At a time long ago when the world was dark, the Earth bare, and the sea with an endless sea, people developed a philosophy about the forces that surrounded them. The Creation myths formed from the world around them into the beliefs of a people. The inexplicable world became orderly through the beliefs and the attempted explanations. Answers to the rain, the wind and the celestial bodies.
12 Constellations form a ring in around the sky in a path that is called ecliptic. The Zodiac as we know it denotes the path the Sun travels through the sky.
Ancient people discovered that it takes a year for the \Sun to move through its journey through the Zodiac. They associated each constellation of the Zodiac with times of the year To them the months changed, the seasons turned and so went time. Centuries later they discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun and the illusion of the path of the ecliptic was false, however the signs of the Zodiac survived.
Calendars were created based on nature's cycles and the ceremonies, festivals and myths of the ancients were patterned after the gods that ruled these rhythms. The sky was the model in which they created their clocks and calendars. The sky, the Moon and the Sun were the most obvious markers and were used as early as the Ice Age.
The Egyptians developed a calendar as early as 4200BC which was used by other cultures as late as the Middle Ages.
The ancients had a respect for their celestial Gds and incorporated it into their myths.
Many of the structures that are found today, such as Stonehenge, the Mayan pyramids, and other circles found throughout the British Isles prove that the ancients used the sky for clocks and calendars. The ancients were sky watchers, the Mayans for example, observed the celestial objects as early as the 6th century BC to make calendars and recorded the pattern of eclipses in what is called the Dresden Codex.
The ancient peoples found order in the natural world if the sky. The order with its cycles was what they needed to survive and also to get in touch with the spirits.
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