Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

Thus are dissipated for ever the conclusions which people had drawn from some ill explained monuments, against the newness of the continents and nations; and we might have dispensed with treating of them so much in detail had they not been so recent, and had they not made sufficient impression still to retain their influence over the minds of some individuals.

The Zodiac is far from bearing in itself a certain and excessively remote date.

But there are writers who have maintained that the zodiac bears in itself the date of its invention, because the names and figures given to its constellations are an index of the position of the colures at the time when it was invented; and this date, according to several, is so evident and so remote, that it is quite a matter of indifference whether the representations which we possess of this circle are more or less ancient.

They do not attend to the circumstance that, in this sort of argument, there is a complication of three suppositions equally uncertain: the country in which the zodiac is presumed to have been invented, the signification which is supposed to have been given to the constellations which occupy it, and the position in which the colures were with relation to each constellation, when this signification was attributed to it. According as other allegories have been imagined, or as these allegories are admitted to have referred to the constellation of which the sun occupied the first degrees, or to that of which it occupied the middle, or to that into which it began to enter, that is to say, of which it occupied the last degrees; or, lastly, to that which was opposite to him, and which rose at night; or according as the invention of these allegories is placed in a different climate, must the date of the zodiac also be changed. The possible variations in this respect might comprehend so much as the half of the revolution of the fixed stars, that is to say, 13,000 years, and even more.

In this manner Pluche, generalizing some indications of the ancients, has imagined, that the Ram announces the commencement of the sun’s elevation, and the vernal equinox; that the Cancer indicates his retrogradation to the summer solstice; that the Balance, the sign of equality, marks the autumnal equinox[232]; and that the Capricorn, a climbing animal, indicates the winter solstice, after which the sun returns to us. According to this method, by placing the inventors of the zodiac in a temperate climate, we should have rains under Aquarius, the dropping of lambs and kids under the Gemini, violent heats under the Lion, gathering of the harvest under the Virgin, the time of hunting under the Sagittary, &c.; and the emblems would be appropriate enough. If we should then place the colures at the commencement of the constellations, or at least the equinox at the first stars of Aries, we should, in the first instance, arrive at a period of only 389 years before Christ, an epoch evidently too modern, and which would render it necessary to recur to a complete equinoxial period, or 26,000 years. But if the equinox be supposed to pass through the middle of the constellation, a period of about 1000 or 1200 years higher is obtained, 1600 or 1700 years before Christ; and this is what several celebrated men have believed to be the true epoch of the invention of the zodiac, the honour of which they have, for other reasons not sufficiently weighty, conferred upon Chiron.

But Dupuis, who required for the origin which he endeavoured to attribute to all religions, that astronomy, and, in particular, the figures of the zodiac should in some measure have preceded all other human institutions, has sought another climate for the purpose of finding other explanations for the emblems, and for that of deducing another epoch from them. If, assuming the Balance as an equinoxial sign, but supposing it at the vernal equinox, it be presumed that the zodiac has been invented in Egypt, other sufficiently plausible explanations might in fact be found for the climate of that country.[233] The Capricorn, an animal with the tail of a fish, would mark the commencement of the rise of the Nile at the summer solstice; the Aquarius and Fishes, the progress and diminution of the inundation; the Bull, the time of labouring; the Virgin, the time of reaping; and they would mark them at the periods when these operations actually took place. In this system, the zodiac would have 15,000 years[234] for a sun supposed at the first degree of each sign, more than 16,000 for the middle, and 4000 only, on supposing that the emblem has been given to the sign at the opposite of which the sun was[235]. It is to the 15,000 years that Dupuis has attached himself; and it is upon this date that he has founded the whole system of his celebrated work.

There are not wanting those, however, who, admitting that the zodiac has been invented in Egypt, have imagined allegories applicable to later times. Thus, according to Mr Hamilton, the Virgin would represent the land of Egypt when not yet fecundated by the inundation; the Lion, the season when that country is most liable to be overrun by ferocious animals, and so on[236].

The high antiquity of 15,000 years would besides induce this absurd consequence, that the Egyptians, those men who represented every thing by emblems, and who must have attached a great importance to the circumstance that these emblems were conformable to the ideas which they were intended to represent, had preserved the signs of the zodiac thousands of years after they no longer in any way corresponded with their original signification.

The late M. Remi Raige endeavoured to support the opinion of Dupuis by an argument of an entirely new kind[237]. Having remarked that significations more or less analogous to the figures of the signs of the zodiac, might be found for the Egyptian names of the months, on explaining them by the oriental languages, and finding in Ptolemy that epifi, which signifies capricorn, commences at the 20th of June, and therefore comes immediately after the summer solstice, he concluded from thence, that, at the beginning, Capricorn itself was at the summer solstice, and so of the other signs, as Dupuis had supposed.

But, independently of all that there is merely conjectural in these etymologies, Raige did not perceive that it was simply by chance that, five years after the battle of Actium, in the year 25 before Christ, at the establishment of the fixed year of Alexandria, the first day of Thoth was found to correspond with the 29th of the Julian August, and continued to correspond since that time. It is only from this epoch that the Egyptian months commenced at fixed days of the Julian year, and only at Alexandria: even Ptolemy did not the less continue to employ in his Almagest the ancient Egyptian year with its vague months[238].