The Equinox:
 

An equinox occurs twice a year, when the tilt of the Earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the Sun being vertically above a point on the Equator. The term equinox can also be used in a broader sense, meaning the date when such a passage happens. The name "equinox" is derived from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night), because around the equinox, the night and day are approximately equally long. It may be better understood to mean that latitudes +L and -L north and south of the equator experience nights of equal length.
The word is also used for the same event happening on other planets and in setting up a celestial coordinate system; see equinox (celestial coordinates).
At an equinox, the Sun is at one of two opposite points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator (i.e. declination 0) and ecliptic intersect. These points of intersection are called equinoctial points: the vernal point and the autumnal point. By extension, the term equinox may denote an equinoctial point.
An equinox happens each year at two specific moments in time (rather than two whole days), when there is a location on the Earth's Equator where the centre of the Sun can be observed to be vertically overhead, occurring around March 20/21 and September 22/23 each year.

The Equinox from the Sun Dagger at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
In what is now the state of New Mexico in the southwestern United States, in an area known as Chaco Canyon, are the remains of an elaborate development of the Anasazi people who lived in the region from about 500 to 1300 AD. Some 120 meters (400 feet) above the canyon floor near the top of an outcropping known as Fajada Butte, three slabs of sandstone are leaning against a rock wall creating a shaded space. Carved into this shaded wall are two spiral petroglyphs, one large and one small. Sunlight passes over them at various times throughout the year as it streams through chinks between the sandstone, but it was not until the 1970s that their true purpose was literally illumined.
In 1977 Anna Sofaer, an artist, was exploring rock art in the region and came across the light patterns on the two spirals. Suspecting that the rock arrangement and spiral carvings might have been intentional, she returned to the site at various dates throughout the year and, along with her colleagues, was eventually able to establish the following facts.



On the summer solstice, a single sliver of sunlight—which she dubbed a "Sun dagger"—appeared near the top of the larger spiral and over a period of 18 minutes "sliced" its way down through the very center, cutting the spiral in half before leaving it in shadow once again. On the winter solstice, two daggers of light appeared for 49 minutes, during which they exactly framed the large spiral.
Finally, an equally fascinating and more complex light show occurred on the spring (vernal) and fall (autumnal) equinoxes. The large spiral is carved in such a way that, counting from the center outward to the right, there are nine grooves. On each equinox a dagger of light appeared that cut through the large spiral—not through its center but exactly between the fourth and fifth grooves from the center. In other words, it cut exactly halfway between the center and the outer edge of the spiral, just as the equinoxes cut the time between the solstices exactly in half. Meanwhile, a second dagger sliced through the center of the small spiral.
These "light shows," which presumably had been going on for centuries, continued for several years after their rediscovery. However, in 1989 it was found that the granite slabs had shifted. The alignments that had apparently been arranged so carefully by the Anasazi were no more.
Similar light displays marking the solstices and/or equinoxes can be found at other locations in the southwestern United States and Mexico. In another Anasazi ruin in Hovenweep National Monument near the borders of Utah and Colorado, light beams also illuminate spiral petroglyphs on the summer solstice. At Burro Flats in Southern California, a winter solstice Sun points a finger of light to the center of five concentric rings in an early Chumash rock art display. In a Tipai shrine known as La Rumorosa in Baja California on the western coast of Mexico, a dramatic display can be witnessed on the winter solstice when a "dagger" of light appears to shine from the eyes of a figure painted on a shaded rock wall.
Although the true purpose of these and other astronomically oriented light displays may never be known for certain, it seems clear that the indigenous people of the region had an awareness of and appreciation for the Sun and its changing path through the sky.

welcome fall.

I've never seen the season change so exactly before. There's a 20 degree drop in temperature today from yesterday.

it sucks that that granite shifted.

What about the quinox?

rrrrrride the snake.

I was going to post a thread!

:(

such an ugly car.

hahahaha

I fucking love you man. I looked at this page today. And while doing so, I thought to myself, "wow, this is something suchfriends would post."

Okay, so what is the connection with fractals and the equinox?

