The twelve signs

13 entries

• AquariusSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  Aquarius's Babylonian name is a status title, not a description of pouring water; the water comes from the god's picture, not from the name itself.

• AriesSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  Aries opens the tropical zodiac at the March equinox itself; its Babylonian figure was a hired farmhand, not a ram.

• CancerSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  The narrowest of the twelve like-named constellations, and the one whose divine counterpart may have been an empty shrine rather than an animal.

• CapricornSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  A goat with a fish's tail is not a natural animal, and it is the one zodiacal hybrid that survived Babylon to the present essentially unchanged.

• EaDeityBabylonianHellenistic

  The Mesopotamian god of the abyssal waters, and the single figure standing behind three of the twelve zodiac constellations rather than one.

• GeminiSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  The Ptolemaic bounds of Gemini split the transmission: Lilly's row, which most software ships as Ptolemaic, disagrees with every Greek edition.

• LeoSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  The Sun's sole domicile, and home to Regulus, one of the four bright stars near the ecliptic.

• LibraSignBabylonianHellenisticRomanIslamicateMedieval LatinModern

  The only sign figured as an object: a Babylonian balance, a Greek claw, and a Roman restoration credited to Julius Caesar.

• PiscesSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  Zero degrees of tropical Aries currently falls inside the constellation Pisces: the concrete case behind the whole tropical-versus-sidereal question.

• SagittariusSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  The composite Mesopotamian god Pabilsag was carried into Greek astrology as a plain archer: the clearest case of simplification among the twelve signs.

• ScorpioSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  Of the thirteen constellations the ecliptic crosses, Scorpius is the narrowest by far, and its missing claws are doing duty as Libra's scales.

• TaurusSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  Taurus is a straight translation of the Babylonian Bull of Heaven, but its real distinction is the Pleiades and Hyades within it.

• VirgoSignBabylonianHellenisticMedieval LatinModern

  The sixth sign was a furrow before it was a virgin, and the name of its brightest star still carries the ear of grain the Babylonian figure held.