Uwe Homann

***A STAR FOR ALL AGES***

Symbol for an Ancient Wisdom and the Reality of the World

A Presentation to the Second Annual Conference on

“Precession and Ancient Knowledge”

Sedona , Arizona, USA

November 12, 2005

Thank you for being here today and for giving me this wonderful opportunity to share with you my thoughts on some ancient and modern cosmic truths and tell you a little bit about the people who discovered them.

In the hope of refining our understanding about the way of life of ancient societies and how they must have perceived the world and the celestial vault above them, we study their scriptures and symbols and their architecture and artifacts. More often than not we stumble across mysteries and anomalies that nobody can truthfully explain.

From the perspective of the incomplete historical data that has reached us, the various myths are like lessons that contain a hidden wisdom. We hope to find in them answers to problems that confront us today. But frankly, we possess a blurry and distorted image of mankind’s past and every new discovery simply doesn’t make it clearer.

It seems that over the ages too many kooky ideas have infiltrated our mentalities. For example, we assume that many thousands of years ago mankind had no real knowledge because they had no science and technology from which they could truly benefit – like we do nowadays.

But what if our remote ancestors of eons past were not longing for material wealth and comfort, but rather attained or realized something that we consider ineffable? Perhaps we could refer to that alternate purpose as concerning an “eternal Truth or Reality” that always exists no matter how the physical world or our perception of that world changes.

In the ancient Vedic traditions of India it was recognized that humanity has the potential to experience different and higher states of Consciousness or states of the Heart. These states of the human heart are described as the dark Heart, the propelled and steady Heart, the devoted Heart and the clean Heart.

From a limited scientific perspective such classifications of man’s evolutionary status refer to ages or Yugas, called Kali, Dwapara, Treta and Satya. It is also said that man’s mental virtue is being affected by a vast astronomical cycle which produces these different Yugas.

Generally speaking, astronomy is the measurement of celestial motions. But the majority of cultures and humans alive today continue to accept astrology, which is the assessment of the relevance and meaning of those motions to life on planet Earth. Regardless of your opinion about astrology it should be obvious that plotting stellar positions is the basis for both astrology and astronomy. Neither practice can be effective if the celestial mechanical model for calculating time is wrong.

From about 300 AD to 1600 AD the true timing of the spring equinox was gradually lost in Europe, because Western astrologers and astronomers had lost the knowledge of how to keep their calendar system in tune with Earth’s tropical year.

And a little over a hundred years ago Priya Nath Karar, later known as Swami Sri Yukteswar, discovered a crucial error in the equinoctial position given in the old astronomical almanacs of India. He noted that due to a phenomenon that modern science calls precession, the spring equinox no longer occurred around March 21st but was off by about 22 days, now coinciding with a date of around April 13 th - a fact that has far-reaching implications.

In 1894, Sri Yukteswar wrote an enlightening book entitled "The Holy Science". He tries to show the compatibilities between the spiritual quests of the East and the West, and introduces these teachings with a revolutionary astrological and astronomical explanation of the Yuga cycle. He declares that the cause of the so-called precession is the celestial motion of our solar system relative to both some dual star of our Sun and a Grand Center.

From a philosophical and spiritual perspective his book conveys a profound message of hope for our times. Yet from an astronomical or scientific perspective, his explanation is so extraordinary that even the most avid scholar is hard pressed to find compelling evidence for this hypothesis in extant records of oriental astronomy - never mind western astronomy. What is Yukteswar’s purpose in leading us through a stellar maze to comprehend a celestial phenomenon which we might intuit is true, but have no rationale to support it?

I will not answer this question now, but rather offer you ‘my version of the story’ about this astronomical phenomenon that in its essence is as esoteric as it is empirical.

Let’s step back a little bit and look at this astronomical picture from a different angle.

Some of the bits of animal bone found alongside early humanoid remain show strange etchings that have been proven* to be recorded observations of moon phases and other astronomical phenomena that occur simultaneously with seasonal changes on Earth. * [Alexander Marshack, “The Roots of Civilization”, 1972]

Those pre-stone age people probably thought they had it all nailed down - they understood Nature. When the earliest civilizations appeared, they developed their own “truth” about what was going on in the skies and how Earth fit into the scheme. Each new generation of thought battled against the previously one.

