The Great Christ Comet (29 page)

The constellation was called AB.SIN (the Furrow) by the Mesopotamians, Parthenos (Virgin) by the Greeks, Virgo (Virgin) by the Romans, and Bethulah (Virgin) by the Jews.

The Mesopotamians and Greeks depicted the constellation as a young maiden who carried an ear of grain in her left hand. We have a sketch of the Furrow (Virgo) from Seleucid
13
Babylonia, in which she is doing precisely this (see
fig. 7.2
).
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The ear of grain was particularly closely associated with Spica and reflects the fact that historically the constellation, and
Spica in particular, was linked to the start of the grain harvest. Often Virgo was believed to hold a palm branch in her right hand. Greeks and many in the ancient Near East imagined her to have wings.

The constellation was associated with a number of different virgin goddesses in the centuries surrounding the birth of Jesus, including Ishtar/Asherah, Athena, Demeter, Atargatis, Tyche, Dike, Justa, Astraea, Juno, and Isis.
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As Dike, Justa, and Astraea, Virgo was presented as an innocent and pure virgin so exasperated with humanity that she left the earth for the starry heavens. Pseudo-Eratosthenes
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states that Hesiod identified her as Dike, daughter of Zeus, who became so weary of human injustice in all its forms that she departed for the mountains and ultimately ascended into the heavens. Hyginus claims that the celestial virgin Astraea became the constellation Virgo.
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According to Apuleius,
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Psyche spoke of Juno as being worshiped “as a virgin who travels through the sky on the back of Leo.” However, Isis (who called herself “The Great Virgin” in a hymn to Osiris) was the predominant identity of Virgo in our period
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and it is as Isis that Virgo is portrayed on the Dendera Zodiac (a famous, probably mid-first-century BC, sky map carved on the ceiling of the Hathor temple at Dendera, Egypt).
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Strikingly, Virgo was widely regarded as a virgin and yet, paradoxically, often also as a mother. Tim Hegedus points out that,

Mother goddesses were not incompatible with Virgo in ancient Greco-Roman religion. According to Frances Yates, “The . . . virgin is . . . a complex character, fertile and barren at the same time.” . . . For example, . . . the figure of Isis holding her son Horus was identified with Virgo. Virgo was also associated
with various other mother goddesses in antiquity, such as Juno, Dea Caelestis, Ceres, Magna Mater, Atargatis, and even Ilithyia, the Greek goddess of childbirth. . . . As Boll concludes, “. . . 
alles ist eins
” [“everything is the same”].
21

Theony Condos comments that, in identifying the constellation as a maiden, the Greeks were probably indebted to the Bab­ylo­nians, who associated it with the virgin aspect of the Great Mother Goddess.
22

Those who deny that Virgo is in mind in Revelation 12 claim that the twelve stars on her crown (Rev. 12:1: “and on her head a crown of twelve stars”) represent the twelve zodiacal signs or constellations (excluding Ophiuchus).
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However, even if we accepted that Virgo was being presented as having the twelve zodiacal constellations/signs on her head, that could be explained in another way, namely, that she encapsulated and represented the entire zodiac.
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At the same time, as we shall see shortly, a careful study of the stars in the uppermost region of Virgo reveals that there is a much better way to understand her twelve-star crown.

The Placement of the Figure Virgo within the Constellation

How did the ancients in this general period conceive of Virgo relative to the stars of her constellation? We have evidence of at least four versions of Virgo.

The first version of Virgo was described by the second-century BC Greek astronomical writer Hipparchus. Beginning at the bottom of the constellation, he regarded her feet as corresponding to the stars
μ
(Mu) and
λ
(Lambda) Virginis, her shoulders (evidently the lower part of the shoulders) as
γ
(Gamma) and
δ
(Delta) Virginis, and the top star in her head as
ξ
(Xi) Virginis. This conceptualization of Virgo is unquestionably the most bizarre—it requires Virgo to have an extraordinarily long neck and/or massive head. Indeed, in Hipparchus's analysis, the distance from the top star in her head to the star in her right shoulder is the same as the distance from her left elbow to her left foot!

