Astrology Quarterly - Astronomy - Heavens Above

A S Morton

Heavens Above - September 2007

The Autumn Equinox and the sign of Libra

Summer officially ends in the northern hemisphere on 23rd September at 09:51 GMT (10:51am BST) with the Autumn Equinox, when the centre of the Sun is exactly on the intersection between the ecliptic and the celestial equator, heading south in its annual journey along the ecliptic. Day and night are of equal length everywhere in our world at this time, we are in balance with our radiant life-giver.

To many cultures and civilisations throughout the history of the human species this was, as it still is, a notably significant time of the year. And certainly to the ancient Egyptians who meticulously and precisely plotted the positions of the rising and setting Sun on the horizon every morning and evening throughout the year for thousands of years. The Sun was worshipped in many forms and guises, primarily as the great creator god, Ra, and its reappearance every morning (something we simply take for granted) was heralded as the daily re-birth of the life-giving god. And its nightly journey through the underworld gave rise to incredible mythology in the form of such as ‘The Book of the Dead’ and more particularly ‘The Book of Gates’, the story of the twelve ‘Gates’ through which the Sun had to pass in order to be re-born at the new dawn, ‘younger than the day before’.

The country was populated with temples, some large, some small, to this great god. And every temple had either a flat roof or building as part of the temple complex giving the clearest view of the eastern and western horizons which would be manned by the latterly-termed ‘hour-priests’ day and night, every day of every year, measuring the passage of time, or more particularly marking the passage of the Sun. During the night the rising of groupings of stars, subsequently referred to as ‘decans’, would be observed and recorded. These ‘decans’ do not correspond to our current constellations nor were they necessarily groupings of stars along the band of what we call the zodiac. Twelve ‘decans’ would rise every night corresponding to the twelve ‘Gates’ that the Sun had to pass through on its unseen nightly journey. Even though the time difference between each rising decan is closer to 40 minutes it is from these ancient Egyptians that were derived the twelve hours of the day and night that are used throughout our modern world.

At the creative height of this ancient Egyptian civilisation, during what are referred to as the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (c. 2055 – 1650 BC) and the ‘New Kingdom’ (c. 1550 – 1069 BC), the Sun at the Autumn Equinox was in the stars of what we now call the constellation of Libra (it is currently precessing backwards through the constellation of Virgo). Since they did not group stars together in the same way as that which we would now recognise as constellations (primarily of Babylonian and Greek origin), this particular grouping of faint stars (that we call Libra) was deemed by those same Egyptian astronomer-priests to be a separate entity from the adjacent grouping which we call the constellation Scorpius (Libra is in fact comprised of the front claws and many of the stars still bear the Arabic names which relate to the Scorpion). This was acknowledged by the occupiers of Egypt during the various stages of the decline of their empire; the Persians, the Greeks, followed by the Romans who determined this grouping as a distinct constellation in the zodiac, Libra, the ‘scales’. But where do the scales come from?

The glyph for Libra represents the Sun on the horizon at the beginning of its annual cycle into darkness, death and re-birth. It is symbolised in the funerary rites of the ancient Egyptians by the weighing of the dead person’s heart against a feather to determine whether that individual had lived a sufficiently commendable life to be considered for re-birth into an eternal life amongst those that had gone before or not, hence the scales. This procedure took place in the ‘Hall of Two Truths’ or the ‘Hall of the Double Maat’. Everything in Egyptian life had a double, a counterpart, it was a world of balance and counter-balance . Every person was thought to be born with a double, a ‘shadow self’, representing their tendencies; their physical, moral and spiritual ‘appetites’ which required to be in some way satisfied during their lifetime in order for the soul to be liberated at the death of the physical body.

The Goddess Maat is representative of the consciousness of the cosmos, the balance between the heavens and the earth (“as above, so below” as might be said). It is the ultimate goal of creation, of life itself, and of every creature thus created, to try and attain this balance between our own consciousness and that of the divine creator. ‘Maat’ is therefore one’s life goal, to ‘live in Maat’, with a purity of heart, in harmony with all creation, with the natural world of which we are part.

Somehwere beyond the fifth ‘Gate’ lies the place where the dead person’s heart will be assessed, the ‘Hall of the Double Maat’ because here we find our own consciousness meeting together with the consciousness of the cosmos. Two ways are available to our soul after physical death, a final liberation to an eternal blissful life with our ancestors or a re-incarnation to continue the process of attaining consciousness in the physical world. Osiris, like the earthly Pharoah, sits on his throne observing the proceedings, awaiting the outcome. In this other world of paradoxes Osiris is the Lord of the Underworld, of re-birth, of new life, but also Lord of the Heavens, the dwelling place of the deities and those who have gone before us, the ‘Egypt of the Heavens’ placed among the ‘indestructible ones’, the circumpolar stars.

