The Great Year and Its Twelve Houses
tl;dr⌗
The third key motion of the Earth next to the other two cycles responsible for the day and the year is what is known as the Great Year.
Its cycle, also called the precession of the equinoxes, lasts 25'920 years. By dividing that cycle in 12 houses of 2’160 years each, you would be given the key to understand the purpose of the zodiac being a time marker. This knowledge is ancient and its remnants are known today as astrology.
The Great Year⌗
Whenever we want to understand our place in the universe, we look up to the deep night sky and loose ourselves in the multitude of stars that we get to see. It seems to us that whatever happens up there is something bigger than ourselves of which we, the inhabitants of the planet Earth, are only a small subscene of.
Therefore, it is only natural for an Earthly inhabitant to start inquiries about his or her location and significance in relation to the realms of vast space and beyond.
[more to come]
The planet Earth has three key motions. These three motions are conceptually easy to grasp and can be summarized using spatial terms as follows:
- Rotation around its axis
- Revolution around the Sun
- Precession of its axis
The first two motions are literally part of our daily life in the sense that we get to experience their effects in direct and very tangible ways. The third motion however –the one we’re going to put our focus on the most– is a bit more forgotten. All three motions exhibit circular patterns and share the characteristic of being recurrent; they repeat themselves over and over again. One repetition of such a circular pattern is called a cycle and the duration of which takes a specific amount of time which we call its period.
| Earthly Motion | Period (approx.) | Common name |
|---|---|---|
| (1) Rotation | 24 [h] | Day / Night |
| (2) Revolution | 365 [d] | Year |
| (3) Precession | 26'000 [y] | Great Year |
The first cycle has an obvious effect on life on Earth: It is responsible for the day and night cycle (1). For practical reasons, a day usually divides its 24 hour cycle into two equal segments of 12 hours. Thus regulating the state of awake and asleep for several mammals such as for us, the human beings. This phenomenon is called the Circadian ryhtm↩︎.
The second cycle, the year (2), also has an obvious effect on life on Earth, particularly noticeable in the higher and lower latitudes of the globe: The seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Culturally, we chose to divide the period of year into twelve houses, one of which we call a month. Knowing a year –this means a full rotation around the Sun taking in the same position as one rotation earlier– takes 365.2425 days, a month, being the divisor of twelve parts, should take around 30.5 days.
On a side note, something I choose not to fully explore here, a month is also known as the period of the lunar cycle which happens almost precisely 13 times in a year. By dividing the 365.2425 days by thirteen, a lunar month would take a tad more than 28 days. All of which begs the question of why we didn’t conveniently choose to divide the year into thirteen houses instead of twelve. One has also to know that a lunar year (counting up to 13 lunar cycles) doesn’t correspond to the duration of a solar year (the definition of which we used for the actual year of 365.2425 days). Also, the cycle of a lunar year dephases with the cycle of a solar year over time.
The third cycle unbeknownst to common knowledge is also a key motion of the Earth. It is this third motion that is at the center of what is following in the next paragraphs: It is a cycle that lasts much, much longer than the span of a human lifetime and thus is not so easily perceivable by us. It is known as axial precession, as precession of the equinoxes or simply as the Great Year (3). The period of a full Great Year takes up to between 25'772 and 25'920 years.
The precession is a tricky motion to properly describe without the help of any visualization. Merriam-Webster defines it as follows:
a comparatively slow gyration of the rotation axis of a spinning body about another line intersecting it so as to describe a cone
In the following image, one can see how the axis of the Earth’s rotation is gyrating in a circular fashion:
(above) Axial precession ↩︎
Notice how the direction of the precession (circular arrow in the upper part) is opposite of the rotational spin (circular arrows around the globe) of the Earth. These two motions spin opposite of each other. From the point of view of an Earthly observer, this would mean that the movement of the sky against the star constellations in a day is exactly going the opposite way of what the change due to precession is responsible for in its 25'920 year cycle.
