That's actually explainable by constellations. Many of the earliest stories were told for eons around the fire, looking at stars, and the pictures painted there, that became the earliest myths. Astrotheology is mostly crazy nonsense, but I think that part makes sense.
the logic is more of "well why did things line up this way, and what does that mean?" rather than "how did this happen?". looking at the world in a more spiritual or religious sense is asking about the intentions of the forces that happen rather than the forces happening themselves.
Not even crazy stuff like this. Thunder? Lightning? Fuckin tornados and hurricanes? Then you have the numerous phenomena from the sun and moon like this and others.
Any weather related activity is mind-blowing. Yeah, you're an island nation, so you understand water currents and wind currents. Do you understand WHY it happens though? Without legitimate sciences backing it up, it's pretty easy to see an all powerful being controlling it from the background. Especially when you lack the capability of finding out what the fuck is going on
Plus, you recognize that religion in modern times should be treated as history, it's all it is. No one needs religion to explain anything. Science helps us find true transparency and sense in the world, not telling lies from child abusers that were told thousands of years ago...
Believe in whatever thingy you want to believe in, but you should only be allowed to do so as long as you're not harming other people by doing so. And religion especially has no place whatsoever in politics. FFS
Imagine we die, and god’s like ”The devil literally took the form of the sun, and you still thought religion was bs? Yeah, off to hell you go. This is on you.“
I heared a neuroscientifical theory that said interconnections in ancient human brains could have been wired differently and they might have actually heared voices from regions of their brains that are now unconcious (except for some people that have brain issues).
Imagine experiencing fear for your life and you can hear your own brain think like another person who isn't there. It must be some kind of god.
It was not until the 16th century that a mathematical model of a heliocentric system was presented by the Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic cleric, Nicolaus Copernicus, leading to the Copernican Revolution.
Wikipedia
You sure about that? How would eclipses be understood without heliocentrism?
Edit: in the dark ages people knew that the moon crossed in front of the sun and when it would happen but also considered them to be ominous portents, which makes no sense to me
That doesn't actually matter when it comes to understanding eclipses, which is an alignment of the 3 bodies. Does it matter which one is at the "center" for that configuration? No, it does not.
I would like you to provide an actual source for this supposed fact
Does it matter which one is at the "center" for that configuration
Kinda does when only one emits light? Wtf
Edit: if you're talking about a geocentric model, then you need to show that the people in the dark ages thought that the sun was farther away than the moon.
All they had to know was the moon was getting in the way of the sun. Doesn't matter if the earth is the centre of the system or the sun, the moon just has to be between them. So it doesn't require heliocentrism.
Reddit always loves to assume people in the past were morons who thought anything was magic.
They don't realize it was closer to how we are now than we care to admit. I know what a computer is, I can't tell you how or why it works though. And my neighbor down the street thinks the earth is flat.
People have always been dumb monkeys. Some have common sense. And even fewer can figure it all out and carry us a little further down the tech tree.
Not only am I not your English teacher but providing me a source 2 hours later in a post I didn't see and acting like your late homework matters is amusing.
The other guy's point still stands though. You don't have to understand why something happens to know its not magical imps.
Which you have shown, very clearly, that you are not capable of. Heliocentrism or geocentrism, it literally does not matter even a little bit. They knew that the sun was further than the moon, as they fully understood what eclipses were and were able to predict them with a great deal of accuracy.
Superstitions and religious interpretations over their meaning aside, they knew exactly why, how, and when they were going to happen despite believing in geocentrism.
The Maya existed in 2,000BC (4,000 years ago) in Central America. The Maya were accomplished mathematicians. They invented the concept of zero, and recorded mathematical tables to predict solar and lunar eclipses.https://maya.nmai.si.edu
Absolutely. So did some other ancient civilizations. They figured out some repeated cycles in eclipses. But do we know that they knew what caused those eclipses...the Moon blocking the Sun or the Earth blocking the Sun from the Moon?
When people say the dark ages, they are talking about Europe because we have very few written records of Europe in that time and America and Europe are the dominant cultures on Reddit.