During the last two centuries, various scientists in their own way have become the “definitive” authority that “finally solved” the riddles of Earth and its cosmic surroundings, and of the powers that run time and motion. However, it seems that nearly every Hubble telescope image that arrives in NASA’s computers tears down some astronomical “truth” and replaces it with a whole new set of questions to be asked.

And our own work - the focus of this conference - is unveiling the evidence that we are now facing yet another shift in our perspective, this one truly epochal, challenging many “laws” in contemporary physics. I ask: Why should this process end here? Isn’t every discovery yet another step up a ladder of human awareness? Each higher step affords a whole new view; wholly different questions are posed that were previously beyond even our imagination. In pursuing the answers to these new questions, in contemplating the new observations, our consciousness expands -- and it seems, oddly enough, that the universe in front of our gaze expands too.

As this process unfolds we must be very careful to revise what may be inadequate or incorrect models to describe our expanding vision of the world. And more importantly, we must guard against making premature assumptions before we collect and evaluate the observational evidence.

Let us take as an example the measurement of time and how it relates to the phenomenon of precession.

Five decades ago, ‘exact science’ formulated a definition of the physical unit ‘second’ that is based solely on the precise length of the tropical year. The experts had realized that the new standard of time should be based on the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun instead of its period of rotation on its axis. Initially, astronomers understood Earth’s revolution period to be a roughly twenty minutes longer sidereal year. But it was argued that the tropical year is more fundamental than the sidereal year, because the length of sidereal year depends upon the value of the precession.

Paradoxically, the Newtonian or lunisolar precession model requires that the rate of precession determines the length of the tropical year and not the sidereal. Nonetheless, astronomers simply substituted one year for the other without ever proving their time-equivalence. There is absolutely no scientific proof that the defined time interval of the “mean solar day” is based on the longer sidereal year. In fact, the truest measure for Earth’s complete 360-degree orbit around the Sun is the tropical year - a roughly twenty minutes longer period is fiction.

The blatant inconsistencies of the lunisolar precession model are also revealed by observations and mathematical equations of Earth’s period of rotation and revolution relative to various celestial objects within the solar system, which clearly show that the axis of the Earth does not wobble.

Just for the record I should mention to you that nearly six years ago I brought these findings to the attention of the International Astronomical Union in Paris and many other authorities worldwide. The overwhelming response appears to be one of denial – astronomers refuse to address the inherent time problem of the Newtonian precession model.

We must also remember that no astronomical observer has ever witnessed or lived through one entire precession cycle. Therefore the cycle employed by scientists is not an observed fact; rather it is the product of calculations derived from data of varying degree of accuracy. Even the actual path of Earth’s celestial pole in the sky is not truly known. The historical information remains vague. We have patched together the rare, surviving texts and monuments of antiquity with the short period of modern observational data to envision the bigger picture of the whole cycle.

As early as 1873, the prevailing theory of precession was challenged. Alfred Wilks Drayson made a critical astronomical discovery* and demonstrated that Earth’s celestial pole describes a path round a point distant six degrees from the pole of the ecliptic in a period of roughly 32,000 years, apparently resulting in pronounced variations in the obliquity of the ecliptic. Though Drayson refrained from offering a plausible explanation for the cause of the unusual pole movement, he was the first scientist to point out that empirical science made a huge blunder in proposing the model of a wobbling Earth orbiting a stationary Sun.

*[Some of Drayson’s findings were also publicized in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association in 1922 - about twenty years after his death.]

Let’s not forget that all ideas about the motion of the sphere of the fixed stars were born before the recent technological advances, which produced better telescopes and much more accurate clocks. Yet regardless of such technological means, it appears that the cognitive ability of the ancient thinkers and seers may have been much broader than ours and perhaps they realized the bigger picture a lot clearer than we do. From the fragments of ancient monuments and records that still exist, we have learned that most of the ancient cultures were not only awestruck by the stars and revered them as something sacred, but some of them also used the stars in a practical scientific sense – namely as a marker for time.