A revised version of Hipparchus's Virgo is found in the second-century AD
Almagest
of Ptolemy. Although Ptolemy largely followed Hipparchus, he perceived the need to make modifications. Ptolemy freely admitted that he was exercising some creative license in his portrayal of the great celestial woman:

We do not employ the same figures of the constellations that our predecessors did, just as they did not employ the same figures as their predecessors. But in many cases we make use of different figures that more appropriately represent the forms for which they are drawn.
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Ptolemy went on to give Virgo as an example of his innovative reimaginings of the constellations: “For instance, those stars which Hipparchus places ‘on the Virgin's shoulder' we place ‘on her side,'
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because their distance from the stars in her head seems too great for the distance from the head to the shoulder in his constellation of Virgo. And so, by making those stars to be on her sides, the figure
will be agreeable and appropriate, which it would not be if those stars were drawn ‘on her shoulders.'”
27

However, in decreasing the size of Virgo's neck and head, Ptolemy introduced a new problem: Virgo's torso and arms became disproportionately long—the distance from the star on her left side (
γ
) to her left hand (
α
) is greater than the distance from her left hand (
α
) to her left foot (
λ
). Quite simply, maintaining Hipparchus's placement of Virgo's head could not produce a properly proportioned constellation figure—measuring from just above Virgo's right buttock (which in a normal human body would be roughly halfway between the top of the head and the bottom of the feet), in Ptolemy's Virgo it is 29 degrees to the top of her head and yet only 18 degrees to her right foot (and 17 degrees to her left foot).

A third version of Virgo existed in the ancient world, around the time of Jesus's birth, which did not entail her having an extraordinarily long neck or elongated upper body (from the waist upwards). The first-century BC work
Poetica Astronomica
, by Hyginus, and the first/second century AD work
Catasterismi
, by Pseudo-Eratosthenes, portrayed Virgo in rather more vague terms than Hipparchus or Ptolemy, but nevertheless in readily identifiable terms. These two authors described Virgo very similarly. According to Hyginus, she had 19 stars, and, according to Pseudo-Eratosthenes, she had 20 stars. The faint star that they associate with the Virgin's head is 16 Virginis (mag. +4.96). Pseudo-Eratosthenes,
Catasterismi
9, stated that Virgo was regarded as headless. The headless version of Virgo is actually easy to explain astronomically, because, as Pseudo-Eratosthenes himself went on to point out, there is only one faint star in the region of sky where Virgo's head was perceived to be (16 Virginis).
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The shoulders are
δ
(Auva) (mag. +3.37) and
γ
(mag. +3.43). The elbows are
σ
and
ψ
(both mag. +4.75). The hands are
α
(Spica) (mag. +0.96) and
ζ
(Heze) (mag. +3.34). Her feet are
μ
(mag. +3.84) and
λ
(mag. +4.5). With respect to the wings,
ε
(Vindemiatrix) (mag. +2.84) and
ρ
(mag. +4.87) are on the right wing, and
β
(Zavijava) (mag. +3.56) and
η
(Zaniah) (mag. +3.87) on the left wing. The six faint stars that make up her dress, that is, the hem of her dress, are
υ
(mag. +5.12),
φ
(mag. +4.78),
ι
(Syrma) (mag. +4.06), 106 (mag. +5.4), 95 (mag. +5.43), and
κ
(mag. +4.15), all of which are fourth- or fifth-magnitude stars—dim, but well within the range of naked-eye observation in good atmospheric conditions.
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This solution incorporates most of the major stars in the relevant part of Virgo in a natural way and is very probably correct.

Therefore Hyginus and Pseudo-Eratosthenes represent a view of Virgo that is very similar to that of Hipparchus from the feet (
μ
and
λ
Virginis) to the shoulders (
δ
and
γ
Virginis), but has the head much lower down and a body with more reasonable proportions. According to their assessment, the stars
ξ
,
ν
,
ο
, and
π
were not a part of Virgo's body, but were above the head.

A fourth version of the constellation figure was also prevalent around the turn of the ages. Teukros (Teucer) of Bab­ylon portrayed Virgo as a goddess sitting on a throne.
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Teukros is an important representative of Bab­ylo­nian astrology at the time of Jesus's birth; indeed he is the only Bab­ylo­nian astrologer of the time that we know anything about. Specifically, Teukros of Bab­ylon describes the sign of Virgo as “a certain goddess seated on a throne and nursing a child. Some say that she is the goddess Isis in the Atrium nursing Horus.”
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Although restricting a large constellation figure like Virgo to a 30-degree zone (to get it to work as a zodiacal sign) naturally results in distortion, and so cannot accurately capture the underlying constellation figure, Teukros nevertheless gives us a good sense of how she was envisioned and a general idea of her proportions. In his description of the sign of Virgo, Teukros locates Spica two-thirds of the way down.
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His Virgo, and that of the Egyptians, is oriented parallel to the ecliptic
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and seems closest to that of Hyginus and Pseudo-Eratosthenes, except that Virgo is imagined as sitting
on a throne, presumably with her legs and feet parallel.
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