And Jah.

thats because to many white people disconcerned with the sites spiritual significance have literally trampled it down. Chaco Canyon was an indian pilgrimage cathedral like those in France and Spain. Consider this, the buildings are aligned to demonstrate several key atronomical events including the solstices, the equinoxes, and are also considered the only buildings to be aligned with the cycles and phases of the moon. BUT, the people never watched these events or the interplay of shadows that the buildings created on them, because they were inside participating in ceremonies in the many, large kavas. it baffles me that they would go to such immense effort for something that essentially remained in the mind's eye. The people knew the buildings were showing these things, but they stayed inside, sort of like going inside a dark building at dawn to meditate on the sun rise...

hopi today say the purpose of celebrating the equinox is that it is the convergence of day and night in equality, it is the bridge between day and night, light and dark, Divine and Earth, hence why they celebrated religious events at these days, sort of like Christmas.





the buildings at Chaco Canyon are like an enormous calendar, keeping accurate track of several key astronomical functions through perfect alignment. The East/West walls are perfect aligned to demonstrate the equinox, and the North/South to the solstices. The buildings lines actually bisect the NS/EW for both solstices/equinox. On the Autunmal Equinox the sun rises perfectly along Eastern walls, on the Vernal perfectly along the West. Also with the solstices along the north and south.

The Solstice Project behind the in-depth astronomical studies at sites in Chaco Canyon


the connection with fractals was obvious, they used spirals as a calendar and fractal geomtry is in part behind the astronomical functions. and jah, well aren't the Chaco Canyon buildings religious in nature? I believe the archaelogists have concluded they were places of worship and not commercial centers because there was no refuse..

It's not fall in Florida.....itll still be summer for about 1 more month

the equinox is when the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere get equal amounts of day and night.

equinoxes and solstices were very crucial for ancient man, who lived a cyclical life, to understand that the weather will change again, that winter will come again, and that, afetr winter, that spring and summer will come again.

I have been reading a book on the history of astronomy and cosmology throughout human history. cool stuff.


at the equinoxes, the Maya would sacrifice humpbacks to their sun god. HUMPBACKS! no lie!

^where do you find that many humpbacks?

my guess is that birth defects (once much more common due to parasites, and disease, and other such things) were seen as religious portents in most of the world. in latin america they would raise the humpback up as an estemmed person, treated with mad goodies, and then killed like a fucking swamp rat to appease the gods.

all you need is two a year! Those fuckers would raid and pillage other tribes of which there were shittons and then take their humpbacks also, I guess!

You know alot of random shit.

my fave thing to read are reference books.

I can tell.

in high school it sucked becauyse reference books could only be checked out of library overnight, and had to be back by the morning first period. what a pain in the ass!

That's how it was here. It was such a pain when I needed those for research papers.

I don't necessarily buy into the whole "maya/azteca" human sacrifice thing.. I think it is a gross exageration on the part of anglo/western/spanish sources..

after all, imagine you walked into a Catholic/Orthodox church hundreds of years after they are abandoned and left in ruin, and you have to construct a scenario to their use and the people who used them based upon a few bits of evidence and what you see.. well shit, you might hear people saying things like, "Drinking Jesus blood and eating His flesh" and all the graphic imagery of crucified Jesus icons and statutes.. shit you might speculate that they actually killed someone every sunday if you didn't know any better..



essentially I believe the 'sacrifices' of the meso-americans were like the sacrifices in a catholic church, they were spiritual, symbolic. I do not trust the word of spaniards from the 16th century, and there is not much factual evidence aside from their written accounts..

"buy into" whatever you want. Their own records and those of their neighboring people's detail in FULL their immensely bloddy sacrifice schedule, from neonatal sacrifices to old people, to humpbacks, etc. they were a blood cult the likes of which we need not see again.

the original sacrifices of the hebrew faith were NOT symbolic in any way, they were actual animal sacrifices. judge not the maya by the symbolic ritual of the catholics.

and if you are catholic, of any persuasion (roman, greek orthodox, ethiopian, etc) you are supposed to believe that the wine is TRANSUBSTANTIATED into actual blood of jesus, and that the host is tranmsubstantiated into the actual body of jesus. so therefore you are actually eating blood and drinking flesh.

I do by the way, but that is a far stretch from actually bringing in somebody and killing them on the altar.. I would assume that indians would be as theologically advanced as christianity to be able to conceive of a spiritual sacrifice that can be physical without having to physically kill anyone after the fact..

I just am highly suspicious of human sacrifice in the Americas, the evidence is hardly conclusive and is mostly speculation.

that is wrong. just flat out man. they have been digiing up corpse pits of sacrifice victims at Chicke Pizza (chicehn itza ) as well as various other sites. CORPSE PITS.
they had to feed this blood clut with an extensive network of pillaging and slave gathering. check it out. the spaniards may have been asshole conquerors but they were not exagerating, according to the latest reserach into the scant literature left behiond, the codexes,.

massive killin.

which records are those Rob? The indians didn't leave a fucking library of Alexandria.. the only written records are accounts by spanish priests with an agenda to demonize the indians. the physical records that archaeologists use to corroborate the spanish accounts are things like statutes, paintings and carvings (ie, images that portray sacrifice) but that is why I brought up Christianity. In the orthodox Church I go into every sunday there are several icons of a crucified Jesus, one of Abaraham about to slay Isaac, one of Saint Stephen being martyred, Moses crossing the Red Sea with all the Egyptians dying in the water,, Saint Tekle Haymanot missing a leg with the bloody stump on the floor next to him, and Shedrach Mechrach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. If all you had to go on with the physical remains in the Church, you would probably believe we were rather violent in our religious services, especially if someone misunderstood a Catechism text and swore they became an expert and claimed we killed jesus every sunday or even every day when there is a Mass.

