FOGS Vernal Equinox News IX398

Gab o' May
Aye keep in some straw and hay
To meet the caal' Kalends o' May

WHILE the equinoxes may still be precessing, the seasons heading toward change with the move into the next celestial sphere, this old farming addage still applies - particularly this year - to a biting cold spell expected around Beltane. Farmers unwary (or wooed by Euro-grants) enough to leave beasts out in the fields, have in the past found it necessary to bring them back inside or suffer calving casualties.

On equinoctial precession, many of us are aware of our headlong course towards the age of Aquarius, but might like to know what it meant in archaic terms. Ancients discovered and handed down the scientific fact that the earth spins, like a top, with its equator inclined at 23.5° to the celestial equator, in ideal terms splitting the zodiac which runs on the ecliptic into a northern band reaching from vernal to autumnal equinox, and a southern zodiacal arc reaching from autumnal equinox through winter solstice to vernal equinox.

The earth's equinoctial times would in that ideal scenario be seen to occur forever in the same spot in relation to the fixed stars and zodiac constellations.

But they do not.

Instead they move quite deliberately 'backwards', in a course opposite to the annual path of the sun, against the zodiac sequence, i.e. Taurus-> Aries->Pisces. This Precession was seen by the ancients as the cause of cataclysm, the rise and fall of civilization, the loss or gain of knowledge. Around 5000BC the sun was in Gemini, moving every 2,200 years into a new 'Age' - to Taurus, age of the 'Golden Calf', through Aries, until it reached the Christian era, marked by Pisces, the fish (symbol of early Christendom, and Celtic knowledge). But each new age was to herald a loss of the best of the last.

If the Piscean Age were seen as a Classical era giving way to a Christian one, with classical learning merely surviving to express both the new and the old, our next move into Aquarius, however enlightening, may sadly mark utter loss of that learning (no longer taught in schools, jocularly 'dead' languages). If a laissez faire approach to our national archives and traditions is now the fashion, what we may lose this time could be irrevocable.

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