The Precession of the Equinoxes is an astronomical motion of the zodiac constellations along the ecliptic plane (or the earth’s orbit). Today many people are disconnected from the movement of stars and planets above us.
In this episode, Stefan and I unpack a simple definition of the precession of the equinoxes and the ancient knowledge of this cycle. Why did traditional cultures measure and treasure this 25 890 year cycle which today, astrophysicists are grappling with what causes it, and are still unable to confirm its significance? Its traces are etched into archaeology across the planet. From what is an equinox and solstice, we explore a beginners guide to Precession.
Here’s the full transcript for this episode:
Steven: [0:00:03] Hey Stefan, how are you, man?
Stefan: [0:00:05] I’m good. How are you doing?
Steven: [0:00.06] Yeah, I’m good. It’s kind of late at night here, we’re recording this episode. We’ve kind of been [inaudible 0:00:12] and it’s a bit of a confusing topic.
Stefan: [0:00:15] Yeah, I’m trying to work out if we should sleep on it and do it in the morning or get it done tonight. But yeah, we’re going to be talking about the precession of the equinoxes, which is something that I’ve only been introduced to in the last sort of two years or so. And yeah, it’s a really interesting topic. It kind of covers the grounds that I’m really interested in, this modern knowledge, modern scientific understanding mixed with ancient culture because this spans back thousands and thousands of years to no one really knows when.
Steven: [0:00:45] Yeah, and the thing that got me interested in it was like, I kept kind of hearing the term ‘precession of the equinoxes’, but I didn’t actually know what it meant. And I kept reading different references and different ancient texts, and once I started to look into the modern definition of it, it surprised me how, for one, little most people know about it. I certainly didn’t know anything about it before I began to look into ancient texts more. And then, actually, when you kind of dive into what the astronomers and scientists understand about it, is there is a lot actually that’s quite mysterious about the precession of the equinoxes. And it’s endemic across the planet that people used to kind of measure this and try and understand what this movement of the stars was.
So, yeah, I thought we’d kind of dive in and just have an overarching episode on precession – what it is, why it was measured. But we’re going to do a lot of shows on this, so this is kind of going to be the first of a series leading into some very in-depth theories as to why the precession of the equinox happens. So that’s going to be really interesting.
Stefan: [0:02:06] Yeah, what’s been the really fascinating thing with learning about it is that there is so much – that you can go into the history of it, you can read the ancient accounts of it, you can look at modern science where people are still trying to work out exactly what causes it, how long the cycle is itself. So, basically, the precession of the equinoxes is a motion that is, as we’ve been talking about, a little bit mysterious as to the mechanism that causes it.
But, basically, just before the sun rises, there’s a constellation that appears in the sky behind where the sun will eventually rise, and it’s a very, very slow process, but over a span of thousands and thousands of years, those stars appear to move. So, one constellation that sits behind the rising sun will be different as the years progress. So in 5,000 years from now, it will be a different constellation to what we can see now.
Steven: [0:03:09] That’s the vernal equinox, isn’t it so? The spring equinox is the definition of when you measure what constellation the sun is rising into. And what you kind of described there was, basically, while looking at the sun if you are sitting on a carousel with a friend and you are looking at your friend, your friend will be spinning around but the background will be moving, and your friend will appear still. And so when you see the sunrise and the sun appears relatively still but the background star or the sidereal star background is moving very, very slowly. And that’s the measure of the precession of the equinoxes on the equinoctial sunrise. You mark what constellation it’s going into.
Stefan: [0:04:10] Yeah, and the fascinating thing about this is that, very different to a carousel which will be over in a few minutes depending on where you are, the stars, to get from one constellation all the way around through the 12 constellations back to that point, takes roughly 26,000 years, which is a pretty long time, especially considering modern civilization has only been around for 12,000 years, up until the last ice age. So it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have come to an understanding of this because it’s such a long, long process.
