next page

previous page

table of contents

home

The Chinese system has its Heart station associated with a fox:

For the ancient astronomers this would have been an obvious clue - the Fox should have been a secure way to allude to a string with a 'heart' (a bob of lead), i.e. a merkhet:

... Evidently, 'heart' is something very specific, as it were the 'center of gravity' ... See Aeg.Wb. 2, pp. 55f. for sign of the heart (ib) as expressing generally 'the middle, the center'. And this may lead in quite another direction. The Arabs preserved a name for Canopus - besides calling the star Kalb at-tai-man ('heart of the south') ... Suhail el-wezn, 'Canopus Ponderosus', the heavy-weighing Canopus, a name promptly declared meaningless by the experts, but which could well have belonged to an archaic system in which Canopus was the weight at the end of the plumb line, as befitted its important position as a heavy star at the South Pole of the 'waters below' ...

... Proclus informs us that the fox star nibbles continuously at the thong of the yoke which holds together heaven and earth; German folklore adds that when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end. This fox star is no other than Alcor, the small star g near zeta Ursae Majoris (in India Arundati, the common wife of the Seven Rishis, alpha-eta Ursae ...

In other words, Spica was like a heavy star down at the end of a merkhet.

There were probably other such such places for plumb lines, for instance at σ Scorpii, the star where the 3 lines from β (Acrab), δ (Dschubba), and π (Vrischika) were joining at the face of the Scorpion: