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Keeping Time

“The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.”

—Albert Einstein

 

Before clocks and calendars, the turning of Earth and cycles of the Sun, Moon, and stars were how humans tracked time. A day is one rotation of Earth, and one cycle of the phases of the Moon gave us the month, while Earth’s circuit around the Sun is the year. Tracking days, months, and larger divisions of time has ancient roots, as the human need to move with cycles of time is universal. Time relates to everything from cooking and gardening to music and medicine.

Archaeologists have reconstructed methods of keeping time that reach back to prehistoric periods. Researchers have deduced from excavated tally sticks that people counted days in relation to the Moon’s phases as early as the Upper Paleolithic (Stone) Age, 50,000 years ago. Ancient cultures such as the Inca, Maya, and Hopi, and other American Indian tribes, as well as Babylonians, Buddhists, and Hindus perceive time like a wheel. Time is experienced as cyclical, not linear, consisting of repeating cycles that happen in measured ages and states of development from the birth of the Universe until its end. According to the large cycle of precession, Hindu cosmology has a wheel of ages called yugas that range from light to dark. The Greek and Roman system perceived ages that ranged from an idyllic Golden Age to the current Iron Age that is filled with conflict and pain.

In the ancient Greek view, time was seen in two ways—Chronos and Kairos. The first referred to numeric or chronological time since Chronus was the personification of time. Kairos conveyed the idea of “the right moment” and is related to “divine timing.” Kairos is qualitative while Chronos is quantitative, and casting and interpreting an astrology chart requires both. According to the Hebrew Qabalah, time is a paradox and an illusion, as both past and future are perceived as simultaneously “present.” In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to Solomon, time has often been translated from Hebrew as “age,” and seen as the unfolding of prophecies or predestined events. The Islamic and Judeo-Christian worldview tends to regard time as linear and directional, beginning with a divine act of creation. Time will end at some point teleologically, an ending understood to be intrinsic to the order of things.

Ancient calendars were usually lunisolar and were based on observation, requiring an intercalary month to bring the solar and lunar years into alignment. The Moon’s motion is complex because the Sun, Earth, and planets all exert gravity. The Moon rotates on its axis every 27.5 days, the same time it takes to circle Earth. This is called the sidereal period as the Moon returns to the same place relative to the stars. This dual motion is why the same side of the Moon is always visible to Earth. However, the far side is not always dark, since the Moon’s rotation exposes the whole surface to sunlight. Even though we don’t ever see the “dark side” from Earth, it is fully illuminated at the New Moon.

The synodic month is the most familiar and is defined as the interval between two consecutive lunar phases, as seen by an observer on Earth. The mean synodic length (rounded) is 29.5 days. The distinction between sidereal and synodic cycles was recognized in historical times in Babylonian lunar astronomy. The synodic period is longer because while the Moon is orbiting Earth, we travel about thirty degrees of arc each month in our annual trek around the Sun. The Moon has to compensate since the Earth-Moon system is orbiting the Sun in the same direction as the Moon is orbiting the Earth, so it takes about 2.2 days longer for the Moon to return to the same apparent position with respect to the Sun. Dividing the number of days of the year by the 29.5 days of the synodic lunar cycle yields about 12.37 New Moons or Full Moons each year, which are called lunations. Numerous cultures have wrestled with the problem of solar-lunar cycles, and many cultures used multiple calendars to distinguish sacred, secular, and agricultural domains.

Regardless of how time is understood philosophically, clocks mark the passage of time and calendars organize segments of time. Water clocks are some of the oldest time-measuring instruments. Where and when they were first invented is unknown given their great antiquity. The simple bowl-shaped outflow water clock existed in Babylon and Egypt around the sixteenth century BCE. India and China also have early evidence of water clocks. Some authors claim that water clocks appeared in China as early as 4000 BCE. The hourglass, or sand clock, is an ancestor of the modern kitchen timer and is thought to have developed from the water clock in ancient India. The sand flows down from the upper bowl, which is seen as the past, through the narrow neck that represents the present moment, and into the lower bowl that is seen as the future.

