George Latura

Zodiacal Light: Forgotten For A Thousand Years

Abstract

The zodiacal light was known in ancient Egypt for thousands of years. The earliest Pyramid Texts describe a ladder to the sky (Allen 2005, 50) assembled by the Sun for the Pharaoh, best explained as the zodiacal light that is composed of interplanetary dust illuminated by the Sun while it is below the horizon. This ethereal glow envelops planets along the ecliptic like steps on a celestial stairway, and the ladder to the sky would still be found in the Coffin Texts and in the Book of the Dead, spanning millennia. In ‘Stargazing in Ancient Egypt,’ Patricia Blackwell Gary and Richard Talcott suggest that the triangular shape of Egyptian pyramids that promised a celestial ascent was inspired by the appearance of the zodiacal light (Astronomy Magazine, June 2006). Islamic tradition on the timing of the morning prayer warns against the ‘false dawn’ or the ‘tail of the wolf’ that is vertical (zodiacal light) rather than horizontal like the true dawn. The paper ‘Plato’s X & Hekate’s Crossroads: Astronomical Links to the Mysteries of Eleusis' (Latura, SEAC 2013 Proceedings) posits that the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries, celebrated for centuries at opposite seasons of the year, align with the zodiacal light that is best seen, in temperate zones, at the equinoxes. Once Theodosius shut down the Mysteries in 392 AD, the zodiacal light disappeared from the Western mind until Kepler and Cassini re-discovered it in the 1600s.

Biography

1985-2005 - Time Inc. 2005-2015 - Independent research 2013 - Published in SEAC 2012 Proceedings 2013 - Numismatic Literary Guild Award (article) 2014 - Numismatic Literary Guild Award (book) 2014 - Published in SEAC 2013 Proceedings 2015 - To be published in INSAP 2013 Proceedings