The Twelve Houses⌗
Now that the 3 key motions of the Earth are established, it becomes apparent this set of key motions is a useful frame of references for the conceptualization and especially the measurement of time. They share following commonalities:
- Definitive periodicity: recurrent repetition of the same pattern independent of human intervention
- Consistency of time elapse: because of the above mentioned definitive periodicity, for a given cycle, the exact same amount of time can be expected to elapse
- Granularity: meaningful divisions of a full period make up for smaller discreet units of time spans
Given these commonalities for a force of physical nature that is beyond our sense of proportions, the application of the Earth motions to understand and measure time becomes common sense. Especially considering the fact that all three motions exhibit intervals of time that complement each other rather well. Days can meaningfully be used to count a year as well as years can meaningfully be used to count a Great Year. Ensuring greater granularity, like the day & night each [rotation] and/or the year [revolution] are divided in 12 units, it only makes sense to divide the Great Year [precession] with the same number of divisions. Dividing the Great Year by twelve gives us 12 times a Great Month which would have a time span of 2'160 years each.
Mapping the heavens into constellations⌗
Before going further, another circumstance has to be considered, namely the importance of Earthly observation of the night sky and the mapping of the stars. As mentioned in the introduction, it is only natural –equally reasonable for civilizations of the past by the way– to look up to the starry night sky and to conceptualize one’s own position in relation to the heavenly bodies.
In fact, people have come up with an ingenious idea: in order to recognize and memorize better what is to be seen in the sky, grouping bulks of stars into superposed images that we call constellations have been identified in the past. The superposed images are using references of mythological folklore pointing at what looks to be a rather effective technique of knowledge preservation: We still know of the mythological images from ancient times! Being able to recognize star patterns, read constellations, human people over millennia had a reliable way of knowing practical and useful things, ie. knowing the harvest season in agriculture or navigation the seas over long distances.
Considering that the gradual progression of the axial precession is responsible for slowly but definitely changing the position of the constellations in the known night sky, it is understandable that the vigilant and meticulous observer eventually has to realize that there must be another cycle way longer than anything known up to this point. For contextualization, the axial precession takes 25'920 years. By dividing that amount of years by 360° –a number convenient for any angular shape– gives 72 years per degree. This means that a progression of any celestial complex like a constellation or even only one star by 1° over the celestial meridian takes precisely 72 years or roughly the span of one human lifetime. On a side note, 1° corresponds pretty precisely to the diametrical line given by assembling the Sun and the Moon (which take up the exact same amount of surface in the sky) next to each other.
In order words, it is a highly arduous task to observe and especially to confirm axial precession without any efficient way of inter-generational persistence of empirical knowledge (science).
Cardinal days in a year and their importance⌗
Another circumstance we need to consider before we get to see the bigger picture, another peculiarity of the second motion of the Earth [revolution] has to be highlighted. Due to the Earth’s axial tilt↩︎ of 23,44° in respect to the gravitational body it is revolving around, namely the Sun, the annual revolution induces a change in at what angle the Sun’s radiation is reaching the Earth. This change is responsible for the seasons.
The prolongation of the Earth’s equator into space is called the celestial equator and the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is called the ecliptic. The moment in a year when those two planes are aligned happens twice a year. It is the moment in time when the day is as long as the night. We call those two moments respectively the spring & autumnal equinoxes. That moment falls usually on the 20th of March for the spring equinox, also called the vernal equinox, and on the 22nd of September for the autumnal equinox. The moment in a year when the day on a given hemisphere is the longest or the shortest are respectively called the summer and winter solstices. That falls usually on the 21st of July in summer and on the 21st of December in winter. The equinoxial and the solsticial days are considered the 4 cardinal days for a given year and thus mark the most important days in a year in astronomical terms.
| Cardinality | Day in a year | Perceptibility |
|---|---|---|
| Vernal equinox | ~ 20th of March | day & night are of same length |
| Summer solstice | ~ 21th of June | longest day in the northern hemisphere |
| Autumn equinox | ~ 22th of September | day & night are of same length |
| Winter solstice | ~ 21th of December | longest night in the northern hemisphere |
Please note that the moment of the equinox and/or the solstice is a precise moment in time, the moment when the celestial equator meets the ecliptic, and not a full day. Another way to define the equinox: It is the moment at which the center of the visible Sun is directly above the equator.