A sundial tells the time of day by the shadow cast by the apparent movement of the Sun. As the Sun moves across the sky, the shadow aligns with different hour lines that are marked on the dial to indicate the time of day. The earliest sundials known from archaeological finds are shadow clocks used in Babylonian astronomy 3,500 years ago. An ancient sundial from Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, dates to 2,500 years ago.

Calendars are explicit schemes for keeping time and organizing dates for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. Calendars give names to periods of time, such as days, weeks, months, and years. The word calendar comes from calends, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar. It’s related to the verb calare, “to call out,” referring to the announcement that the first sliver of new moon had been seen, beginning the month. Latin calendarium meant “account book,” or “register,” as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month.

Historically, the first formalized calendars date to the Bronze Age around 5,000 years ago and were dependent on the development of writing in the ancient Near East. The Sumerian calendar is the earliest known, followed by Egyptian, Assyrian, and Elamite calendars. A larger number of calendar systems of the ancient Near East appear in the Iron Age archaeological record, based on the Assyrian and Babylonian calendars. A 1079 calendar reform in Persia, led by Khayyam, measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days. Since the length of the year changes in the sixth decimal place over a lifetime, this was remarkably accurate. The length of the year at the end of the nineteenth century was 365.242196 days, while today it is 365.242190 days.

The Roman calendar contained ancient remnants of a pre-Etruscan ten-month solar year but was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE. The Julian calendar no longer depended on observation of the New Moon but followed an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years. However, this created a still ongoing dissociation of the calendar month from the lunation. The Gregorian calendar was introduced as a refinement to the Julian calendar in 1582 CE and is still the main calendar in worldwide use today.

The Gregorian calendar has twelve fixed months of differing lengths; so as the cycles change, the shorter lunar cycle (29.5 days) can fall twice in a calendar month. This creates an artifact in our modern calendar that is called a “blue moon.” This is not because the Moon appears blue, but because two Full Moons fall in one calendar month. There is also a “dark moon,” two New Moons in a calendar month. A blue moon month typically occurs once in 2.7 years. However, 2018 will have two blue moon months, one in January and one in March, causing February of 2018 to be a month without a Full Moon. The last time this occurred was in 1999 when the blue moons also occurred in January and March. This cyclical recurrence is because of the nineteen-year Metonic cycle of lunar phases.

The discovery of this cycle is credited to Meton (432 BCE) an Athenian astronomer. Mathematically, nineteen tropical years have 6,939.60 days, while 235 synodic months have 6,939.69 days. After nineteen years, the phases of the Moon occur on the same dates of the year, after which the Moon’s phases recur on the same days of the solar year, or year of the seasons. There are 235 lunar months and 236 Full Moons during one Metonic cycle. There are also 228 calendar months, so at least eight of those months will have two Full Moons.

Since this is almost equal to twenty eclipse years (6,932.4), it is also possible for a series of four or five eclipses to occur on the same dates nineteen years apart. Edmund Halley, of comet fame, mistakenly linked the naming of the cycle of 223 synodic months with Suidas, a tenth century Greek, who had actually called the Metonic cycle Saros. Halley wrongly named the eclipse cycle Saros, and the name stuck.

Astrologically, the Moon moves thirteen degrees a day through an astrological sign and makes thirteen orbits of Earth in a year. Usually, there is one New Moon and one Full Moon in each of the twelve zodiac signs. Symbolically, the cycles and phases of the Moon’s light offer periodic illumination into our individual and collective natures. Just as space travel has given us a glimpse of the Moon’s hidden side, the relationship between Earth and Moon is a journey of ever-changing, but ever-increasing, light and consciousness.

The Moon represents our instincts, memories, habitual behaviors, and the general inheritance of the past. The Moon is seen symbolically as our lost psyche, partly hidden in shadow and separated from our waking consciousness as we journey through time. The Moon reflects our evolving personalities. The hidden side conceals our habitual selves and holds unconscious patterns that need to be healed or reclaimed. The dark side is the realm of depth psychology analysis and astrological insight that can reveal what’s in the shadow and work to bring these issues into the light of conscious awareness. Astronomy is science, based on observation and measurement. Astrology is an interpretative discipline that applies meaning and correspondences to what has been observed over thousands of years. Not so long ago they were the same. I believe we’ve lost a great deal as a result of the radical severance of these disciplines. When we separate meaning from measurement, we cleave the mind and heart.