The heart of the mummified corpse is placed on the scales to be weighed against the single ostrich feather of Maat, the ultimate truth of the universe. To the Egyptians the heart was not only the place within us that expressed the feelings and the emotions but also the seat of the mind, the memory and the intellect. The beat of a heart is the fundamental basis of life, the heartbeat of the cosmos. During mummification the heart was therefore carefully preserved within the deceased’s body and protected by a scarab amulet representing rebirth, the creative power of the rising Sun at dawn, the power of resurrection.

If the life had not been ‘lived in Maat’ and the heart was heavier than the feather then oblivion awaited and it was consumed by the attendant monster, the ‘devourer’. If the heart and the feather were in perfect balance then the way was open to immortality and an infinite existence amongst the gods, the paradise of the heavens above.

So, far from being a purely mechanical sign (just ask any Libran how they feel about being termed the only inanimate sign in the zodiac!) the sign of Libra encompasses the very essence, the centre, of human existence, the heart. Libra then is not the scales themselves, as in ‘the scales of justice’, that is for others, but to attain the balance in their hearts, as in their lives, to find that harmony in all creation within themselves, to ‘live in Maat’.

However, an ever-so-small word of warning, if you upset the balance of a Libran, watch out they don’t devour your heart!

Meanwhile, back in the here and now on our ‘magic roundabout’, planet Earth, let’s see what’s happening in our ‘heavens above’ this month.

Planetwatch

Though the Sun may be waning in our northern skies, in the southern hemisphere it will be simultaneously bursting onto theirs as the bright harbinger of Spring. Goodbye north, hello south, as it were! (Or should that be g’day south?) Our westernised astronomy and astrology were born of the big ancient civilisations located north of our terrestrial equator so we may have inherited a rather one-sided perspective of this oblate spheroid, planet Earth, upon which we all currently reside. North and south are not necessarily mirror images of one another but together they comprise a balanced whole.

And just to give the south a further foretaste of the joys to come, following last month’s total eclipse of the Moon, on August 28th, visible from large areas around the Pacific ocean, there is a partial eclipse of the Sun on September 11th, visible in parts of central and southern South America but not for our eyes in the UK and Europe. Eclipses generally come in pairs roughly two weeks apart, at Full Moon following New Moon or vice versa, at approximately six-monthly intervals.

MERCURY, VENUS and SATURN all experienced solar conjunctions last month, MERCURY and SATURN had superior conjunctions with the Sun (far side of the Sun as viewed from Earth) whilst VENUS’ conjunction was inferior (between the Earth and Sun). And yet VENUS and SATURN re-appear together on one side of the sky with MERCURY at t’other, how did that happen? It’s not simply down to direction of movement (MERCURY and SATURN are moving direct but VENUS is retrograde) but it has everything to do with relative speeds. And not just compared to each other but also taking the (apparent) speed and direction of the Sun into account. Which really means the relative distances and speeds of the orbital paths of MERCURY, VENUS, SATURN and us, planet Earth, around the Sun. It might even be much easier sometimes to imagine we’re stationary and everything else is moving around us. However, hopefully all will become a little clearer as we progress.

MERCURY is moving direct and quickly, generally quicker than all the other celestial bodies except the Moon, so that the distance between himself and the Sun increases quite rapidly. In fact he can’t seem to get away quick enough at the moment, and not just from the Sun but from everything and everyone else as well. Being the closest planet to the Sun he gets the least amount of time to himself and there are occasions when he just needs some breathing space to sort things out and clear his head, a little private down-time perhaps.

Crossing into the constellation of Virgo at the very beginning of the month, which is as good a place as any to re-group and re-organise if not exactly for some quiet contemplation, he rapidly stretches himself out to his position of greatest eastern elongation (26°E on this occasion) from the Sun by the 29th of the month and should be an increasingly lovely evening star but the angle between the ecliptic through Virgo and the horizon as it sets in the west is so shallow that by the time MERCURY should be visible he’s already so low down that it’s almost impossible to pick him out in the evening twilight. What you might call ‘taking a low profile’!

It would seem that MERCURY isn’t the only one requiring some personal space, VENUS has wandered off doing her own thing for some while now and may very well have lost the plot altogether. Having turned herself retrograde at the back end of July and having avoided close contact with everything else during August as she drifted a long way south of the ecliptic, passing through the less familiar territories of Sextans and Hydra as she retraced her steps to roughly where she was sometime towards the end of June, she now ships up down in the bottom corner of the constellation Cancer but much further south of where she was in the days just prior to her first and very close encounter with the stubborn SATURN on the first day of July. A new beginning perhaps?

Because she’s been moving in the opposite direction to the Sun, and even though her inferior solar conjunction was only as recent as the 18th of last month, she very readily established herself in the pre-dawn skies at the end of August and is already rising about an hour before the Sun at the beginning of September. Very slowly and deliberately she turns herself around going stationary direct on the 8th of this month but the Sun is moving faster and therefore the distance between the two continues to widen. Venus rises earlier and earlier as the month unfolds, already some three hours before the Sun by mid-month and an amazing nearly four hours by month end.

