ASTRONOMICAL SUPERSTITIONS 



47i 



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driving his four wonderful horses across the heavens; in the evening 

 he descended into the western sea; at night he slept in a golden boat 

 which was borne along the northern edge of the earth to the rising 

 jdace in the east. The moon was the abode of the lovely goddess Luna, 

 sister of Apollo, who guided its course in the heavens. 



Thus mythology explained astronomical phenomena ; the sun, moon, 

 planets, clouds, dawn, and night with its black mantle bespangled with 

 stars, became animated things. The sun, when setting in the brilliant 

 evening clouds, then became Hercules in the fiery pile. 



While mythology obstructed 

 scientific progress by finding sacred 

 explanations for every natural 

 event, there were a few gifted, in- 

 quisitive minds among the Greeks 

 that sought for knowledge behind 

 the painted curtain of superstition. 

 Thales of the sixth century B.C., 

 was the father of Greek astronomy. 

 He taught that the earth is spher- 

 ical and that the moon receives her 

 light from the sun. Anaxagoras as- 

 cribed eclipses of the moon to nat- 

 ural causes and taught the existence 

 of a creative intelligence. He fell 

 a victim to the superstitions of his 

 age. Sentence of death was passed 

 on him and his family, which re- 

 quired all the eloquence of his 

 friend Pericles to commute to ban- 

 ishment. 



Pythagoras of the fourth cen- 

 tury B.C. was a most assiduous en- 

 quirer. He is said to have been 

 the first to propose the system of a 

 globular earth and of planets, re- 

 volving around the sun. "When the 

 Church condemned the theory of 

 Copernicus the indictment was that 

 it was heathenism and Pythagorean. 



Modern astronomy may be said to have arisen in the third century 

 B.C., under the patronage of the first king of the Greek dynasty, at 

 Alexandria, Egypt. Euclid, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and Ptolemy 

 were among the illustrious astronomers of the Alexandrian era. It 

 was in the second century a.d. that Ptolemy published his great work 

 on astronomy called the " Almagest," which during the following four- 



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ANCIENT THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE 