Increasingly, our personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously, further separating us from the cycles and rhythms that inform both. Clocks and calendars are useful devices, but they make it easy to lose touch with the real rhythms we’re biologically and spiritually attuned to. Artificial light disconnects us from the night, sweeping lunatics and werewolves under the carpet, and denying our instinctual response to deep impulses that dwell in the darkness. Technology is a fact of modern life and has given rise to many timesaving inventions. However, lest we lose touch with nature, we should pay attention to the recurring cycles that keep our hearts, our personal ticking clocks, in rhythm and harmony with the natural world.

http://www.JulieLoar.com

Classic Astrology

Jan/Feb 2018 – #127

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The Roughness of Creation

While many of the mysteries of alternative science, which fascinate many of us, have gone unrecognized by orthodox science, a few have broken through into mainstream consciousness, where they provide a continuing source of confusion and irritation to the more conventionally minded among us. Here are two recent productions from PBS’s NOVA series that make the point.

FRACTALS: HUNTING THE HIDDEN DIMENSION

NOVA

You may not know it, but fractals, like the air you breathe, are all around you. Their irregular, repeating shapes are found in cloud formations and tree limbs, in stalks of broccoli and craggy mountain ranges, even in the rhythm of the human heart. In this film, NOVA takes viewers on a fascinating quest with a group of pioneering mathematicians determined to decipher the rules that govern fractal geometry.

For centuries fractal-like irregular shapes were considered beyond the boundaries of mathematical understanding. Now, mathematicians have finally begun mapping this uncharted territory. Their remarkable findings are deepening our understanding of nature and stimulating a new wave of scientific, medical, and artistic innovation stretching from the ecology of the rain forest to fashion design. This documentary highlights a host of researchers, filmmakers, physicians, and fashion designers who are using fractal geometry to innovate and inspire. You’ll see how fractals can be used to better understand everything from coastlines and rainforests to weather systems and human physiology.

Benoit Mandelbrot is introduced as the father of fractals and fractal geometry. The narrator recounts that while Mandelbrot was working at IBM, he noticed patterns in phone-line transmissions that reminded him of a hundred-year-old mystery known as mathematical “monsters.” The program illustrates some of the monsters, including the Cantor set, Koch’s snowflake, and the Julia set; and it shows how Mandelbrot used the Julia set to create his own equation that, when iterated and graphed on a computer, generated the well-known “Mandelbrot set.”

Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as “the art of roughness” of physical phenomena and “the uncontrolled element in life.” He referred to himself as a ‘fractalist’ and coined the word ‘fractal’ as well as developed a “theory of roughness and self-similarity” in nature. He saw ‘roughness’ in the shapes of mountains, coastlines, and river basins; the structure of plants, blood vessels, and lungs; and the clustering of galaxies.

Simply put, there are some geometric shapes (fractals) that are equally ‘rough’ at all scales; that, no matter how closely you look, they never get simpler; a form of geometric repetition in which smaller and smaller copies of a pattern are successively nested inside each other so that the same intricate shapes appear no matter how much you zoom in to the whole. One might have thought that such a simple and fundamental form of regularity would have been studied for hundreds, or thousands, of years, but—not. In fact, it rose to prominence only over the past 30 or so years—mostly through the efforts of Mandelbrot.

However, Mandelbrot never felt he was inventing a new idea. He described his feelings: “Exploring this set, I certainly never had the feeling of invention. I never had the feeling that my imagination was rich enough to invent all those extraordinary things on discovering them. They were there, even though nobody had seen them before. It’s marvelous; a very simple formula explains all these very complicated things. So the goal of science is starting with a mess and explaining it with a simple formula, a kind of dream of science.”

In 1936, while he was a child, Mandelbrot’s family migrated to France. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and the United States and receiving a master’s degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.

Because of his access to IBM’s computers, Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovering the ‘Mandelbrot set’ in 1979. He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules. He said that things typically considered to be ‘rough,’ a ‘mess,’ or ‘chaotic,’ like clouds or shorelines, actually had a ‘degree of order.’ His math and geometry-centered research career included contributions to such fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, information technology, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy, and the social sciences.