Steven: [0:04:56] Yeah, and the constellations is something that – I mean, I’ve been reading more and more about astronomy, and even astrology too, but the constellations are more associated with astrology, but, this is clear astronomical phenomena. So I just thought I’d list them out just for people that aren’t so familiar. So the 12 hands on the clock or numbers on the clock are: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces. And so currently, the time or the constellation that the sun is rising into is the Pisces, on the verge of Aquarius, and that’s why you may hear the Age of Aquarius, or dawning into the Age of Aquarius, made famous by the musical here. So we are right on the borderline between Pisces and Aquarius, and this is this marker point.
And that’s what we’re kind of going to explain now because it’s kind of confusing, isn’t it? Because you don’t understand. They are not everyday terms that you use and when you dive into it, you actually realize there’s a lot to this that is pretty important that most people don’t understand.
Stefan: [0:06:17] Yeah. And it’s so interesting thinking that there was such a strong effort to commemorate and know what constellation or what sign where we were in the precessional cycle. All throughout history, in cultures there would be more artwork depicting fish, or more artwork (especially in Egypt) depicting rams or bulls, depending on if it was the Age of Taurus or the Age of Aries.
And that’s something that’s hard to imagine for us at the moment because we’re so far removed from that. But it’s just that we are all familiar with the concept of a year and the concept of a day, and precession is just one cycle further up the scale. It’s kind of out of our mind in modern times because we feel so far removed from it, but it was as important to all cultures before us. It seems like it was, as the concept of a day or a year for us was, it was just the next step up which we don’t really talk about that much anymore.
Steven: [0:07:25] Yeah, I think that’s important to explain because when you look at the astronomical phenomenon, it makes a lot of sense because equinoxes and solstices actually defined the seasons. So, the earth basically through one rotation around the sun tilts where the northern or southern hemisphere will face towards the sun. And so when your hemisphere is facing towards the sun that summer, the equinox is the point when the days will actually be equal because the equator is exactly pointing towards the sun. And as the tipping of the earth goes towards the hemisphere, the days will become longer in that hemisphere. And the longest day will be the summer solstice. So the solstice day is the longest or shortest day.
So on the winter solstice, which will be in the opposite hemisphere, that’s the shortest day. And then as we pass back and forth from summer solstice to winter solstice, you hit the equinox point when either you’re passing into the longest day, which is the vernal equinox or the spring equinox, or the autumn equinox, which is when you’re going from the longer days to the shorter days. And so it’s this tilt of the earth as we rotate around the sun. So the equinox is where every day on the planet is equal in time.
When I was growing up, I always hated the autumn equinox because I knew it was the day that daylight savings would change, and the days would get shorter and I’d always get down. And I’d always be so excited –
Stefan: [0:09:01] It’s just downhill for the rest of the year…
Steven: [0:09:02] Yeah, everything is going downhill [laughs]
Stefan: [0:09:06] But yeah, it is interesting when you picture it like that. Lots of cultures describe it as the Great Year, which is, as we were saying before, one step above our year of 365 days. A step above that is the great year, which is this almost imperceptibly slow cycle, which takes 26,000 years. And there was such a strong effort in ancient cultures to mark these dates, so much so that they built some of the most famous structures left to us from the ancient world, things like Stonehenge and Chichen Itza and temples all over the world that would signify the equinox or the solstices, depending on what was more important to them.
Still today, thousands and thousands of people go to Stonehenge to watch the sunrise on the solstice or the sunset on the solstice. So for the ancients, marking and knowing the point of time that they were within the great year or the precessional cycle was so important.
Steven: [0:10:12] And the interesting thing about that is sometimes it’s kind of disregarded as ancient people just measuring the season for farming purposes because equinoxes and solstices obviously mark significant times in the year when you would farm and plant crops because you knew exactly when autumn and spring and the summer were coming. But the precession of the equinoxes show that there was a much, much larger cycle at play.
So we know the seasons obviously, and our days are kind of broken up into four segments, but then the year is broken up into seasons. But then the precession of the equinoxes really, as you said, talks of this larger cycle that really we’re very disconnected from, that we don’t really understand the significance of at this stage. But ancient cultures did talk about how we would have this larger seasonal cycle, which is really interesting.