Reminder they said
We understood eclipses in the dark ages.
They didn't say anything about the maya. And I still have not seen a source for the claim.
How tf you gonna know there's multiple celestial bodies if you don't even know the maths of how they move?
Without the maths, it's just weird lights in the sky to you. Same as a circuit board is just a funny looking green, red, black, blue, grey, brown, purple, or piss color board with small things in it to you, because you don't have the maths to know what's up.
You don't have to know celestial mechanics to predict an eclipse. Multiple civilizations in the ancient world and in the Americas were able to predict eclipses without knowing the exact configuration of the solar system and without any advanced mathematics.
Those you were talking about also believed the sun was a God. They actually did not knew the concept of a celestial body as Newton described it.
They had maths. They were correct to a degree. But it wasn't enough to let them go from "God and lights in the sky" to "stars (balls of heat) and planets". Those definitions came after.
Assuming the earth moves around the sun gives you the same math as assuming the sun rotates the earth - it's just which you choose as the stationary reference point for math. The Polynesians had advanced astrological charts for navigation before the Pyramids, as did most ancient societies to keep track of calendars and earthly cycles.
And the average reddittor of 1200 years ago is probably not doing that math.
One; two, I'm talking about knowing that something is rotating around something else in the first place, conclusion that you get at through the math. If you didn't knew that math, the sun and the moon would just be things in the sky, you really wouldn't have a way of knowing that the sun is a sphere, a celestial body, and the moon is another, and that someone's one "passes" in front of the other.
Checks out with reality: at the village I was born at, whenever there was an eclipse, old people would go out and make a lot of noise and dance to "scare the moon off from harassing the sun". A tradition that dated 600 years back at the very least.
I mean, most priests, sailors, scribes, leaders, and even farmers would have had a general familiarity with the sky and it's cycles 2000 or 3000 years ago.
600 years is a very short time ago. We had the cults of control who forbid the study of grand time and history in order to rewrite it over much of that time - brahmins, catholic, legalistic, etc. Approaches that hid the knowledge. Now, we're at a point to return to it, no?
I want you to consider the ratio between the amount of priests and the amount of people in a town. Then you see why those traditions came to be. Just think: if there's a lot of ignorance, how much more ignorance was there back then? Heck, think of the ratio between the amount of people that could read vs the amount of people that were educated in the sciences and that were qualified to do such calculations. See how it approaches zero? Yeah.
And, well, uh, if you want to return to it, well, idk, that's, that's your thing, I mean, it isn't something I would do as a person that's on track to becoming educated myself, but, you do you.
The ignorance now is mostly designed over the last few hundred years of monarchy - humanity has known more and less before. Most of the educated from our universities are idiots who barely know how to run and maintain one small system. Let alone think and design new ones. People don't act with wisdom and have no comprehension of history or design. We live in an era with widespread ignorance of very basic and very important things, because we take maintaining expensive toys to be the highest good.
Your view of history and humanity is a very myopic one. A glass must be a bit empty before it's filled, no? What's to gain from pretending that we're at a zenith at the end of history, and not a part of the last 150,000 years of places and empires rising and falling? 6,000 years ago was a blink of an eye. You think we went 144,000 years without doing or learning anything that's been forgotten?
But now we are taught in school the sun is a star, and the moon is a planet that orbits Earth, and that Newton's model of gravity is eerily similar to Coulumb's model for the electric force.
That's the difference: societies in the past, like the mayans, for example, thought of the Sun as something like a God, not as a celestial body, or even as a star. That definition is relatively modern. Relatively.
By the way, fuck you, I didn't insulted you, I'm giving it back.
Funny you chose the Mayans, we just have 4 surviving books by them and, well...
The Dresden Codex contains accurate astronomical tables,[39] which are recognized by students of the codex for its detailed Venus tables and lunar tables.[40] The lunar series has intervals correlating with eclipses, while the Venus tables correlate with the movements of the planet Venus
Yeah, I have seen those, even if I don't understand them much, and I have learned, or at least tried to learn, the numerical system of the mayans. For all it cares, it does its purpose.