This ‘roughness’ idea is fascinating, especially when you hear him speak of savoring the ‘unsmooth.’ In an interview with NOVA, the narrator asks: “You’ve said, ‘My whole career is an ardent pursuit of the concept of roughness.’ What exactly do you mean by that?”

His response was: “Actually, this word ‘roughness’ has different meanings according to context. Until I turned 20 and World War II ended, my life was becoming increasingly rough because of historical events over which no one I knew had any control. But after I turned 20, things changed. Without any clear plan or conscious decision, I became fascinated by, and then almost exclusively devoted to, all kinds of phenomena in which irregularity and variability dominate but are so great that they don’t average out. This led me first to disbelieve and then to contradict in a radical fashion what everybody else was saying about those phenomena. The predominant view of irregularity continues to follow Galileo’s famous saying that the Great Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics, the characters being circles, triangles, and other such shapes. A circle is perfectly regular. A triangle has three corners and is otherwise very smooth, and the great bulk of science studies smooth behavior, in particular, using equations that assume that everything evolves in a very regular fashion.

“But I was so alone that the direction I was following was not described by any existing word. In 1975, my work forced me to coin one: ‘fractal.’ The Latin adjective, fractus, can denote anything that is like a broken-up stone—irregular and fragmented. The sudden realization that “fractal” deserved to be put in a book’s title changed nothing in the substance but brought considerable change in the perception of my work. The word is now found in many dictionaries. With two hands, you can count all the simple shapes of nature—everything else is rough.”

This program gives us a clearer understanding of how the application of fractal geometry has already altered our world. For example: the engineer who worked for IBM on fractals then moved from IBM to Lucas films, using his knowledge and understanding to create computer generated landscapes; downsizing wire antennas; better understanding human physiology; and investigating why large animals use energy more efficiently than small ones; and much more.

The quality of this film is excellent, as are most NOVA productions, and it includes special features: printable materials for educators; English subtitles; and described video for the visually impaired.

DVD – 56 Min. • $24.95 • 1-800-228-8381

ANCIENT COMPUTER

NOVA

In 1900, a storm blew a boatload of sponge divers off course and forced them to take shelter by the tiny Mediterranean island of Antikythera. Diving the next day, they discovered a 2,000-year-old Greek shipwreck. They had come upon a heap of marble and bronze sculptures. It was part of the biggest hoard of Greek treasure ever found. It had come from an overloaded Roman galley, sunk 2,000 years ago, as Rome’s empire began to grab Greece’s overseas colonies in the Mediterranean. By accident, the divers had rescued some of ancient Greece’s most beautiful artifacts. But among the collection of bronze and marble statues was perhaps the most important object of all: Item 15087 in the Athens Museum. It had been split into several, badly corroded lumps of bronze. Then, remarkably, researchers noticed rusted remnants of gear wheels on its surface, suggesting some kind of intricate mechanism. The first X-ray studies confirmed that idea, but how it worked and what it was for puzzled scientists for decades.

Recently, hi-tech imaging has revealed the extraordinary truth: this unique clockwork machine was the world’s first computer. An array of 30 intricate, bronze gear wheels, originally housed in a shoebox-size wooden case, was designed to predict the dates of lunar and solar eclipses, track the Moon’s subtle motions through the sky, and calculate the dates of significant events, such as the Olympic Games. No device of comparable technological sophistication was known from anywhere in the world for at least another 1,000 years. So who was the genius inventor behind it? And what happened to the advanced astronomical and engineering knowledge of its makers? NOVA follows the ingenious sleuthing that finally decoded the truth behind the amazing ancient Greek computer, now known as the ‘Antikythera Mechanism.’

This compelling documentary, highlighting current technology and reverse engineering, features: Astronomer, Mike Edmunds; Mathematician, Tony Freeth; X-ray Engineer, Roger Hadland; Historian of Ancient Astronomy, Alexander Jones; Archaeologist, Dimitris Kourkoumelis; Historian of Babylonian Astronomy, John Steele; Coin Expert, Panagiotis Tselekas; Mechanical Engineer, Michael Wright; and Senior Archaeologist, Mary Zafeiropoulou. These men and women offer an astounding solution (of high probability) to this fascinating find. To see Michael Wright’s working model is a nice finale to this program.

