The SIrus Mystery

The Sirius Question is Rephrased
 

INTRODUCTION

We shall turn now to the star Sirius in history. What was its importance, if any, in ancient religions ? Is there evidence from the ancient cultures that the mysterious details of the Sirius system were known to others than the Dogon tribe? And can we discover where the Dogon got their information?

I must warn the reader that Part Two is difficult, by the nature of its subject matter. I have tried to make it readable, but beg the reader’s indulgence if have not succeeded. It is exciting material and the reader should stick with it I am certain he will come out at the end of the tunnel with a great deal of amazement.

For the ancient cultures are far more bizarre than the ordinary person is generally led to expect.
 

A Fairytale

Once there was a beautiful bright star named Sothis, as fine as any goddess. She had long held a dominant position in the sky and been admired by all for her beauty. But of late she had felt unwell; indeed, it distinctly seemed to her that she felt her life ebbing away. Night by night she fell further from her high, proud place in the sky – closer to the skyline and what must surely be her certain death.

Failing, failing, she clung to any companion star she could find, only to discover that they too felt this deathly weakness, and were sinking into a kind of sweet sleep. What was she to do ? She felt her strength going nightly; she could hardly shine the way she wished. Once she had been as glamorous, as scintillating a queen of the night sky as ever had been seen.

And now she felt she was as worthless as any old woman, her position at the centre of things gone, and her beauty fading steadily. . . . Towards the end she wept bitterly and her eyes reddened with the shame of her coming eclipse. She was so ill, her discomfort so acute. She was almost glad to welcome her fate, and that terrible line of earth and hills which she had dreaded, at last devoured her brilliant presence entirely. The night came and she was no more. Beneath the earth she rested in the balm of death.

But because this queen of the sky had been good during her ascendancy and had not been too haughty or vulgar, there were many admirers of her beauty to mourn her passing. Down on the lowly earth moved less brilliant mortals. Many nights they had stood in awe of the beautiful Sothis when she was in her prime.

Some, indeed, had watched her birth when, red as a baby from the womb or as the Sun when he rises daily, this bright and beautiful immortal (or so she had seemed) had first flashed the most piercing and glittering rays of her incomparable presence sideways across the earth seeming almost to scorch the very ground with her flaming beauty. This first appearance had been brief, for immediately behind her had come the all-engrossing grandeur of the great Sun himself. Heedless of Sothis, he soon washed the sky white with his splendor.

All the stars dissolved like tiny drops of milk, lost when their bowl is suddenly filled to overflowing. So great was the Sun, so irresistible his presence – he whom some compared to a great wild bull bellowing and lording it over the heavens and the earth alike. But every night the Sun retired to his resting place, and night by night the flaming goddess Sothis entranced and bewitched mortal men, as she rose steadily higher and grew to great perfection. And further and further ahead of the Sun she rose each night.

Seventy days had elapsed. Hope had long since been abandoned to acceptance; sorrow had become numb. A shepherd had gone out before sunrise to his lambs now fully six months old. The Sun would not long be delayed, it was approaching the time of daybreak. The shepherd looked towards the skyline in the east. And as he looked, he saw the horizon burn with a refulgent fire, and the shimmering red birth of the goddess. It was she, it must be she! No other star had that aura, such a penetrating persona.

The shepherd stood transfixed; his eyes were seared by this fresh star, dripping it seemed, with the waters of life, and aflame also with the fiery resurgence of its renewed existence. As the quick Sun behind her moved up to erase Sothis’s tantalizingly brief appearance, the shepherd turned and ran to the nearest settlement. ‘Awake! Awake! The goddess has returned! She is reborn, immortal, come back from death!’ And all the devotees assembled with excitement and renewed hope. They heard the tale, saw for themselves the next morning, and they instituted a yearly celebration.

This celebration exists to this day, and many are the temples, many are the priests, who gather in the month of July throughout all our land of Egypt to witness the much-heralded yearly rebirth of the great Sothis, Mother Isis, bestower of concord and blessings to her people. And in honor of her seventy days spent in the underworld, we have instituted the seventy-day embalming and mummification rites for our own dead, as it is pious and indeed right that we should do.

Sothis was the ancient Egyptian name for Sirius as it was spelt by the Greeks. The Egyptians had a Sothic calendar and the first appearance of Sirius on the eastern horizon just before the sun – after 70 days in the Duat (Underworld) — was what is called the heliacal rising (or ‘with-the-sun’ rising) of Sirius.

This event occurred once a year and gave rise to the Sothic Calendar, whose details we need not go into.

The heliacal rising of Sirius was so important to the ancient Egyptians (as Indeed it is to the Dogon as well¹) that gigantic temples were constructed with their main aisles oriented precisely towards the spot on the horizon where Sirius would appear on the expected morning. The light of Sirius would be channeled along the corridor (due to the precise orientation) to flood the altar in the inner sanctum as if a pin-pointed spotlight had been switched on.

This blast of light focused from a single star was possible because of the orientation being so incredibly precise and because the temple would be otherwise in total darkness within. In a huge, utterly dark temple, the light of one star focused solely on the altar must have made quite an impact on those present. In this way was the presence of the star made manifest within its temple.

One such temple to the star Sirius was the temple of Isis at Denderah. An ancient hieroglyphic inscription from that temple informs us:2

She shines into her temple on New Year’s Day, and she mingles her light with that of her father Ra on the horizon.

(Ra is an ancient Egyptian name for the sun.)

The heliacal rising of Sirius was also important to other ancient peoples. Here is a dramatic description by the ancient Greek poet Aratus of Soli of the rising of Sirius3 (often known as the Dog Star as it is in the constellation Canis, or ‘Dog’):

The tip of his [the Dog's] terrible jaw is marked by a star that keenest of all blazes with a searing flame and him men call Sirius. When he rises with the Sun [his heliacal rising], no longer do the trees deceive him by the feeble freshness of their leaves. For easily with his keen glance he pierces their ranks, and to some he gives strength but of others he blights the bark utterly.

We see that this dramatic description of the rising of the star indicates an event which was certainly noticed by ancient peoples. Throughout Latin literature there are many references to ‘the Dog Days’ which followed the heliacal rising of Sirius in the summer. These hot, parched days were thought by that time to derive some of their ferocity and dryness from the ‘searing’ of Sirius.

Traditions arose of Sirius being ‘red’ because it was in fact red at its heliacal rising, just as any other body at the horizon is red. When making rhetorical allusion to the Dog Days, the Latins would often speak of Sirius being red at that time, which it was.
 

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