter-gatherer that grew to his modern state in a roughly
linear path. To believe otherwise is to believe in fairy tales.
Yet, this is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of science.
We know the cycle of the precession of the equinox is real.
We know the Great Year is woven into the myth and folklore of
just about every ancient culture that existed on Earth. And
we can see the archaeological record indicates a high state
of civilization that declined into a Dark Age before beginning
to advance again with the Renaissance. The precession of the
equinox, with alternating high ages of enlightenment and low
ages of darkness, may not be the accepted paradigm but it does
make sense of anomalous artifacts like the Antikythera device
and ancient, astronomically aligned structures because it puts
them into a workable context. In the Great Year such phenomena
are no longer anomalous – they are expected.
But it is difficult to imagine how civilization might be so
influenced just by a slight wobble of the Earth’s axis, the
current theory of precession. Could precession have a different
explanation? Some modern astronomers seem to think so.
Just as the cycle of day and night is caused by the Earth spinning
on its axis, and just as the cycle of the seasons is caused
by the Earth on its tilted axis orbiting the Sun, it now appears
that precession and the cycle of the Great Year might also be
caused by an orbit. But this orbit is not so small as the Earth
going round the Sun. This is a grand orbit of our Sun carrying
the solar system in a huge arc around another nearby star. Under
this new theory it is the constant change in direction of the
solar system that produces the apparent motion of the stars;
the precession of the equinox.
As our Sun moves in a great orbit it carries the Earth in and
out of the influence of another star. This in turn affects our
magnetosphere, ionosphere and consciousness itself, much like
our closest star the Sun affects all life, causing all manner
of plant and animal to grow, spawn, sleep or wake. It is this
larger motion that indirectly produces the cycle of the Great
Year and makes sense out of ancient mythology and the history
of our distant past.