About Michael Wright, this is what Kristina Panos had to say: One of Wright’s insightful suppositions about the device was that the gearing that drove the display on the back side, where eclipse prediction takes place, appeared to have a pin and slot mechanism. His adapted x-rays revealed a slot and the ghost of a circular piece inside of it. Wright ultimately determined that the pin gear and the slot gear pivot on slightly offset axes. Both are connected to the 223-tooth gear, which keeps track of the Moon’s orbit. This meant that the pin and slot mechanism was a differential gearing solution designed to compensate for the irregular, elliptical orbit of the Moon around the Earth.

Mathematician, Tony Freeth, said that if the Antikythera Mechanism hadn’t been discovered when it was, in 1900, no one would possibly believe that it could exist, because it’s so sophisticated… “An ancient Greek scientist had done a truly remarkable thing. He’d found a way, using bronze gearwheels, to track the complex movements of the Moon and probably all the planets as well. It was a mechanism of truly staggering genius… It’s an incredible puzzle, probably one of the most fiendish puzzles in history. We had no confidence, ourselves, that we would actually be able to solve it.”

And Astronomer, Mike Edmunds, adds: You’re just amazed by the quality of the workmanship. And then, suddenly, you look and you see there are tiny Greek characters engraved into the actual metal, itself. The shock they must have had when they first saw this and saw these gearwheels; they knew wooden gearwheels were used in Greek mills and so on, but nothing was known like these precision, metal-engineered gears.

Pointed out by the narrator is the fact that if it hadn’t been for the two storms in the Mediterranean—the first around 70 BC that sunk an overloaded Roman trading ship, carrying the precious mechanism; and the second in 1900 that drove a team of sponge divers to shelter off the island of Antikythera—the most important scientific discovery to emerge from Ancient Greece might have been lost forever. And it makes one wonder how much more awaits us at the bottom of the seas of the world!

Another excellent production by NOVA; includes English subtitles.

DVD – 60 Min. • $24.95 • 1-800-228-8381

 

 

NEW WORLD ORDER: A 6,000 Year History

Secret Society and The Matrix of Control

UFO TV

“Secrets of the New World Order are revealed like never before in this shocking feature film.” This is the way that the contents of this video is described on its cover. “Tragic events throughout history,” it says, “have been orchestrated behind closed doors. Unseen forces are united with a hidden agenda to manipulate governments, institutions, and all of the earth’s resources. Includes the history of the Secret Societies, Ancient Beliefs, and the Matrix of Control that has shaped human history for thousands of years. Also includes, for the first time, a documented history of the true birth of the Illuminati, and its affect on the world today.”

So, what does the “Illuminati” mean today? It has become ambiguous. It means different things to different people. “There is a multitude of different versions of what exactly the Illuminati is, but most researchers agree that the group consists mainly of the upper crust of the world’s financial and political elite. Generally, It’s used as a catch-all term to describe the One Percenters, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, or the ruling class whose combined wealth and power influence every aspect of our daily lives,” wrote Tom Hidell of IlluminatiRex.com.

Author Jim Marrs adds, “A growing number of the public today are waking up to the fact that a virtual handful of international bankers and financiers, the ones who set the rules for the world’s financial institutions and interest rates, control the global economy and, hence, most governments. But it was as the Bavarian Illuminati that, for the first time in modern history, ‘enlightened’ men, who believed themselves superior to the masses, created a unified movement against church and state to overthrow the old order and establish control over entire nations.”

This documentary covers much of the history of Freemasonry and the Illuminati, and its purported bloodlines, etc. Marrs points out, though, that: Founding Father Thomas Jefferson perhaps echoed the earliest and truest intentions of the Freemasons and even the Illuminati when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seen most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” But, states, Marrs, as in so many instances in the past, basic truths such as these are manipulated and twisted by power-hungry individuals, members of secret societies, and hypocrites who speak the language but practice something entirely different.

Whether or not one believes in conspiracy theories, one can appreciate this assemblage of information, as it is not ‘preachy,’ and contains a good amount of historical fact. And there will be those who can view this type of documentary with the belief that there is more than just physicality at work—see what it does for you.

DVD – 102 Min. • $24.95 • 1-800-228-8381

Jan/Feb 2018 – #127

Video & DVD