The prime example, of course, is the ancient Egyptian civilization, who regarded the star Sirius as the central object for their calendar system. These ancient astronomers noticed that the yearly motion of Sirius in the sky appears to be in tune with the solar year - the year of the seasons. In science this phenomenon was first discovered by the astronomer Brahe – who was Kepler’s teacher - and modern observations clearly confirm his findings and thus the ancient observations. For instance, Jed Buchwald – a distinguished Professor of History & Science - made it very clear that during most of Egyptian history "Sirius remains about the same distance from the equinoxes - and so from the solstices - throughout these many centuries, despite precession".

And the Meridian Transit Measurements of Sirius, that Karl-Heinz Homann began to record almost two decades ago, offer even more conclusive proof – but more on that a little later.

Using the stars to date events in the history of mankind is not without peril of making errors. Scholars and historians (particularly Egyptologists) have developed a Sothic dating method that “over-interprets”, in my opinion, the astronomical significance and the symbolic meaning of Sirius. So many volumes have been devoted to this subject that it has become nearly impossible to extract the authentic sacred ancient teachings and to examine them in their original form. It is also my strong conviction that if such teachings still exist, they would always remain hidden to the eyes of the profane. An example is offered in the western scholarship on the teachings and oral traditions of the Dogon tribe in West Africa.

While much has been written about the Dogon’s creation myth and their profound astronomical knowledge - especially about the Sirius system - it seems that little of the Dogon wisdom has been truly understood. Or as a great scientist once put it: “In trying to grasp the so-called ‘primitive’, we receive as much as we are able to give.”

For centuries the Dogon have observed, analyzed and studied everything that surrounds them and developed an internally consistent and detailed cosmology expressed in mythic terms. They do not require textbooks or sophisticated instruments to understand reality. While the Dogon may have had no need for theories such as Precession or Yugas, they do possess an astonishing clear perception of mankind’s place in the universe which centers, so to speak, on the invisible stars of the Sirius system.

For example, we learn from the Dogon that "two systems, that are sometimes linked together, intervene, and are at the origin of various calendars, giving a rhythm to the life and activities of man.… One of them, nearest to the Earth, will have the sun as an axis … and another, further away, Sirius … monitor of the Universe”. “The primitive location of the star in the sky is the one in which the sun is found today … Sirius was also there but he moved away like it. Like the other stars it moved away from the Earth, for only the sun remained close to her. It therefore moved & now is located in the middle of the sky, but it is a center of movement… The movements of the 'po tolo' (which is the first companion of Sirius) maintain all the other stars in their respective places; indeed, it is said that without this movement, none of them would “hold up”. It is the 'po tolo' that forces them to keep in their trajectories: it regulates Sirius’s trajectory, Sirius is the only star that doesn’t follow a regular curve which it separates from the other stars by surrounding it with its own trajectory. That is why it is called “the pillar of the stars”. … 'po tolo' is the axis of the world."

Evidently, the Dogon’s “Weltanschauung” offers a number of perspectives that differ dramatically from the better-known religious, philosophical and scientific systems in the world. Their way of thinking accepts the universe as an orderly whole, in which the determination of "laws" is less essential than the apperception of a pre-established harmony that is endlessly troubled, and continually reorganized. Every part of the entirety is a summary of the whole. The Dogon view does not emphasize the immaterial world or liberation from existence, nor does it embrace the values of the material world. Rather, it evokes a picture of man that gives meaning to our earthly existence and its impermanence.

If today we can realize that the fundamental purpose of all astronomical quests might transcend the mere measurement of cosmic cycles we may regain the potential to comprehend the same messages that the ancients saw in the motions of the stars.

Another interesting detail in the Dogon cosmology is the description of a third star that exists in the Sirius system. They say that digitaria - the white dwarf companion of Sirius A - “is not Sirius's only companion: the star emme ya … is larger than it, four times as light (in weight), and travels along a greater trajectory in the same direction and in the same time as it (fifty years)”.

Some anthropologists have ridiculed this idea. However, modern science had no reason not to believe the Dogon. The suspected third companion was observed by a few renowned astronomers during the early 1900s, but the reports were never really verified. While a study in 1973 by Irving Lindenblad at the U.S. Naval Observatory concluded that there is no astrometric evidence for the existence of a third body in the Sirius system, another study in 2000 by a team of French astronomers arrived at a somewhat different conclusion. It seems there is still unstudied evidence out there.

