Page 107 - The Irony Board
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Into the Cosmos
Leo, wherever and whenever the latter may intercept the Sun’s
apparent yearly course around the Earth.
In the poem, the child’s puzzle of making a picture by connecting
dots represents Gluckman’s speculative history of the zodiac. It may
well have been the Babylonian priesthood who formalized the
generalizations we know today as the twelve signs of the zodiac
(Greek: circle of animals). They had the astronomical knowledge and
the political power necessary to impose their typology of star-
clusters upon the populace. If one gazes at the night sky objectively,
it becomes obvious that only by long habit do we consider those
jagged patterns to bear any resemblance to their namesakes. Had
astrology originated five thousand years earlier, different dots would
have been used to outline the same zoo of characters.
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