So those references that people see in ancient structures all over the world, at Chichen Itza, for instance, on the equinox day, you see the snake run down, it’s just unbelievable that it boggles my mind every time I see it. But what they were kind of showing then was this understanding of probably not only the seasons, but this much, much larger cycle of time too, which is really interesting, because today, as we look into it now, we don’t actually understand all that much about it. And so if there was a more detailed understanding of this, it’s probably pretty important that we get to the bottom of it.
Stefan: [0:11:59] Yeah, definitely. And a good way that I’ve learned how to understand it – it’s hard to explain without the aid of pictures – but if you imagine a clock with 12 hours/12 numbers on it, if you replace those numbers with a constellation of the Zodiac, and imagine that every hour is a great month that falls within the great year, so as you go through the great year, instead of taking 12 hours, it takes 26,000 years. So between each number, instead of 1-12, each constellation is split with a 30-degree portion of the sky. So, instead of taking 12 numbers on the clock, there is 360 degrees of sky. So each hour turns into 30 degrees of movement.
And just for some sort of perspective on how long it takes for just one degree of motion, so that’s if you stare at the sun, just before the sun rises on the vernal equinox, just one degree of movement of that constellation before the sun rises, it would take roughly 72 years, which is about the length of one human lifetime. So it’s unbelievably slow. I don’t think you would notice it in one lifetime.
Steven: [0:13:08] Yeah, you would not. It’s very little.
Stefan: [0:13:11] Yeah. So it’s something that has taken such a long time to understand, even in modern times. We are still coming to grips with how long the cycle is because it seems to be speeding up and slowing down and there’s lots of factors that go into the motions at play. So yeah, it’s really hard to know exactly how long it is.
Steven: [0:13:30] Yeah, and the way I kind of picture it is that I picture the earth inside that 12-handed clock, or 12-hour clock, which are the constellations, and as you’re facing from the earth (actually between the sun), you’ll see one of those backgrounds and as the sun moves around, we will see the background of that star drop. And so it’s this huge clock that spins around 26,000 years. So for one degree at 72 years, it is this huge timespan. It’s interesting actually that modern calculations of precession – so we’ve talked about the ancient calculations – but modern calculations really are showing that it’s starting to speed up, aren’t they?
Stefan: [0:14:25] Yeah. There’s been really interesting work coming out of, I think it was Caltech, the astronomers there who’ve been studying this for the past few decades and they’ve noticed that the rate of precession, so the rate of our apparent motion is speeding up. It’s still quite slow, but it’s definitely noticeably faster than it was even 20 years ago. We don’t really know what causes precession. It could potentially be us moving through space within our solar system, there’s lots of things it could be, but—
Steven: [0:15:06] Well, the current theory is it’s the lunisolar wobble, which is the gravity of the sun and moon tilting the earth and making us wobble to the background of the constellations. But there’s some controversy around that now, whether that’s true, which we’re going to cover, but there are other explanations too, potentially, as to why this movement happens. And the implications of that are quite interesting.
So we’re going to do a whole episode on the causes of precession, which is a topic that I really kind of went into probably about a year and a half ago, and it’s really, really interesting. There’s a very few amount of people in the world that are kind of focusing on this, and we’re going to interview some of the ones that are actually probably on the verge of a breakthrough of really understanding the concept, which is really exciting.
Stefan: [0:16:07] Yeah, definitely. And it’s so exciting to be having this discussion now that there is so many people looking to what causes this. It’s really interesting that there is kind of a wider perspective on things. It kind of makes sense how much a day affects us. The rising and setting sun controls our circadian rhythm, our sleep cycle, we know when to eat, we know when to go to sleep, the seasons. So the cycle of the day is super important. The cycle of the year is as important, going through summer, winter, autumn, spring, and the difference that has on the world, and our bodies, and animals, and migrations, and all those sorts of things.
