This wheel that sits above our heads: the Zodiac of stars and signs that – just a few thousand years ago were studied, named, and made sense of – works beautifully, doesn’t it?
The one true and original version of our ‘sky mirror’ that faultlessly reflects our own grand and tiny stories back at us. And because of that, our collective consciousness holds it together even more tightly, making it even more real.
I don’t doubt the ‘realness’ of it for a moment.
But I also love to hear of older times when perceptions of the skies were different. This doesn’t make the ancient versions wrong and our version right… or our Zodiac wrong and those other ones right.
No one needs to be right.
That’s not a place that exists.
It’s more a sense of stories changing, evolving, and satisfying the need that humans have always had, to see meaning in our world and beyond.
According to Barbara G Walker in one of my *favourite!* books in the world: the Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, in the Akkadian Empire (this was the first ancient empire of Mesopotamia, and united together the Assyrians, Babylonians and Sumerians) the zodiac was known as Innum: the Furrow of Heaven.
And the Furrow of Heaven was ploughed by the heavenly bull (the God El) as he travelled, slowly through the year.
Isn’t that the most *divine* image of the Zodiac?!
This sign of the sacred bull, is where our Moon sits in Taurus, all these thousands of years later.
It feels to me like it has roots in a very ancient place.
And whilst the Akkan bull god was masculine, there is femininity here.
Something fertile and unceasing. An endless turning of the rich soil and the Earth that is the same earth now, as it was then.
Mama Gaia.
Mother Earth.
Still with us, holding us, as we gaze up to old Father Sky above.
We are all part of this very old and changing story too.