Since the first time I visited Birla Planetarium as a school kid, one question started rupturing inner walls of my skull i.e, how did they found zodiac signs? There are infinite number of stars in the universe and ones which are visible to the naked eye in the sky are scattered randomly. Then how did our ancestors observed patterns in them and named them?
Everybody seems to have observed the pattern in my class, i would be the dumb fellow if i asked the question , so i played along with everybody else. As a kid who grew up in the outskirts , i was forced to enjoy the sleeping on the roof in summer. Many times i tried to find the pattern by myself, but it was impossible. All i could find is the saptarshi mandlam which is more like a distorted parallelogram with a tail.
I googled for the answers and landed up in the wikipedia as usual. Normally we see the lines which connect the stars for our understanding and assume that there is a pattern. This time, I observed the stars which are connected.
Apparently, the stars which form a particular astrological sign need not be having same characteristics. The stars which are connected by the lines dont have similar size or brightness. So our ancestors , imagined a picture in the sky and then pointed out the those particular stars. Its cheating. Its a lie. And all major countries adopted this system. There are books, based on this system, daily future predictions on news papers, channels, magazines etc etc. A big fat lie.
After i finished laughing, i started thinking about the scholars who invented this system. Of course there is no information available on them. But one thing for sure, they are all insomniacs. And were thinking deeply about something, and hallucinated objects and then thought of zodiac signs with the stars which are behind the hallucinated objects. Most of them must be hunters because we have many animals in that list ( Aries, Taurus , Scorpio, Capricorn and Leo), Sagittarius must be representing a hunter. Apart from hunters , we have fishermen ( Cancer , Pisces) , gardeners or slaves (Acquarius) , retail merchants (Libra), infertile women ( Gemini ) , farmers ( Taurus ) and perverts who masturbate under open sky ( Virgo) .
Somehow, the system became famous and since then we have been cheated for generations.
If the modern insomniacs want to design a new system, may be we will develop signs representing bus, laptop, chicken etc etc .
1 comment:
Of course! all the stars of a constellation are not equi-distant from the earth either. But the point is... they seem to be maintaining their relative positions from one another no matter what time of the night it is. They helped the sailors in figuring out where they were at any point of time (just like a chronometer helps).
People of different regions and different times different patterns in the sky and named the constellations accordingly.
But that's it. Astrology is nothing but a bunch of axioms without any proofs and for that matter without any attempt to prove at all. Unlike geometry and mathematics, in astrology, no observation, experiment supports the notion that the axioms (assumptions?) are correct.
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