Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/282

202 In that interesting book by Maunder, entitled The Astronomy of the Bible, we are told that on the Babylonian monuments and boundary stones, the most ancient records extant, there appears a set of symbols repeated over and over again, and always given a position of prominence. It is the so-called "Triad of Stars," a crescent lying on its back and two stars near it.

The significance of this symbol is now clear. Four thousand years before the Christian era, the two stars Castor and Pollux, α and β Geminorum respectively, served as indicators of the first new moon of the year, just as the star Capella did two thousand years later. The "Triad of Stars" then is simply a picture of what men saw year after year in the sunset sky, at the beginning of the first month 6000 years ago. It is the earliest record of an astronomical event that has come down to us.

Plunket says that the early astronomers who mapped out the zodiac, noticing that the equinoctial colure in 6000 passed the two bright stars Castor and Pollux, chose to represent them as marking the heads of twin figures, which they determined should symbolise the equal day and night of the season over which they presided.

Thousands of years after these two stars had ceased to mark the equinox, they were still associated by the Greeks with the twin heroes Castor and Pollux, brothers, who according to the legend were "possessed of an immortality of existence so divided among them that as one dies the other revives."

The learned Dr. Barrett has pointed out that this furnishes a complete description of day and night, a simile that is especially interesting if we attribute the first symbolising of day and night by these stars to the work of astronomers at a date when the days and nights these stars symbolised were exactly of equal length, and when therefore the equally bright stars and equal alternations of light and darkness might both be fitly symbolised as twins.

The Latin title "Gemini" by which we know the