My point is that there is little evidence, the evidence there is is strictly circumstantial.

There are some bodies, true, but no where near the piles they speculate and further finding bodies does not imply sacrifice. what about all the crypts in European churches?

In European churches you find 'sacred' bodies all around the altar, relics and kings and all kinds of creepy shit.

some of the old spanish friars who lived in the times just after the settlement of the country could read and even write the maya script but they regarded it as evil or as being a native tongue of no value and so didn't preserve it.
in 1575 Bishop Landa attempted to write down the Maya alphabet through finding out from the natives, but he was highly unpopular with them as he had almost completely destroyed all their literary treasures, so in revenge they misled him as to the true meanings of the various symbols.

so as we have no mayan writing we can only hazard a guess at what the spaniards might have twisted to suit their own ends.

thank you, my point exactly. There are to my understanding four mayan "codices" but they have yet to be properly translated by actual mayans, just a bunch of over-excited american scholars (who have a similar agenda as the spanish). Further, the pictographs which cover most of the buildings have never been translated, they are an educated guess at best, there is no rosetta stone.

yes without such a key the work of any scholars on this is purely guesswork, apparently they have made some progress but it seems to me that if you study something in such detail for long enough of course you will find links that COULD mean seem something and seem to fit together in a way... for example going back to the equinox apparently they traced the symbol for the spring equinox.. 'because of its obvious representation of a cloud from which three streams of water are falling upon the earth. the square at the top represents heaven. the obsidian knife underneath denotes a division or period of time cut off, as it were, from other periods of the year. that the sign means "spring" is verified by its position among the other signs of the seasons.'
could be i guess, but arent they just looking too hard and wanting to see things?

thats how I feel about sacrifice. Our Judeo-Christian Euro-Western-American backgrounds are biased. We learn in school from 5 years old this kind of lies and exaggerations, then we go to college and become archaeological grad students, we go do a dig with some professors who think they know everything, and we carry their assumptions. We look so hard for sacrifice, we think we find it, but why are we looking in the first place? Because the SPANISH said so, and the academic world trusts the racist, imperialists, murderous spaniards over the indigenous folks everytime!

take an example from this recent article:

"This new discovery at Tula is of a tomb containing two dozen sacrificed children. They appear to have been sacrificed between AD 950 and 1150, during the Toltec Golden Age. Apparently all but one of them were between the ages of five and 15.
Why do archaeologists think they were sacrificed? For one thing, the ritualistic manner in which the skeletons are placed together indicates sacrifice, plus cut marks on their bones are consistent with it. And within the tomb an idol of Tlaloc, worshipped as a rain god, was found, which could provide motive for the sacrifice."


Really? Why do the bodies have to be sacrificed? couldn't they be ceremonious without having to have been killed? perhaps they all died in a accident together? perhaps they are the childern who died of natural causes over a period of time and were ceremoniously burried together in memoriam. why do the cuts have to be in relation to sacrifice? Couldn't they simply be funerary? BIAS BIAS BIAS. My bias is that I don't trust the spanish or the establishment.

I've been lead to believe that archaeological records have disproved the claims coming from some quarters that the sacrifices are an invention of Western historians to paint the Mayans and Aztecs as savage races deserved of their eventual downfall rather than them being advanced civilizations.

I suspect the issue has been politicized by the Left's obsession with political correctness. Even going so far as to alter historical facts to tie in with it's political dogmas.

bla bla bla let's just keep brushing the anasazi under the rug. maybe they'll just go away. have you done your duty today? hang a nazi!

yes they do seem to make sweeping statements without any apparent evidence, just a 'reason' for their guess displayed as 'fact'.
perhaps subconciously it is still hard to admit that we destroyed something amazing, that something actually important was lost.

I'm waiting for the claim from the Left that stone age man was a herbivore and never dreamt of killing and eating an animal. :D

what do you mean from the Left? Like maybe a whole poopulation than only types with their left hand? The shadowy gates for THAT membership are quite beyond my ken. And by ken I mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPHXJ9NPmuI..

It's a common term describing the positions and ideologies of the left-wing. :)