There in the east in the hours before dawn is brilliant, ice white, glistening VENUS, bright as a button, the archetypal ‘Morning Star’, almost as radiant as she was for much of the winter and spring as a fabulous ‘Evening Star’. Recharged and seemingly ready for anything, after a somewhat hazy summer, she begins to pick up speed as she crosses the border and moves on into the constellation Leo, all the while getting closer to the ecliptic and back on track for whatever excitements might lie ahead.

And what should now be dead ahead of her but dear old plodding SATURN. Has she got him in her sights once more? More trouble in the offing? We’ll have to wait and see because the third of this year’s triple conjunction between these bodies isn’t until next month, and under very different circumstances indeed from the previous two. Meanwhile SATURN has got his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead, he’d had enough of all the hanging about and going back over old ground many a month ago, time to move on to pastures new. So despite his somewhat debilitating solar conjunction of last month it’s business as usual as far as possible for the visibly ringed planet, the outer signs of increasing age and his current state of weariness.

Although he’s focused on the straight and narrow SATURN is not the quickest of movers even at the best of times, being the outermost of the classical planets visible to the naked eye and on a long, slow, nearly thirty-year circuit around the Sun. So after he was swallowed up by solar conjunction last month the Sun, appearing to move much more swiftly through our skies, left SATURN increasingly trailing in his fiery wake to emerge blearily from the morning twilight. So VENUS and SATURN have both ended up on the same side of the Sun, to the west that is, by entirely different mechanisms but on the opposite side to that of MERCURY.

SATURN rises in the east just before the Sun at the beginning of the month and is all over Regulus, the bright star in Leo and one of the very few positioned virtually on the ecliptic, for the first part of September. Some form of ancient retribution, or salutation perchance, since Regulus is the leading light of Leo, the constellation most closely associated with the Sun? As the distance from the Sun increases so SATURN continues to rise earlier in the pre-dawn skies such that by month’s end he’s visible nearly three hours before the Sun, but always in the wake of VENUS who rises earlier and higher and is therefore to the right and the more elevated of the two. Even though SATURN’s dull yellow glow is not a patch on VENUS’s diamond-white allure it does have a subdued charm all of its own and the pair make for a fascinating odd couple in the early hours before dawn.

As VENUS radiates in the east in the early hours so her fabled partner in crime, the increasingly ruddy and emboldened MARS, is crossing the meridian and culminating in the south in the moments before dawn. Rising in the northeast before midnight as the month commences he can be seen to be travelling between the horns of the bull of the constellation Taurus such that at month’s end, now rising by 10.30pm BST, he has negociated that particular dilemma and is moving into the constellation Gemini.

Meanwhile, JUPITER’s summer nights’ sojourn is heading towards its reluctant autumn finale. Having only just recently been in opposition to the increasingly prominent MARS, as the red planet is rising in the northeast so the giant JUPITER is setting in the southwest at month’s opening. Still within the constellation Ophiuchus he’s now moving direct but as yet not noticably so such that he remains comfortably positioned above the bright red Antares in Scorpius. Though dimming slightly from his mid-summer peak he is still a brilliant yellowy-white light low down in the south west as twilight falls, setting earlier as the month progresses until around 9:00pm BST at month’s closing.

NEPTUNE, in the constellation Capricorn, arrived at solar opposition last month and this month it’s the turn of URANUS, located within the ancient constellation Aquarius. NEPTUNE quite definitely requires optical aid to be seen but URANUS is at the very limit of human sight, some even suggesting that they have seen it with the unaided eye. However, were it so readily visible it might possibly not have taken until 1781 for William Herschel to discover it in the eyepiece of his telescope.

Mind you it isn’t entirely necessary to aquire expensive equipment to catch sight of this beautiful and bizarre world at this time, a reasonable pair of binoculars should be sufficient to enable a glimpse of the glowing turquoise-blue planet. Unfortunately the stars of Aquarius, the ‘water carrier’, are particularly faint as is the whole area of the sky around these ‘watery realms’ of the ‘heavens above’ so actually knowing where to look to find URANUS is possibly the hardest part. The stars of the square of Pegasus are situated above but the best locator would be the bright star Fomalhaut below. Often considered to be member of the Aquarius grouping of stars, even by Ptolemy who confusingly placed it in both constellations, it is the significant star in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus (formerly Piscis Notius), ‘the Southern Fish’. The name Fomalhaut derives from the arabic ‘Fum al Hut’, meaning ‘the Fish’s Mouth’

At the midnight hour on the 9th of the month (1:00am BST) and for the days either side of that date URANUS will be cossing the meridian due south with Fomalhaut fairly low down to the horizon and directly below. Fomalhaut is by far the brightest star in that region of the night sky but you would need a reasonably clear southern horizon to be certain of locating it. Having done so it is then a matter of tracking slowly upwards until you come across a pale-ish green circular area of light distinct from the surrounding white points of light. Then you will have discovered him for yourself: URANUS, the God of the Sky.

© A.S.Morton – August 2007