If we consider the Earth to be a huge clockwork of celestial motions, the cardinal days would be the references for the 4 quadrants of a clock face. Or in other words, if one had to choose one of any moment in time when to compare measurements of celestial bodies in the sky, the desirability to choose a cardinal day, especially one of the equinoxial days as their characteristics are valid on any point on the globe is apparent.
Astronomical watchmaking⌗
The mere nature of the Earth having three key motions, two of which have a comparatively fast periodicity, makes it troublesome for the third motion [precession] to be noticeable. For this reason, in order to assess the slow progression of the precession, one has to choose one moment in a year when to observe the stars. The same way a mechanical wrist watch incorporates various mechanisms of time measurement which have to interplay with each other in order to properly depict time, there are moments in heavenly time and space which are more appropriate in order to notice the progression of the Great Year. As a wrist watch has a reference of initial time, usually 0 or 12 o'clock, the Great Year also needs such a reference point.
In order to assess the necessary constitution of an astronomical watch, we need to make following assumptions regarding the reference points:
- Reference for the first motion [rotation]: Sunrise (instead of sunset)
- Reference for the second motion [revolution]: Spring Equinox (instead of autumnal equinox)
- Geographical point of reference: due East (towards the rising Sun)
Using those reasonable parameters for our reference point of 0, we can now look up the stars or constellations over which the Great Year is iterating.
What constellation can one see behind the rising Sun due east on the morning of the spring equinox in our day and age?
The end of the constellation of Pisces and the beginning of the constellation of Aquarius.
(above) Vernal equinox on the 20th of March 2020 due east, taken with Stellarium ↩︎
Zodiacal Ages⌗
The assumptions we took in order to define a moment when to look at the constellations serving as a frame of reference for observing the slow progression of the precession of the equinoxes is no coincidence. That has already been figured out in the distant past. The hypothesis of this writeup is that the origin of the Zodiac is intimately connected to the precession. The Zodiac is a set of 12 constellations that are known throughout written history and throughout cultural insularities. It is undeniable that the Zodiac and the related field of study we call nowadays astrology have had a long history of significance spanning thousands of years. The earliest civilization we know of, the Sumerians, has known and attributed high significance to the Zodiac. One can easily see how controversial it is to link the precession to the Zodiac because one has to imply full knowledge of the former. However, knowing about precession implies science and many modern assumptions like the Earth being a globe among many others. Attributing science and knowledge of cosmic insights to the earliest known civilization is highly problematic for the contemporary consensus on known history, because it would question the whole narrative of the slow and linear fashion of steady incrementation by which the human species have progressed ever since. Such an assertion would induce a basis for different ways of stitching together alternative narratives.
So, coming back to the Zodiac, the term Zodiac comes from Ancient Greek zōidiakòs kýklos (ζῳδιακός κύκλος) which means ‘cycle or circle of carved animals’↩︎. In language families other than Indo-European, other terms are being used for Zodiac. In Biblical Hebrew, the zodiacal constellations are called Mazzaroth (מַזָּרוֹת) which means ‘garland of crowns’↩︎. The expression ‘mazel tov’ (מזל טוב) meaning good luck or more accurately good fortune actually is derived from mazzaroth. In Chinese logograms, the Zodiac is 獣帯 meaning ‘animal belt’. The zodiac counts 12 constellations, twelve signs. These twelve constellation are part of the ecliptic. And this is no coincidence, then it is precisely the ecliptic which is aligned with the celestial equator on the days of the equinoxes (see Cardinal days in a year and their importance).
