What is the Zodiac?
Who hasn’t looked up with wonder and appreciation at the stars in the sky on a beautiful, clear night and tried to understand the vastness of what they see? The impossibility of a universe so large that it truly is beyond our comprehension? And to think said universe is endless yet constantly growing? I know I have. I still can’t wrap my head fully around it.
When I was little, I thought if I got high enough, I would be able to touch one. The stars were always such a magical…concept? Place? Part of the universe? IDK. Looking back, I don’t remember what I knew about them. But I do remember being shocked in my elementary school science class learning that the Sun was a star and that it was the closest star to Earth. My fascination with the stars never went away. I still think of them with wonder and awe. Before anyone comes for me, yes, I do recognize the science. But night to night, it's the beauty that takes my breath away, not the rationality of the science behind astronomy.
As I got into my teenage years, I became interested in the Zodiac. I am a Taurus for anyone that is interested to know. A very typical Taurus, the good AND the bad! I was also a history major so I LOVE doing my research! That got me looking up friends and family members’ signs. My immediate family is an Aries (mom), a Taurus (me), a Gemini (my brother) and a Cancer (my dad).
But what is the Zodiac and how did it become a thing people are so interested in? The Zodiac is made of up groupings of stars that can be seen as specific shapes if one was to play connect the dots. We see certain groupings due to the position of our planet in relation to the stars. “The zodiac is a belt-shaped region of the sky along the path of the sun, a path often called the ecliptic. The planets in our solar system appear within this region as they also orbit the sun, and the moon generally sticks in this region as well.” (https://www.amli.com/) Within this are the 12 constellations that make up the zodiacs, each being 30 degrees of this belt. Each section being nearly equal in size. Each constellation represents an animal or a figure and due to their location to the sun at a given time, helps mark the time passing on Earth.
“The zodiac calendar marks when the sun moves “through” a constellation of a particular zodiac. Of course, the sun doesn’t move through any of these, but to the ancient stargazers,the sun was the moving object and the Earth a stationary one.” (https://www.amli.com/) With the zodiac calendar separating our year into 12 equal sections (star signs)- twelve signs = 12 months, the star sign one is born under is when a particular constellation was seen as being directly behind the sun.
While many ancient cultures used the stars to mark periods in time at differentiating degree measurements, the Babylonians were the inventors of the zodiac horoscope we have today, roughly 2,500 years ago. The Babylonian astral scientists used their observations and calculations to put together all the knowledge they had about the universe, science and mathematics to assign meaning to the positions of the constellations and planetary placement. To the ancient people, all this would be seen as something divine and must have a greater meaning.
The ancient Greeks, specifically the astronomer Ptolemy, give us the names and dates in which we know the zodiacs by today although there is similarity between the names the Babylonians used and the Greeks such as the Lion and the Scales. I am sure we recognize what signs those are: Leo and Libra respectively. These Babylonian signs/names were incorporated into the Greek divination. Ptolemy’s book, Tetrabiblos, became THE book in the history of Western astrology and popularized the signs we know today.
Resources
https://www.amli.com/blog/what-is-the-zodiac-and-how-does-it-work
https://time.com/5315377/are-zodiac-signs-real-astrology-history/