And from a more theoretical perspective, John N. Harris, an expert on Babylonian astronomy, discovered an amazing resonance relationship that occurs within the Sirius system itself. Taking into account the paired highly eccentric orbits of Sirius A & B and their differing separations, he was able to integrate the various orbital parameters only by incorporating an additional “third” motion for Sirius A & B. To be more specific: For the computations to make sense it requires a phase-locked, synchronous planar rotation of both stars with the same period of almost 50 years and also in the same direction as the orbits. I think it is very interesting that Harris’ theoretical findings about a third motion in the Sirius system seem to corroborate the statement from the Dogon teachings.

However, a co-orbiting body with a different sized orbit and mass, having exactly the same orbital period, seems to be too incredible to accept even as a possibility. It would overthrow everything we have been told by the authorities about the laws of gravity - assuming we were told everything!

If the Sirius system has some unusual and still undiscovered properties that could even affect us here on Earth, then the term “gravity” would certainly have to be re-evaluated under a different light. Maybe some stars have more mass than previously presumed. Maybe one can not classify everything according to Newton, making assumption about the masses of celestial objects based on computed velocities and distances or the kind of light they emit.

Aside from the fact that solid masses are an exceedingly rare thing in the universe, we also have to keep in mind that we are dealing here with the relatively unknown properties of super-dense matter.

Sir Arthur Eddington, the father of astrophysics and one of the few scientists who fathomed the underlying spiritual nature of the material world, explained in his last major work, entitled “Fundamental Theory” (which was published after his death in 1948), that an analysis based on the conventional physics of energy-wave-mechanics cannot be applied to super-dense matter. Eddington points to the initial fallacy in the earlier investigations of white-dwarf matter, which in his view continued to “work devastation in astronomy”. One must admire his genius. Would his new approach to wave mechanics and scale uncertainty have led to the discovery of an alternative for inertia and gravitation?

Not every astronomer thought about this matter as seriously as Eddington. But it is evident that the Sirius system has been the focus of many astronomical observations in the past. And I am sure it will continue to for the simple reason that we just haven’t developed the instruments yet that reveal what its radiating light obscures. Yet it is that brilliant light which made possible an exceptional recent astronomical discovery. I am proudly referring here to the observations made by my father, Karl-Heinz, who began almost two decades ago to meticulously record the transit periods of Sirius. The results are quite astonishing.

But let me tell you first a little bit about my father and how his work also influenced my thinking.

Back in the late sixties and the seventies, when we stilled lived in Germany he would usually take the family out on Sunday for a short hike in the forests. Actually, for me these walks felt quite long, because they were every time accompanied by his tedious lectures on all kinds of scientific subjects - especially on math, physics and astronomy. And although my head was always spinning afterwards from sheer “information overload”, his attempts to teach me scientific laws and theories has helped me to see a much more interconnected picture of the physical world than any of my school teachers were able to convey.

My father is a very practical man, who has learned several trades. And sometimes I think that his ability to combine the knowledge and experience of someone trained in the world of mechanics, electronics and pneumatics makes him more an ‘inventor’ than anything else. He used simple models that made the most complex processes easy to grasp.

I still remember vividly, how dad used apples and oranges to explain how the Earth wobbles on its axis – of course that was many years before he made his own observations of Sirius, but I think at that time he sure would have made a good astronomy teacher! His love for mathematical exactness and mechanical precision, and his tenacity to solve difficult problems, was not something I appreciated much as a boy. But luckily not all of our conversations were about scientific facts.

We also talked about the various mysteries that surround science, and which for the most part remain unexplained. And I do not exaggerate when I say that we “covered everything” from the space between the atom to the infinity of space itself. But our own senses cannot perceive these dimensions, and as a young adult I needed something more tangible, like Chemistry which you can experience at least with your own body. The questions though of what we are made of, where we come from and who we really are, took our explorations into new directions.

We studied ancient history. While we were living in Europe, it was relatively easy to see and touch evidence of human history, practically all the way back to the “missing link”.

