History of Astronomy

For the first time we have published this idea in: Himmelsscheibe, Sonnenwagen und Kalenderhüte – ein Versuch zur bronzezeitlichen Astronomie. Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica 40, 2008, S. 93-126, insbesondere S. 105-106.

At the end of the 1st century a new exotic cult appeared in the Roman Empire - the Mithras cult. The name refers to the Persian sun god Mithras. In Persia, however, there was no cult of the sun god Mithra that resembled the later Roman cult. Merkelbach suspects a creation of the cult from the surroundings of the imperial house. We would associate the idea of the cult with the procession of Tiridate. The new Armenian ruler moved through the Roman Empire with a troop of thousands of Parthian horsemen. In gold-decorated Rome he threw himself at Nero's feet, worshipped him as his god Mithra and received his reign from Nero. Through this propagandacoup a threatening war between Rome and Parthia for the rule in Armenia could be prevented. As a sign of the solidarity between the two peoples, there could have been an agreement that a Persian god should also be worshipped in Rome.
The cult image of the bull-killing Mithras gives puzzles away. This picture cannot be understood from Persian mythology - but from the Roman imperial propaganda: Since Julius Caesar the Roman rulers increasingly connected their power with the sun. Thus the Egyptian solar calendar was introduced by Caesar in Rome, Augustus sacrificed Apollo after his decisive victory in Actium and erected an Egyptian obelisk as a sign of victory and pointer of a sundial in Rome. Nero received Tiridates disguised as sun god and Aurelian introduced in the 3rd century the December 25th as feast day of the invincible sun god in Rome.

In the Mithras relief, the sun-god kills a bull, that is curved to a (thick) crescent moon. The portrait is full of astral allusions. It is often framed by the zodiac and the participating animals partly represent the celestial equator. The zodiac and celestial equator together symbolize the whole cosmos, which is dominated by the sun god. In the calendar the sun replaces the triad sun, moon and stars. In a Babylonian leap rule, which enjoyed wider distribution, the thickness of the crescent moon in the Plejades in the constellation of Taurus in the supposed spring month is used to conclude the necessity of switching on a month. Thus sun, moon and stars (in particular the Pleiades) regulate the calendar and thus the order of the sky. However, this regulation had begun to waver around 500 BC. Due to the precession of the Earth's axis, the validity of the leap rule moved slowly from the spring month towards summer. An adaptation of the leap rule in the spring month would have led to a thicker moon crescent, than indicated in the Babylonian tradition. If one measures the cult images of the Mithras, then quite uniform "thicknesses" of the moon crescents result from the bull body. Converted into the age of the moon they correspond to a lunar thickness, which one would have had to use adapted in this time for the Babylonian leap rule - which however would have been clearly wrong for all experts. Thus the cult picture symbolizes the "falling" switching rule to the initiate and thus the failure of the triad moon, sun and stars. Only the sun alone could be relied upon. Thus the Mithras cult supports the supremacy of the sun over all other gods and thus also the legitimacy of the emperors, who increasingly referred to the sun. Just as the sun orders the cosmos, so does the emperor on earth. The Mithras cult was thus appropriated for the rule of the emperors - the Mithras relief contributed its part to this.

Cultures around the world find meaning in the shapes of stars and features in the Milky Way. The striking appearance of our galaxy in the night sky serves as a reference to traditional knowledge, encoding science and culture to a memory space, becoming part of their overarching cosmologies. This paper examines traditional views of the Milky Way from cultures around the world, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere. These views comprise dark constellations: familiar shapes made up of the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way, rather than the bright stars. Some of the better-known examples include the celestial emu from Aboriginal traditions of Australia, and the llama in Inca traditions of the Andes. We conduct a comparative analysis of cultural perceptions of dark constellations in the Milky Way, examining common cultural themes and meanings at the crossroads of Indigenous Knowledge and Western science.

The troglodyte village of Tara (Telde, Gran Canaria) brings together an important group of artificial caves from the ancient Canarians where, according to a certain tradition, the faicans or high priests of this part of the island resided, at least in the centuries immediately preceding the Spanish conquest of the island. In this work, we present an archaeoastronomical study of the cave of the Virgin, where we document the existence of a device designed to mark accurately the passage of the Sun and the Moon by a point on the horizon that aims to divide the intersolstitial interval into two halves.

The fact that, surely, they were the same faicans who exercised their astronomical activities in Tara and the nearby mountain of Cuatro Puertas invites us to relate both places and propose their joint use with observational and calendrical purposes: the equinoctial observations would take place in Tara, and the solstitial ones in Cuatro Puertas. Our work points out some of the possible advanced objectives of these observations.