Assuming that following the ecliptic on the equinoxes is the proper way to track the progression of the precession, the Great Year, then the twelve constellations identified along the ecliptic are indeed representative of the twelve houses, of the twelve Great Months for a given Great Year. As seen earlier, dividing the Great Year in twelve houses makes one house last 2'160 years. One might wonder by now, are we already in the Age of Aquarius or still in the Age of Pisces. In order to answer this question, one has first to know when the precessional cycle initially started or rather when a given house starts or ends precisely. Unfortunately, this isn’t so easy to determine without major assumptions. What is clear however is that now, in the beginnings of the 21st century, the likelihood of being in the new Age of Aquarius is getting the more likely the more we advance over the years.
Aquarius is both a constellation and the twelfth of a circle known as a sign. Entering Aquarius means entering the period during which astronomers will see the sun rise in Aquarius on the day of the vernal equinox. The phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes is involved in this fact. The equinoctial sun has been rising in the sign of Aquarius since 1950. In this interpretation, we are in the ‘Golden Age’ of prophecies. The equinoctial sun will not begin rising in the constellation of Aquarius until about the year 2700. In this interpretation, neither you nor I will see the prophesied ‘Golden Age’.
– Jean Sendy: Coming Of The Gods (1970), p. 69
On a second note, one may assume that the duration of a house is as long as the shape of a given constellation in the sky. This is a ill-defined way of assumption because the shapes of Zodiacal constellations vary by large margins. Pisces for instance has a comparatively large constellation, particularly in ecliptic length, whereas Aquarius is comparatively short. Furthermore, there’s a non-negligible gap between the two constellations. It is therefore important to note that what matters is the length of a Great Month of 2'160 years mimicking the twelfth section of its parent year cycle. For reasons that I may highlight in a following writeup, the assumption of the year 1'950 AD for the beginning of the Age of Aquarius is to be our best pick as of now.
Based on that assumptions, calculating back the Zodiacal Ages by decrements of 2'160 years, we arrive at following table:
| Zodiacal age | Time span | Alternative signs & symbols |
|---|---|---|
| ♑ Capricorn | 21'810 – 19'650 BC | Sea goat |
| ♐ Sagittarius | 19'650 – 17'490 BC | Archer |
| ♏ Scorpio | 17'490 – 15'330 BC | Eagle |
| ♎ Libra | 15'330 – 13'170 BC | |
| ♍ Virgo | 13'170 – 11'010 BC | |
| ♌ Leo | 11'010 – 8'850 BC | |
| ♋ Cancer | 8'850 – 6'690 BC | Scarabeus, Turtle |
| ♊ Gemini | 6'690 – 4'530 BC | |
| ♉ Taurus | 4'530 – 2'370 BC | Calf, Bison |
| ♈ Aries | 2'370 – 210 BC | |
| ♓ Pisces | 210 BC – 1'950 AD | |
| ♒ Aquarius | 1'950 AD – 4'110 AD | Water bearer, fountain |
These are the World Ages of the past. And of the future: after Aquarius comes Capricorn, after Capricorn Sagittarius, so on and so forth. One may ask what’s the meaning of all of this? Nothing more (or less) than knowing the hour of a day, the day of a year, or the age of ages. In my personal understanding, the precession and its tracking by the means of ecliptic consellations is a way to determine one’s location on a bigger timescale. It is a convention, it is a name for bigger timescales than years. If there’s anything to name after and measure World Ages, using the third key motion of the Earth enabling time references of millenia certainly is the best and most intelligent way to do so.
If Earthly inhabitants have done so in the past, is it possible we now understand what they might have meant when talking about world ages or aeons of time?
Encoding⌗
Past civilizations have not only known about the precession of the equinox, they have taken several attempts at preserving that sort of almost sacred knowledge. Preservation in form of language and in form of constructions.
Hamlet’s Mill⌗
In 1969, two scholars published together a 505-page-long essay expanding on the precession of the equinoxes as a piece of information dating back to an ancestral civilization characterized by highly sophisticated knowledge and transmitted later through world civilizations encoded in mythical images. Giorgio de Santillana (1902–1974), professor of history of science at the renowned MIT and Hertha von Dechend (1915–2001), professor of history of science, philosophy and ethnology at the University of Frankfurt both co-authored their Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth↩︎.