To be fair, we actually don't have a lot about them. What I'd say is the most popular, the Popol Vuh, is more like a recollection from spoken accounts of events, tradition, and outlook on reality.
So, really, much of what you can say about them, you have to be kinda careful about. Barring when you talk about the traditions that survived the colonization and remained ingrained in the society that formed after, some of which persist to this day, even if they morphed and changed over time.
By looking at the shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse you know the Earth is a sphere, the shape of the moon during a crescent makes it fairly obvious that it is also a sphere. This was fairly well known by the ancient Greeks.
The math for a Earth-centric system made sense, it just involved using a ton of circles. By tracing the position of the moon it became pretty obvious that when it hit the sun an eclipse happened. Ancient people weren’t stupid, they just had less data points to go by.
Part of the reason why the Greeks didn’t want to do a heliocentric model was because there was no obvious parallax on the stars. They didn’t yet have any reason to assume that the stars were as far away as they were, so to them the planets were the odd ones out since they were the only lights out of hundreds not to travel with constant speed across the sky.
And promptly ignored by the Spaniards hundreds of years later.
I'm not talking about those that knew the maths, I'm talking about those that didn't. You simply wouldn't know what was happening, because its not like everyone some 600 to 1200 years ago was an educated cleric at some knowledge capital of the time.
If you’re referring to Columbus then everyone knew the Earth was round, they just knew there was no way to make the entire trip to India westward. Columbus had mixed up the units and believed the Earth was far smaller than it actually was, to the degree that when he hit the Americas he was several days beyond his estimate for reaching India.
The... the spaniards? They knew it was a sphere. Do you think flat earth was believed in the middle ages? During the time of Columbus? Everyone knew the earth was a sphere for a long time at that point. And even if it weren't already common knowledge, age of sailing would've made it obvious
Columbus was never debating about the roundness of the earth, he argued that you could sail to India from the other way. Other people believed it was too far away, but Columbus taking some specific numbers about the circumference of the earth as well as picking a specific map about the location of asia (note that at the time it was easier to know the size of the earth than the size and location of landmasses, and Europeans at the time always mapped Asia much farther away than it was in real life) and calculated that Asia could be sailed to. Others didn't believe this, hence why henhad to convince to sponsor the voyage
He was wrong of course, Earth was both bigger then his number and Asia was much much closer to Europe going east than going west, but luckily America was just there for him to stop by
People knew some of those lights as planets and others as stars. It is difficult to understand but ancient people were not monkeys. They were as smart as we are, just born centuries before us. They could deduce certain lights moving faster or slower than others and realize there are different types of celestial bodies. Calendars in India and china were established as far back as 500 BC where entire committees of very smart people were tasked with tracking this stuff. They did not track everything properly since some effects are visible only on the order of centuries, but they did a pretty good job for their time. They understood eclipses very well and could predict them. They did not have heliocentrism. It is possible.
Yeah, I didn't said it wasn't possible, if you knew the maths.
But I'm not talking about the very select group of people that knew it. No, I'm talking about the people that didn't. They would just be lights to them, they wouldn't even know the concept of a celestial body.
Like the mayans. They tracked the stars, but thought of the sun as a God, not as a star. There isn't records of them knowing the sun is a star. Their math, while impressive on its own, wasn't enough to reveal the true nature of the phenomenon happening in front of their eyes.
And this has happened time and time again throughout history. It's how science moves forward. You get an inaccurate picture first of what's going on, and then you refine it into something more solid. That's just how the advancement of knowledge goes.
They need not know the sun is a thermonuclear bomb hanging in the sky to predict eclipses. Again, the question is only could they time eclipses? Yes, they could time them very very well.
Ancient astrologers knew about heliocentrism. Astrology is considered a pseudoscience in modern times, but we have to consider that studying it in ancient times was reserved for the most knowledgeable people, the ones who knew astronomy, physics and mathematics. The models they made and the whole zodiac is clearly heliocentric, but this is often forgotten and even completelly dismissed in moderns times due to the negative reputation it gained.
