Abstract
The tilting of the axis of the heavens must have been one of the big riddles for the ancients who studied the skies. Why does it look as if the stars turn around a point in the northern region of the heavens, and not around the zenith? In other words, why is the axis of the heavens tilted? One would expect myths to be told about this phenomenon. However, I know of only one, from ancient China, where, just as in Presocratic Greece, people believed that the earth is flat. The legendary hero Kung-kung struggled with the also legendary emperor Chuan Hsü about the sovereignty of the empire. In great anger, he threw a mountain that shattered the pillars of the heavens. Since that time, the heavens are inclined toward the north-west (see Needham 1959: 21). It is strange that the heavens are said to tilt in the direction of the north-west instead of the north, as we might expect. Perhaps one source gives a reason for this anomaly, as there it is added: “the earth does not fill the South-East, so the rivers and the rain floods find their home there” (Graham 1990: 96). Broadly speaking, one might say that the great Chinese rivers flow to the south-east. Here, the same identification of the tilting of the heavens with a dip of the earth as in Presocratic Greece, which I discuss below, seems to be the case.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time of the Presocratics, due to the precession, the Polar star was much farther away from the north pole of the heavens than in our times. Around 500 B.C., Kochab, one of the stars of Ursa Minor, was the nearest star to the pole, at about 7°, whereas in our days Polaris is at no more than 41′ distance from the pole.
- 2.
See also Rovelli: “la hauteur du soleil varie avec la latitude (…) l’interprétation chinoise: la Terre est plate et la variation est due à la faible distance du soleil” (2009c: 131, subscription of Fig. 18, left).
- 3.
- 4.
A theoretical possibility would be that originally the celestial axis is thought of as lying in the plane of the surface of the flat earth, and that later on it was lifted up onto its present angle. This, however, would not be in accordance with the sources, which speak of a tilt, and, in the case of Anaxagoras, explicitly of an originally upright position of the celestial axis.
- 5.
On a flat earth, the tilting of the celestial axis will only by accident be the same as the obliquity of the ecliptic, viz., when the center of the flat earth is thought to be at what we would call 23.5° latitude, for instance at Syene. Only in that case the celestial axis on a flat earth will lie in the plane of the ecliptic.
- 6.
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Couprie, D.L. (2011). The Riddle of the Celestial Axis. In: Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 374. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8116-5_5
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