Let their book speak for itself:
– Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend: Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (1969) ↩︎
To begin with, there is no system that can be presented in modern analytical terms. There is no key, and there are no principles from which a presentation can be deduced. The structure comes from a time when there was no such thing as a system in our sense, and it would be unfair to search for one. There could hardly have been one among people who committed all their ideas to memory. It can be considered a pure structure of numbers. From the beginning we considered calling this essay ‘Art of the Fugue’. And that excludes any ‘world-picture’, a point that cannot be stressed strongly enough. Any effort to use a diagram is bound to lead into contradiction. It is a matter of times and rhythm.
The subject has the nature of a hologram, something that has to be present as a whole to the mind. Archaic thought is cosmological first and last; it faces the gravest implications of a cosmos in ways which reverberate in later classic philosophy. The chief implication is a profound awareness that the fabric of the cosmos is not only determined, but overdetermined and in a way that does not permit the simple location of any of its agents, whether simple magic or astrology, forces, gods, numbers, planetary powers, Platonic Forms, Aristotelian Essences or Stoic Substances. Physical reality here cannot be analytical in the Cartesian sense; it cannot be reduced to concreteness even if misplaced. Being is change, motion and rhythm, the irresistible circle of time, the incidence of the ‘right moment’, as determined by the skies.
– p.56
We today are aware of the Precession as the gentle tilting of our globe, an irrelevant one at that. As the GI said, lost in the depth of jungle misery, when his friends took refuge in their daydreams: “When I close my eyes, I see only a mule’s behind. Also when I don’t.” This is, as it were, today’s vision of reality. Today, the Precession is a well established fact. The space-time continuum does not affect it. It is by now only a boring complication. It has lost relevance for our affairs, whereas once it was the only majestic secular motion that our ancestors could keep in mind when they looked for a great cycle which could affect humanity as a whole. But then our ancestors were astronomers and astrologers. They believed that the sliding of the sun along the equinoctial point affected the frame of the cosmos and determined a succession of world-ages under different zodiacal signs. They had found a large peg on which to hang their thoughts about cosmic time, which brought all things in fateful order. Today, that order has lapsed, like the idea of the cosmos itself. There is only history, which has been felicitously defined as “one damn thing after another. »
– p.67–68
The greatest gap between archaic thinking and modern thinking is in the use of astrology. By this is not meant the common or judicial astrology which has become once again a fad and a fashion among the ignorant public, an escape from official science, and for the vulgar another kind of black art of vast prestige but with principles equally uncomprehended. It is necessary to go back to archaic times, to a universe totally unsuspecting of our science and of the experimental method on which it is founded, unaware of the awful art of separation which distinguishes the verifiable from the unverifiable. This was a time, rich in another knowledge which was later lost, that searched for other principles. It gave the lingua franca of the past. Its knowledge was of cosmic correspondences, which found their proof and seal of truth in a specific determinism, nay overdeterminism, subject to forces completely without locality.
– p.74
Zodiacal constructions as time markers⌗
Several constructions of the past have shown alignment with Earth coordinates, with stars and therefore with the ecliptic itself. This field of study, called archeoastronomy, has been established in the early days of contemporary science: no other than Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836–1836), credited with the discovery of helium, founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature, has been one of the most prominent founding figures of keeping up a keen interest in astronomical alignments in ancient buildings. His book The Dawn of Astronomy - A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians (1894)↩︎ has been one of the earliest archeoastronomical works.
One of the most famous examples of archeoastronomy is the Giza pyramid complex. The pyramids themselves seem to mirror a non-zodiacal star constellation, there’s a Leo-alike statue known as the Sphinx, and the Pyramid of Khufu depicts an intrinsic capability of marking the day of an equinox. ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ or so says the Sagan standard, right? For the sake of briefness, let’s focus on the second and the third claim, because both share common ground with the precession.
The Pyramid of Khufu, also known as the Great Pyramid has actually eight sides, not four. The concavity on each side makes it possible for the light to mark the construction whenever the light comes from a straight perpendicular direction towards a given side of the pyramid. The Giza pyramid complex and the Pyramid of Khufu are both precisely aligned due to North which means that only two days in a year can actually mark the pyramid as seemingly intended: on both equinoctial sunrises.