After an extensive experience in the Great Pyramid of Egypt in 1980, we began to wonder why is it that we seem to know more about Neanderthals and their caves than about the people who built the greatest and most precise monument on Earth. My father was also intrigued with the so-called Pyramid Power, having been inspired by it during our prolonged stay inside the King’s chamber.

As a scientifically-minded person, he can not accept many ideas and interpretations as facts - he has always needed to verify things for himself. I remember how he built little pyramid models to “sharpen” razor blades and experimented with “preserving” food in them. Although the early experiments were not entirely successful, he continued to try to build bigger pyramids and also to develop methods to perform better experiments with water and other materials. His test results with water and ice crystals were truly amazing! But that is another story – perhaps some other time.

Another stimulus to his ongoing researches was Robert Temple’s book “The Sirius Mystery” which drew lots of attention in Germany in the late 1970’s. Of course, my father was really fascinated by it, especially by the intriguing astronomical information about Sirius. By the way, let’s not forget that Temple was actually inspired by the brilliant thinker Arthur M. Young, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, who probably understood the real significance of the Dogon material.

The most obvious astronomical fact is that nowadays the culmination or Meridian transit of Sirius happens to occur around Midnight on January 1st, at the beginning of the “New Year”.

After our trip to Egypt, in a strange way we felt sorry for the ancient Egyptians, who regarded the star Sirius as an important spiritual symbol in their religion. Yet they apparently built their Great Pyramid at a time when Sirius was extremely low in the sky. What a divine experience it would have been for them, if they could have seen what we see today - Sirius directly shining over the southern shaft of the King’s chamber.

But because of Earth’s precession this was impossible millennia ago, or was it?

In essence, this kind of question prompted a myriad of investigations, researches, experiments and observations that eventually led my father to some important findings, which I believe are bound to have serious scientific implications. Perhaps his most important finding resulted from his experiment involving Sirius. His hypothesis was that if Sirius possesses any unusual celestial motion relative to the orientation of Earth’s rotational axis in space it would have to show up in the transit periods of Sirius over the years.

The scientific method he employed is simple. Using a fixed mounted telescope with a 25x magnification as a basic transit instrument and the UTC atomic time signal, he recorded the actual time when Sirius passed the crosshair every day. The idea behind this method is that the more transits of Sirius recorded, the higher will be the accuracy for calculating its mean transit time. In other words, if we take the total time interval between the first and the last recorded transit and divide it by the total number of transits, we get an average figure for that particular observation period. The most important factor, aside from making this observation from a single location over a period of several years, is accessing a precise reference signal (atomic time) and, of course, to immobilize the instrument.

Given the complexity of the data he collected and interpreted, all I can do here now is to refer you to our website, where you can find Karl’s detailed explanations of the recorded transits which he began to document in 1988. I do want to make it perfectly clear that these observations and measurements are based on the principles of exact science. And to paraphrase Eddington, they are not observations of approximate coincidences of a pointer reader with a scale division.

The result of these observations confirms the astronomical fact that Earth’s rotation period relative to Sirius is almost exactly identical to the so-called ‘mean sidereal’ or ‘equinoctial day’. Yet under the current lunisolar precession model such measurements can only be made from a wobbling Earth and the result should have been a significantly longer ‘mean’ transit time for Sirius.

Let me try and put this in another way, because we need the connecting background to make sense of this important result. According to the current scientific understanding about the cause of Precession, not a single star should be observed to move at the same rate as the equinox relative to the zodiac. However, my father’s observations prove that Sirius does NOT show the usual stellar motion of roughly 50” per year relative to the changing orientation of Earth’s axis in space.

Evidently, when the ancient Egyptians used Sirius as the marker of time for their solar based calendar system, they made a wise choice. For many ancient cultures the double star of Sirius is a symbol for divinity. For the ancient Greeks it is “Sothis” and for the Egyptians it is “Sopdu”. For the Hermetics it is the “virgin of the world” or the “eye star of the cosmos”. For the Dogon it is “digitaria”, representing the seat of knowledge and the invisible seed of creation. In India it is referred to as “Surya” the sun of our Sun, and in the Zoroastrian tradition it stands for the spirit of wisdom or the ‘Sun Absolute’. For the Hopi Indian, on whose sacred land we celebrate this event, it is the blue star “Kachina” whose re-appearance is said to usher in a new world. For our astronomers it is just the brightest star in the night sky.

