The formation was apparent from astronomical cartography till the twelfth century, as we can see in the detail taken from a very ancient edition of Aratus codex NLW-MS-735C where Dubhe and Merak form a thigh-pointing a line to the head of Ursa Minor.
However, this was not the case with the more recent sky maps since painters and astronomers seem to have lost the ancient knowledge of turning the two bears on their axis to make what in ancient times was the thigh to be now an out-of-place tail. We know that bears have quite no tails and very long-necked heads. I could provide dozens of these errors.
I could say that all the painters from the renaissance to the nineteenth century felt the same gap. The first image below is a sixteenth-century edition of the same Aratus by Hyginus, but the wrong bear had already been taken as a model. The same inaccurate bear model also appears on other maps.
But let’s go back to the astronomical mythologies of ancient Egypt; mythologies in the plural as a complete understanding is far from being reached. The identification of the “thigh” as a different constellation from the Greater Bear will alter the reading of certain inscriptions in which the “Thigh” and “Bear” have been mixed up together. For example, when the alignment was made for the Temple of Hathor to be rebuilt at Denderah, in the time of Augustus, the King tells us that he oriented the corners and established the temple as “it took place before” while looking to the sky and directing his gaze to the “thigh” constellation.
Moreover, there was even an early definition of the northern sky in ancient Egypt. Before being the place of the “thigh” that was given to a “seat” or a woman sitting in a chair, the lady of the chair usurped the throne of Isis with her seat and the pre-anthropomorphic type that was constellated ages on ages earlier in Egypt as the cow of Nut or heaven, the birthplace of the celestial waters in the mythos, and the place of re-birth. The mother of water in the northern heaven was imaged as the water cow. Another type of birthplace was the thigh or haunch of the cow, and one of the two lakes at the head of the Milky Way in the northern polar region was called the “lake of the thigh”. This is in the position of the pole, which was the yoke or bond of heaven and known in Babylonia as “the yoke of the enclosure”.
In the land of pyramids, Polaris has often defined the Pillar of Osiris and, in ancient China, the Jade Pillar.
The same impression of pillar permanence is obtained by fixing a camera to a tripod and making long exposures of the night. The result is sky images filled with star trails around the north celestial pole. The sky seems to rotate around us as a reflection of the Earth’s daily rotation on its axis. The North Celestial Pole (NCP) is easily identified as the point in the sky at the center of all the star trail arcs. The star Polaris makes a very short bright circle near the NCP; it is directly above our earth’s axis at the North Pole so that as our earth spins on its axis, it precesses around that point in the sky called the ecliptic center. The impression is of the Earth’s axis pointing toward Polaris, the North Star, near the center of the concentric trails. From a poetic point of view, these images may evoke a tunnel of stars (of course, the tunnel is only apparent because, in a real 360-degree earth rotation, the sun would rise and dominate the frame). Another Egyptian name for the Great Bear stars was the “Serpent Mountain”, repeated with the great serpent winding around the tree or mountain of the north celestial pole.
According to ancient Egyptians, the stars that never set, the Eternals, form a type of stability. The Great Bear made her circuit outside the never-setting stars, whereas the “leg” or “haunch” was a constellation in the circle of the perpetual apparition. In Egypt, too, this constellation never set below the horizon, nor did any of its stars go down through the period of the great long year. Egyptians used the binomial stars-thigh to indicate a source of life or a river overflow. The star Phact, meaning just thigh, was a herald of Horus in the inundation. Egyptians had dozens of stars in their astronomical mythology, but all gave the impression of flowing from a south place in the earth to a north place in the sky. In Egyptian myths, when speaking of their going forth from the tomb, the deceased identifies this constellation with the place of re-birth above, saying, “I shall shine above the ‘haunch’ as I come forth in heaven”. The Egyptian Milky Way, rather than the common bright powdery area in our galaxy, was more likely a natural “way” to the sky, a mercurial door.
A Mercurial Door may have opening time mechanisms. In 1755 during the archaeological diggings in Ercolano, a nearby city of Pompei subjected to the same fate, a strangely ham-shaped solar clock was found. At first, it was supposed to be just a kitchen decoration, but after a thorough examination, it was unquestionably trusted as a roman time solar clock of about 28 b.c. This specimen is Viatoria Pensilia, commonly as the “Prosciutto di Portici” or Portici ham. So an idea of nourishment from the sky can be involved ( or maybe, more prosaically, the item was hanging as a calendar in a kitchen), together with an idea of time, a calendar event. When the time is set, Dionysus comes out of Zeus’ thigh to life through a cut. In certain old Egyptian calendars, the periodic triumph of Horus over the plagues of drought and darkness was commemorated by a festival called “the wounding of Sut”. Thus a wound here seems to recall a specific interval of time.
Finally, I would like to mention that these thighs are very often required to be hollow, like bones, or like the thigh bones. Or flutes, since back then, these whistling (5) musical instruments were made from cow femurs. The constellation of the Cow, or the seven cows, was the oldest extant ancient name for the Great Bear. And from above these stellar cows falls milk, strange milk which doesn’t wet hands (6).
- See also Introitus Apertus vs Waite’s Open Entrance. Chap 4 ;
- See also Fulcanelli & the External Influences;
- See also Thesaurus Hermeticum & the Pythagorean River;
- See also Archarion & the Opus Magnum Scheme , Ostanes, One Nature etc ,
- See also Canseliet, the Art of Music & Weight;
- See also Hans Memling’s Altarpiece with Boar and Jabuary 17 ,
The Aratus manuscript can be downloaded from National Library of Wales. The other ancient astronomical maps can be found at atlascoelestis.com , Star Trails pictures have been downloaded from NASA Picture of the Day.