In Cufic characters, stating that it was 'Made by the most humble in the supreme God, Mohammed ben Helah, the astronomer of Monsul, in the year of the HegiraįIGURE 58. They are taken from an Arabic celestial globe, made of brass, in 1275 A.D., which was deposited in the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 58 and 59) are merely supplementary to Scheuchzer's Creatio Universi. The Northern and Southern hemispheres of the heavens (Figs. VII, an Astrolabe, which is almost to say, 'the handle of the stars,' and which was called by the old astronomers 'the Mathematical jewel.' III, what is known as the semi-Tychonian system Fig IV, the blazing and effulgent Sun, containing within himself his seven children, Earth and Moon and the five great planets Fig. I in this Plate illustrates the system of the 'eleven heavens,' with the Earth the centre of the universe. Physica Sacra is an early eighteenth-century Bible illustrated almost text for text, and Plate XXVI is its first illustration, for the first verse of the first chapter of the first book: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.' Outside the Zodiacal Wheel are clouds upon clouds bearing a multitude of spheres, and, in addition, seven numbered diagrams. But no one knows how long before the days of the Greeks far earlier astronomers first linked the single groups of stars into the twelve great signs of the Star-bearing Circle.

The Greeks named this oblique ring of star-groups just behind the Sun when it sets or just before it when it rises, the Zodiac or Path of Animals, because the names and configurations of the groups were mostly those of animals, and by that name we know it. (From Physica Sacra Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, 1731, Vol.

There were zones written in the heavens long before man stretched his imaginary lines of the terrestrial zones over the Earth-'The circle called the Zodiac,' said Plutarch, 'is placed under the three that are in the midst, and lies obliquely, gently touching them all.' And it is not hard to see how this great circle came to seem to man a mirror of the Earth, a storehouse of its history, its constant Watcher in the sky, and the unerring prophet of For uncounted centuries man knew the geography of the heavens better than the geography of the Earth, and whatever life on Earth meant to him, the unfailing procession of the great star-groups of the Zodiac meant certainty, law, order. The Wheel of the Zodiac was of course the great original for all such figures, particularly for the Wheels of Life. There is a hint of this in the Tibetan world-picture, with Mount Meru the axis or hub of the world about which are placed like spokes in a wheel the four quarters of the Earth, with their three islands each, making the sum of twelve radii from the centre. Sacred Texts Earth Mysteries Index Previous NextĬLOSELY ASSOCIATED with the World Mountains are the many Wheels of Life, by which the ancients sought to picture the relations of parts of the universe to each other and to the whole.

Wheels of life