Yet for some people the five-pointed star represents the “star of consciousness” or the inner eye - the spiritual light that is not confined to any particular time period, Age or Yuga. Were the ancient seers and observers aware of a cosmic phenomenon that modern astronomy has failed to recognize? Or was it just plain luck or a coincidence?

I will let you draw your own conclusions about these findings. But before you dismiss them merely as chance occurrences, please allow me to quickly say something about chance in science and its significance for understanding Life on Earth.

In his wonderful book “The Nature of the Physical World”, Arthur Eddington warned us about chance coincidences, namely that “chance can deceive us by bringing about conditions which look very unlike chance. In particular chance might imitate organization.”

Yet organization cannot be brought about by randomness, and it appears that under the disguise of precision the only safety that exact science has is in numbers. The more improbable the occurrence, the more certain will be the scientist that it is not the result of a purposeful organization in a world of atoms and stars.

But what is the probability of the silent force that produces the biggest galaxies being the same as the vital force that enables the smallest seeds to grow? It is not without higher reason that the Dogon equate the small companion of Sirius with digitaria - the world’s smallest grain seed. Both are ruled by the same laws and structure - they are a manifestation of the omnipotent force and the omniscient feeling which produces the world and makes it conscious.

In the gross material world, life is an evolutionary process that goes against the direction of probability. And a science that rejects questions about the purpose of Life as meaningless or accepts meaningless answers is not a real science in my opinion.

Life is no coincidence and its purpose might be very different from any human purpose, but not necessarily beyond our comprehension. There is the possibility for us to overcome the element of uncertainty in life, and eventually to overcome Time itself, the power of cause and effect and the cycle of sorrow and suffering – the ancient quest to become immortal.

We have arrived at the end of my story.

As you have seen, I have tried to open the portals of our vision rather than paint the picture of a new model. In doing so, I may not have pleased everyone!

From a historical and scientific understanding, I am asserting that the “lunisolar wobble” model needs to be buried, because it's dead. That probably won't make most of you very happy, because it denies the all-knowingness of astronomers and the “truth” of their current stable of “facts”. But if science calls itself “objective”, it has to account for the observations and must explain the gradual displacement of the equinoctial points relative to inertial space.

From a mythological and spiritual understanding, I have argued that the various ancient myths and scriptures about consciousness and creation don't deal per se with the question of 'precession' or 'binary motion'. That won’t make some of you happy, but the very fact that the myths and scriptures give rise to such a question only shows that our theories about them extend outwardly.

And from a more personal understanding, I will acknowledge that our Sun may or may not revolve around Sirius. That might not make my father too happy, but the gist of the matter is that it may well be that we must climb the ladder of consciousness a bit higher before we can understand why Sirius is so important, both esoterically and empirically.

Great men and women have devoted their lives to the cause of science and the benefit of mankind, understanding that an overarching spiritual purpose underlies all of our intellectual endeavors. Knowledge based on intellectual analysis is merely stored as information, but there is a higher knowledge to be obtained, an intuitive understanding, that marks the evolution of one’s inner being, one’s Self.

For both the spiritual and the scientifically-thinking mind, it is a long and difficult path from concentration & contemplation to illumination & revelation. But it is a righteous path that deserves our utmost attention - or what ancient science otherwise distinguished as “the strength to embrace”.

Sri Yukteswar tells us when “all the developments of Ignorance are withdrawn, man’s Heart comes to a clean state, void of all external ideas. Then man becomes able to comprehend the Spiritual Light, the only Real Substance in the universe, which is the last and everlasting spiritual portion in creation”.

This is this eternal, “death-transcending” Truth that is spoken of in ancient mythologies and teachings across the globe.

Perhaps Yukteswar’s essential message in “The Holy Science” is that astronomy is only an entranceway to the vision of this Truth … and that we must always remember that our primary goal is to embody the wisdom within the ancient teachings.

This goal supersedes any astronomical pursuit.

Reflections