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An Article In Issue Number 10 (Winter 97)

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ANCIENT STAR PICTURES

by

Laura Lee

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Lascaux, France, 17,000 years ago: in star pictures of the Pleiades and
the ecliptic Astronomer Frank Edge has not only found elaborate star
pictures in a whole new medium, cave paintings, he's put them in a whole
new time frame: the Stone Age.

There had been a hint of this, Dr. Wheston Price noted that 10 dots on a
Neanderthal cave painting clearly represented the Pleiades, the Seven
Sisters. The dots were in all the right places, but they represent four
more stars than we can see today with the naked eye. For Dr. Price, that
was proof that cave men had better developed senses, including sight, a
result of living in harmony with natural law and better nutrition
provided by the ancient ways. Dr. Price doesn't mention where that cave
painting is, but in the meantime, star pictures were recognized in two
additional, well known, cave paintings.

Frank Edge's discovery began as a moment of pattern recognition, and it
would take an astronomer's familiarity with the constellations to see
it. Edge was just gazing at photos of the famed cave paintings at
Lascaux, France, when he quickly identified the Pleiades in a series of
six dots over the shoulder of the most prominent bull. He kept looking
at the six figures, four of them bulls, that make up the Hall of Bulls
mural. The more he looked, the more representations of stars he began to
see in the outline of those figures.

Now that he's sorted it all out, he can tell you that what he saw were
new constellations, arbitrary groupings of stars, that are bigger than
those we know today. The body of that dominant bull incorporates the
constellation Taurus, of which the Pleiades is a part. In the next bull,
he found Orion and Gemini, and in the next Leo, with portions of Virgo.
In the next figure, a horse's head is the feet of Virgo, and at the far
end of the mural, a curious unicorn is made up of Scorpius, Sagitarrius
and Libra. All the dots are in the right place, with appropriate shapes
says Edge. With the Pleiades, we have it easy, with dots matching dots.
All the rest are what you get when you connect dots into pictures.

It was time to turn to the computer for verification. Using Sky Globe,
Edge went backwards in time to the date archeologists assign the cave
paintings, based on cave floor pollen samples. And there the
computer-generated pictures of the positions of the stars showed those
very same constellations, all neatly lined up on the horizon on the
summer solstice of 15,000 B.C., 17,000 years ago. He had confirmed the
painting's date.

The Magdalenians, as this artistic culture is called, were Ice-Age
hunter-gatherers who had practical reasons to mark the passage of time,
carefully observe their environment, and pass this knowledge on to the
next generation. Useful survival skills: living, celebrating and
migrating in tune with the seasons. With no electric clocks, no printed
calendars, no city lights to obscure the stars, and the need to travel
light, the heavens were a handy timepiece, always there no matter where
you were. Telling time would involve learning the rotation of the sun,
moon, and stars, just like we learn to tell time today by the rotation
of the hands of the clock around its face.

These paintings were teaching aids to memorize the stars and the
mythology that went with them. A new breed of researchers are trampling
the old view of cave art as attempts in sympathetic magic to bewitch the
animals of the hunt. Instead, led by the evidence, they favor
metaphysical and religious interpretations.

These star pictures are elaborate and well designed. The constellations
depicted from one end of the mural to the other are just what you would
see if you sat up all night watching the stars from sunset to sunrise.
These stars appeared just above the horizon, along the ecliptic, the
path the sun and moon follow through the sky. Most of the year, you
couldn't see all these constellations on any one night, due to their
axial tilt. But the night of the summer solstice of 15,000 B.C. is the
one opportunity to see them all.

It gets better still. The mural wraps around the walls of the cave, with
a natural division in the center. The figures on each half of the
wrap-around face center, to gaze at one another. Those figures on the
east wall represent the constellations that were visible as the sun
rose. On the west wall are the constellations that were visible as the
sun set. The stars are arranged on the cave wall in just the way you
would see them if you were standing outside the cave.

Edge has found this layout is more than good composition, it's what
turns this star picture into an ingenious device to fine-tune your
calendar. The middle of the mural, where the two halves meet to face one
another, is the same place in the sky where the full moon annually
appears, closest yet prior to the summer solstice, the longest day of
the year. Edge imagines the Magdalenians kept their calendar on track by
watching the full moon until finally one midnight it hit that
pre-designated spot, and there was no mistaking this day, it was the
summer solstice. The mural, when first painted, remained accurate for
several centuries.

Altamira Cave, Spain, 15,500 years ago: star pictures in a cave
painting. Edge found another famous cave at the southern edge of
Magdalenian territory, with a second mural that he correlated to the
stars. While the Lascaux painting depicts just those constellations
along the eclliptic, Altamira's is more ambitious in scope, with the
cave wall organized to represent the entire visible night sky. Selected
stars are depicted among all that would have appeared through the spring
nights, from sunset to sunrise, from the horizon all the way up to the
pole. Those closest to the Pole, the circumpolar stars that never set,
are nicely arranged across the top of the mural. At the bottom are
Scorpius, Leo and Taurus, the stars then seen along the horizon. The
painting is dated at 13,500 B.C. It's fascinating to think of someone so
long ago memorizing the stars and their relative positions within star
groups, says Edge. He actually prefers the Paleolithic groupings,
finding they make better sense, and easier identification of the stars.
Our modern star groupings are a hodgepodge, he says.

Chartres, France, 700 years ago: star pictures in gothic cathedrals. And
then I came across another ancient star chart in a book by Louis
Charpentier, The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, which is not all that
far from Lascaux. Amid an examination of the hidden geometry and role of
the Templars in the construction of the cathedral, there is this layout
showing a layout of churches all named Notre Dame, or Our Lady, of which
Chartres Cathedral is one, and whose configuration matches the stars in
a section of the constellation Virgo. Our Lady for the Virgin, Virgo and
bulls for Taurus. Could we trace this symbolic language all the way back
to Paleolithic times?

