The Babylonian zodiac, for better or worse, has exerted enormous influence over New Agers, alternative historians, and ancient astronaut theorists. One of the more popular “alternative” conceptions is the idea that world mythology is influenced by the “World Age,” defined by the constellation of the zodiac against which the sun rises on the spring equinox. This constellation changes every 2,160 years (more or less) as the earth wobbles on its axis.
In Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), Graham Hancock described his half-cocked theory (derived from Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill [1969]) whereby myths associated with bulls, like those of the Apis bull in Egypt or the bull cult of the Minoans, represent the Age of Taurus (c. 4300 – 2150 BCE); myths about rams, like the Biblical story of Isaac or the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece, symbolize the Age of Aries (c. 2150 BCE – 1 CE); myths about fish, like that of Jesus Christ and his “fishers of men,” represent the Age of Pisces (c. 1 CE – today); etc. Hancock projected these ages back to the Age of Leo (c. 10,500 BCE – 8,000 BCE), when, he thought, the leonine Great Sphinx of Egypt had been built (pp. 455-456). But this was no new idea, not when Hancock wrote about it, not when Santillana and von Dechend wrote about it, and not today when entire websites are devoted to championing it. In the August 10, 1882 edition of Nature, in the very same issue that savaged Ignatius Donnelly’s wildly speculative Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the scientific journal shredded the “Astrological Age” concept of mythology in a few brief lines savaging the work of the Austrian scholar Anton Krichenbauer. (Note, however, that modern scholarship puts the fixing of the zodiac to around 500 BCE and perhaps as early as 900 BCE, not 2000 BCE.) Too bad alternative historians never learn… Read on the for the full text from Nature.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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