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Chapter 29
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
The First Crack in an Ancient Code
The plane of the earth’s orbit, projected outwards to form a great circle
in the celestial sphere, is known as the ecliptic. Ringed around the
ecliptic, in a starry belt that extends approximately 7° north and south,
are the twelve constellations of the zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer,
Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces.
These constellations are irregular in size, shape and distribution.
Nevertheless (and one assumes by chance!) their spacing around the rim
of the ecliptic is sufficiently even to bestow a sense of cosmic order upon
the diurnal risings and settings of the sun.
To picture what is involved here, do the following: (1) mark a dot in the
centre of a blank sheet of paper; (2) draw a circle around the dot, about
half an inch away from it; (3) enclose that circle in a second, larger, circle.
The dot represents the sun. The smaller of the two concentric circles
represents the earth’s orbit. The larger circle represents the rim of the
ecliptic. Around the perimeter of this larger circle, therefore, you should
now draw twelve boxes, spacing them evenly, to represent the
constellations of the zodiac. Since there are 360° in a circle, each
constellation can be considered to occupy a space of 30° along the
ecliptic. The dot is the sun. The inner of the two concentric circles is the
earth’s orbit. We know that the earth travels on this orbit in an anticlockwise
direction, from the west towards the east, and that every
twenty-four hours it also makes one complete rotation around its own
axis (again from the west towards the east).
From these two movements two illusions result:
1 Each day as the planet turns from west to east, the sun (which is of
course a fixed point) appears to ‘move’ across the sky from east to
west.
2 Roughly every thirty days, as the spinning earth journeys along its
orbital path around the sun, the sun itself slowly appears to ‘pass’
through one after another of the twelve zodiacal constellations (which
are also fixed points), and again it appears to be ‘moving’ in an eastwest
direction.
On any particular day of the year, in other words, (corresponding on our
diagram to any point we care to choose around the inner concentric circle
marking the earth’s orbit), it is obvious that the sun will lie between an
observer on the earth and one of the twelve zodiacal constellations. On
that day what the observer will see, so long as he or she is up and about
well before dawn, is the sun rising in the east in the portion of the sky
occupied by that particular constellation.
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