"25th Degree - Night of the Brazen Serpent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

Pisces
Gemini
Virgo
Sagittarius
Vern. Eq
Sum. Sols
Aut. Eq
Winter Sols

From confounding signs with causes came the worship of the sun and stars. "If," says job, "I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon progressive in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand, this were an iniquity to be punished by the judge; for I should have denied the God that is above."

Perhaps we are not, on the whole, much wiser than those simple men of the old time. For what do we know of effect and cause, except that one thing regularly or habitually follows another?

So, because the heliacal rising of Sirius preceded the rising of the Nile, it was deemed to cause it; and other stars were in like manner held to cause extreme heat, bitter cold, and watery storm.

A religious reverence for the zodiacal Bull [TAURUS] appears, from a very early period, to have been pretty general, perhaps it was universal, throughout Asia; from that chain or region of Caucasus to which it gave name; and which is still known under the appellation of Mount Taurus, to the Southern extremities of the Indian Peninsula; extending itself also into Europe, and through the Eastern parts of Africa.

This evidently originated during those remote ages of the world, when the colure of the vernal equinox passed across the stars in the head of the sign from Aries.
from Cancer.
from Libra.
from Capricornus.
from Pisces.
from Gemini.
from Virgo.
from Sagittarius.
from Aquarius.
from Taurus.
from Leo.
from Scorpio.

Taurus [among which was Aldebarсn]; a period when, as the most ancient monuments of all the oriental nations attest, the light of arts and letters first shone forth. The Arabian word AL-DE-BAR┴N, means the foremost, or leading star and it could only have been so named, when it did precede, or lead, all others. The year then opened with the sun in Taurus; and the multitude of ancient sculptures, both in Assyria and Egypt, wherein the bull appears with lunette or crescent horns, and the disk of the sun between them, are direct allusions to the important festival of the first new moon of the year: and there was everywhere an annual celebration of the festival of the first new moon, when the year opened with Sol and Luna in Taurus.

David sings: "Blow the trumpet in the New Moon; in the time appointed; on our solemn feast-day: for this is a statute unto Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob. This he ordained to Joseph, for a testimony, when he came out of the land of Egypt."

The reverence paid to Taurus continued long after, by the precession of the Equinoxes, the colure of the vernal equinox had come to pass through Aries. The Chinese still have a temple, called "The Palace of the horned Bull" and the same symbol is worshipped in Japan and all over Hindostan. The Cimbrians carried a brazen bull with them, as the image of their God, when they overran Spain and Gaul; and the representation of the Creation, by the Deity in the shape of a bull, breaking the shell of an egg with his horns, meant Taurus, opening the year, and bursting the symbolical shell of the annually-recurring orb of the new year.

Theophilus says that the Osiris of Egypt was supposed to be dead or absent fifty days in each year. Landseer thinks that this was because the Sabцan priests were accustomed to see, in the lower latitudes of Egypt and Ethiopia, the first or chief stars of the Husbandman [BO╓TES] sink achronically beneath the Western horizon; and then to begin their lamentations, or hold forth the signal for others to weep: and when his prolific virtues were supposed to be transferred to the vernal sun, bacchanalian revelry became devotion.

Before the colure of the Vernal Equinox had passed into Aries, and after it had left Aldebarсn and the Hyades, the Pleiades were, for seven or eight centuries, the leading stars of the Sabцan year. And thus we see, on the monuments, the disk and crescent, symbols of the sun and moon in conjunction, appear successively, first on the head, and then on the neck and back of the
Zodiacal Bull, and more recently on the forehead of the Ram.

The diagrammatical character or symbol, still in use to denote Taurus, is this very crescent and disk a symbol that has come down to us from those remote ages when this memorable conjunction in Taurus, by marking the commencement, at once of the Sabцan year and of the cycle of the Chaldean Saros, so pre-eminently distinguished that sign as to become its
characteristic symbol. On a bronze bull from China, the crescent is attached to the back of the Bull, by means of a cloud, and a curved groove is provided for the occasional introduction of the disk of the sun, when solar and lunar time were coincident and conjunctive, at the commencement of the year, and of the lunar cycle. When that was made, the year did not open with the stars in the head of the Bull, but when the colure of the vernal equinox passed across the middle or later degrees of the asterism Taurus, and the Pleiades were, in China, as in Canaan, the leading stars of the year.

The crescent and disk combined always represent the conjunctive Sun and Moon; and when placed on the head of the Zodiacal Bull, the commencement of the cycle termed SAROS by the Chaldeans, and Metonic by the Greeks; and supposed to be alluded to in job, by the phrase, "Mazzaroth in his season"; that is to say, when the first new Moon and new Sun of the year
were coincident, which happened once in eighteen years and a fraction.

On the sarcophagus of Alexander, the same symbol appears on the head of a Ram, which, in the time of that monarch, was the leading sign. So too in the sculptured temples of the Upper Nile, the crescent and disk appear, not on the head of Taurus, but on the forehead of the Ram or the Ram-headed God, whom the Grecian Mythologists called Jupiter Ammon, really the Sun in
Aries.