Egypt, 4-6,000 years ago: dressing your age in Egypt, during the Age of
Taurus, this symbolic language was in full swing. The bull was the
predominant symbol. Isis, the central goddess, wears an exotic
headdress: a large disk representing the sun, held by two curving bull
horns. This is the sign of times, when the sun rises at the equinox in
the constellation Taurus, then it's the age of Taurus. You'd have to be
a real star watcher to know that, because the sun obscures the stars.
And because the equinox is a function of the sun, that moment of equal
measure between the length of night and day, the sun is the obvious symbol.

The constellation also defines the major symbol for that age, lasting
roughly 2,000 years. It was helpful to know that when in ancient Egypt
and you saw a bull, you are probably looking at something created
between 3-4,000 years B.C.

So now both the sun and moon have a relationship with Taurus that maps a
moon moment and a 2,000+ year-long sun era, or solar age. A permanent
association of Taurus with the sun disk is clear, with lots of time in
which the iconography is valid, and therefore lots of opportunity to
paint it on walls. But I wanted to know how the moon came to be
associated with Taurus. Edge answered with a bit of history: early in
the Age of Taurus, Mesopotamians marked the first day of the new year
with the appearance of the first thin slice of the first crescent moon
after the spring equinox. The symbol for Taurus, Edge suggests, is
derived from this. To demonstrate, draw a circle for the sun.. Place
atop it an open half circle, representing the thinnest crescent moon.
You've just drawn the astrological symbol for Taurus. It doesn't hurt
that the crescent moon slice, pointing upwards, also doubles nicely as a
set of horns.

I have to confess that all through Egypt, I assumed Isis, with her
disk/horn headdress, was wearing the full moon. My logic was sound
enough. The sun and the full moon both have a simple icon, the circle.
Often the sun has a dot in the center; this disk had no dot. We often
portray the sun as masculine, the moon feminine, so a goddess would
naturally wear a moon. Mirrors in Egypt are a thin silver disk (really
silver polished to a fine reflective sheen), the color of the moon, with
a handle in the shape of a cross. The circle supported by a cross is a
symbol of the feminine. Often on those round Egyptian mirrors, the cross
bar gently curved down on both ends, which I read as upside down bull
horns. So perhaps that disk began as a moon, long ago at Lascaux, and
when the solar age of Taurus arrived, naturally segued into the solar disk.

Edge said I wasn't necessarily off. He calculated that if the disk once
represented the full moon, it had to rise at midnight on the summer
solstice in Taurus, placing it half a precessional great year backward
in time, just the time the cave art at Lascaux was painted.

Could the bull/moon/goddess, as a symbol, traveled from the Ice Age to
the present? It could have been invented and lost many times over, with
ample opportunity to be rediscovered by those using the same timepiece,
the heavens. But you needn't look far for traditions that go way back.
The use of herbs for medicines goes back at least to 60,000 years ago.
That's the age of the oldest known grave at which medicinal botanical
were found.

Edge is sure the moon/bull symbol was carried forward at least as far as
the goddess cultures and agricultural communities of 6,000 B.C. I see a
direct link between the crescent moon and the horns of the bull. The
bull was considered the consort of the Great Goddess. The continuity of
goddess figurines from the Ice Age to the goddess cultures is well
documented. I believe we can now add the crescent moon, he says. And he
believes that the association of the bull, and the constellation we know
as Taurus, stuck, and can be traced all the way from 15,000 B.C. to the
present.

OK, maybe it's because I'm naturally inclined this way, being a woman
and all, but I'm seeing continuity between that Paleolithic moon rising
between the star bull's horns and the Neolithic Goddess, all the way to
Egypt's Isis, to her transformation to Hathor with her cow's ears and
link to the planet Venus; to Venus the goddess of beauty and love, and
her astrological association with Taurus, and in France, her
transformation from Earth Mother to Our Lady to the Virgin/Virgo. And
let's not forget that in William Sullivan's Secret of the Incas, he
points out that the ancient Incan cultures assigned the brightest
planets the same traits as did the Greeks and Romans, and had the
equivalent of the goddess Venus. This goddess just keeps going. I'm sure
that's because you can't keep a good woman down. (But she never will
tell you her age.)

Edge does concede that traditions get layered over one another, so we
have no idea how far back it all goes. And, he likes the fact that
before the Magdalenians, Neanderthals used these same caves, and
Cro-Magnon before that. We've lost track of how much continuity there
was in oral traditions, says Edge. We wonder how they could have
remembered it all. Yet in mediaeval France, minstrels were said to be
able to remember 1000 words of rhyme, verse, and song in one hearing,
then perfectly mimic it.

I've heard it said that the memory skills necessary to preserve this
oral was also good practice for the development of that part of the mind
used in visionary journeying. We activate the inner screen of the mind
when remembering, the same part of our brain used for visionary practices.

Edge's discovery is important in a number of ways. It clearly sets the
origins of astronomy back at least to Paleolithic times. It gives us yet
another reason to update and upgrade the image of our early ancestors.
And, it provides clear evidence for the long-term astronomical
observations that are a cornerstone of both the iconography and the
cultures that followed.

Interesting, too, that Lascaux's Hall of Bulls pictures the stars of the
ecliptic, the sun's path around the earth, the highway the sun, moon and
planets, from earth's point of view, follow around the sky. It later
became the great circle used by astrologers, the zodiac.

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For Frank Edge's complete report, Aurochs in the Sky: Dancing with the
Summer Moon, A celestial interpretation of the Hall of Bulls from the
cave of Lascaux, call 1-800-243-1438.

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