We see what they saw We ask the more analytical questions. What planets were involved? How did they move? What happened to cause them to change their appearance? The ancients were not so discriminating, for the most part. The ancients described their world and their heavens in impressionistic ways rather than in analytical terms. They experienced truly remarkable phenomena that defied analytical description, given the overwhelming and unique things they observed. They interpolated what they saw, turning it into images of things that were familiar to them. Their impressions were somewhat simplistic, but accurate associations. We know what they believed they saw because they left countless records and icons of these manifestations. These are the records and icons we seek to interpret — mysterious and enigmatic forms in stone and story. The most remarkable part is that now — given our newly found understanding of Saturn’s career in Earth’s ancient skies — we can see and appreciate what they saw. We have simply to ask ourselves, “What does that look like?” For example, what did you see in the first illustration? An eye? A navel? A breast? A wheel with an axle? An island? As it turns out, these are precisely the terms the ancients used in their accounts and their icons to describe and depict this earliest stage of the Saturnian configuration of planets. Additionally, because they saw vivid, colorful images in the heavens (whereas we can see only black and white images because this print medium can only display images in scales of gray), they also identified Mars as a heart because of its deep red color and its placement in the center. So it is that the icons and metaphors created by the ancients to describe the forms they saw are not as mysterious as they once may have seemed, now that the Saturn story is allowed to give them meaning.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 04:16:33 +0000