It’s just a cycle above the precessional cycle, which could potentially be as important to human existence. It’s just something that we may not fully understand yet. It might be something that we are getting closer to understanding, which is a really interesting thought.
Steven: [0:17:08] Yeah. There is a really interesting anomaly. Is it two full moons equals one degree in a precessional movement? What’s that measurement?
Stefan: [0:17:19] Yeah, so if you look at the night sky when there’s a full moon, and picture that full moon as half a degree of the total 360 degrees of the sky, which would mean that if you imagine two full moons in the sky next to each other, that would be one degree of sky. So you have your two full moons, that’s how much movement the constellations appear to make after 72 years. It’s very minute. I mean, if the sun rose two full moons away from where it did yesterday, I don’t think anyone would notice.
Steven: [0:18:03] It’s such a fascinating measurement. And for anyone that wants to read a little bit more about this, there are articles on the website on the precession of the equinoxes, and some diagrams, because it is quite confusing to picture. So it’s good to kind of jump in and look at diagrams of the sun and the earth, and everything.
But also to the lunar calendar, which is really, really interesting because we know how influential the lunar calendar is, yet it really hasn’t been very acknowledged as to how it affects the seasons, the tides, the human physiology, all kinds of things. The strange Barrier Reef, for instance, blooms on a full moon. And these are huge factors on earth that are depending on the moon, and we are a little bit lost as to how these processes affect us.
And one thing that I’ve really kind of found in the health sphere is that connecting to, for instance, the diurnal rhythm, the sun, the physiology of Vitamin D, of Vitamin A, of melatonin, the brain and pineal gland, the endocrine system, is very much connected to how you understand the movement or astronomical bodies that we are basically connected to. So, precessional movement is such a bigger span of time that really starts me to think, are we connected to these larger cycles?
And when you kind of go into potential causes of it, it really shows that maybe there are very big connections to potentially far away things in the universe. And that’s why people, for instance, were looking at why were the constellations marked and measured as they do, because it’s a very strange thing, isn’t it? And the processional measurement measures that 16-degree band in the sky where those stars sit. But when you look at the constellations, they don’t actually make up the animals we describe them as. So it is a very mysterious origin of where they come from. But it does fit into this cycle of time, which is interesting, and the calendar system is run on it. It really goes deep into the human origin story.
Stefan: [0:20:50] Yeah, definitely. And when you look at all the cultures that had stories of this great year and this great cycle, it’s pretty much ubiquitous. You find it in ancient Greece, they’re talking about Golden Ages and Silver Ages, Iron Ages, Bronze Ages. They’re speaking as if they know the difference in human existence and the planet as it goes through this larger cycle. It wasn’t just the Greeks that thought that. All through ancient Rome, the Maya had the insanely complex calendar system and ways of measuring huge cycles of time, which they thought human consciousness was tied directly to.
And even the ancient Indian philosophy of the Yuga Cycle, which is the great year in terms of human experience – that we go through this vast cycle of time in which there are certainly eras where humans are more spiritual and less spiritual, more material. But they used the vernal equinox to work out exactly where they were in the cycle. It was like looking at the clock, but a clock in the heavens. It was kind of like vitally important to understand where they were up to in the cycle because that would determine how the cultures would exist, whether there’d be catastrophes, whether there’d be famines, or fates or whatever it was.
So, for them, and for many ancient cultures, that understanding was so vitally important, because if that was lost, you don’t know where you are in within the year. It’s kind of like, for us today, waking up and having all the calendars burnt. We wouldn’t know where we were.
Steven: [0:22:30] Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective. And one thing I kind of think about, it’s really strange that cultures all over the world had a very, very similar calculation of the great year, from all those cultures you mentioned, the Yuga Cycles and so forth. They’re all very similar. It’s close to the precession of the equinoxes, the periods they talk about. So, it does seem that they were calculating an astronomical phenomenon.
