Zodiac

In the European tradition, time is measured by the Year of Our Lord, Anno Domini, started, mas o menos, with the birth of the infant Jesus. By our language, we are on the liturgical reckoning which measures a year with the advent of the infant four weeks before the big holiday, an old Bacchanalian feast day turned into the birth of the Holy Child, now celebrated as Christmas Day. We remembered months with the ditty, “30 days has September, April, June, and November; all the rest has 31, except February with 28, and a 29th added on leap years.”

The Islamic one, incorporated into the current Solar Hijri or Shamsi Hijri of Iran and Afghanistan, is a real solar calendar that starts with the day after winter into spring, also known as the vernal equinox. So the Solar Hijri always begins on the first day of spring. The first six months has 31 days, and the next 5, 30. On ordinary year, the 12th month has 29, adding a day on the fourth year, the leap year, making 366 days.

The Gregorian calendar is 2016 years since Jesus was born, and the Solar Hijri is 621 or 622 years later, the year the Prophet Mohammed got the revelation of Allah through the Koran. The Gregorian calendar goes by four-year cycles while the Shamsi Hijri is 29, 33, 33, 33-year cycles, the leap cycle at the start. The Gregorian calculates by mathematical algorithm while the Solar Hijri observes the sun, with the standard time determined by an office in Teheran.

Both types of calendars follow the relationship of the earth to the sun as it journeys before the stellar constellations for which the Zodiac were named. Aries begins that journey, commencing at midnight of March 20, ending with Pisces 365/6 days later. Day 1 begins with the vernal equinox.

This tradition of looking up to the stars, or, at least, up in the sky, defined metaphors on what is important. The pharaoh is perched at the apex of the pyramid close to the sun, the god Rah, reigning during the day and going under the Nile at night only to emerge again the following day. The rituals of Egypt insured the sun rising again.

The Greeks took the skyward metaphor, housed power and authority in Mt. Olympus, giving the supreme the quality of human mercy that spilled over into the Moslem merchants that moved east with their Anshallah and left in the Austro-Polynesian tongue the Chamorro term for “thank God, thank you”, Si Yu’us Maasi (Zeus, Deux, Dios is merciful). Even our marcher to Jerusalem got elevated into Cristo Rei that now reign supreme from the sky.

It is this skyward-looking that got abstracted into the cognitive sense of the infinite and eternity, so what is ultimately important is garbed in the language of the skies, adopting the Greco term “theo” that left us with our theological metaphysics, depending on the whims of Zeus of Olympus.

All these metaphors, however, redounded to the common intent to have human’s “have life, and have it more abundantly.” The religious metaphors from the Dharmic Om/Aum of the Hindu reverence to the balancing act of the yin-yang in the Buddhist tradition, to the triune formulations of the Bishops of Rome that pits thesis against antithesis to effect a synthesis, the practical quad of the plaza by the Mediterranean and the villages of the Yucatan, the Sierras and the Andes, to pentagonal mindsets of the thinkers by the Potomac, the ultimate aim was the welfare (the joke is, if the Fathers by Trastaverde mistook “celibate” for “celebrate”, the grunts took “welfare” and read “warfare” into it) and wellbeing of the human involved rather than the adulation and idolatry to anything external to them.

The signs of the Zodiac physically reveals the location of the sun (and the Earth) in relation to star constellations, metaphorically, to the fortunes, buenas y malas, of humans as their fate and destiny is determined by the sign they were born in, much of all these metaphors dismissed easily as superstition, was a celebration of profound humanity, enshrined in the Christian liturgical rhythm of “confession, affirmation, and dedication.”

The issue begs the question: can we point to profound humanity without use of the theological metaphor? The answer is “yes” to me, but right now, the field is a dry desert best filled with deafening silence than the din of another set of metaphors that still locate and derive what is humanly profound in the “infinite, eternal, providential, and divine.”

The language of profound humanity, lauded by the superlatives of Aquinas supernatural, underpins our earthrise earthwise, earthbound homebound poetry, without staring up high in the sky, looking at the Zodiac signs of the constellations or its stellar equivalence in medieval theology but tasting the grub and grime of the mellow and the dusty down here on Earth, in the here-and-now.

A friend once asked why I left the revered ordained clergy. Without missing a beat, I replied, “I celebrate the ordinary and the common without the lifted chalice.” He didn’t say a word.