-:- the house of the sky -:-
(4)
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We will return to the story of Samson later, but for now, the point has been made that precise observations in the stars were anciently encoded in myths in order for people to gain a clearer view of their world and ensure their survival. But it wasn't just observations of distinctive constellations such as Orion, or bright features such as the Pleiades that interested the ancients. It wasn't just survival that caused them to head for the highest hills and mountains at dawn to make their observations, but a hard-wired need that seems to common to all humans to understand what their world was like, and what humanity's place in it was.
Therefore, they mapped a whole array of observations, based on the apparent permanence of the behaviour of the sky. In some myth systems, this map was called a house. In others, it was called a Sun, or a world. But in truth, it was just a map. However, it wasn't a map in the conventional sense of the world - it wasn't a plan view of the continents or a tribal territory. Rather, it was a map of the arrangement of the (flat) Earth's edges in terms of the sky, and the stars that guarded its flanks. By way of explanation, let's look at what the Incas did (*5): they observed the sky and the earth and they built a metaphorical house.
In Incan times as now, there were many ways to build a house, but the most common way was to begin by digging four holes in the ground and placing a pole in each of the holes. A roof then capped this construction - often it was sloping to allow the rain to flow off onto the ground. As with all cultures, there was a great deal of symbolism applied to and inherent in the house. In the case of the Incas, much of the symbolism had to do with the sky, and the Sun's behaviour within it.
Each of the housepoles was undercut by a Foundation which held it permanently in place - this spoke of the permanence of the sky and its behaviour. Each pole in turn also represented a compass direction, and stations of the Sun were assigned to each direction - north for the winter solstice as that happened in the far northern sky, east for the spring equinox, south for the summer solstice, which occurred in the far southern sky, and finally west for the autumnal equinox. The Sun therefore made a symbolic clockwise motion around the house as it passed through the year. Finally, the roof of the house was seen as the dome of the sky.
Thus, mankind not only lived in a house, he also effectively lived in the very sky itself. The House of the Sky was perfectly centred and balanced within the cosmos, and became the object which it was supposed to represent. This mandala of experience, this natural order of things, was mapped by each culture across the world. Just as the house was firmly founded, so was the sky. But the experience went further, to include the Milky Way, and the blazing light bridges that the Sun annually threw down to Earth. Each summer and winter solstice, the bridges created by the light of the Sun shining 'through' the Milky Way allowed the sacred influences of the Gods and the Ancestors to come to Earth and enter the homes of the people. Every house, every dwelling, no matter how rich or humble, became a sacred space, filled with the essence of the numinous.
In particular, anyone born into a house or family that year might on the winter solstice receive via the Bridge to the Gods any of a number of God-like powers and become either a shaman or a priest (or perhaps a poet or astronomer). Similarly, the soul of anyone who died in a family would be able to return to the World of the Ancestors on the summer solstice via the Bridge to the Ancestors. In turn, each Inca house stood on the backbone of the Andes, a mountain range that also stretched west to east like the Milky Way, in the perfect centre of the Tawantinsuyu - "The Four Corners of the Earth". Beyond those four corners, there lay - as there lay for all ancient peoples - the abyss of the ocean, surrounding the flat earth completely and holding everything in place.
It was a beautiful system, one that placed mankind perfectly centred and balanced within the cosmos. The stars spun around us, the Earth stood around us in equal portions, the sky warned us of impending actions that were needed for survival. We lived in a pristine, perfect world that moved like clockwork. Wherever you went in the ancient world, from Japan to Babylon, from Peru to Europe, the same four-cornered system obtained. Whether it was a house, a threshing floor, a Sun, a hogan or a church, the same images kept coming up time and again.
But, of course, this Golden Age could not last. The Incas had never observed or taken the phenomenon of precession into account. The slow backwards tracking of the sky over a period of 26,000 years couldn't possibly have been fully observed in one lifetime, but the oral transmission of astronomical myths made more accurate measurements possible. Careful observations made over generations made people begin to realise that all was not quite so clockwork as had been first assumed. The Pleiades no longer rose heliacally when they were expected, the seasons seemed to come a little bit earlier than when Grandfather was a lad. The sky was beginning to change. And worst of all, if it continued changing in this way, one of the sacred lifelines to the sky was about to be broken.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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