4. The very last stars at the head of the Ram are Mesarthim and Sheratan, and quite interestingly they are close (in time) to Polaris:
26.6 * 72 = ca 1915 years ago or practically at the birth of Christ (there is neither a year zero A.D. nor a year zero B.C.). Here at last came a cardinal point of a magnitude comparable to that of Aldebaran:
Polaris is the 'pillar to fish by' in the Tahitian star pillar list. It marks the Era of Pisces and it seems even to have transformed Aldebaran into a Fish. Presumably Antares at the same time was transformed from a Scorpion to the other fish in Pisces, the one with his belly up as a sign of death - cfr the curved tail in the Urania's Mirror version. We have in the course of all the preceding pages covered the whole distance of the Tahitian pillars (each one of them an α star), even if there still remains much right ascension time ahead for us to investigate:
249.1 - 26.6 = 222.5 days were enough, leaving 143 days with no Tahitian star pillar. 222.5 / 365.25 * 24h = 14h 37m. Antares was rising heliacally in day 329 according to my reconstruction for the circumstances at the time when the G text was created. And Polaris was rising heliacally in day 107. 329 - 107 = 222. Yet the front side seems to cover only 329 (November 25) - 144 (May 24) = 185 days, a measure suitable for summer north of the equator. There are only 9 star pillars on the front side of the year, Polaris is on the back side. It should be added that the Sign of 4 extra nights at the end of the month according to the Hawaiian Moon calendar possibly could be reflected in those 4 last days before line a1 is beginning. "When Julius Caesar established his calendar in 45 BC he set March 25 as the spring equinox. Since a Julian year (365.25 days) is slightly longer than an actual year the calendar drifted with respect to the equinox, such that the equinox was occurring on about 21 March in AD 300 and by AD 1500 it had reached 11 March. This drift induced Pope Gregory XIII to create a modern Gregorian calendar. The Pope wanted to restore the edicts concerning the date of Easter of the Council of Nicaea of AD 325. (Incidentally, the date of Easter itself is fixed by an approximation of lunar cycles used in the Hebraic calendar, but according to the historian Bede the English name 'Easter' comes from a pagan celebration by the Germanic tribes of the vernal - spring - equinox.) So the shift in the date of the equinox that occurred between the 4th and the 16th centuries was annulled with the Gregorian calendar, but nothing was done for the first four centuries of the Julian calendar. The days of 29 February of the years AD 100, AD 200, AD 300, and the day created by the irregular application of leap years between the assassination of Caesar and the decree of Augustus re-arranging the calendar in AD 8, remained in effect. This moved the equinox four days earlier than in Caesar's time." (Wikipedia) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
