Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/98

54 It is easy to see, as Brown avers, that the comparison of the sun to a ram or bull is a line of thought which naturally and spontaneously arises in the mind of archaic man.

In the Euphratean Valley, the probable birthplace of the constellations, the sun was styled a "Lubat," meaning old sheep, and ultimately the planets were called "old sheep stars." Hence the symbolic view of the sun as an old sheep or ram is necessarily of a remote antiquity.

In Aries we have very clear proof that many of the constellations must be regarded as mere symbols, and in no-wise to be thought of as owing their names to a fancied resemblance to some creature or object, for the obtuse angle formed by the three principal stars in Aries could only resemble at best the hind leg of a sheep or ram, and so we are bound to the conviction that the ram is simply a symbol.

One theory holds that the solar ram, the sun who opened the day, was in time duplicated by the stellar ram, who in 2540 opened the year, and "led the starry flock through it as their bell-wether."

Unfortunately for this theory, as Maunder points out, we know that the constellations were mapped out at a far earlier epoch, when the equinox fell not in Aries, but in the middle of the constellation Taurus.

In mythology Aries has always represented the fabled ram with fleece of gold. Manilius thus describes it:

The old fable is as follows: Phrixus and Helle were children of Athamas, the legendary King of Thessaly, Their step-mother treated them with such cruelty that Mercury took pity on them, and to enable them to escape their mother's wrath sent a ram to bear them away. Mounted on the ram's back the children sped over land