Before you ask - yes, they observed the movement of the planets from Earth (hey that's where we live), this doesn't mean they thought the planets revolve around Earth, quite the contrary.
There are descriptions of retrograde planetary movement - you have to be able to understand the solar system and what revolves around what to able to explain it.
some ancient astrologers knew about heliocentrism. But heliocentrism was not the dominant theory until the 16th century, according to the source provided. If you have a source that refutes that I'd like to see it.
Not some, you had to understand the heliocentric model to practice it - the zodiac and planet hierarchy are purely solar.
It wasn't a dominant theory because people couldn't care less - they didn't need to know if it was helio- or geocentric because as said in the previous comment, this knowledge was useful to a reserved minority who practiced science. It meant nothing to an average person. But Copernicus was not the first person to introduce the heliocentric model.
You can have eclipses with the Moon and Sun both orbiting Earth. Heliocentrism is irrelevant to the Sun, Earth, Moon system. It's about how everything except the Moon and Sun relate to the Earth.
Also important to note - the term "Dark Ages" was coined by Protestant propagandists trying to discredit the Catholic Church which governed much of society during that time period. It was not, in fact, a dark age.
That is not the origination of the term. The term "Dark Ages" was conceived 200 years before Protestantism. The reason it was called the Dark Ages was in contrast to the Roman and Greek era. And yes comparatively speaking, it was a dark age. (At least in western Europe.)
The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity.
My apologies, you are correct that the term predates Protestantism. It was, however, used by Protestants to deride that era and the Church of the time which is likely how it became so widely used. This is from the same Wikipedia article you linked, for the interested:
During the Reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants generally had a similar view to Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch, but also added an anti-catholic perspective. They saw classical antiquity as a golden time not only because of its Latin literature but also because it witnessed the beginnings of Christianity. They promoted the idea that the 'Middle Age' was a time of darkness also because of corruption within the Catholic Church such as popes ruling as kings, veneration of saint's relics, a licentious priesthood and institutionalized moral hypocrisy.
Importantly, today, historians tend to discourage the use of "Dark Ages" to refer to that period of history as it is not an accurate way to describe the time period.
The guy who asked is trying to help you understand that people in the "dark" ages didn't believe the earth was flat. Western society has known the earth is round since Antiquity. The ancient Greeks even guessed the size of the earth quite accurately considering they were, you know, ancient.
I never said I thought people in the dark ages thought the world was flat.
It was an example of how people can reject any idea or knowledge even if it's true because they believe something else, and people did struggle at first with this idea...
So, whether astronomy was a thing or not in the dark ages, there probably was some percentage of people freaking out....
The uneducated.. stubborn religious figures.. etc..
That's all my OC was.
I'm not generalizing anything, you said the dark ages, which is an era specific to European history. The dominant religion was Catholicism, which was at the forefront of astronomy of that era. They knew they Earth was round, they understood and could predict eclipses. They weren't quite ready to accept heliocentrism for theological reasons, but no one is perfect.
Christianity being the dominant religion of that time.. so it's safe to say that the majority of these religious people were not educated in Astronomy and I'd even say that a percentage of those people completely rejected astronomy.
Just an opinion.
So.. imagine seeing this in the dark ages and what religious people must have thought and what they may have done to appease god when the devil is in the sky.
There is no need to argue against a harmless comment that was just a passing thought.
The majority of people today aren't educated in astronomy, but that's beside the point.
The Catholic Church and European society during the middle ages was almost OCD about record keeping and writing down crazy random shit that happened. Yet we don't have any account of people from that time losing their minds because of an eclipse looking like horns. We do have accounts of spectacular meteor showers and what may have been a star going supernova and stunning the population.
The only thing it is safe to say is that you seem to really want to believe that people back then were just plain stupid. They weren't. They understood the concept of an eclipse, and were able to predict and anticipate them. They would have known there was going to be an eclipse. It wasn't a surprise.
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u/Outcast199008 1d ago
Imagine seeing this in the dark age.