Precession and Publishing after Jung...

Definition: [Astrological Ages] During the last half century, since the popularisation of the Age of Aquarius by Carl Gustav Jung, a surprisingly large number of books have been published concerning ancient cultures, attempting to show that they were aware of the Procession of the Equinoxes. The question is... why?

Why Publish on Precession? I think the simple answer is: Precession is a way in which those civilisations can be made relevant to us.

By that I mean the following:

You are an ancient astrologer observing the heavens. You may know that the Eclipses seem to repeat every 18 years. You may know that Saturn seems to repeat its movements through the heavens every 30 years. That's your longest scale of time - and in fact with your life expectancy you're very likely to be dead before you ever get chance to see Saturn repeat itself. What does that have to say to us in the 21st century? Answer: essentially nothing...

For an, I think, instructive example of this, please have a look at examples of Babylonian Omen Astrology from actual, deciphered cuneiform tablets, dating from before 550 BC, and see how little they say to us today.

On the other hand... you are an ancient astrologer observing the heavens, and you can understand and predict Precession. Suddenly you can work on a near 26 000 year timescale. You can project millennia back into your own past - to strange and fascinating prior civilizations - and predict millennia into the future. To our time. Suddenly you are relevant to us... And now modern books about you will sell... :) [Or you can construct a calendar with a cycle large enough to end in our time. Books about you will then sell in our time too... :) ]

When did the Modern Publishing on Ancient Precession Begin? These ideas were formulated quite recently, and show an obvious line of descent from Jung's ideas on Astrological Ages. The trend started with two books which appeared one to two decades after Jung's ideas were published:

Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy [published 1961], R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, which covered Precession in ancient Egypt, and,

Hamlets' Mill: A Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth [published 1969], Giorgio De Santillana, Hertha Von Dechend , which covered Precession in the Mesopotamian civilisations.

These have been followed over several decades by dozens of books on a similar theme, that an ancient civilization knew of Precession and therefore there is a relevance to us. More recently, other authors have extended the concept to pre-Colombian Western hemisphere civilisations.

Academe Fights Back: Please see Ancient Egypt and Precession and Ancient Babylonia and Precession for a summaries of why Egyptologists and specialists in Mesopotamian history don't think either of these two ancient cultures had an understanding of the Movement of the Ages. [Please see Mithraism and Precession for an analysis of the arguments that the later Roman Mithras religion had precession as part of its central mystery.]

Publishing and Precession after Jung...