One very unusual feature of the Great Pyramid is a concavity of the core that makes the monument an eight-sided figure, rather than four-sided like every other Egyptian pyramid. That is to say, that its four sides are hollowed in or indented along their central lines, from base to peak. This concavity divides each of the apparent four sides in half, creating a very special and unusual eight-sided pyramid; and it is executed to such an extraordinary degree of precision as to enter the realm of the uncanny. For, viewed from any ground position or distance, this concavity is quite invisible to the naked eye. The hollowing-in can be noticed only from the air, and only at certain times of the day. This explains why virtually every available photograph of the Great Pyramid does not show the hollowing-in phenomenon, and why the concavity was never discovered until the age of aviation. It was discovered quite by accident in 1940, when a British Air Force pilot, P. Groves, was flying over the pyramid. He happened to notice the concavity and captured it in the now-famous photograph.
– J.P. Lepre: The Egyptian Pyramids: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Reference (1990)
(above) photograph taken in 1940 by P. Groves (unverified)
The Great Pyramid seems to be designed and built with astronomical knowledge in mind. Hence, it is able to indicate sunrises and sunsets (whenever the Sun is on the horizon) on equinoctial days. In other words, it is lid up whenever the moment has come to track the progression of the precession. By now, we can assume that whenever the precession and/or cardinal days like the equinox is brought up, the consideration for Zodiacal constellations is no more such a far stretch. Is ther any Zodiac symbolism incorporated around or near the Giza pyramid complex? The Sphinx is indeed a figure with a full-fledged body of a lion. No matter how much the bad state of the Sphinx is having us guess what it originally looked like, the lionesque aspect has been known throughout written history. Already the Ancient Greek thought of it depicting a lion figure. Furthermore, the Sphinx is facing exactly East. The unflattering face of the figure is looking right toward the rising Sun on the equinoctial days, thus looking at the Zodiacal constellation that is hiding behind the Sun in that very precise moment. There is a Zodiac sign that is known as depicting a lion, namely Leo. Could it be that the Sphinx together with the Pyramids just behind her were both built with astronomical knowledge, encoding some ancestral awareness of the precession and therefore of their own World Age, the Age of Leo?
I’m more than conscious of how much of a conjecture all of this is. And yet, once this insight fully integrated, it becomes almost too obvious. There is a pleasant law of problem-solving principles known as the Occam’s razor which states that ‘entities should not be multiplied without necessity’. This means that it is usually heplful to consider that the increase of factors of congruency (entities) makes a certain circumstance unlikely. Adding seemingly coincidencal aspects to the erection of monumental buildings like the whole Giza pyramid complex doesn’t make it unlikely because considering the possibility that such highly sophistiacted astronomical knowledge has been used to built these and especially has been used all over the world in other monumental projects reduces the overall complexity when laying out the evidence in a different narrative.
Summing it up⌗
Several aspects of the Great Year and its Twelve Houses have been hightlighted: There are three key motions of the Earth. The last of which is known as precession, a slow westward shift of the equinoxes along the plane of the eclicptic, resulting from precession of the earth’s axis of rotation, and causing the equinoxes to occur earlier each sidereal year. A complete precession requires 25'920 years years. The precession can be considered the Great Year and by dividing this Great Year up in twelve distinct months, we get the World Ages, each of which takes up to 2'160 years and corresponds to one of the constellations on the ecliptic, specifically a Zodiac sign. Since the year 1'950 AD, the Earth and its inhabitants has entered the Age of Aquarius, the Aquarian Age, the New Age. This knowledge about everlasting World Ages seems to have been known thorughout history since the beginning of the civilized human species and encoded into folklore and monumental construction, a few of which we can still admire today.
For all that has been written about has purposefully been kept as simple and straightforward as possible. There is definitely more to say about any topic mentioned here. More writeup will follow in a soonish future where I’m going to dive into each aspect for as much as there something meaningful to say.