And when you look at the modern perspective, it’s now speeding up, and astronomers today can’t definitively define it because we haven’t been around with technology 26,000 years ago to say that, ‘well, this is what happened’. There are probably techniques you can do, but we haven’t really reached that point yet. And so there is this misunderstanding that we have about it today that, maybe, in ancient texts and so forth there are kind of hints and understandings of. I’ve definitely found that traditional knowledge really does hold a lot of real nuggets of information that we really should be treasuring.
Overall, if we don’t know the rates, why would we be speeding up? I mean, we’re now moving into a vast knowledge of the universe; the Dynamical Universe theory shows that we’re spinning in a spiral galaxy. So we’re within that galaxy, and we know that we’re spinning around the center of it, and there is a huge timespan in that. And that we’re these people measuring a larger timespan. There’s lots of theories of different cycles and different patterns of, for instance, influences on our solar system. It is a really, really interesting modern dilemma that we’re kind of sitting with. Very few people are talking about it now. It fascinates me. I think about this a lot.
[both laugh]
Stefan: [0:24:38] Yeah, I hear it about a lot. But yeah, it’s really interesting. And it’s funny thinking that a lot of the things that we use today are based on ancient thought and the ancient calendar systems and the idea of the Yuga Cycle and things like that, unanswered questions that you’d think if there was nothing to them, we would be able to flatly dismiss them. But the fact that so many people are looking at the cause of precession and why it’s happening, why it’s speeding up, all these unanswered questions, but there are answers if you look back through ancient cultures, which is really fascinating. I love the merging of the two because I feel like there’s a lot to learn if we try and lose the idea that we’re at the pinnacle of human existence.
So there may be potential to remember things that we once knew, or build upon old thoughts that were sort of on the mark that we’ve fallen off a little bit of.
Steven: [0:25:41] Yeah. And some of the evidence of that is how old some of the markers of the precession of the equinoxes are on the planet. So, one of the old [inaudible 0:25:50] in the Egyptian desert is a very, very old stone circle that is a measurement of the precessional cycle. And that’s going back, what, 8,000 years? somewhere in that range [inaudible 0:25:57] well pre-dynastic Egypt. The origin of the Zodiac constellations is something that’s kind of attributed around 1000 BC, maybe a little bit before. But if you look at a lot of the calendar systems, a lot of the mythology, there’s a lot of symbology that looks a lot like Zodiac constellations.
So it seems like this is much older knowledge and even back to [inaudible 0:26:25], there’s definitely, potentially some reference to the Zodiac constellation. And that’s really interesting because that’s nearly half a precessional cycle ago – nearly 12,000 years ago. And then all sudden we’ve got all this record of this huge cycle and time sitting there under the dirt, buried on purpose. Was this a message that people were trying to leave for us, something that we need to pay attention to and understand? Because you do lose it like we do. You can’t go out under the sky today and just understand the precession of the equinoxes, you have to have either a broader technological understanding or an ancestral understanding of people telling you what happened and why.
And one interesting thing is, and you described it there; the Zodiac, they circle over the sky every year, but then the vernal equinox kind of locks into that point, and that’s that measurement, that turning point. There is this whole circle of stars you see, but then that point in time, that marking point of this circle is an important period that we don’t really know what it exactly represents.
Stefan: [0:27:37] Yeah, it’s nice when you go out on a clear night and you can see the stars. They’re all moving throughout the day, but it always comes back to the exact same point on the vernal equinox. So it’s really nice being able to see that motion and then it sort of locks back into place, and then spins and then locks back into place. But that locking isn’t set. That’s also slowly moving, which is really interesting.
I’m really looking forward to looking into some of the current models as to why precession happens. There’s lots of debate. There was a set idea that was in place a little while ago, and that’s kind of been blown a little bit out of the water with new technology and new ideas, and things like that. So the conversation is still definitely open as to what’s causing it, but there are a few really interesting arguments that we’re going to be covering in the next few weeks.
Steven: [0:28:36] Yeah. So if you want to read a little bit more about precession and solstices and equinoxes, there is a series of articles on the website. It is a deep topic and we’re going to be covering more. I really find interesting the crossover of the astronomical knowledge into what we would call astrology too, because there is a lot of practical applications like the lunar calendar and its physiological applications, and even just understanding the sun cycles and its importance in the body. It’s very important for people know those things for health. But all these things potentially have wider implications too.
Stefan [0:29:19] Yeah. I used to get scared of that word ‘astrology’ because I sort of don’t really understand it and just the connotations behind it. You kind of want to distance yourself a bit because sometimes you could say I’m a bit… I don’t know what the word is… But if you do think of it in terms of the sun affecting us throughout the day, that’s astrology. It doesn’t need to be this far-out-there theory, there’s actually quite a lot of evidence.
Even back to Greece, the word ‘lunacy’ arose because if people committed a crime on the full moon, their punishment was deemed less severe because it was obviously not them committing the crime, it was the fact that the full moon makes people a little bit crazy. I mean, that was believed back then. And I think there’s quite a few papers out on how animals – I think it’s the lions that time their attacks during the full moon – and there are other animals that work around the full moon. So it’s not a wild step to think that humans are also affected in a way. I mean, if the moon strong enough to pull the entire ocean, then I feel like it can slightly affect people.
Steven: [0:31:28] And there is enough published research out there to show that there are physiological effects, and we’re talking to an expert on hormones and how a lunar calendar can be used for fertility, for instance. There are some studies to show, for instance, that fertility rates and infertility rates may be associated with being out of sync with the moon. That’s one area. The Islamic calendar, for instance, is a purely lunar calendar. And we know, for instance, that the Chinese calendar, nearly all calendars are lunisolar where they account for lunar cycles, and this is all just understanding astronomical measurements. And precession is the same. And like you said, astrology can seem like that. There’s articles in the paper where it’s kind of like –
Stefan: [0:32:18] Your daily horoscope…
Steven: [0:31:56] Your daily horoscope, that’s right! But this is a real phenomena. And it’s really interesting, but the science behind is just fascinating.
Stefan: [0:32:30] Yeah, and it’s interesting that maybe it is a case that we are so out of sync with this larger cycle that we’ve kind of removed ourselves from being able to be influenced by it. You know, thinking about how the Gregorian calendar today is so far off the mark in terms of measuring anything really solidly astronomical, it’s kind of a little bit arbitrary. We covered the Gregorian calendar in an earlier podcast.
And it’s interesting to say that, looking back at these ancient calendars, most of the most advanced calendar systems were lunar calendars, which is a concept that we unaware of today, being a purely solar calendar. But when you talk about these papers and this research coming out, showing that the full moon affects not only the tides, but potentially people and hormone levels, yeah, there could be a whole part of life where we’ve sort of fallen off the mark off.
Steven: [0:33:37] Just to kind of quickly cross into another topic that we’ve been looking at too, the physics behind electromagnetic waves, astronomical phenomena and how it influences us is very much being detected now with heavy scientific equipment. And so, for instance, the influence and the idea of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement is potentially now moving back to the idea of an ether and a resonance field that we all kind of work and move within.
This kind of goes between relativity and quantum mechanics, and all those things are pointing to the idea that an astronomical body can have a big influence on a very small thing down here. So the scientific understanding is explaining that these things are very real and then it kind of delves into the world of consciousness. Is all of this matter and the intertwined energies are they all just a manifestation of what we would call consciousness and we attribute to the brain? Is it coming from or is it interconnecting with all these larger cycles?
Anyway, I think a little bit of philosophy there… [laughs]. I think next week we’re going to have a look at sunken cities?
Stefan: [0:34:59] Yeah.
Steven: [0:35:16] We’ll get back on planet earth, huh?
[both laugh]
Stefan: [0:35:00] Yeah, we’re looking forward to getting into that and down the track, getting back into this and the causes of precession, and going a little bit deeper into exactly what could potentially be happening and what the current theories are.
Steven: [0:35:15] So there’s going to be a few, probably three more episodes on this that we’ll spread over and release over this series. I’m really looking forward to it.
Stefan: [0:35:24] Yeah. See you guys next time.
